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THIRD EDITION
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CONTENTS
Notice to librarians
This book 35 primarily a work on the history of film style.
Catalogue records relating to it tan be obtained from the British Library and the Library of Congress
Published by
STARWORD 5 Tadmor Street London W12 SAH
Copyright© 19S3, 1992, 2009 by Barry Salt
Printed by Mobbs the Printers, Totton, Hampshire
Made in England
fSBN 978 0 9509066 5 2
1. INTRODUCTION
2. OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
3. THE INTERPRETATION OF FILMS
4. FRENCH FILM THEORY INTO ENGLISH
5. PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
6. FILM THEORY WITH AN AMERICAN ACCENT
7. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1895-1900
8. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
9. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
10. DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION FROM STAGE TO FILM
11. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1914-1919
12. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART I
13. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
14. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
1 S. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
] 6. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 2
17. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
I«. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
19. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 3
20. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
22. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
23. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
24. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 4
25. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21st. CENTURY
26. STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
27. AFTERWORD
28. BIBLIOGRAPHY
29. TECHNICAL GLOSSARY & INDEX
30. INDEX OF NAMES
31. INDEX OF FILMS
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25
34
121 124 !S5 163 197 215 241 251 267
2SS 305 322 337 367 176 379
400
401 404 426 43S
PREFACE
The main body of this book is made up of an exposition of the history of the development of the Formal features of film style, and also of those developments in film technology that might have some connection with stylistic developments. Although the main events in the history of film technology are covered, it is not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of that subject, and I omit all those technical ideas that had no success in the film industry! not to mention the pre-history of film technology. My consideration of the major trends in film style and technology is based on the examination of several thousand films whose production dates spread fairly evenly over the years from 1S9S to 1970, and on the comparison oftho.se films with information about film-making and technology derived from the sources listed in the Bibliography of this book, and also from my own film-making experience.
This book is basically concerned with mainstream fictional cinema, and! most truly avant-garde films are excluded from consideration in it. This is because there is a very real separation between these two bodies of cinema, with avant-garde films heing influenced mostly by other avant-garde films and other contemporary advanced art, and not by mainstream cinema, and vice-versa. My failure to treat avant-garde cinema does not mean that I consider it to be unimportant: on the contrary, following the principles f set forth in Chapter +, I believe that on the whole its works are of at least equal value to those of mainstream cinema. Japanese cinema is also excluded for rather similar reasons. Until fairly recently there have been influences on Japanese cinema from Western cinema, but no influences going the other way. Also, the large number of films that are necessary to ^et a dear and accurate picture of overall developments within which individual films arc placed has not been available to me in the case ol Japanese cinema, nor has a complete knowledge of the very different social and cultural background to Japanese films.
The main work in this book extends naturally in several directionSj and some of these are exemplified in the consideration or the films of Max Ophuls at the end of it. In that final section some of the stylistic information from earlier in the book is put to work in combination with the analytical and aesthetic principles j develop at its beginning. In their turn, my analytical and aesthetic principles are justified in both positive and negative ways by the critical material in Chapters 1 to 3. Although it is possible to understand everything that follows Chapter 3 without reading these first three chapters, there are further good reasons for their presence in this book. Ideally, the critical
material in these early chapters should have been published long ago in one of the serious film journals, but in fact Sight SiSound^ Movk, and Screen in England, and film Qiiarrcth- and The Quarterly Review of Film Suidics in the United States have all refused to publish all, oi part, of various earlier versions of these Hrst three chapters, with no reasons given. As well as this, tjuite a number of American film academics have tried to prevent these chapters being published in book form, so 1 have drawn the obvious conclusion that a 11 of these people have no answers to my criticisms of various previous forms of film theory that they happen to believe in. Adding the fact that a recently published book on film history uses novel information taken Troni the manuscript of this book without acknowledgement, it is clear that I had to get all oí this book published by the only means left to me. However, 1 am very glad to acknowledge that there were two people, namely John Ellis and Ben Brewster, who though thevdo not agree with many of my ideas, were broad-minded enough to advocate its publication, though without success.
My work was supported lor some years by the Slade Schoo I o f U n í ve rsity Co 11 ege, London, hea d ed by S i r YV i 11 ia m Coldstream, where the prime mover of the beginning of my researches was the head of the Slade Film Unit, James Leahy. James Leahy has given me massive support ever since, and it is difficult to be sufficiently grateful to him for this. Pieces of useful information about past film practices have been generous!)' provided by Kevin BrownlowT Byron l-Iaskin, Vic Margutti, Mark Pytel, Noel Burčh, Charles Musscr, Andre Gaudreault, Tom Gunning and Tim Dean, and a special acknowledgement goes to Ben Brewster for pointing out to me an important stylistic trend that I had overlooked. I have another important debt to Richard Abel for his descriptions of four films by Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein that I have so far been unable to see. I also owe a lot to Laurence Baxter and Valerie Isham for their help with the analysis of the statistics of shot length distributions, and Wai Ling Chan Tor her calculations on those same distributions. Other people whose help J want to acknowledge on the production side of this book are Frances Thorpe and Peter Miller for their advice, Cathy Grant for doing the typing in the early stages of the writing of it, Nick Collins for proofreading, Vossi lialanescu for ihe jacket design, and Tom Graves of Wordsmitlis for his mastery of typesetting from microcomputer disks.
The large amounts of film viewing that lie behind mv work in this book depended on the help and facilities provided by a number of film organizations and the people who work in them, and I tender my appreciation to .Eileen
Bowser and tlic W the Museum of Modern Art film archive, the American Film Institute Archive at the Library of Congress, the W&M Museum and lb Monty and Karen the Cinematheque Royale Belgique and
Jacques Lcdbux, the Cinema Studies Department of New York University, and the film archive at Eastman House, Rochester, under John Kuipcr. By far the largest part of prt of my viewing has been done in London, and here my thanks go to the National Rim Theatre and its staff, and the British Film Institute Distribution Division under Colin McArihur, whore [especially thank Nigel Algar and the Film
& Video Library. Out my major <!cbt is io *f National Film Archive of Great Britain and its stafT under David Francis, My special persona! thanks go to Jeremy Boulton, Elaine Burrows David Meeker, Clivc Truman, and Tim Cotter who do eheir all to keep researching viewers happy, not to mention Roger Holman and the staff of the Cataloguing Department, particularly Don Swift and James Patterson. Without them nothing could have been done, and for this reason this book is dedicated to the National Film Archive and all who sail in her.
London, June 1983
PREFACE TO THE 2nd. EDITION
Many things haxe happened since the first edition dl this book, some of them good, some of them bad. One of the good things was that I sold all the 200D copies of it that I had printed, and'it has made a certain impression, at least in Europe. On the other hand, the printers destroyed tlie film from which a reprint could have been made. But even this has its good side, as lhave taken the opportunity to revise the book and include the latest discoveries 1 have made about the development of film style. I have also extended the treatment up to the present, with full chapters on the seventies and 'eighties,
Another piece of bad news is that even after 1 !had success fully published tlic first edition of this book, many American aead em i cs h a vc cont i nued to qp pose i is d is tr ibut i on in the United States, anddiave used their power as advisers to American publishers to prevent them distributing it or m a ki ng a go -publ icati on d eaI w itlvm e for t he second ed ition. Proper distribution in America is impossible for very small publishers like myself without either a co-publication deal with an American publisher, or alternatively by paying out a lot of money to a commercial book distributing firm. The reason for this academic opposition is that the opening chapters of this book criticize various forms of film theory and interpretation that they happen to believe .in,; and in particular those dcrivedtfrom Marxism and-psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is apparently an area of blind faith for most American academics in the humanities departments of universities, and- their closed minds are shown by their inability ,to produce any rebuttal of criticism of its validity ■In fact .there has been no attempt whatever to produce an intellectual defence of any of d,e forms of Him theorizing and interpretation thatlcritic^d in the first edition ofthis book, which is just- what | exp^ed, All this-hascontinued despite the admissioniby AhW anr, Lacan towards the' ends of their lives, that they were indeed charlatans, as was
obvious twenty years ago to any intelligent and informed person. Yet Lacan's version of psychoanalysis is still being taught as received truth in Tilm departments in universities around the world, and new 'theoretical' nonsense ol similar kind has continued to appear, so the early chapters on film theory in this book still have to stay there. I do what I can, though those academics who oppose the truth being told know they can continue to rely auitc successfully on their institutional power, which grows ever stronger, to protect their inadequacy.
However, another good thing that lias happened is that there has been an increasing amount of research into silent cinema over the last nine years, immensely helped by the appearance of new yearly festivals of silent film, and also by single conferences on aspects of the subject. The most important of the festivals is the Giornate del cinema muto at Pordenone, but there are others which include silent film sections, such as the Mostra del cinema libero at Bologna. I have not been present at all of these, but like everyone else interested in the subject, I am profoundly grateful for their existence.
Wie .people who have begun researching early cinema in the last decade are mostly eager to collaborate in the production of knowledge, though there arc unfortunately a few Americans who are more dishonest and careerist about what they do.
On the good side again, Ben Brewster has shared a number of viewing* and ideas with m ^ ^ importantly, let me see his frame enlargements of some of the copyright fragments of early Vka^raph films in the Library of Congress. His work on this, together with frame enlargements, can be seen in Vitagraph Co. of America (ed. Paolo^herehi fclsai, Studio Tesi, 1987). Much of the other contributions to film history during the last nine years ^ VaK'ablc       h* nothing that has appeared removes
the need for this book in a second edition, even though some works, like the new series 'History of the American Cinema' that has started appearing might be thought to cover a lot of the same ground. Although the volumes on the silent period written by Charles Musser, Eileen Bowser, and Richard Koszarski arc packed with good stuff, there are major aspects of tlic evolution and nature of American mainstream continuity cinema (or 'classical cinema', if you prefer) during the silent years that they do not properly
cover.
My work has also continued to depend on all the films from various times and places that continue to come into the National Film Theatre in London. There Waltraud Loges and Helen Deeble, and also the other staff, have been very helpful, as always, with my detailed studies. Nevertheless, most of my viewing has continued to be done in the National Film Archive, where the preservation programme has produced thousands more viewing copies ofsilent films in the last several years. 1 have now seen nearly all of these new viewing copies, and although there has not been anything comparable to the revelations that came from the first several hundred, many points have been further clarified. At the National Film Archive, the Viewing Service, run by Elaine Burrows, assisted by Jacqui Morris, and more recently Julie Rigg, have done all they could to help me, as they do other researchers. And Give Truman is still the helpful man in charge of the machines in the basement. 1 also have to thank those reviewers of the first edition who picked up some errors, though not a couple who invented a large number of errors which were not there. During the last five years there has also been a farther enlargement of my knowledge of professional film practice through working with my fellow teachers at the London International Film School, and 1 am grateful to all of them for this, and particularly to Roy Pointer.
With this hew edition I have tried to keep the cost down, both to myself, and to the purchaser, by changing the format, with a larger page, double column setting, and a different typeface. This means that, although the actual
content has increased by one third, the number of paaes has decreased. I have also rearranged the order of some sections within chapters, to make the treatment of topics follow more consistently, thus aiding anyone wishing to follow any single major technical topic all the way through. To this end there is also, as before, the index in the technical glossary to aid such a longitudinal search. There are a more frame enlargements than before, but having the even larger number that I would like is still prevented by the high cost of half-tones, not to mention colour plates to illustrate topics in the last couple of decades. On the production side, this rime I give special thanks to Stephen Miller for his help with the typesetting;
I suppose what anyone who has bought the first edition of this book will want to know about is the additional material in this edition, inevitably, given the thousands more silent films 1 have seen from the pre-19 IS period, it is the chapters dealing with this area that have changed mostr In particular, the chapter on 1907-1913 is more than twice as long as it was before, a no1 contains many new insights on various topics. The other major additions are Full chapters on style and technology through the last two decades. There has been a great enlargement in my database of formal statistics, and this clarifies the descriptions of various stylistic trends. Besides all this there are various additions and corrections elsewhere, so although I got the major developments pretty right in general the first time, it is probably necessary for anyone interested in the history of film style to buy this new edition. For instance, since J considered that it did not need me to point out the basic features of the large-scale construction of film scripts, I did not say much about this in the first edition, though I did briefly indicate some of the important points in this area, Now that some people have attempted to deal with this topic, and have not managed to get it right, I felt that I should spell out the obvious in a couple of places. So, although you could try xeroxing sections of this new edition from a library copy, if you jusE do that you are bound to miss something significant that wasn't in it belbrc.
London. October 1992
PREFACE TO THE 3rd. EDITION
Imiscalculated how long the last printing of the second edition of Film Siyk and 'feclmohgy would last when I published Moving into Pictures in 2006. That is why 1 included the chapter on film style and technology in the 'nineties in that book. But by this year, stocks both here and in the United States of Film Style and fecAno%'had almost run out, \ couldn't do another simple reprint of the second edition,
because printing tech nology had moved on a Eong way in the last ten years. Nowadays the priming plates are prepared directly from PDF files on a laser plate-setter at over 2,000 lines per inch. This eliminates the whole business of film to plate and tipping in half-tone pictures, and it has actually reduced the cost of printing a book in real money. So \ had to completely lay out and re-sel Lhe whole book again. The
formats very similar, but nothing is in exactly the same place fn it. So the chapter on the 'nineties has been added onto the end of the previous edition, and .a little gesture towards the new century and new. millennium after chat, plus the migration-of- the data from my article on "The Shape of 1999" and also that from another even newer article, "The Shape of 1959", which will likewise have appeared in Vol 7 No.4 of'The Nay Review of film and Television Studies about the same time this hotik comes off the presses, Warren Auckland's       fitwity has also generated an enthusiasm in me for Eric Gill's Pcrpetua typeface, which is now used in setting the text in this book. I suppose for consistency I should have used Gill Sans for all the little numbers in the graphs as well, but I left them in Helvetica because of the considerable labour involved in changing oil of them, and time was pressing. I think the half-tones should1 come up 9 'little bit sharper with the new methods, as well.
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It is a pity that I had to get this new edition out so suddenly, because I still have one or two useful ideas to bring out, and with more time they could have been included in il. The most important of these is that 1 think I have found a new measure that reveals style in editing, but it will have to wait.
If you are only interested in silent cinema, and already have the 2nJ. edition, it is not absolutely necessary for you to buy this 3rtl. edition, since there is little new in the text in this area, apart from a few more frame enlargements. But if your interests in film style reach up to the present, you should probably get it, However, the major additions to the text and .pictures are mostly available in Moving Into Pictures, so if you already have that, a purchase is not absolutely essential, despite the fact that there are other additional illustrations and thoughts that weren't in the 2rA, edition.
London, November 2009
1. INTRODUCTION
Although there has been hardly any extended writing about the historical development of film style, with or without its relation to film technology, there arc some people who will say, and indeed have said already, that what i have written on the subject is false and worthless because 1 do not have the correct theoretical approach. Because of this, and because it is a good thing to have one's conceptual frameworks clear to oneself and others, it is essential that I show why their claims on your time and attention are unjustified, and why my approach to the matters with which this book deals is the correct one. Some of what I have to say is simple and some is not, for although simple arguments can often be conclusive, and simple analyses and demonstrations will take us much further in the study of films than has been realized, recent developments in this field force me to deal with some apparently difficult matters on their own level. And because 1 am forced to deal with some very fundamental matters in the course of these explanations and demonstrations, I will very briefly sketch my biography to indicate why what I have to say should be taken seriously.
1 first became interested in and involved with film nearly sixty years ago as a member of a film society that screened everything from Melies to iMaya Deren, by way of the usual 'Film Society Classics', and whose members also indulged in amateur film-making, but 1 later had a rather varied career that included dancing in a few ballet companies in Australia and England, and doing research in theoretical physics. Tor the latter work on the theory of superfluid helium done under Professor David Böhm I gained a Ph.D, from the University of London, and then went on to do a year as a lecturer in physics and mathematics at one of the colleges of that University. I had retained an interest in what was going on in the cinema during those years, and when it became clear to me that 1 was not another Einstein, I returned to lilm-making, doing a course at the London School ol Film Technique for which, in a Diploma thesis written in 1968, 1 proposed the methods of stylistic analysis that you can see carried out in later chapters of this book, I worked professionally as a lighting cameraman on a number of small Rims of one kind or another, including an independent feature, before declining into the teaching of film-making and film history at various institutions in London, including the Slade School at University College London, and the Royal College of Art, At present I teach at the London Film School (which is now the name of the former London
School of Film Technique}, where amongst other things, 1 supervise the 35 mm. studio production exercises, to a total of something like 4 hours of finished film a year. In the past I have also directed a few films, including a IS mm. feature.
The intellectual position that I take from this background could be described as Scientific Realism, and this can be crudely summarized as the view chat there is a real world, and that this real world is described by the established natural sciences. Scientific Realism is a development of common sense realism (or 'naive realism' as some would have it), and the relation between Scientific Realism, commonsense realism, and the real world is a kind of parallel to the relation that exists between science, technology, and the real world. The rest is just words, some of which have some sort of correspondence to the real world as described by the natural sciences, and some of which do not- Perhaps [ should make it clear that amongst those working in the sciences it is recognized that what constitutes an established or mature science is, amongst other things, that there should be agreement amongst its practitioners as to what arc its basic concepts, and also the general way research should be carried on. Disciplines such as biochemistry and astronomy meet these requirements, whilst others such as sociology do not. Linguistics and psychology are in a marginal stale, but making some progress to wa rds matu rtty. One of the essentia I and characteristic features of the way the natural sciences approach the world 3s through thinking and reasoning in terms of strict causal relationships, and indeed this is the source of our present and increasing power to control the natural world, and also of the benefits enjoyed by evetycrtetQ some degree in the industrialized world. Ail our technology, including the components of the cinema, could not exist without the kind of rational, causal thinking central to the real sciences, and even the economic and other organization of all countries East and West is attempted using the same principles. Procedures based on other kinds of subjective, semi-arbitrary, irrational, associalional, relatives tic, or magical thinking have no power to produce results with any certainty* and if everyone restricted themselves to *ueh thinking the average person would have to live a short and unpleasant life in a mediaeval hut. Before the advent ol science and technology the average person had the benefit of stuffy, dark, cramped dwellings, butcher-type surgery, and a very good chance of dying in an epidemic or famine, and this is the alternative that a specially favoured minority
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of the $0bm in ^ w|™hc*1 Parts °rthc vvorld ha"
managed to forget or never learn about.
The other essential component of real science is the continual interaction between theory on the one hand, and experiment arid observation on the other, and this too is necessary for the useful application of the products of science, k « because of the feature* 1 have just mentioned chat the natural sciences present the paradigm of objective knowledge, and becau.se they are the same everywhere - in Russia and China, Britain and America - they demonstrate that objective knowledge is possible, whatever some ill-informed literary intellectuals may happen to believe. For Lhe unfortunate truth is that many people have great difficulty [n thinking rationally, logically, and causally, and are limited to purely verbal manipulations. They tend to conceive of the world as being totally describable hy words only, and to think of words as the labels over discrete pigeonholes into winch everything in the world Jits. Rut just as there are not three distinct categories of heights of people corresponding to the words we use to describe them - tall, shorthand average - but a distribution ofli eights over a continuous range for the population, so many other phenomena exist in a fairly continuous range thai defies exact description by words alone, however precisely defined. Just so with objectivity^ it is not an absolute quality, but something one can have more or less of, and the way to get as much objectivity as possible is by adopting the general attitude to their subjects (not necessarily copying any particular methods) that workers in the natural sciences take. As I said before, this entails the critical use of rational and logical thinking in inspecting one's theories, and also the careful comparison of those theories with the real world. I have purposefully put these essential characteristics of real science in a form sufficiently general to accommodate all the major attitudes in the philosophy of science that are acceptable to actual scientists as being in accord with their practice: for instance those of Kuhn7 Lakatos, and Popper. The importance of these requirements for real science is that they arc what ensure that it will 'work', and that wc can be as sure as possible of its results. A large proportion of the psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists in the English-speaking world, and even some of the sociologists, wish their disciplines to meet these requirements. But there are people, without exception uneducated and inexperienced in the real science, who desire to attach the name of science to what they call the ^human sciences', which apparentlv mclude no more than Marxism, psychoanalysis, ^ ^fcj ^hcFrenchsd^
1 ™* ™L^s Tor doing this are not el,ar, but it is natural to conjecture that th,y desne to appropriate some of the presuge and trust that are attached to the real sciences even
INTRODUCTION
though their activities lack the precise characteristics that haverise to that prestige and trust.
So there has recently arisen the remarkable phenomenon of wliat is claimed to be a scientific theory of film created bv people calling themselves theorists, who yet know very little, and apparently have no interest in learning, about what the films that exist are actually like, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, 1 call this a remarkable phenomenon because it is only fairly recently, after several hundred years of its existence, that just one of the established sciences, namely physics, has reached the point of having quite separate groups of theoreticians and experimentalists, who nevertheless continuously depend on each others' work. On the other hand, in biology, despite its vast achievements in this century, there is still little real separation into experimental and theoretical branches. So the idea that a few people can, by sitting in a chair and spinning a web of words, create a 'science' of film can only seem grotesque to anyone with any close acquaintance with the real sciences. There are other subsidiary features of these unfortunate attitudes that need commenting on here, the most serious of which is the belief thai it is only necessary to cite one feature of one or two films to support vast generalizations about the nature of all films, without bothering to note that there may be hundreds of -films that contradict those generalizations. Such procedures have always been endemic in writing about the arts, but never before has a claim to 'scientific truth1 been made on that basis. Again, 1 shall give examples in succeeding chapters.
Although it is not necessary for the acceptance of what I have to say in this book, I will add that in its entirety my philosophical position goes beyond Scientific Realism to the most tough-minded form of Physicalism, which is the most recent and sophisticated variety of philosophical materialism. 1 mention this to point out to Marxist film 'theorists' who always coyly use "materialism3 as a euphemism for Marxism that there are forms of materialism prior and subsequent to the historical and dialectical variety.
Many people whose behaviour shows that they accept the truth of scientific realism, in that they expect that transistor radios will produce sound {rather than say paint the room blue), or that modern drugs will cure their ills, and so on, indulge in a form of \louble-think' in coming to h ratioml anc] ar|)itrary conclusions in less essential areas' of their lives, and refuse to recognize that it is possible to arrive at sounder knowledge. To do this one only needs enough theory to do the job in hand: in this particular case to produce new information about film style and its determinants that is not only true now, but will always he true to the greatest possible extent. This extent is limited by the essential uniqueness and idiosy ncrasv of i ndividual art
INTRODUCTION
objects, in our case, films; and of course that idiosyncrasy and uniqueness is what makes some films art rather than craft. It is in the nature of artists to defeat the expectations of everyone about what they arc going to do next, as I, and 1 think other interested observers, found out during the last th ree decades. Around 1960, having reached the minimal extremes of abstract painting, there seemed to be nowhere left for artists to go, but then there was Pop Art. And several years later the same kind of impasse looked as though it might have been reached, hut Conceptual Art was in the egg. And who could have anticipated New image painting thirty years ago?
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So the study of film can never he a real science, although ii can use the scientific approach in the general sense described earlier. In fact this is largely what has been done in Art History as it has successfully developed in this century, and this should provide the model for the development of Film History, (When I speak of Art History, I mean Art History proper, and not the entertaining but dubious business that is
\'ariouslycallcdfcLdturalhistoryhorJculturecritiquc'/) Some younger workers are proceeding in the sound direction of Film History, but this development is still being impeded by the attitude that a correct total theory explaining everything about films is necessary to do any valid research,
2
. OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
Before proceeding to my main task, it is necessary to present the general theoretical framework avith in which niv descriptions^ analyses arc conducted, and before doing that 1 will clear the ground of unsatisfactory previous theories about film, My criticisms will have two prongs: I shall demonstrate the fundamental Daws in the various attempts at theorizing of the last two decades, and 1 shall also deal with the errors in one attempted application of each of these theories. J will not bother to discuss theories that predate the avian theory, since the shortcomings of the previous major efforts by Kracauer, Bazin, etc, are adequately dealt with by Victor Perkins in Film as Film (Penguin liooks, 3 972). More recently Noel Carroll has gone over the same ground in much greater even excessive, detail in Philosophical Problems of Clascal Film Theojy (Princeton University Press, 19SS), In his book, Perkins also presents theoretical proposals for dealing with most, but not all, commercial feature films, though he himself admits that his proposals are both restricted and restrictive. Since his Ideas have strong connections with some aspects of the auteur theory, I will not deal with them in themselves, but instead discuss the more influential form of that theory given by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema (E.P. Dutton and Co., 1968),
The Auteur Theory
The ourcur theory in its Anglo-Saxon form derives from the auicvr policy operated by film critics on the French magazine Cahicrs du Cinema in the nineteen-fifties. This policy was to value all the films by certain film-makers whom they considered to be the controlling creative forces behind the films in question, and to dismiss the work of all the others. However Andrew San-is gave these ideas a slightly different form in what he called the auteur theory', and although his presentation is neither complete nor consistent, it is still worth discussing since it could well have been expanded into a complete and consistent critical approach to film.
The central tenet or the Snrris auteur theory is that the aesthetic value of the films made by any director depends on the degree to which he succeeds in expressing his per^ sonality in at least some or them, and that if he does this to any detectable extent he becomes an aut^ Then all of hi, film,, even those in which his personality is not evident become of more value than those of a non-„ The central p^t of the criterion of excellence in this theory, which is
that value resides in expressing the maker's personality, is certainly fairly definite, and although Andrew Sarris docs not outline in his theoretical presentation bow one establishes if a film-maker is expressing his personality in a film, he does demonstrate it in practice. But it can be considered a weakness of this criterion that it will, if strictly applied, rate a film-maker with a commonplace personality as highly as one with a unique personality, provided be gets as much of it as possible into some of his films as does a more original figure. For instance, there were quite a number of directors such as Tay Garnett, Mervyn Le Roy, and George Sidney in Hollywood in the 1930-1950 period who had the kind of vulgar extra verted personality that usually goes with a background in the popular theatre, and whose films, although reflecting their makers' personalities, can be rather difficult to distinguish one from another on any grounds connected with those personalities. Although Sarris does not rate them as highly as for instance John Ford, he presents no reason why they should not be so rated,
Th is may be because Sarris' presentation of his theory is far from consistent, even though what he is saying is quite clear at any point in his exposition, and this lack of consistency may have escaped his attention. For instance, Sarris says at a point subsequent to the introduction of his main criterion that a good director is one who makes good films, but he does not define what determines whether a film is good or not. if we are meant to suppose that a good film is just one that expresses the maker's personality, then this is simply a restatement of the original criterion, and the objection I have made above stands. But in his discussion of the films of Billy Wilder, Sarris implicitly introduces the criterion that a good film must be a 'coherent comment on the human condition3, though nowhere else does he refer to this necessity, so it may be that this is a hidden basic criterion for quality in his critical practice. If this is so, it is regrettable, for the requirement that all works of art be coherent comments on the human condition is a most pernicious one, as it immediately rates most avant-garde and fantastic art, including films, as worthless, and it has appealed to the stupider critics of the past and present for precisely that reason. Certainly Sarris has a low opinion of the value ol avant-garde films, though he justifies this by the quite specious argument that they have made no contribution to the subject matter or forms of commercial cinema. Imagine
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
the reaction in serious music circles to the claim that Anton Weber n's music was valueless because his techniques had no efTect on popular music! In fact the points I have made above about the deficiencies of the auteur theory can be graphically illustrated by imagining an attempt to apply an equivalent of the auteur theory to the other arts, for instance assigning values to paintings of this century according to how much of the artist's pcrsonalityrhey express,
The instance of Billy Wilder also seems to be an attempt by Sarris to satisfy his personal prejudices by introducing yet another unacknowledged criterion for value, namely that a sentimental view of life is truer ('more profound1 as he has it) than a cynical view, and hence that works which promote such a view are more valuable. It may well be that sentimentality is more attractive to the mass audience, but those who are not eager to make the Box Office the final arbiter of aesthetic value may agree that cynicism is at least an equally possible attitude for the artist to take to human behaviour.
Finally, Sarris admits that his theory has exceptions in the form of films that are better than the theory will strictly allow, and also in the form of good films which have no auteur at all. One example he gives is Casahhnco, and whatever one thinks about the value of that particular film, the fact that the theory docs have exceptions means that it is to some extent unsatisfactory.
So taking this last point together with the imperfections listed above, there is no doubt that the auteur theory as expressed by Andrew Sarris leaves a lot to be desired. A more modest formulation that went no further than to claim that those films in which a director had succeeded in expressing a distinctivc personality were especially valuable would be much less vulnerable to objection, But it would still omit films without an auteur as defined, but which every interested person would insist on finding valuable. An obvious example is Doj Cabinet da Dr. Cah$arL
The auteur theory is basically an evaluative theory having implicit subsidiary analytical and interpretative components that are only demonstrated in practice, and this has usually been the case with film theories until fairly recently. But now it is necessary to deal with new theorizing about film that has been developed in France, and which has no evaluative component whatever, but which is only meant to be intcrpretativc and analytical.
New French Film Theory
To fully understand the development of French theorizing about Rim since the middle nincteen-sixties it is necessary Tor me to explain what seem to be little-known features of French education and intellectual life, and in particular the peculiar position of the natural sciences in France.
Until fairly recently, science has been taught in French state secondary schools in a very strange way. It has been presented to the students as abstract systems of theories and the idea of the comparison of scientific theories with the real world has not been brought home to the students by their carrying out experiments, or by them learning anything much about experimentation at all, Those few French students who went on to do physics and chemistry and biology at university level eventually discovered that science essentially involves a checking of theories against reality by experiment and observation, and that all engaged in the natural sciences are agreed on this, even though some mav cli Her about the finer details of the process.
One should also know that philosophy forms a compulsory part of the French secondary school curriculum lor those students going on to university, but again students £et a very inadequate and strange idea of that subject. The philosophy course is directed towards the German mncteenth-century tradition of system building after the manner of Hegel, which is qui to unable to deal with the nature of modern science. For Kegel was the first, but not the last, in Lhát tradition to claim to have built a complete philosophical system providing a framework for all possible knowledge, despite his total lack of understanding of contemporary mathematics and science, as was pointed out at the time by one of the major creators of that mathematics and science, Carl Friedrich Gauss. This philosophic tradition has been rejected in the English-speaking world precisely because it is incompatible with scientific and technological thinking, a fundamental point which is invisible- to the French for the educational reasons I have just mentioned.
In France the philosophic fashion of the decade or two before automatically becomes part of the secondary school philosophy curriculum: in the 'thirties and 'forties Henri BergsonTs vitalism was taught, then next phenomenology, and subsequently Marxism. All ol these philosophies have arrogated to themselves the right to decide what shall be believed in the natural sciences; Bergson was so foolish as to decree that Einsteini relativity theory could not possibly be true because it conflicted with his own philosophy; then the phenomenologists tried to dictate to scientific psychologists like Jean Piagel whether their experimental observations were correct or noL, purely on the basis oi the phenomenologists' own introspections (sue imtghts and tifusivns of Philosophy, Jean Piaget, Rout Ledge and Kvgan Paul, 1972); and since then similar situations have arisen yet again, as I shall relate.
Another very relevant peculiarity of French education is that anyone who has passed the graduating w am i nation (Baccalauréat) has the right to attend university, without acceptance standards and numbers being under the control ol
6
the universities themselves. The result #| ^ particular time there were morethan a million university students in France. Obviously a large proportion of these students would have been unfitted for university study in Britain thirty years ago, Ifrthe period J am discussing. Not vcrv surprisingly more than 90*/o of these French university students choose'tlic easy options studying arts and human^ ities subjects. Although a large proportion of them failed or dropped out before the end: of their courses, the fact that they had been to university, and so considered: themselves educated, meant that they form part of the undiscriminat^ ing audience for the endless scries of literary intellectual fashions that emerged from France. -: J?IFhi5 whole .unfortunate educational *ilnation has produced the weakness in the Frendii natural sciences during this century that is well-known, to scientists, and which as measured by.tihc relatively small number of references to French sdi tintific work in the international literature, and by the Nobel priiic statistics; and so on: Its otherresult is that RrenaHi lUcraryj intellectuals, including would-be film \$bw Grists , ■ so- ca I led so ci a! seie nt ists, a rid ■ j>li i 1 osopheis \ i Ji ave not.the slightest idea, of what science.is really.about: that ththkinginjierms oficausai'chainSj interaction ol theory.and experiment, and certain standards of demonstration and proof are what -distinguish all the established sciences from disciplines (if they arc disciplines) of lesser certainty. This is just as l rue of biology as of physics and chemistry, as a top biologist relates in P:B.S. Mcdawar's The Art of the Soltibk (Metliucn, 1967, p>99 clscq). A striking Illustration of the ignorance of French I ilcrary intellectuals in this area is provided by Michel Foucault, whose name is often invoked by English, devotees of Fr-ench film theorizing, inihis book Let Mot&et Its Choscs (Gallimard- 1966, translated as The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970), iHe repeatedly describes mathematics, physics, anchchemistry as together being purely deductive sciences, in opposition to biology, economics, and linguistics, which alone he characterises as empirical sciences (op, cit. p.246 andip.34-7), and repeatedly states that mathemali/ation is the only essential elemcntof the natural sciences.
Such: fundamental misconceptions based on ignorance also surface in the writings of Louis Aklmsser, who equalled Bergson's folly by proclaiming that the biochemical theory of genetic transmission, could notbe correct because it conflicts with Marxism-Leninism, So it is no surprise that AltWr repeatedly advanced the notion that all that is nectary to constitute a science is that it have a distinct ob-|eeL, and also that it have a theory and tech 'lffi$&in W il^phy New Left B00ks, 1971, p.184). By this criterion innumerable aetivitics such as witchcraft, p.hnistrv repaid to| motor cars, pbying footbaU| ^ ^ whid^n^
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
ouitc definite objects, theories, and techniques, would all be sciences with the same standing as physics, neurophysiology, and botany, it iselear that Althusscr has no conception of the simple logical distinction between the necessary conditions thatsucli and such be the case, and the necessary and sufficient conditions that it be so; for although his criteria arc indeed necessary for the existence of an established science, they are not sufficient to guarantee its standing. As mentioned before, logical reasoning, causal thinking, comparison of theory with experiment and observation, and the maintenance of certain standards of demonstration are also necessary for real science, though sadly lacking in the theorizing of Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Grcimas, and other Parisian-Left Bank favourites whom 1 will come to presently:1       «i    .;    ■' • ■-. .' '--i     "*f< .■•■
a / letmemake it^uitecleár before I;proceed'that most ai-pecLs oFíthc-modern imlustrialisíed world. From the LhS-.fti tofChína, including its communication systems, its industries, its economic planning, (yea even unto the cinematographic apparatus and.the film, stock that runs through it) are designed1, or produced,-or organised in large part by the kind of logical, causal, experimental, dynamicithinking that ismsedjust because suchthinkingrs the best guarantee ofthc most certain and most usable knowledge that we can have. Those who have no access to this sort of thinking arc cut off from a large part of modern culture, and are in no position to pontificate about its general nature,
I3ul all this means nothing tothe massive audience formed by the people who have been to university in France, for they are much more impressed by meaningless rhetorical flourishes like 'Desire is the desire for desire' (Lacan), and only too ready to take in any novel system of ideas that contains nothing more than a few new words with a few vague connections between them. Anything containing mathematical and logical difficulties beyond the limited comprehension of this audience never becomes fashionable, as is the case with Jean Piageťs work in psychology during the ninetccn-for-ties. This last is a very interesting case, for there are definite indications that Piaget1* publications on the logical organs '/ation of concepts in the development of children's thinking (particularly in Trnité de Logtquc, Colin, Paris, 1949) influenced features of the ideas of more recent and fashionable figures, though they make no acknowledgement of this. It is to these latter writers that [ now turn, though only after remarking that unlike them, Piaget demonstrates his understanding of the logic and mathematics to which he appeals. Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Laean, and A.j. Grcimas do not, as I shall show.
■
Linguistics and Film
The interest of French literary intellectuals a couple of
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
decades ago in the linguistic systems of the schools of Sau^ ssure and Hjehislev has now entirely evaporated, and all that is left are a few pieces of terminology that are occasionally brandished to impress the ignorant. This is despite the incessant claims that were made at the time that these systems were going to solve all the problems of investigating not only language, but also other forms of communication. Since the failure of these pretensions is fairly obvious to most interested people, and in some respects is demerit strated in readily available books such as Jonathan Cullers Structuralist Poetics, 1 shall not examine them in detail. However, the important points that should have occurred to any thoughtful person at the time are that firstly, .then as now, linguistics is not a well-enough founded science to base anything else on, as no agreement has been reached among its practitioners'as to the validity of the several .irreconcilable theoretical systems that arc current in the subject, and that secondly the mechanisms thai lie behind our perception seem to differ too much between our different senses to allow our understanding of things by means of them to-be described by a unified system. As pointers to thl<l, note that we learn,to speak our language with much greater ease and speed than we learn to write and read it, and also that we have visually and mathematically formalized understanding of things for which we have no verbal understanding. And contrariwise. This situation seems to be a consequence of the processing of visual and verbal information separately in the two halves of the brain, as has been shown bv neuro-pb ys i olog i ca I i n vesttgat to n.
Within its own area it became clear long ago that French structural linguistics has only had a very limited success in the area of phonology, and has achieved nothing whatever concrete and practical in syntax and semantics. As an instance of this failure it is worth examining the work of A J. Grcimas, because this has often been referred to by the English disciples of French theorizing, and also because it is one of the few instances ofthc actual attempted application of that theorizing to the meaning of film narratives.
In a paper written with F. Rastier, and included in his Du Sens (1970), which has been translated in Yak French Studies No. 41, 1968, Grcimas produces a modd on page 161 which is represented by the following diagram, which he claims represents the elementary structure of meaning.
i"r *—---> S_.
Now although Grcimas does not .-define the relations be^ tween SlrSivS2 and St , he claims that this diagram is a repre-sentation of the Klein (or Piaget) group. (Both Grcimas and I arc using group' and 'representation' in the mathematical sense here.) Now this is certainly not the case, for a rcpre^ sentation of the Klein group requires two more relations to be added to such a diagram, and also that the relations be defined in a certain way. This would produce a diagram like tlie one below:-
S<
.-.tit
-1 ^;
■i' ;
c1 ■ — ■
' What seems to have happened is that Grcimas has borrowed, without understanding the mathematics involved, a diagram of Piaget s like, that I have just illustrated, which bad the relations between the elements properly delined, and has tried to combine it with a much older diagram often used to illustrate the relationships between the four pro posit ion a I forms of the classical logic of the syllogism. In the case of the logic of the syllogism the element    is a statement of the form 'All S is P', si ■* 1 statement of the form 'Some S is P', % is the form 'No .S is P', and S2 is Lhe lorm *Some S is not-P\ Now lor the particular case of these logical forms we can define the relations between them of 'contrary\ 'contradiction1, and 'implication' which are represented by the arrows (though the relation ol implication is not reversible as is necessary for them to form a group), but unfortunately these relations cannot be generalized to ctwer the cases when the elements ' s 1 are something other than the logical forms of the syllogism. Out this is just what Greimas tries to do in bis model. This fundamental misunderstanding becomes quite apparent when he applies his model to the particular case ofthc possible sexual relations in traditional French societv. when his diagram becomes:-
Cupitat) Ifi^v
■
$, «-
4
J       (fir*- -i-'i Stí l-ifcrfu
Wc can see that he is positing that conjugal love is the contrary (or opposite) of incest and homosexuality in the same way that male adultery is the contrary (or opposite) or female adultery, which is ridiculous. Further than that, it is obvious that the sexual relations which are not prescribed' include adultery by the man, and incest and homosexuality, as well as adultery by the woman, and a similar situation holds for the relations that are 1 not forbidden'. The source of Greimas' error here is a failure to understand that although one can always find the contradictory for any term (i.e. for any P there is always a not^P), there is not in general an opposite or contrary to every possible term. There would not be a great deal of point in going into this matter but for the fact that there have been a number of published attempts in English-language film journals to use the above kind of approach in the interpretation of films. Besides the particular method T have just discussed, many other aspects of Greimas' work are based on this kind of faulty thinking, and in particular his so-called transformational model of narrative, which has been applied to a television play by Roger Silverstone, without any recognition of its basic falsity. I shall return to this.
Eco and the Idea of Gcnoral Semiotics
At that time around 1970 when there began to be some kind1 or dim recognition of the lack of success of a science of communication by signs (semiotics) which was directly based on the model of French structural linguistics! there was an attempt to create another theory of this putative science which did: not depend so heavily on the linguistic mod-el. The most clearly written example of this development was Umberto Eco's A- Theory ofScmioiics (Indiana University Press, 1976), In Eco's treatment the sought-after generality was obtained by defining a sign as something that can possibly he interpreted as standing for something else by a possible interpreter. This hypothetical process of signification isiakenio define codes that could be used1 in anything that might be taken tobe a communication .process, These codes are a set of relations between one system made up of elements of expression (for instance whether the indicator lights on a motor car instrument panel are on-or off), and another system made up of elements of cornet (whether the battery is charging or discharging, etc.). When we are concerned with such simple examples there is no problem about the concept oPcode' being used, for in such a case the system of the elements of expression.is ifixed, as is the system of the elements of content, and also the relation between the sys^. Tn fact the Usage .m: the case of the indicator hght example corresponds to the way the word W has been used, not only i„ the past, but also in more recentlv developed mathematical communication theory. flut Eco
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
wretches the concept to extend very much further, as is indicated by his general definition, given above, of the signs (or strictly 'sign functions1) that make up the codes. To give a specific example from the cinema, if a dissolve in a film always meant that a time lapse had taken place, it would be part of a code of shot transitions functioning in the same general manner as the battery indicator light, And indeed functioning as the word 'code' has been ordinarily understood. But as 1 shall show later in this book, for most of film history the meaning of the dissolve has been ambiguous, and there have even been periods when it did not mean a time lapse at all. The same applies to every other feature of film form, even down to such classic examples as who wears the dark clothes and who wears the light clothes in a Western.
It is quite definite that in Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics such vague and transient relations are still described as 'codes', and in tact Eco quite explicitly extends his 'codes3 to the point where a unique feature of some communication medium, which might possibly be interpreted by someone as having some meaning, falls under a 'code*. An example might be that someone decides that one of the dissolves in a commonplace film such as From Russia With Love represents a transition to a mystical higher state of being for the characters. Obviously this use of the concept 'code' to refer to private interpretations takes us even further away from the way the word "code1 has been used in the past.
In fact what Eco and other would-be semioticians have done is to replace an existing set of descriptive terms —codes, conventions, and interpretations - which made distinctions between fixed relations of meaning, transient relations of meaning, and arbitrary relations of meaning, with a vastly extended use of one term which fails to make these distinctions, This would not be a valid criticism if such a greatly extended use of the concept of 'code' had produced new knowledge or any kind, but the effect on people who have taken up the idea of semiotic theory has been quite the opposite, particularly as far as film is concerned. The use of the word code' with something like the incredibly wide meaning given to it by Eco, but without any recognition of the true nature of this use, has led people to think that whenever they use the word 'code', they understand everything about the code' to which they are referring, or at any rate could with ease if it would not compromise their standing as pure 'theorists1, So this thoughtless adoption of such a notion of codes has nearly totally inhibited the investigation of the actual forms of films past and.present in England and Francevand also to some extent elsewhere. If everyone had beencontent with the already existing concepts of stvlistic conventions' and 'stylistic rules' they would have had adequate terms for the formal analysis of films, and none of these difficulties would have arisen
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
After establishing the basics of his theory in A Theory of Semiotics, which he does in a clear and consistent manner, whatever its fundamental flaws, Eco then adopts an excessively eclectic approach, and tries to include as many as possible or the previous ideas of others working in this area. For instance, he uncritically accepts the theory or Greimas that I have discussed above, not to mention others similarly deficient. As far as film is concerned, Eco's own idea, which was much discussed at one time, is that it forms a triply articulated code. This idea rests on a failure to make a distinction between the film strip which has separate images on it, and the image on the screen, which can be continuously present without any obvious transitions between images under certain conditions of projection, as happens in the best contemporary viewing tables, such as the Magnasync Moviola. When it comes to trying to incorporate a semantic theory into his general semiotic theory, Eco returns to a model based on verbal language, as everyone else has had to do+
The general approach or other would-be semioticians has rested, though less explicitly, on exactly the same sort of assumptions about codes' as Umber to Eco makes, and in particular this is the case with the much more confused and contradictory writings of Christian Met?..
Metz and Cinema Semiotics
The theoretical writings by Christian Met?, on his proposed semiotics of film have made only one practical proposal for the analysis of films, and otherwise, on the rare occasions when Metz deals with actual films, he can only reproduce the old critical cliches about the same old 'Film Society Classics', as happens on pages M2-H4 in his Language and Cinema (jVlouton, 13 74)
One of Metx s last statements of his position on straightforward film semiotics before he abandoned the subject to pursue that new Left Bank will o'the wisp, psychoanalysis, can be found in his lecture of 1971, On the Notion oj On-emoiographic Language. This is readily available in translation in Movies and Methods (University of California Press, 1976). A large part of this lecture is Metz's usual mixture ol truisms, error, and contradictions, such as his repeated initial assertion that there is no 'cinematographic language system' and then his final claim that the notion of a cinematographic language system is useful. Metz also asserts that the cinema is not a communication system because 'it does not permit immediate bilateral exchange between a sender and receiv-cr', which shows that he is not aware of the simple face that all that is necessary for a communication system is that there exist a sender, a method of encoding, and then transmission followed by decoding by a recipient. If these conditions are satisfied, then the pcienuality for inverse transmission exists,
9
and that is all that is necessary. In fact the average member of the cinema audience could, if given all the appropriate facilities and support, make another filni that conveyed a narrative with almost equal probability of having it understood by a film-maker. What such a film would not have is the technical smoothness and individual artistic qualities that make commercial films interesting beyond being the bare transmission of a narrative, Incidentally, if Met* does not believe the cinema is a communication system it is rather strange that he should always refer to its conventions as J codes1.
Such contradictory statements run right through Mete's earlier writings on film semiotics, and although he does not realize it, they are forced on him by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of all film construction, which increases in rough proportion to the artistic interest ol the films under consideration. Even in the most banal films of any period the constructional and other features which appear with some consistency are so few and limited that no coherent way ol classifying them into a useful system can be created. Metz's sole concrete proposal in this direction, his "grande syntagmatkjue', suffers from a basic difficulty in how the segments he uses arc to be precisely separated from one another in an actual film. This crops up immediately at the beginning of his sole published analysis, that of the film Adieu Phiilipine, Meu assigns shot number 8 to two successive segments simultaneously, and this means that a segmentation and attribution of categories different to the one he actually gives would be possible within his system. Similar alternative possibilities of analysis under his system occur later in the film, and are half-recognized by Metz, but what he fails to recognize is that these ambiguities remove the point of the creation of his new terminology, 'f hey were tjuite apparent with the already existing system of .segmentation into scenes, sequences, and so on, and the *grande syntagmatique' does not resolve them. Not only is Metz's system no improvement on the existing terminology ol film analysis on this level, but when we look at its deeper basis we find even more unsatisfactory features. Metz lays out the classification of his fundamental units of film narrative or 'syntagma' as shown above, at the top of thu next page.
The most striking of the many unsatisfactory features ol this classification is the wide separation, by several dichotomies (or branchings)> of the continuous scene done iii one shot (the plan leyutnct) from the continuous scene doo^ in a number of shots. The former falls under Mm'* category 'autonomous shot', and is classified by hirn with Inserts of various kinds, and the latter exists alone in the category 'scene'. But as far as the presentation of narrative is concerned, both the scene shot in one continuous take, and the same scene broken down into a number of shots with temporal and ac-
OLD FILM THEORY. NEW FILM THEORY
10
AaianomůtíS Segment
r is Ätiionötitoui Shot
Chronological fyttiag
mi
2. Parallel Siiuagm
3. Bruder Sjíuogm
4. Descriptive Syntagtn
Nätrotiic fyntaams
lion continuity fulfil exactly the same function. Thjs means that these two out of Mctzs set of syntagmasc categories can be interchanged without altering the meaning of the film, and this jsconlrary to his claim that the ■ com mutation test' ofithcorcticablinguistics, ^rhichdoesnot^permit this, can be applied to distinguish hi sicategoiiiesof narrative units one from-another. As .ar matter of face this pint also applies tO'Some. of Iris other categories under certain conditions^ so that-it seems that Metz!si often repeated id aim that the applicability of the commutation test is one of:the things that demon str ates that h e 'has d is covered □ rcod i fi e tl frl m ic system is alsoTalse,,Toi put it- another way, evemin the films of5the 193 3>l 955.period die sequence and'sceh'ejconstruction is^so iittle codiiiedl that analytical conedpts borrowed- from linguistics are of n o use whatsoever.'     1 '■,:.'
Rut Metzs major claim that he has identified and described one of the language systems of die cinema is returned1 to in the course of the lecture 1 am considering with a new example. He calls this narrative unit 'duralive montage', and: presents.an imaginary example of it as follows:
tc
Mere is a film that shows two men walking painfully over a vast expanse. We see, alternated, tight shots of their socks falling into pieces, close-ups of their faces, little by little overgrown by hairy beards, medium shots where we understand: the immense expanse they have to travel across and where they appear on foot with their somnambulistic andabrupt gait, The successive images arc connected one to another by dissolves and also by a unitary musical motiLThe dissolves and the music stop when the twomenvfbr example, reach awater hole and rest in. the shade of a tree, exchanging a few words:.k is toy another sequence that begins, dominated by another principle of montage.
On. the plane of the signifies this configuration involves three relevant character is tiesi 1. .cyclical and narrow mixing of several motifs taken from die same space;-2. Systematic recourse to an optical etfect and to one alone, 3 .Chronological co-incidence Ween a mus.ealimotif^ single one) and the iconic series under consideration. ;
i
my do these trail, desert to h, considered per-
5. Altemaiirtg Syntatftii
Linear Narrative Syrttagms
Serene
Sequence (Proper)
7. Episodic Sequence
8. Ordinary Sequence
tinent? On the one hand, because they do not appear - or their exact combination does not appear - in the other types of montage in usage in the same period. On die otherhand; because mey! appear, in return, iri n
J all the curative montages- of this period, beyond the ; ■ ;i diversity of the filmedobjects and actions -(which are •■! , ;not.]3er tinent here)-THiis figure dierefore does-not cor-i: respo nd to an occurrence;, bu L -to a: d ass o f occu r re nc-i ■ .es;it is ajcode unit (in the codei of classical montage in ■
this case).
■; rr,; % lOmdic planeof the signified^three'per tinent traits ivare^showri to:us... - t.<* ■    .'i . ; !.-:i.'L The semantic trail ofsimuharrciijy while the; beard :  grows;- while the socks are worn out,, the expanse of. the desert is gradually crossed'.
2. The 'durativc1 semantic trait. In other sequences of the classical cinema, temporality is strongly veccoral: actions succeed each other, and are added to each other. Here, time Is organised in a vast, immobile, and slack synchrony. The single action (that of ■proceeding painfully") is interminable and does not advance: it is the protagonists that advance and not the plot,
3. A semantic trail that concerns the modality of enunciation. Ordinarily, the film is fully assertive; it affirms that events unfolded down to their smallest details, exactly as we see it on the screen. Here, the modality becomes, so to speak, sub^asscrtive; the sequence does not pretend to present to us the heroes' long walk with all the factuality of the upheaval of events but rather to offer us a plausible it lustration of it, to give us an idea of it, a convincing sample, This method of affirmation is no longer 'It was thus", but 'It must have been something like this1".
Leaving aside the obvious point that no-one moderately knowledgeable about film has the slightest difficulty recognizing without the help of Metz1s semiotics what is, or is not, a montage sequence indicating passing time in films of the I933-19SS period, his discussion contains a number of errors, both major and minor. Specifically, montage sequences indicating the passing of time are not restricted to
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
cyclical and narrow mixing of motifs, but can be made up of a totally diverse collection of shots, their shots can be joined together by various sorts of wipes as well as dissolves (i.e. by recourse to more than one sort of optical effect), and the music accompanying them docs not necessarily begin and end with the first and last dissolves of the sequence, but usually continues into the beginning of the next scene. Incidentally, this last point connects with other uncertainties about where sequences start and end, and these Mcuis both unable to recognize and unable to deal with. The sort of situation I have in mind can be demonstrated by an example from Only Angels Have Wings (Howard J lawks, 1939), in wh ich a cross-cut.sequence of a radio-conversation between Gary Grant and one of the pilots ends in; the middle of a shot: with an abrupt transition to air ordinary, sequence of a dramatically quite different nature involving Gary Grant and one of the women. This sort of thing tan occur from time totime in the films of lesser directors too, but MctVs definition; of his syntagms requires, that they end where a shot ends. t-, Returning to the matter of montage sequences, all that truly characterizes them is that they be made up of a series of short shots whose images represent features in scenes as-sociatcd in some way with the action of the surrounding film, and that they be joined together by any sort of optical transition. This is so obvious that it is scarcely surprising that no-one has bothered to say it before, and even if Met'/ had seen enough films to be capable of recognizing it, he would have no way of being more precise about it. As for his statement: lOn the plane of the signified, three pertinent traits are shown to us ...*, this could be replaced with equal accuracy by 'Three pertinent traits ol meaning are shown to us and again he is wrong in what lie says about these traits, for:
1, Simultaneity is not unique to such montage sequencest but occurs in the same sort of way in cross-cut sequences.
2, In the sequence described, actions succeed each other and are added to each other just as in other types of sequence: the shots of the same feet walking with socks that are more worn-out are clearly successive in lime, and can in no way be described as synchronous.
3, The attempted distinction as to different modalities of enunciation is also mistaken, as ordinary sequences also often elide small and insignificant parts of the action between cuts, and in the case of cross-cut sequences quite large amounts of action are elided, The only distinction in the example described is that very large, amounts of insignificant action are omitted. However, Met/, would have a point here if he had described die kind of montage sequence in which the dissolves between shots ore butted up against each other, so that there are no single shots in the sequence,
but only a continually changing sequence of superimposed shots. In this case the super impositions make it impossible to recognize alt the details in each shot, and we could sav 'It was roughly like this' (not *lt must have been like this1). Met/, is unable to make this distinction, and I have shown how his subsequent claim that terms from Un£uisuies like 'signified', 'commutation', and 'syntagm' are necessary to such observations as can be truly made about such a sequence is false as wellt Some of the more knowledgeable and intcL ligent people who have long been concerned with film have intuitively recognized the emptiness of Metz's writings, but unfortunately they have not properly demonstrated these failings in print. Mctx himself seems to have some sense of the inadequacy of his attempts.at theorizing, for.Raymond 13 el lourhas very obliquely reported a private admission -that Meu made to him that his "grande syntaeTnatiquc'. does not work. This admission can be read in Bcllour s article ' Segm en ti ng/A na\ysi ng' i n The Quarterly fa riciv of Film Studies VolJv Nro.'3, Nevertheless, some people; arc still bus v republishing' Mete's.articles and talking about "syntagms", and some of Met?/s authorized disciples are still teaching his theories as received truth at various places around Paris, whichi must say something about the integrity of -French' literary intellectuals.
Marxism and Althusscr
The very limited additions made to Marxist theory by the 'philosopher' Louis Althusser have led to claims, which arc still being repeated, that his ideas justify some of the more recent developments in French film theory, so it is appropriate that I should examine a typical example of his thinking from his essay Ltmin antl Philosophy (New Left i3ooks, 1971), This piece contains some incredibly ignorant statements about the history ol philosophy, most particularly AJthusser's assertion that Ernst Mach's work had no importance whatsoever for subsequent developments in philosophy, when in fact the Viennese Logical Posit frists explicitly acknowledged him as an immediate predecessor, and other interested parties detected a strong influence Irom his ideas on ftusseli, Wittgenstein, and William James. That Althusser should know nothing about these matters is no surprise, but that he was happy to make dogmatic sta tem ents about them to an audience of French philosophers should he.
The nub of the first part of the essay under discussion can be found on p.42 el seq, as follows;
"Marx founds a new science, i.e. he elaborates!system of new scientific concepts where previously there had prevailed only the nun ipula Lion of ideo logical notions. Marx founds the science uf history where there were pre viousJy only philosophies of history"
12
Notice here again the assumption that al! that is necessary for a science to exist is the existence of, ftp | concepts; there is no realization that this system needs to be checked apinst reality in any. way. Further than this, Althusser s assertion that what composed Marx's system, were scientific concepts, whereas his predecessors were only dealing w.th ideological notions, is nowhere demonstrated; nor does he show any awareness of the necessity of this, .Tour bd.cl in Marx's alleged science is to rest on anything other than
blind faith.
A Ithusscr continues:
■
... before Marx, two continents (of theory) only bar] been opened up to scientific knowledge by sus-taincd cpistemological breaks; the continent of mathematics with the Greeks and the continent of physics by Galileo arid his successors ... A science like biology which came to the end of the first phase of its cpistemological: break, inaugurated by Darwin and Mendel, only a decade ago by the integration with molecular chemistry ..."
Here we have demonstrated a total ignorance of the history of science ami mathematics; an ignorance that Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics existed1 before that of Greece, that Galileo's astronomical1 theory and observation were preceded; by those 0f Ptolemy, and that there was a science of biologybefore Darwin. Italsoibecomes clear that Alt buyer's 'cpistemological break1 is a very strange sort of 'break' indeed", since one phase of it can cover a hundred years and generations of scientists, from Darwin till a decade ago, I say that the evolution of the sciences needs an analysis better than this simple-minded crudity, even though it might seem impressive to those who know nothing about science.
As everyone knows, Marxists have been very unsuccessful indeed in predicting the course of history over the last ■hundred years, so if they have been working by a science of history, it is a totally unsatisfactory one when compared to the real, sciences, which' can tell us what is going to happen (or be observed) with better than chance probability, given a set of initial conditions- Andiasfar as social organization goes, theilast fifty years have provided: conclusive .proof that Marxism- always leads at the the best to bureaucratic totalitarianism, not to mention what it leads to at the worst. There is no such thing as Socialism with a human face.
A major contributory factor to the inadequacy of Mar * ism is that, particularly in.its Leninist form, it is only made Up of a limited number of indeterminate concepts like 'class struggle1, 'ideology, '.petty bourgeoisie', and a very few others, which is not much with which to confront the eom-.plexus of modern society, One of AkhusserVmain claims
OLD FILM THEORY. NEW FILM THEORY
to fame is to have invented a new concept, that of the 'Ideological State Apparatus1, which according to h,m .s made up of the systems formed by the churches, the educational system, the trade unions, the political system, the legal system, etc., and which he alleges is distinguishable from the (repressive) State Apparatuses, which include amongst other things the Government, the Administration, the Police, and the Courts. One might ask how the man who has repeatedly demanded rigour in analysis can so easily separate the Government from the political system, and the Courts from the legal system, particularly when he goes on to claim that what distinguishes the two Apparatuses from each other is whether they function by repression or ideology, though at the same time maintaining that both Apparatuses function by both means to some extent. (See page I3S WWM and Philosophy).
But it may be that the true-believing Marxist is immune to argument of any sort. Page S of the Foreword to Lenin and Philosophy may be claiming this immunity with the statement
"... it is only from the point of view of class exploitation that it is possible to sec and analyse the mechanisms of a class society and therefore to produce scientific knowledge of it."
This is exactly equivalent to saying that one has to be a Marxist to sec the truth of Marxism, or even more concisely, Marxism is true because it is true. This is demanding a purity of blind faith equal to that of the most primitive Christian.
Psy choan aly s i s a n d Lac a n
The claims of traditional psychoanalysis and its validity can be dealt with quite quickly. Psychoanalysts in the English-speaking world sensibly do not claim that psychoanalysis is a science, and so the only reason for believing in its validity is its success as a treatment for mental illness. Unfortunately, surveys of the effectiveness of psychoanalytical therapy show that the cure rate for patients with neurotic symptoms who have been selected for treatment by psychoanalysis is about two^thirds after two years of treatment. This is just equal to the rate of spontaneous remission of neurotic illness occurring in patients who are not given any special psychological treatment at alL So it seems that psychoanalysis has no curative effect. Even worse, other forms of individual and analytical therapy give just the same results, or lack of them, as psychoanalysis. All the evidence on these points is presented and discussed in S. Rachmann s The Effects of Psychotherapy (Pcrgamon Press, 1971), and HJ Eysenck & G.Di Wilson's The Effects of Psychical Therapy,
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
(Methucn, 1973) and as far as I am aware there has been no reply from the apologists for psychoanalysis. So if the therapy based on the theory does not work, there is no reason to believe in the correctness of the theory.
Let me make it clear that I am not saying that there is no such thing as the unconscious mind, the existence of which had been noted by scientists such as Sir Francis Galton before Freud, but just that Freud's theories about it are patently unsatisfactory. And 1 am not denying that elements of 'kitchen-Freud* have been intentionally put into Hollywood films by writers such as Niven Busch and Ben Hecht from, the nineteen-forties onwards, and even sometimes by directors. For diis last reason it is as well to know something about psychoanalysis, but it does not follow that it can serve as a sound general basis for interpreting all films, as its disciples claim. I will also admit that traditional psychoanalytical interpretation of films can be a lot of fun when practised by someone with imagination and wit, as the writings of Parker Tyler, for instance, demonstrate. But this is not the case with the new variety of psychoanalysis which was preached by Jacques Lacan.
Jacques Lacan was the guru of a schismatic sect of French psychoanalysts, and he claimed to be the only guardian of the True Faith of psychoanalysis through a return to Freud's original teachings, which, he would have us believe, had been perverted by everyone else. However, La can's version of what Freud was really saying radically transforms his source, The stimulus for this revised version of Freud can be detected on page 73 of Lacan's Function and Field of Speech and Language in his tcriu (English translation, Tavistock 1977). There one can see that his psychoanalytic pretensions to provide a complete explanation of mental functioning were being threatened by Claude Levi-Strauss' claim to have discovered the basic method of operation of the human mind through h\s theories of savage myth and kinship systems. Since Levi-Strauss1 ideas were guided in part by the French variety of structural linguistics, Lacan immediately advanced the idea that",,, psychiatric systems are structured like a language." Of course the fundamental shortcomings of Levi-Strauss' theories, which stem from their failure to take account of myths and kinship systems which do not fit them (see Edmund Leach's bookL&i-Strauss (Collins, 1970) particularly page 117), do not trouble Lacan, or for that matter other French literary intellectuals in the slightest.
The evidence presented to support Lacanrs reformulation of Freud is rather difficult to disentangle from the wilfully increasing obscurantism of his writing after the secession of his school from the main body of psychoanalysis in 1953, but it seems to depend on a few slight odds and ends of doubtful anecdotal evidence like Freud's observation of one instance of preliminary language behaviour in
one German-speaking child. Lacan does not even bother to inquire what some, let alone most, children speaking other languages start out doing \vhen co-ordinating pre-language with their actions, and whether it supports the inverted pyramid of interpretation Freud constructed on it.
Eventually we come to the usual French allegation that what will guarantee the status of psychoanalysis as a science is its formalization, and nothing else (see page 72 of Function and Field of Speech and Language). The necessity of some sort of experimental testing of psychoanalytic theories is explicitly rejected in this essay with the astonishing assertion that the experimental sciences have no more relation to nature than does pure mathematics (page 74), How Lacan then accounts for the way we act on nature with devices based on our knowledge of physics, chemistry biology, etc. must be beyond the comprehension of anyone with any real acquaintance with the natural sciences.
Lacan next describes psychoanalysis as a potential 'conjectural1 science, like mathematics. He does not realize that part of thsigcance of mathematics for us resides in the fact that it grew out of applied mathematics in real situations in the first place, and that since then parts of it keep turning out to have applications in the natural sciences, If this were not so, the development of mathematics as a purely formal system would not have continued to the extent that it has, What Lacan had in mind for the development of psychoanalysis was quite different to this. After more confusion about the nature of science, he finally arrives at the contradictory claim that psychoanalysis will derive its justification from its curative efficiency. As for chat, there has been no word from Paris of any controlled (or even uncontrolled) observation of cure rates by Lacan and hb school, so there is no reason to assume that he could do any better in this direction than other psychoanalysts, (It is interesting to note that in 1966, at any rate, Lacan was not claiming chat his psychoanalysis was yet a science, Althusser and his English admirers, who have had no professional engagement with psychoanalysis, let alone with any real science, have not been sorestrai nedin the claims they have made on his behalf.)
The nature of Lacan s attempts at ' formal Ration1 of bis psychoanalysis can be indicated by an example from Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Dew? in Z&iti (page 317). Here he takes the basic symbolic representation in Saussurean linguistics:
Sianifitf J Signified s
as an algebraic expression, which u is not, and puts
'signified' and 'statement' equal in the ca^t of a proper
14
& S case the signer correspond, to tfctt -hch U not the Ego Ideal, and so by another ordinary algebraic manipulation Lacan obtains:
Signifkr * f^f%> ideal)
Apart from the initial misuse of Saussures expression for a linguistic statement as a division of sign! Her by signified, the use of algebraic operations by Lacan without Hist showing how they are defined for his own system inevitably leads him to the ridiculous nonsense of the final expression.
Another and more ser iou s in stance of Lacan $ use of subjects of which he does not u nderstand to bolster his ideas and hoodwink his audience occurs in one of a series of lectures that are included in Tour fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Hogarth Press, 1977). Here, in discussing his concept of 'alienation' on page 210 (in the original French on page 191 otic Scminoiv - Lhrc ,Y/), Lacan appeals for support to symbolic logic, and in particular to its concept of the logical relation W; He says that there are three kinds of or\ all of which he insists on refer ring to as the Latin re/, and his examples of these three kinds are;
1. "1 go either here or there - I make a choice between the two places," This is indeed the exclusive "or1 as recognized by formal logic, but it corresponds to the Latin aut, not the Latin vei.
2, uI go to one side or the other, I don't care which.11 As far as logic is concerned, this is not different to the first W, but just another example of the exclusive or', Lc< auL
3.41 Your money or your life." Lacan would have us believe that this is yet another kind of 'or' from the logical point of view, but in fact it is exactly the same as the other two, as the hearer is being ofibred an exclusive choice. What might happen after he has made his choice is irrelevant. It seems that at this point Lacan is ignorant I y groping for the inclusive V oriogie, which alone corresponds to the Latin re/, and which can be exemplified by the statement UA native citizen of the United States is someone who is bom of American parents, or born on American soil" This statement defines a category of people who fulfil both conditions as well as those who fulfil just one of them.
The confusion of Lean's already quite incorrect statements is worse confounded in Stephen Heath's presentation oi Laean's position in Wn (Volume 13, No 4) by the substitution of Whaustive for exclusive", so reversing the meaning which is thus made even more incorrect. Lacan follows this point by a further app.al to the algebra of sets
OLD FUJI THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
m which he says that the number of elements in the union of two sets is different to the number of elements resulting from their addition, quite failing to realize that the second operation does not exist in the form of ordinary arithmetical addition in the algebra of sets. The importance of all tins wildly fallacious confusion is that it is supposed to provide the justification of a concept called the 'suturV introduced into attempts at film theory created by Laean's followers. {See Caters k Omma Nos. 211 and 212, April and May [969, and Screen Vol.IS No.4), According to the latest version, the 'suture' is supposed to inhere in the operation of practically every feature of Him, including the soundtrack - image relationship, the effect of the edge of the frame, the occurrence of reverse-angles, and every cut in a film. As usual with French theory, no description oi exactly how it docs this in general is provided, and the way it is invoked arbitrarily in any specific instance irresistibly suggests the use of'the Will of God1 in low-grade mediaeval thinking. The absence of the 'suture1 has been invoked to explain some cases of 'distancing effects1, hut there is no necessity for it \\\ this case either, as distancing effects arc already easily recognizable and explicable in their action by making comparison with films in which they do not occur, and hence in terms oi their unexpectedness.
What we have here, as in some other instances of the activities of Laean's disciples, is something exactly analogous to a man going round a picture gallery and drawing lines around the already visible outlines of the objects in the pictures, and then saying thai this 'explains1 the pictures. The need lor a special ncwT 'theory of the subject1, which Laca-nian psychoanalysis is supposed to supply, is not felt at all by truly scientific psychology, and it might be advisable to point out to likely readers of this chapter that that discipline has been making considerable concrete and useful progress in many directions in the last few decades; with the prediction of behaviour, the analysis of perception, in making connections with neurophysiology, and even in producing rapid cures of phobic neurotic states under controlled test conditions. Of course, the more scientific psychology advances, the more difficult it is for literary intellectuals to understand it, so I quite expect psychoanalysis to hold its ground lor some time as the current form of 'literary psychology'. I Compare the psychology of humours, phrenology, etc. in past centuries.)
Cahiers du Cinema and Young Mr. Lincoln
Lacanian psychoanalysis has provided the mode! for a new kind of interpretation of narrative films which has been propounded and demonstrated in Cahicrs du Cinima No.223 (I97G), and translated in Scmn Vol.13 No,3. In principle this simply consists of finding (or inventing - "...we shall
OLD FILM THEORY, NEW FILM THEORY
not hesitate to force the text /') 'gaps1 or J lacks' En a film, which are then interpreted like symptoms in psychoanaly-sis to give an indication of what the Him, like a'patient, "is repressing. This ingenious inversion of older procedures of interpretation baa attracted a lot of attention from those interested in creating interpretations of films without taking ciny regard for their possible validity. There is of course nothing wrong in itself in taking over a theoretical model from one discipline into another, but it is not usual to do this with one that does not work in its original application, as is the case with psychoanalysis.
The authors of the Cahien article John /Wj Young Mr. Lincoln claim that their work11.,, will not be a new interpretation, i.e. the translation of what is supposed to be already in the film into a critical system but since they say a few-paragraphs later that their aim is to carry outan active reading to reveal what is already there, but silent ..." and since they are undoubtedly working in terms of a special Freudian-Marxist system in doing this, we must disbelieve their initial claim. In any case, in their practice it is quite clear that what they arc doing at least some of the time is interpreting negative (i.e. absent) feature* of the film. The writers ol this article say that their principal aim is to show that the fil ni is about the reformulation of the historical figure ol' Lincoln on the level of myth and the eternal
and that any thing that conflicts with that end, such as se* and politics, is omitted from the film. 1 think anyone would agree with this interpretation when it is simply put to them in those words after they have viewed the filmT and would do so without twenty pages of Marx and Freud, hard-
ly any of which bears on this particular point in any case. The observation I have just made is supported by the fact that in a contemporary review of the film in 1939, CmJvam Greene wrote, "... k is intended to be legend, not history ... . I would expect any film engaged in a similar project and made around that period to proceed in a roughly simv lar way, though it is to be noted that John Ford was more inclined to leave sex out of his films than the average Hollywood director.
A major section of the Cahiers analysis of Voting Air, Lincoln is to do with the alleged political and economic determinations of the film's production, and here lar^c amounts of totally erroneous injormation about American economic and social history arc produced by the wTiters, as has often been pointed out, even in the pages of Screen by Ben Brewster (VoL 14, No, 3).
Returning to Cahien psychoanalytical interpretation of the III m, we iind that the authors very quickly slip back into the usual kind ol interpretation of features actually present in it, rather than absent, although they show- no recognition that they are doing just what they said they were not go-ing to do (note their treatment of the various occurrences of the Mother and the Law (book), of Carrie Sues kissing Lincoln, and so on).They even descend to psychoanalysing the personality of the fictional character of Lincoln as he is presented in the film, twice describing the behaviour of this invented person as denoting bis paranoia. Gut I shall return to the fundamental defects oi the psychoanalytical approach when I deal with the general matter of interpretation.
THE INTERPRETATION OFFiLMS
17
. THE INTERPRETATION OF FILMS
1 of, film or other work of art, and why it should, is one m most people do not seem to be willing to Face. For brevity we can consider the alternative posiuons on this question as being stretched out along a spectrum from the most conservative or restrictive position to the most extreme or radical. At the restrictive extreme the possibility of true, or at any rate fairly certain, interpretation is denied altogether, and at the other extreme all interpretations, however generated, a re regarded as equally valid. Inbctween these two extremes arc various position* where smaller or hrger numbers of different systems of interpretation are considered to be valid, There is also a tendency for the amount of unjustified personal intuition used by the critic or interpreter to increase towards the more radical end of the spectrum.
The most restrictive position, which is the denial of the possibility of any valid interpretation at all, does not concern us, since anyone who held it, but Still produced interpretations of films, could be fairly regarded as wasting everyone's time. The next most conservative position is that all interpretation should be controlled by> and compatible with, what we know about the way the film was produced, including the context of the other 111ms of that time and place, and also what we know about the ideas and personality of its maker. By these standards, a religious interpretation of a film on a non-religious subject by an irreligious film-maker would be regarded as invalid, as would an interpretation that read significance into eye-line mismatches in a European Mm of the nineteen-twenties, since most films of that time and place contain some 'wrong directions' of all kinds, (This Vast error of interpretation has become increasingly common in recent years,} The contextual limitation on interpretation which 1 have just put forward is one that I myself hold to, and 1 put it into operation in a consideration of the films of Max Ophuls in a later chapter. Although 1 arrived at this position on interpretation independently, I have found that a very similar position has been earlier argued at length with respect to literature by E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his book Validity in Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1967). It is also an altitude that is in part implicit, perhaps'in a not very conscious way, in some conventional film criticism It seems to me that a well-known figure like Andrew Sarris ^applying it in arriving at his excellent interpretations of <he films ol Josef von Sternberg (Museum of Modern Art
1966), though elsewhere he sometimes lets his imagination and prejudices take complete control.
When a critic allows his private view of the world to determine his interpretations, as often happens, we arc moving into a more extreme position, where systems of doubtful  relevance and truth  are used  to create interpretations. One variant of this position, which has been entertained by by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Bruce Kawin, is a conscious adoption of complete subjectivity in interpretation. Though in practice 1 don1t think they have really followed this program through fully. When considering the application of more extended systems of ideas to interpretation, a factor that becomes important is the degree ofcertainty that can be attached to the assignment of meaning to any particular feature oi a filmr Possible concrete illustrations of this point are innumerable, but I shall return to psychoanalytic interpretation to provide an example. Taking up again the specific instance of the Cahiers du Cinema article on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, we lind that Lincoln's fixed stare in that film is always interpreted as castrating", whereas according to another psychoanalytic authority, quoted by Peter Wollen in hip comments on the Cahicrs article in the same number of Screen (Vol. 13, No.3 \911)} fixed stares are phallic, a symbol of rape. This situation, in which totally different interpretations of works of art are explicitly accepted by the devotees of psychoanalysis as equally valid, is quite common. In the reverse way, an interpretation that sees quite different features of the film as meaning the same thing can also he accepted as valid in psychoanalytical interpretation, as also happens in the article mentioned. In section 19, Lincoln is identified by the authors with the Law, but in an addendum to the article it is claimed that the mother represents the Law. Because of these various multiple connections between features of the film and the symbolic features that the psychoanalytic interpretation connects with them, it is impossible to trace back connections from the symbolic plane to that containing the features of the film with any certainty at all. What we have here is an aspect of the essential arbitrariness of psychoanalytical interpretation, or in mathematical terms, the lack of any definite functional relationship between the features oF the film and the set of symbols to which they are supposed to relate, Seen in yet another way, the system ol the features of the film and the psychoanalytic symbolic system do not have the same kind of relation to each other
that two natural languages have, for in the case of naiural languages one can always make a fairly accurate transition of a text from one to the other, and then back again. This point was made long ago by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and of course this sets psychoanalytic interpretation totally apart from the nature of explanation in the real sciences, and may well have something to do with the failure of psychoanalysis as therapy It is well worth noting at this point that the concept of Werdetermmatton' introduces an almost equal arbitrariness into Marxist explanations' of the existence of various ieatures of cinema.
Not very surprisingly, these ambiguous and arbitrary features ol psychoanalytic interpretation usually lead to muddled thinking in general, not to mention a high-handed attitude to evidence bearing on the point in question. A good example of this is provided by an article in Film QitancrW Vol.33, No. f, mi, entitled The Lady Vanishes'. The central point of this article rests on a psychoanalytical interpretation of Uie alleged absence of female magicians from early trick films, but the author, although told that there were female magicians in Pathe trick films (for there are indeed quite a number of Pathe films made around T90,S featuring a female magician), did not bother to investigate this. Whether there were a lot of female magicians in early trick films, or only a few, or none at all, clearly did not worry the author of the article, for although the facts undercut her main thesis, she was obviously not really interested in films in themselves, but only in using them io provide bogus support for quite other aims. This kind of attitude has unfortunately become very common in recent years.
Paced with the kind of situation in which there arc-competing interpretations of a particular feature of a film, the response of anyone with any scientific inclinations or training is to use some extra system of real knowledge to determine the relative pertinence and validity of these different interpretations. This has also been part ol the practice ol art historians dealing with painting and the other fine arts during this century. The literary type's who are so interested in psychoanalysis show no Interest in doing this, presumably because they are only interested in interpretation ibr its own sake, as a form of self-expression, or in the pursuit of some extra-artistic concerns, rather than in creating relatively certain knowledge about films, which can be built upon further. Because of the essential arbitrariness of psychoanalytic interpretations there is no possibility ol basing any generalisations on them that have true explanatory or predictive powers with respect to the features of other films. As has proved to be the case in the past, psychoanalytic interpretations are shilting sands on which nothing solid can be built.
One justification sometimes advanced for the most
extreme position on interpretation, which is that all interpretations are equally valid, is that some modern artists sometimes say that their work moans whatever a member of their audience wants it to mean. But in fact it will he lound that such artists nearly always reject interpretations that clash strongly with their beliefs when confouud with them. Andrei Tarkovsky is a case in point. Although he has sometimes said to enquirers that his films mean whatever they mean to the individual person watching them, when it was suggested that the mother in Zaka\o was an unloving mother, he instantly rejected this, as he did other interpretations which he didn't agree with.
A variety of the extreme position on interpretation, which has not so far tempted anyone interested in film, is indicated by the program advocated, but only feebly attempted, by Julia fCristeva, with respect to literature. (See page 229 of Essais dc Scmiotiifm: Voctiqu? (] 971), edited by A.J. Greimas). This program involved using random operations on texts to generate new words from them; the new words so generated constituting the interpretation. Nevertheless, something approaching this degree of arbitrariness has been used by Raymond Mel lour, in a study of Hitchcock's >ionhhy North hl'^i, published as Ic Biocogc symboliyuc in CtirnrnunKiiiions Vo!r23, I97S. I will consider the part of it dealing with the well-known crop-dusting sequence, starting from paj*e of the article.
ftellour daims that, amongst the numerous codes imbued with significance in this film, there is one that involves the directions of the arrivals and departures of the vehicles at the cross-roads where this Sequence takes place. After illustrating the arrivals and departures with the following diagram:
X
C2 Ii?
PI;
arte
V
C, \h c, c,
Bellour then makes a series ol statements about the alleged operation ol this code;
41 The first bus (lii) appears from the direction xt jnd it disappears in the direction \ ' r.r
IS
•The m car (&), repeal, this movement oř appearance and <to.pp«»i>ee fronv* to v'. A gap if in.'ctiWlfrom the Ito tothe car in terms 0Í the k. ncf of vehicle...
The second car (O)operatcs a path exactly inverse to that of the first. The differentiation of the bus is reinforced by this symmetry in the measure where this second car constitutes a closed sub-cnsemblc with that which it immediately precedes. The Hrst truck (Ti) that follows it accentuates the opening of the system. It arrives from xlike the bus and the first car from which it differs by its kind, but inversely to the preceding three vehiclesilis not seen to dis appear in the opposite direction, and so leaves an empty term in x in the equilibrium of the systems of which the sub-ensemble of the two cars proclaims the constraint. The appearance of the third earmarks a radical opening of the system. It adds to the axis jcjt' the axisjy' The arrival of the second bus allows, like the arrivals of thesccondcar followingthc first, a relative closure of the system of which the third car underlines the differential1 expansion. It strictly in veils the effect of the thirdlbus 0
And soon. This might seem quite impressive at first glance, but an instant's thought should tell one that Be Hours procedure is.meaningless. To demonstrate this, take the case th at one creates a s i in i 3 ar di agram of arri va I s an d de par t u res of vehicles at a cross-roads by a totally random process oT coin-tossing to determine what the direction should be, whether tile arrival or departure is shown, and what kind of vehicle is involved- Although in this situation the diagram will1 be totally without any meaning, nevertheless Bellour s sort of interpretation can stilltoe carried out. 1 shall show tins for one example Created by just the sort of random coin-lossingl have described1, and: which I illustrate below;
t;- -
c= c, Q %
C,     B, Ha T,
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THE IN TERPR ETA TI ON OF FILMS
We can easily repeat Bel lour's procedure to find a pretended significance in this diagram as follows:
-
"The first car appears from the direction x, and disappears in the direction x'
The second car operates a path exactly inverse to that of the first, so constituting a closed sub-ensemble together with it.
The opening of this system is announced by the arrival of the third ear without its departure being shown.
The departure of the bus that follows it underlines the differential expansion of the system which is further accentuated by the next two departures. Two successive trucks departing in opposite directions now produce an oppositional symmetry t hat signals th c s tab i I izalion a n d re I a ti ve c I os u re o f t h e system before the fina I departure of truck 2 produces a radical re-opening of the system, accentuating the total dissymmetry which compensates for an equal dissymmetry in the movements of the vehicles aligned with iheiy* axis.*1
The fact that my interpretation, though based on a meaningless diagram, is indistinguishable in its nature from 6 el lour's interpretation demonstrates the point lessness df his approach, and ] could produce the same kind of interpretation for an infinite number of arrangements. To reinforce my point, I will similarly deal with another and even more extreme instance from the same source. When Bellour is interpreting the movements of the crop-dusting plane in the same scene from North by Northwest, he represents them by the following diagram;
tsi. attack arrival
3r<l. .muck arrival
In. aibick departure^
2rul, jUack arrival --
fill i r .-íitock arrii at
Y
3rd. car arrival
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In this diagram, as before, only the arrivals and departures ol the aeroplane which are actually shown in the film are represented by arrows. A careful comparison with the film
THE INTERPRETATION OF FILMS
itself shows that Bellour has created a bogus extra symmetry by displacing the centre or the attacks to the centre of the cross-roads, when in fact they are centred at a number of points in the bottom right quadrant formed by the crossroads, and he has also represented the sixth attack as taking place along the yy' axis, when it is actually oblique to it. Having done this, Bellour then says:
"One can see: a) that the attacks 1, 2, I and 6 of the aeroplane arc arranged symmetrically two by two in the directionsy andy with respect to their arrivals, but that- b) the departures progressively draw away from the rigorous symmetry of the first attack: either in marking a distortion of their paths in relation to the axis (departures 2 and 3), or in being differentiated by the exigencies of the action (attack 6)T c) that the car involved in the sub-ensemble of features connected with 'aeroplanes' doubly accentuates this disequilibrium, enhancing in one way the number or arrivals, and in another the prominence given to the directionyT
Of this last point, Bellour also says:
this reprise accentuates the constitutive dissymmetry which, sliding into the heart of the repetition, allows this series of operations to be tied up."
I hope it is obvious that any random set of directions laid down at various points in a plane could just as well be 'assimilated' (as Bellour puts it) to a pair of perpendicular axes nearby. Consider the diagram below, which I constructed by drawing a pair of axes, and then dropping ten pins which fell onto the sheet in the marked positions.
y
The random direction of those pins which happen lo lie close to those of the axes have been 'assimilated' to them, and then the arrival and departure and ordinal designation have been assigned by a random coin-tossing operation to give the next diagram.
19
5Ml. altAck .irrii-a!
Ira. e-jr arrival
tit; part clrfr 2rn\. itlJi-t .irrivjf
Y
One can then construct an interpretation of this ria|u> hand diagram of exactly the same kind as that produced by Bellour, as follows:
"One can sec: a) that the attacks 5 and 6 of the aeroplane are arranged symmetrically in the direction y and y with respect to their arrival, and that: b) the departures progressively return to this same rigorous symmetry, producing a relative closure that is broken by the final departure, which in its turn: c) is compensated for by the arrival of the third car."
-
And again the result is indistinguishable from IJellour's kincf of interpretation, even though deriving from an intrinsically meaningless set ul features.
That Bel lour should be unable to see the total arbitrariness of his method becomes less surprising when we look back to the way he introduced it on page 294 at the heginning of Ins ariicicT before beginning his 'analysis';
"The progression k double, at the same time profoundly linear and non-linear; on one side tying together the elements ol the system step by step in a contiguity more or less immediate, from one series, from one alternation, from one rupture to another; on the other hand tying at a distance, at a greater ur lesser distance, according to a play of echoed which produces simultaneously a perpetual contraction and expansion of the systems
With such a system that simultaneously a>e* the kiuily contradictory ideas off i near i iy and iiou-linearity, contiguity and non-contiguity, and expansion and contraction, aW-lutely anything can be filled jo, even if it be a series of totally ran don j features.
20
Only occasional touches of this sort of procedure have appeared in the writings of the English admirers of French theorizing, for instance in Stephen Neath's Film and System m Screen Vol. I6T Nos. 1 and 2, 1975, and the charitable assumption is that this denotes a heller sen.se of what is reasonable than Raymond Bel lour has. But equally unjustified over-interpretation of a more general kind has appeared from time to time in the last couple of decades in more conservative journals. The sSort of thing \ have in mind is the reading of major significance into such features as the directions of panning shots, or the actual length of particular shots, without regard for the plausibility of this. An early example of this sort of tendency was the almost legendary occasion when the Writers of Movie asked Vincente Minnelli the meaning of a wob hie of the image in his The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Minnclh replied.that the wobble was not in his film but in their projector To he fair, the Movie writers were taking the right general approach in checking then-interpretations with the film-maker, but they .should have done it with some awards of the techniques and aesthetic attitudes that he was likely to use.
It is worth noting that ordinary academic film criticism
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THE INTERPRETATION OF FILMS
frequently suffers from some of the same kinds of illogicality as those in the examples I have been considering. Recently, many good examples of the basic Raws in the arguments used in interpretation have been given by David Bordwell in his Making Meaning: Inference and Rhacaric in the Interpretation oj Cinema {Harvard University Press, 19S9), but he does not also consider the frequent lack of simple correspondence with the facts to be found in academic criticism. When .such faults are not present, what we usually get is a mixture of unth inking reactions produced by the critic's personal system of beliefs, mixed in with more reasonable interpretation that is controlled in an implicit or unconscious way by just the kind of checks for relevance that I have advocated at the beginning of this chapter. This latter component of criticism can produce observations of lasting interest about a film, so that not everything that is sweepingly dismissed by would-be theorists as 'impressionistic' criticism is wo r till ess, though this is no reason to encourage its proliferation. Rather it is to be hoped that its practitioners might come to dilTerentiatc, both for themselves and for others, between the various kinds of approaches to film that they are employing undiink-ingly.
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4. FRENCH FILM THEORY INTO ENGLISH
The principal channel for the presentation and advocacy ol French Him theory in English translation has been the magazine Screen, one of the Marxist journals subsidized by the British Film Institute. From 1971 French theoretical writing of the kind I have already commented on has been translated in Saecn, and more recently such ideas have been presented in rewritten form, and nearly always totally uncritically. Indeed, the claim has often been made in Screen that these French inventions represent new truths that render all other ideas about film worthless, and that they provide new standards of Vigour' and exactness. Many would agree that the standard of previous discussions of cinema could be improved, and that moves in the direction or improvement are to be welcomed, but only if they produce new and constructive knowledge, and not just more empty words.
At first sight, those original articles by members of the Screen group which attempt to apply French ideas to actual films look quite impressive, lor they mimic the appearance of scholarly articles in established disciplines, with very large numbers of footnotes and references, and often also elaborate analytical tabulations. But when one looks more closely at the references, one finds that they are not to well* established results, but at best to a source where a chain of dubious arguments rests on baseless assertions, and at worst to some bald assertion by an ignorant and badly-educated Frenchman. As for analytical tabulations, I will just mention one in an article by Stephen Heath on Touch of Evil in Screen Vol J 6, Nos. 1. and 2< In this there is a large chart covering a number of pages which tabulates, amongst other things, the Scale of Shot for the shots in a section of that film. But the Scales of Shot given are written down incorrectly and inconsistently, and then no use is made of ihis chart in the course of the article. No doubt the model for this ktnd of pointless procedure is the list of Actions at the end of Roland Barthes' S/Z, of which that author too makes no use wh also ever.
The novel but unnecessary terminology which is used in these articles in Screen may have helped to conceal their inadequacies from their authors, and as an example ol this I will mention two article* by different authors in Vol. 17, No.4 and VoUS, No J, which deal with the first twelve shots in Un Chien AnJabit. Both authors repeatedly describe the first four shots of this film, which comprise a repeated pair of reverse-antdc cuts on action between a shot ol a man sharpening a razor and a detail Insert of the sharpening ac-
tion, as an alternating syntagnT. Now although Christian Metz's 'Grande Syntagmatique', which had previously been expounded at length in Screen, is quite unnecessary and productive of no extra precision, Met/, has made it quite clear that by 'alternating syntagrn he meant what is ordmarilv refcrred to as cross -cutting between parallel actions in different places, and certainly not continuity cutting within an ordinary scene, which is what wo have in these lour shots. This misunderstanding of the basic 'theoretical* ideas beinji used leads the authors or these articles on tu further confusions about the placing of the camera and the actors, and then this confusion is reinforced by a failure to recognize the eye-line mismatches still common in European films made in 1928.
Leaving aside further similar confusions, I will mention yet another kind of characteristic failing in the original articles written for Screent and I will take an an example an article by Roger Silvers tone in Vol. 17, No. 2 called An Approach to the .Structural Analysis of the Television Message'. This purports to apply to a contemporary television play the system of narrative analysis developed1 by Vladimir Propp for Russian fairy tale* in his Morphology of the Folk Talc (University of Texas Press, 1968). Fn Propp's work various narrative functions describing parts of the stories are defined specifically to relate to the nature of events in Russian Wiry tales T and in fact Propp's aim was to show that all Russian folk tales of a fantastic nature had a similar struc-tu re, with the narrative functions occurring in the same order, and hence that all Russian fairv Uiles derived from a common original tale. In his attempt to fit Propp's narrative functions onto a modern drama, Si I versions uses them sometimes with the literal meaning Propp attached to them, but sometimes Ik- can only get them to fit the events in the television drama by widening their meaning to take in a figurative sense. For instance, Propps (unction which relates to the giving of a magical object to the hero is used by Silverstone to apply to the wife giving breakfast to her husband, and so on. For the instances when even tins ilit:-gilimate tactic will not work, Silverstone ha* no hesitation in inventing a series of new ad hoc functions for his am lysis. Hven so, he cannot get aJJ of Propp's functions lo occur, and in their correct order, but thb docs not stop him chiming that he has done a Propp-type analysis, and that it fits the television play well! But there is more io come. Sihvrjtone has now add^d more material to hi* original article and it
hns all been «ibtbhd "itl.oul alteration in book form as TteM^ tfT«ferfctat (Heincmann, 1981), However he has also included in.an appendix an entirely differentana Ij-,i,«f the teleplay wiwj-Propp* functions, which lie cla.ms is the same as his original analysis which is in the body ol the hook! The acclaim with which Silverstonc's work has been greeted by other sociologists gives one some idea of the intellectual standard prevailing in sociology as well as
i n Screen m agilní n c.
In the last several years there have been various other attempts to force Propp's functions onto film narratives, and they have all shown the same kind of faults as those in Silverstone's work. However it is only Screen that has made repeated chums that the articles it publishes meet new standards of rigour. As a summation of the failings of the Screen approach to film theory, I will consider in more ífetaíl another article in that magazine which has been frequently referred: to as though it contained profound truths about the nature of photographic reproduction, whereas in fact the case is quite the contrary.
Narrative Space
An article by Stephen Heath in Screen Vol. 17, No. 3 fi9l6)t which attempts to draw a number of topics together under the heading óf Narrative Space has since been cited in various articles as support for erroneous positions and ideas. It perpetuates some common misunderstandings about the nature of photographic reproduction, and buttresses what il says on this anil other topics with a large number of factually incorrect statements,, so a closer look at the matter is in order. To do: this concisely it is necessary to go back to a consideration of photographic reproduction from first principles.
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A real scene has light waves coming from it, and then arriving at any particular point in front of it, in a way that is in .principle completely determined, and-this is the case whether there is an eye or a camera at that point or not. The ideal of perfect photographic reproduction is to have light waves coming from a screen or other source to a point in; front of it in exactly the same way as regards direction wavelength; intensity, etc. as was the case for the corresponding point in front of the original scene. And this, is again lo;be so whether there is an eye to look at the repro-duced scene ior not.
Iftliis aim ^perfectly achieved, a-veye placcdin.the two co,rc,pon(|ing.|Jositiljns be|br£ t|)c rea, sce[ic - —
tW reproduce scene in mian wMt of m
able to <hst,nguis)l whiclvisthe -^^^ and:whfch fe
d-repro.ction-Shceve.hr.m.combin.Uonfes.difficu.t d.S«ngU1Slung case, where the absolute intensity of the 2 * —-nsisái,Wlibu,stillill lhe JggP
FRENCH FILM THEORY INTO ENGLISH
proportion one to another w&h each of the versions, but bevond that there is very little leeway for the brain to compensate for deviations from the ideal to give the illusion of perfect reproduction when it does not exist. If this were not the case there would be no possibility of deciding which was the more accurate of two differing repro duct ions of a scene, and this we can certainly do, and agree about as well. To take the crudest instance, we can easily agree about which of two photographs of the same subject is more in focus, but the case extends to much more subtle details than that. The existence of visual illusions is irrelevant to the matter, since nearly all of them exist in the same way in a real scene and ajso in the best possible photographic reproductions of that scene. Nearly all the writers on visual perception, and also on perspective in reproduction, fail to realize this, including the ones Stephen Heath cites, and they are eventually led to the puzzled (and false) conclusion that wc should not be able to recognize the similarity or otherwise of two scenes, whether reproduced or not. j.J. Gibson's Perception of the Visual World (Houghton Mifflin, 1950) is a case in point. After mentioning the correct view of the matter that I have presented above, he fails to discuss it at all. Other discussions of perspective in reproduction confine their attention to the case of painting, though sometimes bringing in black and white photographic.prints on paper, which is not much help as far as the general case is concerned.
At the present time one can in practice achieve various approximations to the ideal reproduction of visual reality. One approach is through central projection (in both the geometric and cinematic senses of the word) onto a hemispherical screen with a f fish-eye' (180 degree field) lens used for both taking and projection. An even more nearly perfect reproduction for two-eyed humans can be made by using a stereoscopic pair of cameras and projectors in this situation. But these arrangements arc not economically at-tractive, so we ordinarily have the usual reproduction of a restricted part of the visual field from a flat surface, so introducing the possibility of artistic composition of the image. {The possibility of image composition docs not really exist with hemispherical projection, since in that case the edge of the image can not be seen properly when looking near the. centre of it.)
In the arrangements so far described, movements of the eyeballs of tlic spectator are allowed, but if one wants to maintain the perfection of reproduction as well as pos^ *m< movements of the head are not. (Stephen Heath falls to distinguish between these two types of eve movement.) Perfcct reproduction of part of the visual Held in a manner that accomodates the head movements of the spectator can be accomplished with holography, and motion holography was achieved nearly two decades ago, but this is still be-
FRENCH FILM THEORY INTO ENGLISH
ing ignored in theoretical discussions of these matters. And holograms can be synthesized from ordinary photographs taken from a large number of different angles to a scene, so that the visible world can be considered as "... a sum total of possible photographs and not the contrary, as Stephen Heath wrongly claims on       of his article.
Short of having one of these two more nearly perfect, but at the moment highly inconvenient systems, we settle for the next best, which is, as already stated, the optical and geometrical projection of a scene onto a flat surface. The way the eye-bra in combination works is quite irrelevant to all this, as there is no way it can change the physical information (the light waves, that is) impinging on the eye, and that is oil that determines whether the brain has a chance to sec' a perfect reproduction or not. Some sort of vague impression that the brain, eye, and external world are bound together into a kind of un-analysable whole seems to have become quite widespread amongst literary intellectuals in recent years, This is quite falseT Only light waves {or photons if you like) go into the eye, and nothing ^oes back the other way, so that one can make a simple separation between what goes on in the external world, and what goes on in the eye-brain combination.
In Stephen Heath s attempt at an account of the significance of photographic reproduction, which is more a free fantasia round miscellaneous quotations than a logical argument, the principal idea put forward is that the form of photographic reproduction results solely from a 4code" invented in the Quattrocento (iStk century) for painting, as a result of a sudden new philosophical or ideological conception of space itself. This superficial and false idea is not original, but along the way of rehearsing it from pages 73 to 81 of his article, Heath produces a number of factually false statements, starting with the claim (page 73) that representation is a matter of discourse. As I have indicated, true representation is just a matter of optical correspondence, regardless of whether there is any observer to give the possibility oTcalling it 'discourse'. Next, from page 75 onwards, the idea that there was a "..perspective code of Quattrocento painting appears. Now the specific characteristics of Quattrocento painting are actually due to the way a convention of composition interacts with the reproductive system then in use, through the lining up of the edges of solid objects with the perspective construction lines. As every art historian knows (Gisela M. Richtcr, Perspective in Greek and Roman An, Phaid-on, 1970), correct perspective renderings corresponding to the results of central projection had been achieved in classical antiquity, presumably in the pursuit of mimesis. \ hese renderings do not have the centralized compositional contention of Quanrocento painting, but that does not prevent them from havino correct perspective. If one insists on talking
23
of codes, even though it is not necessary and the use of that word tells us nothing ncwp then one has to say thai there are two codes involved in this matter a perspective code, and a compositional code. The first is a simple mechanical code like M orse code (from a mathematical point of view even simpler than Morse code), and if it is altered very much it just vanishes, ceasing to be a code. The first signs of a revived interest in it can be seen before the Quattrocento, possibly due to concerns vnth the new popular religious teaching. As for the specific Quattrocento corn posíl ion at Hcode', interest in this convention departed remarkably suddenly around 1520, after which compositional interest in paintings shifted to complex figure arrangements in a shallow space, or alternatively I o landscapes done freely with-out construction lines, in the first case there are sometimes bits orarchitecture dim in the backgrounds of the paintings, but the renderings of these are sufficiently inaccurate from a perspective point of view as not to count as perspective. If the reader wishes he can check the above statement against any sufficiently large sample of Renaissance paintings, such as Frcedbcrg's Italian Painting in the Sixteenth Century in the Pelican History of Art series.
In film terms, the independence of centrally organized compositional conventions from the reproductive system is demonstrated by the existence of alternatives to their usual co-presence* In horror films, a n amorphic images (in the general gc o metrical sense: i.e. distorted, without correct perspective reproduction), but with centralized composition, are sometimes used for expressive purposes, and in some avant-garde Alms one sometimes gets images that have no centralized composition, but do have correct perspective, as in Hall and Sinden's Edge (1973). The rarest combination is images having neither correct perspective nor centralized composition, but some of the distorted shots in Abel Gance's b Folic da Doctcur tube (Í9I5?) just about I ill the bill.
In his failure to understand these facts, Stephen Heath has put himself in the position where he can uncritically quote statements like: "The public has come to believe that geometrical perspective, so Jong as it doe* not involve unfamiliar points of view, is 'true1, just as a long Ume ago it was believed that the old geometry of Euclid was "the truth'." I have already indicated that as far as get Ling the most accurate reproduction of visual reality onto a flat surface {and off it again) is eoiKíerned, geometrical perspective is the Vuesi\ and of course liuclidean geometry is still accurate as far as all practical purposes are concerned, it is only when dealing with cosmological matters that one has to take account of Riemanjiian geometry. In using a quotation like this, Stephen Heaih is clearly confused about whatcost si i ^ tutes useful knowledge, and he goes on to empha^i^e thi>
24
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by using as part of his argument quotations relating to Rim construction from authors who have not worked in fictional filmmaking, and hence whose ideas have no direct relation
to film practice.
Then, on page 8 J of his article, Meath makes an attempt to associate with the Renaissance the existence of pictures and their frames as entities independent from wall decoration and other applied uses. Apart from the fact that, contrary to his claim, paintings were made on freely movable rectangular panels of wood and terracotta withpaintcd borders in classical antiquity, he is also flatly wrong in stating that the Quattrocento system cannot be realized without it (i.e. the frame) In fact, perspective by central projection does not require that the projection plane have any limits; the semi-infinite volume of the visual world which exists onthe other side of the infinite projection plane from the projection point can be projected onto that infinite projection plane in exactly the same geometrical way as for the projection of a limited volume of space onto a limited area of the projection plane, whi eh incident ally can be of any shape;
After more pages stitched together from quotations of varyingreliability, (e.g. the Lumicres did not restrict themselves to audiences viewing the screen from one side, but the alternative used at the Paris Exposition of 1898 required the inconvenience of keeping the screen continuously wet), Stephen Meath arrives at a favourite statement that he has
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FRENCH FUJI THEORY INTO ENGLISH
repeated in other places. This is: "The 180 degree line that the camera is forbidden to cross answers exactly to the 180 degree line of the screen behind which the spectator cannot and must not go ..." In fact it is quite easy to find examples of crossing the eye-line in scenes involving two people in Hollywood films; about once in every twenty films if one looks for it carefully For example, inside a couple of weeks fhave seen instances in Pilgrimage (John Ford, 1933), Lady in a Jam (La Cava, 1942), and The Unsuspected (Curtiz, 1947), Obviously these occurrences were not considered of any importance 3t the time, as retakes were usual to correct faults in those days. When one turns to European films of the nincteen-thirtics it is quite easy to find orgies of eye-line crossing: as in Paul Cziliner's Escape Me Never (1935)., and Duvivier's Un Cornet de Bal (1937). From all this the only possible conclusion is that 'crossing the eye-line' is far less important than is usually supposed, and since the rule is far from exactly held, there is no way for it to correspond to the line of the screen, as Stephen Heath would have itr
This article on 'Narrative Space' ends with four pages of mixed rhetoric, description, and frame enlargements centering on a tiny peculiarity of one scene of Oshima's Death by Hanging; a peculiarity that has nothing to do with 'narrative space1, but a lot to do with the difficulty of getting a cat to do what you want when shooting low-budget location film, but Heath is incapable of recognizing this last point. Can we do better than this sort of thing?
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5. PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
r
Itake the aim of film studies to be arriving at, and then communicating, the maximum amount of useful knowledge about all sorts of films from the past to the present. 1 also believe that the best sort of knowledge is constructive, meaning that it has its basis in what we can be fairly sure about, and also that it can be used as a sound basis to build upon further. To handle this task practically, there must be methods of analysing and evaluating as objectively as possible the hundreds of thousands of films that have been made. Analysis is necessary, for nothing can be said accurately without it, Evaluation is necessary, because only some films can be considered, saved, and made available out of many. The maximum amount of objectivity is necessary, because that permits the maximum communication of knowledge. (In a world where total subjectivity and relativism reigns, no meaningful communication is possible.) This means that serious study of the cinema should strive towards, without being able to attain, the nature of the established sciences such as biology and physics, which are identical in England and Russia, America and China. Film studies are unable completely to become a real science because of the essentially innovatory, idiosyncratic, and complex nature of the art object. There are no eternal laws of aesthetics.
Principles like these, though not usually expressed, doubtless because they are obvious, have guided the fruitful development of musicology and art history during this century. An important aspect of this approach is that only as much theory as is necessary to deal with the matter in hand is used; there is no point in the pursuit of totally unnecessary and unobtainable rigour and generality. AsP.B. Medawar observed, in the real sciences there arc no prizes for tackling too difficult a problem and then failing to solve it. Though in the humanities it seems that if this is done with enough flashy rhetoric one can collect one an admiring crowd of ignorant disciples for a while, not to mention providing a comfortable living for oneself The other main error of film critics has been loo ^reat an eagerness to say just what sort of film is good and what sort bad; by an unconscious desire to justify personal preferences. The two sides of film thcory the analytical and the evaluative should be separated as much as possible, and for both the individual film should he central, not the director or the genre or anything else.
Analysis;
Analysis of films can proceed in two directions, and
these are far from equivalent. jMost importantly, films can be analysed in terms of their construction and their relation to their makers: analysis in this direction is rnnstlv ignored
i 9
in theorizing about films. This is strange, because if one insists on describing a film as a coded message, that coded message must have been constructed by the films immediate makers, and the only way to get an accurate decoding must be- to reverse the process of encoding. Actually, it should be noted that the film medium, in terms of its narrative function, is not a simple communication channel, but a complex object that is also a representational system, but neverlcss with aspects that function In other ways, such as communication.
Less importantly, films can be analysed in terms of the response of their spectators. Of course film-makers also form part of the audience, and they are the part that is capable of the fullest response and understanding. It is in relation to them that the film comes closest to being something like a language system.
The obvious factors that influence the creation of a film   previous films, the technical and other production constraints from inside the film industry and craft, and the more general influence of society and culture all act through individual Him-makers whose individual differences play a large pari in producing the visible varietv of films: a variety that will be underlined in the following chapters. Attempts at the type of large-scale 'cultural history* or 'culture critique' generalizations that ignore the relations of individual filmmakers to their work and try to explain everything about films in terms of such lenuuus and imprecise abstractions 4* ^bourgeois ideology' invariably founder on the sheer variety of films. The generalizations of cultural history, Marxist or otherwise, are always either banal or false, and indeed experience shows that one generations cultural history, however diverting it was at the time, is the next generation s waste paper.
Most of the numerous features of a film are the way they are because ul conscious decisions by the director, writer, cameraman, etc. (There is a possibility that this was slightly-less true in some cases in early cinema, but it is fairly easy to tell the occasions when this happened, if one has seen enough examples of films from the period in question,) So in the first place the narratives of films should be looked at in the terms used to construct them. Be>ides the well known vocabulary of '.scenes1, 'sequences' and so on, the^e
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terms arc mainly of dramatic origin, bat there are other more specialized terms such as the .switch1.
The conventions of editing and lighting are already supplied with descriptive terms, and where there are gaps they-can-be Oiled by the natural extension of existing expressions. For example the existing description 'core lighting can.be extended to cover another common type of lighting of figures by the term 'angled core lighting'. The other dimensions of the medium arc similarly provided with their analytical concepts and terminology. More generalized forms of classification such as 'genre' and 'style' form themselves in the usual way on a secondary level, after this primary analysis has been carried out. The fact that this is fairly obvious and straightforward doesnot make it incorrect
and unsatisfactory.
The film-maker's beliefs, aesthetic and otherwise, undoubtedly influence the product, and they certainly must be considered, as might ate the connection ol the film-maker's personality with what he does. For this latter purpose, scientific personality theory is sufficiently advanced1 to guide the investigation without recourse to baseless Freudian speculations. ■
To wards the Spec* ci tor
tin like the rel at ion of the fi n ish ed fi 1 ml o <\ts m ake rs a n $ product!on.process, which is fixed and:definite for all Itme once it is complete, the relation of the film to its audience not only varies between audiences of different filmic sophistication as already mentioned, but this relation also varies with time: the reaction of a contemporary audience to a silent film is often quite different to that of an audience in the ninetccn-twenties. This fact alone renders this side of film analysis less important, but nevertheless it is well worth pursuing. Proceeding in this direction we are led to the once popular investigation of the sociological effects of films, then to what is essentially part or the psychology or perception, and finally to a consideration of.how audiences understand films. As far as the psychology of.perception of film is concerned^ what is needed is the kind or research begun some time ago i^painting andmusic into the response to the simplest elements of these ants, and then working up to more complex structures. Recently there has been quite a lot ofintcrest inthe branchy perceptual psychology called cognitive psychology, though so far this has mostly produced a great dcaVofthcormng, with little in-the way of experimentally suppnrted conclusions of any but ^ most banal-kind, Nevertheless, we should keep our eyes open for more i.vibe way of solid; scientific results in this area The evidence so far in the other arts shows that the response ^nations of artistic elements can be preLd Irom the response to the elements, (colours, shapes, etc )
PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
themselves taken individually, despite the unsupported speculations of Gcstalt theorists that this would not be so. k is also undoubtedly the case in these other arts that the personality of the spectator affects his artistic preferences. (See D ^ Bcrlyne, Acsihciics ami Ps/chobioh^ Appleton^ Century-Crofts, 1971), Would-be film theorists are mil proceeding as though all the members of the film audience are identical.
Leaving aside the understanding that film-makers and those with equal knowledge have of Film, the major part of film audiences probably understand film in a very simple way. in fact as an intensified and extended dramatic representation i.e. like a stage play with knobs on. Although the idea awaits full experimental verification, my suggestion is that the mass audience does not register in any significant way any minor infractions of editing and other conventions as long as rough temporal continuity is preserved within a sequence. The way a naive audience comes to understand film representation quite quickly gives some idea that the understanding is as simple as I have suggested. On the other hand, most avant-garde film is quite meaningless to the mass audience, for in that case its appreciation depends on an understanding of its relationship with other films, other arts, the conventions, and other things. Avant-garde film is the most difficult area of all to handle, and most recent film theorizing has little to say about most of it.
The Nature of the Medium and Film Form
The first crude holographic films have already been made, and we can anticipate a complete, all-surrounding audio-visual representation of reality being possible at some time in the future. So the most useful basic way of regarding the medium (and this includes television) is as a more faithful or less faithlul reproduction oraudio-visual reality. One extreme, as presently possible with the OMNIMAX system, is a series of 70 mm. colour stereoscopic films with multi-channel sound taken of an unstaged event, and projected so as to fill the complete area of possible vision, while the other extreme would be some kind of small-screen abstract film with synthetic sound, or no sound at all All films can be considered to lie on a spectrum between these two extremes, with a greater or lesser degree of distortion (or transformation) of reality being introduced in various ways: by making cuts between shots rather than running the camera continuously, using zooms and camera movements within shots, shooting in black and while rather than colour, using various degrees of non-natural sound, hlming acted events, and so obviously on. The amount of distortion of reality introduced in the separate dimensions oi the medium (cutting, photography, sound, acting, the events represented, etc.) is not necessarily parallel between
PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
each of these dimensions and the general effect of the film itself, though there is not usually a great divergence.
These dimensions can even be considered in a semiquantitative way in many cases; for instance the strength' of a cut or other shot transition can be defined in terms of the amount of discontinuity in space and time introduced into the action by the cut. Another possibility is a precise analysis of the number of shots having various shot lengths in a film, and also the numbers with various degrees or camera closeness and camera movement. It might bc claimed that this is a rather arid approach, but considerations of how long a shot is to be, where the camera is to go, and so on, are some of the things with which the director of a film is principally concerned. (Note also that acting style has been included as a dimension of the medium as well.)
Film Style
Questions of style arise when we consider films in relation to other films. If analysis along the lines just mentioned has been carried out, then the distributions of these quantities (shot length, etc.) for a particular group of lijms, say by a particular director, when compared with those for other directors working at the same place and time, give a sure Indication of the existence of a personal style; in Tact this is what Ibrmal style is. (Analogous analyses have long ago been carried out Ibr the style of literary and musical works.) To give a simple example, in die middle of the nine teen-thirties the cutting rate for better, the Average Shot Length) in Mervyn Le Hoys films was near the norm for Hollywood films of that time (an Average Shot Length of 9 seconds), whereas in Michael Curtizs films it was around 6 seconds, and in John Stahl's hi- seconds or longer. Using a measure like this, or indeed other more complex ones, it is also possible to compare the range ol variation characteristic of American films with the different range holding for the contemporary French films, and so on, When this method of norms and differences is generalized to all the features ol films it can help to avoid the frccjuent error of describing as unique what is in fact a common feature of a large class of films from a particular time or place or genre. For instance, Noel Burch has described the use of dissolves Irom a Long Shot to a closer shot in Caligari as subverting the codes (a pointless synonvm for 'breaking the conventions'), whereas in fact this usa^e was fairly common in German and American films during World War 1, and indeed through into the 'twenties in Europe- The error of failing to take Lne context into account is very common In writing about older films, and I have already referred to another instance of it in a previous chapter.
it could be argued that often the individuality of a fiJm-makerliesin the verbally expressible content oi histiJms.and
indeed It often docs in part, but this individuality of content will mostly bc found to be allied to formal individuality if the analysis is carried far enough.
The importance of formal style analysis is beginning to be realized, but It still has not got much further than remarking things like die fact that Howard Hawks keeps the camera at eye-level and doesn't move it if possible. But in fact there are other directors of his vintage who do this too. For instance Henry Hathaway. (Keeping the camera at eyc-level makes for efficient shooting because the actors can be kept well-framed at all distances without tilting the camera up. If the camera were tilted up, the lighting set-up would sometimes have to be changed to keep the back-lights out of shot.) The real stylistic distinction is that further than this Hawks keeps his Average Shot Length a little longer than normal, whereas Hathaway uses faster cutting
Some attempts at style analysis have unfortunately been conducted in spurious terms that ignore conditions imposed on the director, and also the relation between the approach or a particular director and that generally prevailing at the period in question. For instance, the style or Douglas Sirk cannot be simply pinned down by talk about mirrors and flat shiny surlaces. Mirror shots are quite common in dramas made by ordinary Flollywood directors from the nineteen-thirties onwards (it'-makes shooting a studio scene more interesting for the director), and insofar as Sirks films have flat, glossy surfaces this is due to the art directors at Universal Studios and the deficiencies of Cín em a Scope lenses, (The squeeze ratio of Cinemascope lenses varied with object distance, so emphasizing the existence ul" the picture plane,) Actually, Sirks formal style is distinguished by a so-far unremarked excess of low-angle shots over the norm. To judge by an unprompted statement of Sirk s, this resulied irom a seeking for expressivity on his part.
The formal spectrum covered by the cinemat that I described in the previous section, when translated into terms of style becomes a spectrum stretching from extreme naturalism to extreme expressivism,
If one looks back to statements made by Hollywood directors in past limes, it Is apparent that they mostly saw their task as one of expressing the material in the script - putting the story across' in the most effective way, and a point at issue between them was just how much expresi vfom to use, and bow much naturalism. The genera) desire was to affect the audience in the appropriate way, and this called tor the application of un mentioned supplementary principles, unm ent ion ed beca u * e t ra d i t i o na 1 in t he d ra* m a nd or lu-r a rts k and so obvious to film-makers, such as internal consistency in ail aspects oi the film to maintain suspension oi disbelief. Ibis is closely related to Victor Perkins' principle-o L'internal coherence. Incidentally, many or the example* d focused in
2S
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■
m *w$m mm. Mb m^^m
throuoh formal devices. Indeed discussion of the detail .n a mm in these terms is not new, but it has nearly always taken place within a framework that unfortunately assigned aesthetic values to particular styles ami' contents.
Of course nearly all commercial films occupy a fairly small central region ol the style and form spectra, but the extremes arc increasingly taken up by films of the avant-eardfe. These are still denied satisfactory discussion, partly because the terms for this arc lacking, partly for less creditable reasons.
At this stage questions of value, of aesthetics, are still excluded, but there are still lots of things that can be said about films, even in a more general way. For instance, we can sav that Bergman prefer red to film in black and white rather than colour at that period when he had a choice, -because he wished to make films that were more expressivist than the norm. We can talk about how the degree of naturalism of the average entertainment film has changed over the years, and about many other interesting matters. And we can talk about films like Godard's which have different parts made in different styles.
In other words, the interactionibet ween style and content is a second^order-effect that can ibe dealt with once the first
approximation in the analysis has been carried out.
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_
The Evaluation of Films
Now that form and style have been-considered, aesthetic evaluation can he dealt with without creating confusion. My criteria for doing this are, in the order of the weight to be attached to them; firstly, the originality in all respects of the film; secondly, the influence it has on other films; and thirdly, llic'dcgrcc to which the film-maker has fulfilled his intentions in-the finished film. The criterion of influence on other films should also be weighted according to the excellence, by these criteria, of the fuWthat arc influenced by the film in question. These criteria are the most objective possible, and are equally applicable to every type of film, which cannot be said of previously proposed criteria.
My .first two criteria arc completely .realizable in principle, witlv the proviso that the iterative prt of the sceonteiterion, which requires that the influence on other films takes account of the quality of the films influenced has to be calculated with a reducing factor applied on each *epemion, in which case it can be cut off after a fixed f °t cycles to give a sufficiently correct answer
The third andiJeast important criterion does .present some dim«ih«».ift application, Nevertheless it can be worked WLcnb,ghior practical purpose,, ^tóer
SLÍT ff^** ^mm mÁ^k
cr,te,^hen we are considering newfUm, The conscious
PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
intentions of the filnvmaker (or makers) can usually be found out or reconstructed with sufficient accuracy for this purpose by taking a little trouble. Although something has been done in this direction already by interviewing film-makers, a certain amount of misleading information is produced because interviewers do not know enough about the subjects on which they ask questions. A case in point is the many manifestly untrue things that are said about north light' in Charles Higham's Hollywood Cameramen. Such errors arc partly produced by the asking of incorrect leading questions, to which Hollywood types have a tendency to reply with the answer expected of them, and partly by the boastful exaggeration endemic in Old Hollywood. In fact my principles provide the justification, which is otherwise lacking, for the interviewing of film-makers.
A shallow thinker might object to my criteria by inventing what they intend to be difficult cases for it such as a film-maker who fully intends to make a film that is as orthodox as possible, and indeed makes a film that is fully ordinary. This film-maker would score low on originality but!high on fulfilment of intentions. And we would have to rate this work more highly than that of a film-maker who produced an equally insipid film, but who intended to make one that was innovative. But there is nothing absurd about this result of using my criteria. The artistic strategy of the first film-maker is one that is well-known in advanced art of recent times. One obvious example from the avant-garde that immediately springs to mind is Owen Land's film What's Wrong With This Picture? - Pan 2y which contains an almost identical re-make of an extremely banal educational documentary. And as you can read on page 101 of Moving into Pictures, my definition of what constitutes an art-work includes what the artist has to say about it as part of the work. A shallow thinker might also object to the fact that my criteria means that when Wim Wenders is influenced by Onu, the artistic value of OaTs films immediately increases. (Wow much the value of Oau's work increases depends, of course, on the artistic value of Wenders1 films as evaluated by my criteria.) I see no problem with this, since I don't think the artistic value of an art work is immanent in it. It is true that according to my ideas, the artistic value of an art work can never decrease, and may well increase over lime/but this is only a handicap to conceited critics, both academic and commercial, who like to use their 'intuition to re-evaluate older art-works.
Although these criteria 1 have put forward here are the most objective possible, they do not quite provide a calculus which can be operated mechanically to crank out values, They need to be applied by people who have viewed large numbers of films with analytic understanding in the ways 1 have indicated, and indeed there have always been some
PRACTICAL FILM THEORY
people in this position. They have had significant things to say about films, even if unclear principles have sometimes led them astray.
The evaluation of films by aesthetic criteria to which their makers did not subscribe also seems fairly pointless, and tends to look foolish in the light of history the most famous example being the attitude of Socialist critics to von Sternberg's films in the early 'thirties. As is also recognized now, Bazin% consideration or the films of Welles and Wylcr in terms of concepts that were not those of their makers was also factually inaccurate and logically confused. More recently the evaluation of films purely in the light of moral educational concepts such as 'maturity' has risen and fallen, and now purely political values are being pushed to the fore again. There is no doubt that large numbers of film-makers do not subscribe to these values, and so the extremely limited usefulness of these approaches in film terms should be recognized.
The Auteur Theory Revisited
it does not seem to he fully appreciated that, in its original form, the 'Auteur Policy' as it developed in Cuhicrs du Cinema was influenced by the way that film-makers see films; the people who were its leading proponents were just-starting to direct films, or were thinking about doin^ so, and they were looking at films of the past, or what was then the present, for guidance about how to handle the camera, when to cut, and so on+ The operation of this interest enabled them to see individuality and skill at work in films where it was invisible to the ordinary critic, but it also led them to slightly overvalue many of the American films of the nineteen-fifties.
The ghost of this semi-conscious use of film-makers3 ways of seeing persisted in the form that Andrew Sarris gave to the Auteur Theory. Amongst the numerous subsidiary evaluative criteria that he introduced, mostly to demote the film-makers whose films were unsympathetic to him, was the criterion oI craftsmanship. This is a relevant criterion, and it is included as a part of the third general principle that I have proposed, which i.s that the film succeeds in fulfilling its makers intentions.
Because of all this, my theory, when applied to the American sound cinema, produces evaluations rather similar to those of Sarris in the upper ranks of film-makers. But it moves Stroheim and Wilder up a step, and it moves Raoul Walsh down as being little more than an excellent craftsman, to mention only the more obvious adjustments. Since my approach works through individual films in the first place, important film-makers arc just those who have produced important films. There is nothing in my theory that says that ali films by a particular film-maker must be
good, or even interesting, and in fact for most film-makers their most important work is concentrated towards the earlier parts of their careers. This is because the strength of will and body needed to control the film production process, necessary to a far greater degree than in the other arts, decreases with increasing age.
The principal reason that my theory of film evaluation produces rather similar results to the Sarris Auteur Theory is that 'originality1 and 'expression of the maker's personality' amount to almost (but not quite) the same thing in practice, but a subsidiary reason is Sarris7 personal sensitivity and the fact that he has seen and compared a very targe number of UEms. Apart from the elements of confusion and illogicality that spoil Sarris' work, he himself admits that there are exceptions to his theory: films such as Casablanca that are better than their directors. There arc no exceptions to the theory advanced here. The importance or excellence of Das Cabinet iles Dr. Caligari is not because Robert Wicne was a great director, but because of its originality and influence.
In Conclusion
One of the merits of the theoretical framework for film put forward here is that it has spaces to accommodate quantities of useful work, writing, and information that have been produced in the past, and are still being produced by a large number ol people interested in films. Tor of course it is hardly likely that intelligent people who know a great deal about films could be totally mistaken in everything they sav. Vet this seems to be the position of those who hold the ideas described in the first section of this bookT And even further, they appear to believe that by reading a few approved books and articles, and seeing a small number of approved films, one is in a position to understand everything about cinema that matters. It is a conception of the cinema that would limit it to serving some extra-filmic concerns of the moment, and in its most extreme form wishes to dictate what sort of films should be made.
There is no royal road to knowledge about film*, or about any other art for that matter.
By contrast, the theoretical framework that I propose for film studies puts the difficulties where they belong, in dealing with individual problems, and makes it possible to deal with those that are soluble one by one in a sound and useful way, as I hope the rest of this book demonstrates.
Jf film-makers did not make films, following as they do their o:vn ideas about what they art doing, there would be nothing to support would-be film theorists who write about films, At a time when there are already a number dj film-makers who are as well-educated, ai clever, and who certainlv know more about films than most theorists, a certain humility should be in order.
THEORY WITH AN AMERIGO ACCENT
6. THEORY WITH AN AMERICAN ACCENT
Tn the ninetccn-seventies there was a massive expansion lof Him studies courses in American higher education, accompanied by all the usual institutional appendages, such as the award of higher degrees, and the appearance of academic societies with their annual conferences, and their journals for the publication of their members1 papers. And in some of these academic publications there is a display of exaggerated and pointless pedantry, to the extent of some articles having end-notes as long as the articles themselves. Indeed some American Him studies academics could be found- childishly boasting that their work was better than anyone else's just because it is longer, and had more footnotes. J n the 'seventies the works and persons of people like Christian Me up Stephen Jd eat h, and Raymond Re I lour were received with awe by many American academics, and they provided;a pernicious model'for American film studies. For now there had1 to be native American academic film theory as well, and!it had'to contain striking new concepts and terminology, withilittlc regard;paid to its possible validity. So in the United'Stales inthe last couple of decades there have been various attempts to produce new theories about all, or part of, the cinema, ibut mostly these are not worth taking seriously, being vulnerable to the same kinds of objections as the French-derived: theories discussed in the previous chapters. The major exception to this generalisation is one of the earliest contributions to American theorizing, which came from David BordweIIand Kristin Thompson, starting at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties. They called their theoretical approach,'Neo-formalism', Which indicated that it was ostensibly directly derived from-the Russian Formalist aesthetics of the nineteen-twenties, as propounded by Boris Eikhenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynjanov, and others. Their immediate inspiration came from a rash of F-ngUsh- translation and comment concerned with the work of the Russian Formalists that was published in the ni teen-seventiesin variouSJ>laces, including even Wn ma .me. (The publication of,ny ideas on Him analysis, which have a.quite independently formalist aspect, from 197+ to 1977 in %k ^ Wand Fii^an^ may also have had,
thirfT1:^^
tm^
f^chology of the nineteen,lenties, whi 1
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of art to the spectator, with more recent speculations about perceptual psychology.
The basic ideas of Neo-formalism are fairly simply stated, as can be seen in David Bordwell's The Films of Carl-Thc-odorBreyer( University of California Press, 19Sl)and Kristin Thompson s Breaking die Glass A rmour (Princeton University Press, 19S8).
^The fundamental assumption is that art is an affair of perception, and as such it presents the per-Cciver with prohlcms of unity and disunity. The unity springs, of course, partly from patterns within the work, such as composition in a painting, sonata form in music, or narrative in cinema. Unity also emerges from the art-work's relation to the history of the medium. Thus conventions and the art-work's use of other works lead us to expect unity. Vet the Formalists also stressed the importance of disunity in aesthetic experience. The force of art arises from shocks and disturbances which it gives to our perception. Viktor Shklovsky called this ostranenie, (cs-trangement\ Idefami 1 iarization', (m a k ing-strange\" (Drercr, p,3)
"Disunity is also perceived in the art-work's relation to other works. The text defines its strangeness not by imitating tradition but by violating it by breaking conventions, reordering tried elements, shattering our expectations, In all, Formalisms conception of art as a struggle between a stable unity and a dynamic estrangement has a usefulness that transcends any particular medium." {Drcycr, p,4).
"Hut if a scries of artworks uses the same means over and over, the defamiliarizing capabilities of ■those means diminishes; the strangeness ebbs away over time. I3y that point, the dcfamilianzed has become familiar, and the artistic approach is largely automatized."
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"These assumptions about defcmiliarization ant| automatization ilbw neotbrmalism to eliminate
* COmm°n rcaturc aesthetic theories: the
iorm-contem split. Meaning is not the end result of *n art-work, but one of its formaJ components. The
artist builds a work out of, amongst other things, meanings" (Glass Armour p. II)
This last claim that Neo-formalism eliminates the form-content split is obviously self-contradictory, since its verv wording attests that "meaning1 for a Neo-lbrmalist is a separable element of the art-work, and indeed Bordwell and Thompson do treat all the parts of what is ordinarily considered content as something separable when they analvsc particular films. All they are doing is to include meaning as a sub-section of Toirn', which is purely a verbal trick, and contributes nothing extra to more traditional analytical methods such as my own, which already deal with the form-content Interaction to produce the same sort of results, insofar as they are valid.
Indeed, a great deal of Bordwell and Thompson's theorizing is a matter of replacing existing terms and concepts that were already in wide use with new names, and then discussing these renamed concepts at length in an unnecessarily pedantic and tedious way. One example is 'background1, which just corresponds to the concept of context' of a work of art, widely used long before, and another is 'de-vice', which just means a significant element in an art-work. Yet others include the 'stairstep construction' ol narrative, which is nothing but the series of 'steps* which form part of Gustav Freytags theories about dramatic construction in his Die Tcchnik tics Dramas of 1876, And 'defamiliarization' is a direct result of the original features in an art-work, and so on.
Amongst other concepts taken over by Bordwell and Thompson from the Russian Formalists as part or their theory of narration, and in this case altered in meaning, are 'fabulaT and 'syhuzet\ Like 'stairstep construction^ the original Formalists had these from a long tradition of dramatic theory stretching back to Aristotle, which was already well-known to practical Russian playwrights like Chekhov. In the form Bordwell and Thompson use these notions to analyse narrative, they don't actually do anything extra cither.
To Bordwell and Thompson 'syuzhet' means the narrative events as they are actually presented in a lilm, including gaps and possible irregular time schemes, while Tabula1 refers to the complete, continuous and chronological events in a world just like ours which the audience reconstructs in their minds in the course of understanding the incomplete scenes they are seeing shown on the movie screen before them. Although this distinction is unarguable, their choice and application of the name 'syuzhet' is particularly unfortunate, as it is the Russificstion of the French word 'sujee' (i.e. 'theme'). But when it comes to their application of these terms to the analysis of actual films, this distinction
between fabula and syuzhet is hardly ever used, and most of the detail of the examples David Bordwell discusses in Narration in the Fiction Film deal with the interaction of syu/het and style. This is exactly equivalent to that good old ana Ey sis of the interaction of content and form, which is so theoretically despised nowadays. And there is nothing wrong with that equivalence in my eyes, as it merely reverses the way most films are constructed, with a script being written first, and then a director filming it, and including what he considers suitably expressive or stylistic effects. The really novel and interesting interaction of what Bordwell and Thompson call fabula and syuzhet is sufficiently rare for examples of it to be discussed in an ad hoc way using existing terminology, without the need for special new general terms for this purpose. In their actual analyses, Bordwell and Thompson also make hardly any use of another of the Russian Formalists basic concepts, the 'dominant', and in the little use they do make of it, it could just as well be replaced by existing terminology again, with a little periphrasis.
The analysis of art-works in terms of the 'unity-disunity' between their elements has actually been a commonplace of literary criticism since the New Criticism of the intcrwar years. Since any feature of a film or other artwork can be taken to contribute to either its unification or the contrary, in practice this approach is subject to the same kind of abuse that 1 demonstrated in tie! lours analysis of Nanh by North-wen in a previous chapter. According to Bordwell and Thompsons own principles, this danger should be eliminated by taking the context of other art-works from the same place and time into account, and I would agree with this, provided that the context also includes me way the films were made, and what the film-makers thought they were doing at the time. But because they refuse to take these last two restrictions into account, and also because of their lack of full knowledge of this context, they often attribute aesthetic significance to features of films that really have no such significance. This is particularly the case in Bordwe I Is Drcyer book, where many features that he analyses formally in terms of 'unity-disunity' are the meaningless small-change of film style Ln a European backwater. The danger of such misinterpretation when a theory like this is. in less knowledgeable people's hands is even greater.
It is usually considered that Russian formalist aeslheties was severely limited fn dealing with the history ol art, because it refused to deal with historical causation in the creation of particular works of art, and also in the development of artistic styles, Bordwell and Thompson have likewise rejected the consideration of the way the actual maker> had put any particular film together when iht'V are analysing iis form, as can be seen in the mo*t recent edition of their Film An: on fnitoductjQn. However, in practice they are guilty oi
32
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a fair amount of 'dbublc-thmk' on this points In particular, Tor their analvses they use the basic analytical terms that were invented, by film-makers to describe what they were doing, and which are part of the film-makers' own theor.es about what they are doing. And when we look at their actual consideration of film historical matters, in their ffl* ska! milpvood Cincm* (19S5) and elsewhere, we find-that it is carried out purely in terms of standard art-historical analysis, just as it was in other people's earlier work, such as my own on historical styHstics done in the nineteen-seventies. Indeed, some of the key methods and observations that iierdwcll and Thompson use in the last-mentkmedbook are taken from my work. But strictly speaking, my approach to film analysis rejects the reading of any meaning that was not put there intentionally into.features of a film, whereas theirs docs not. Despite this, they now say that their Neo-formal-jsm is necessary, not just for considering the interaction between the perceivcr and the work of art, but also for the proper analysis of film history, Indeed, David Bordwcll has recently, in the last chapter df \un. Malting Manning (Harvard, 1989), taken jny theoretical framework for film analysis and interpretation that you have just seen outlined in the previ^ ous chapters of this'book, and; which he too had read in the first edition of 1983, and appropriated it as a new part of his Neo -for ma I ism, calling it 'historical poetics*. He does not mention where these ideas came from, hut that seems tobe acceptable practice for ambitious American academics. He presumably did this because of the growth of serious interest in ft I nv his tory since the 'seventies,;hut because Neo-formalism as formulated'by Bordwell and Thompson is essentially audience-centered; andiinsists on giving all spectators equals tat us, to claim that it is sufficient and necessary for doing film history is either self-delusion orfflim-flam.
There is only one component of Bordwell and Thompson's NeoTormalism thai is truly unique amongst contemporary film ^theories, This is the part consisting of their psychological ideas about the perception of films. The fullest form of their treatment of film perceptions in Chapter 3 of Bordwell's Narration inthcFiaton Film, but close inspection of this shows that it is made upřímost entirely ofpure speculation: abcul the psyclio logica I processes involved in perception, and: the references given;arc also almost entircly to.recent speculative theorising by other people, likewise unsupported by experimental evidence. In the last decade this activity has caught on, andnow has two academic journals-devoted ,o articles that speculate about cognition and idm.andare almost completely devoid of any experimental ^5^*^^ the one piece o"f real research reported in ^em lends support to my contention that the average spectator does as little mental wQrk while watching filrns,
as
possibh
THEORY WITH AN AMERICAN ACCENT
A major notion in Bord well and Thompsons ideas about film narration rs that, in contradistinction to a view of it as some kind of communication process, it "...is better under-stood as the organisation of a set of cues for the construction of a story. This presupposes a pcrceivcr, but not any sender, of a message." (pM) This is not the only contradiction of this kind within Bordwell's arguments in support of his notion df narration, as Seymour Chatman has pointed out, though it is the only one that is contained within the one sentence. Such illogicality, in which the act of organisation has no subject, must result from Bordwell and Thompson's eagerness, like so many academics, to downplay the relation of the significance of the features of films to the way they were put together, and in particular to what filmmakers thought they were doing when they made them. The attraction of this attitude is that it makes the critic or analyst more important than the artist and the art-work, and it also means that he and his students don't have to know very much about how films arc made, let alone having any filmmaking experience and ability,
My view of the matter is that film is the most complex artistic medium there is, and inevitably has a number of aspects , so it escapes any simple reduction that depends on describing it as $nlj> mimetic, or only linguistic, or only a simple communication system. Narrative film is basically representational, but it docs have a component of its organizational structure that is like the vestige of a language system. Rather tike the grunts and waves of primitive homi-nids before real language developed. And Him undoubtedly functions as a communication system in transmitting a story from scriptwriter to audience. The representational aspect of the film medium presents no special theoretical problem, because our perception of it works just like our perception of the real world, for all practical purposes. Our perception of the purely filmic part of film construction, which mostly relates to shot transitions, is undoubtedly quickly learned by children or adults in their first acquaintance with cinema or television. Once you have learned it, you don't have to think about it anymore, but it is available to simple introspection, in a way that the truly natural part of film perception, which proceeds at a much deeper mental level, is not. Bordwcll has made much of the notion of 'the viewer's activity', but there are good indications that most of the film audience is reluctant to engage in any extra conscious or semi-con^ scions mental activity while viewing films. Apart from the res.stance most people have to watching avant-garde cinema, there is also.a strong resistance to watching silent films, which also call for a fair amount of semi-conscious mental activity to fully follow their narratives. The recent failure to detect.the ^Kuleshov efW reported by Prince and Hens-ley {Cin^ journal Vo|.3l, No.2, Winter 1992) also shows
THEOR Y WITH A;V AMERICA N ACCENT
that ordinary viewers do not really do much of the extensive positing and testing of perceptual hypotheses attributed to them in David Bordwells speculations about film perception in Narration in the Fiction Film.
Eventually we will discover how the actual mental mechanisms involved in perception of the real world work and then we will know how the perception of the representational part of the film medium works as well. But this
33
will be done by scientists, and not by 'theorists1 sitting in armchairs in the humanities department of universities, As for how the small part of purely filmic perception works, this will likewise have to be found out with active expert mental research. It truly embarrasses me to have to state something which should be so obvious, but the conceit and self-deception involved in most recent theorising about film forces me to do it.
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... • t
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cfore 1900 the volume of film production was small ^Jwhcn compared with that of the next several years, and formal development of the medium was restricted and desultory. The few makers of fictional films active at this time were mostly occupied with the iairly close copying of one another's films by restaging them, though there were alreadv a few signs of the elaboration and variation that later became so important in filmic evolution. On the other hand this was obviously the time when the influences from pre-existing artistic: media were most important.
Photograph)' and Cinema
In the beginning, the cinema benefited from the flexible film developed in ISS9 for the Kodak and other hand cameras thai had been designed tp use it. It seems that the same negative emulsion was used to coat Eastman motion pi ct u re fi I m ■ a s wa $ usedj on Koda k fi I m for sti 11 pho togra phy; certainly it was treated in the same way as regards exposure. The restriction of the colour sensitivity of this orthochromaticfilm to blue and green light was less serious than is usually supposed., since at that time, much more so than now, the things in the world thai were coloured bright red or orange were few and small, so that their reproduction in a heavy black tone had littile significance, The fspeeď of this film in our contemporary sense was largely immaterial,
over
an
since it was developed by inspection to the correct density under a red safelight, just as is now done in still photography when making positive paper prints. In fact the development of motion picture negative at that time had the advantage the development of ordinary still photographic film d plates in that a test section of several inches from the beginning of each shot was always torn off and given a separate development first. This whole procedure continued to be standard till the end of the silent period.
What is important, as far as any possible visible effect in films is concerned, is the lens aperture that was used. This was about the same as that used for hand-camera photography at that time: i,e, an aperture of fll to f 16 for ordinary scenes under direct sunlight. Most fiction film-making was done out of doors at first, with the exception oI some of the Edison company films made in their well-known 'Black Maria1 studio. This was nor. modelled on the typical still photography studio of the time, but seems to have followed some idiosyncratic Edison idea about fixed scientific experimental conditions. It was rotated to follow the sun, and fitted with a clear glass ceiling, so that filming was always done under direct sunlight coming from high front to the actors and set. This model was imitated by some other small studios built for other companies in the next lew years, but it was quickly realized that It was an impractical
A view of Georges Afelics' swdio about 1900, showing the camera end, (The camera is in  an alcove behind the snail black curtain in the centre of
the picmre.) Movable squareframes with thin cotton diffusers stretched on them are suspended below the front part of the glass roof
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1895-1S99
design once the new century began. The new standard was provided by the studio Georges MeJies had built in 1897, In May of that year Mclies had a studio with glass-roof and glass walls constructed after the model of large photographic studios of the time, and it was fitted with thin cotton cloths that could be stretched below the roof to diffuse the direct rays of the sun on sunny days. The soft overall light without real shadows that this arrangement produced, and which also exists naturally on lightly overcast days, was to become the standard for Him lighting for a decade, but for a few more years after 1397 no-one but Mclies had the facilities to produce it.
It is interesting that some of the well-established techniques of the still photography of this period were not taken over into film photography; among them the use of arc floodlights with diffusing screens in front of them, which was already a standard principal light source for still photography by 1894, and also the intentional production of "soft focus' by lens manipulation, which was a standard technique in still photography by 1898. Reflecting screens were also being used to bounce light on to the shadow sides of figures in portrait still photography before the turn of the century, (it is most regrettable that no existing histories of still photography deal with the standard techniques and styles of still photography in this century, but on the contrary deal only with the exceptional work of the Steichens, Westons, and the like.)
Summing up on the question of the influence ol the style of still photographic lighting on that of films, I can say that there was no intimate connection between the two, since lilm lighting was restricted to frontal sunlight, whether diffused or not, while studio still photography mostEy used light from the side or side-front.
Before leaving the subject of motion picture film slock, it should bc mentioned thai initially, from I#95 onwards, both negative and positive film were supplied in rolls of an approximate length of 65 feet by Eastman, and 75 feet by the English company of Blair. The positive film was, as it still is, of much slower speed, finer grain, and higher contrast than the negative Him. Unexposed rolls of negative could be cemented together in the darkroom to make longer rolls if this was absolutely necessary, though this rather troublesome procedure seems to have been mostly avoided in fictional film-making. For actuality filming this creation of rolls of the order of 1000 feet length out of the standard size roils began as least as early as American Mutoscope and Biograph s filming of the Jefieries-Sharkey fight in November IS99.
Cameras
In the first several years of the cinema one of the two
3S
most important classes of cameras descended from ihe Edison Kinetograph. In its initial form the Kinetograph was contained in a very large and heavy casing, and was driven by a variable-speed electrical motor. For the purpose of producing films for the Edison Kinetoscope peep-show machine it w=as run at 46 frames per second, but from 1893 onwards it was also used to produce films for projection at the usual speed of approximately 16 frames per second. Its intermittent mechanism, which depended on a Maltese-cross gear to drive the sprocket wheel that transported the film through the exposure gate, was not reversible. This last drawback did not hold for the camera that R.WH Paul based on the Edison design in 1896, for Paul's camera had synchronized sprockets driving the film both above and below the film gate. Georges Mclies based the first camera he had built for himself on this Paul design, and eventually though not till 1S9S, took advantage of the facility it gave lor controlled winding back to produce superim posit ions in the camera. Although the Paul double Maltese-cross mechanism had the advantage of reversibility, it also had the disadvantage of poor registration, at least when compared to the Luniierc mechanism. This is evident in the Robert Paul trick films that involve superimpositions.
The other major type of camera mechanism was represented by that of the Lumiere camera of IS9S. In this case the intermit ten t pull-down of t he fi I m was a ceo mpl i shed by a claw driven by two cams, one ol' which produced the vertical motion of Lhe claw, and the other its insertion into the sprocket holes in the film before pull-down, and then its withdrawal afterwards. This mechanism could produce reversed film motion too, but all the remaining types of camera interna it tents - the Demcny beater or dog* movement, the Mutoscope (later fSiograph) camera of Dickson, the Preslwich epicycloidal sprocket wheel, and others - could not be reversed.
In general, the cameras of the first several years had no separate view-finding systems that could be used to check what was in frame during the lime that the shot was being taken, "{"he shot had to be framed and locussed beforehand by opening the back oi the cjmcra, and then inspecting the image in the gate through a hole of the same dimensions as the frame that was cut in the back pressure plate. When actually taking the shot it was largely guesswork as to exactly what was in frame and what was not, unless the limits of the frame were marked on the set.
Camera Supports and Camera Movements
The first movie cameras were fastened directly to the head of their tripod or olher support with only the crudest kind of levelling devices provided, in the manner ol the stiU-camera tripod heads of the period, Movie cameras were rhu>
elWcly Ml fttt ^ course of the shot, and hence fa first earner, movements were the result of mounting i camera on ( moving vehicle. It is claimed that this was first done lw Alexandre Promio, one of Lumiere s traveling cameramen/exhibitors, when he put a camera in a gondola to film A Grand Canal a Yenisei but certainly by M
ihefe were a number of films shot Horn moving trains, and made by English film-makers as well as French. Although catalogued under the general heading of panoramas', those films shot straight forward from in front of a railway engine were usually specifically referred to as 'phantom rides'.
Also in 1897, R,W. Paul had the first real panning head made for a tripod, so that he could cover the passing processions of Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot. This device had the camera mounted on a vert real axis that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank handle, and Paul put it on general sole the next year. Some European film-makers acquired this device in the next couple of years, but in general it was scarcely used before 1900, Shots taken with a panning head were also referred to as panoramas' in the film catalogues of the first decade of the cinema, though the description of the film concerned almost invariably makes it clear which meaning was intended,
Lenses
Lenses having focal lengths from 50 mm. to 75 mm. seem already to have been considered standard before the turn of the century, and any lenses that were available with slightly shorter focal length seem not to have been used, On the other hand long lenses, already referred to as telephoto' lenses, were occasionally used in actuality filming, though I have not seen anything longer than about I GO to 150 mm, used in surviving films. Many Him-makers apparently had a range of lenses Tor their cameras, even though there were no standardized mounts, and each owner had to have each lens individually fitted to match his camera. As a consequence, lenses were notmade with.a focussing scale on their barrets, and focussing on the film in the gate was unavoidable! Maximum lens apertures were mostly within the range ft,S to f5.6, with some cameras such as the Lumiere having lenses of even smaller maximum aperture, With the latter, filming wasrcsiricted to fairly bright days.
Projectors
Many or the earliest cameras Could be quicklv converted mto projector, by opening their backs and putting a lamp, house and condenser lens behind them. Light sources were e.tl^
.-hydrogen flame playing on a stick of lime, and a water m ®* invar,ably placed between the condenser and the
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: IS9S-JS99
film to absorb heat radiation. Purpose-built projectors used the same sorts of intermittent mechanisms that have already been mentioned In connection with the cameras of the period. The problem of pulling film intermittently from a roll longer than about 100 feet without the sudden jerks breaking it was solved in 1896 with the invention of the 'Latham loop'- This was a free loop of film between the continuously driven sprocket wheel now placed below the feed reel to pull film off it continuously; the small changes in the size of the free loop absorbing the effect of the intermittent intake into the gate below, This addition to the mechanism ofprojectors was already widely diffused by 3S97, well before anyone had started to think about making longer individual films, which did not happen until 1899. The demand for such an improvement to projectors was caused bv the desire to splice a number of short individual films together onto one reel for convenience in projection, as Hcpworths book Animated Photography (1897) makes clear.
Photographic Framing
The relationship of the framing in the first films which Louis Lumiere made in 1895 — VArrivcc d\m train-t fa G outer de Bebe and TArroseur orrose — to the kind of framing previously occurring in amateur and professional photography before the birth of the cinema has often been pointed out, and this is one of a limited number of instances in which I think received ideas are adequate. For the sake of completeness I must also mention the use of nearly axial movement to-wards the lens in the first of these films; a usage the force of which was recogni'/cd immediately, but not fully applied in fictional films until the new century. However, it docs not seem to have been noticed that in Mclies" I'AjJohc Dreyfus (1899) these features arc reproduced in a staged narrative.
In the scenes of the attack on the lawyer Labor! and the fight in the courtroom at Rcnnes, the camera is placed at eye-level, aud bystanders and observers of the action fill the space between the principal actors far in the background and the front of the scene in a way that was also commonly found in actuality footage of street scenes at the time. In the scene in the courtroom at Renncs there are also exits past the camera in the way that became standard in chaseT films after 1903. It is possible that these intimations of staging in depth and the use of a truly 'cinematographic1 angle may have becn forced on Mclies by the small initial dimensions of his studio, for though weaker forms of this kind of staging occur once or twice in Mclies" big films or the next two years, such M jwniK d'Arc (1900), after he had extensions bmlt onto the sides of his stage in 1902 they no longer occur From that date onwards entrances into, and exits from, the shot in Melies' films always take place from the sides; in fact
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1S95-IS99
■t
The scene showing the attack on the lawyer Labori in At el tits' film ]'Affaire Dreyfus (1899).
from the equivalent of the wings of a theatrical stage.
Theatre nnd Cinema
Pre-existing theatrical forms have their only strong influence on the development of cinematic forms in the films of Georges Melies and his imitators. As is well known, Melies' earliest one shot trick films are in the manner of a straight recording of his earlier stage presentations in the Theatre Robert-l-Ioudin, but an important point in this connection arises with the transition to multi-shot films in IS9S. There are other aspects of this matter which will be dealt with in later sections, but in 1898 Mclies made a film entitled la I.lim a un riieife. which was closely based on one of the miniature fantastic shows that he had previously staged in his theatre, la Lone 6 tin mitre was made up of three scenes, representing first The Observatory', in which an
The first scene, "The Observatory", of Melies* la Lunc a un metre (1S9S),
37
aged astronomer looks at the moon through a telescope and then falls asleep; next The Moon at One Metre' in which the moon descends from the sky and swallows him up; and lastly 'Phoebe", in which he meets the goddess of the monn. The second scene and the beginning of the third were intended to be understood as the dream of the astronomer, who wakes up in the middle of the final scene when the goddess he is chasing vanishes by a stop-cam era effect,
Th is was the first of a Ion* line of films marie over the next couple of decades that used the device of a dream story turning back to reality at the crucial moment, but the most important thing about fa Lunc a tm metre was that this whole concept was not immediately apparent from the film itself. This was because there were only small changes made in the decor between one scene and the next,, so that there was no way for the viewer to instantly notice the transition between what took place when the astronomer was awake and what took place when he was asleep. Since films in those years were nearly always shown with an accompanying commentary by the showman who projected them (just as in the earlier lantern-slide shows), this was not such a great handicap, but Melies must have felt ihat the way he had treated the matter was not ideal, for in his next lantasv film, Ccndrillon (IS99), he joined all the scenes by dissolves, just as was the practice in most slide shows. In this and all subsequent long films made by Melies during the next seven years, dissolves were used indiscriminately between every shot, even when the action was continuous from one shot to the next - thai is, when there was no time lapse between shots. The dissolve was used in the same indiscriminate way in the slide shows that pre-existed the cinema, and hence in both cases the dissolve definitely did not signify
The second scene, "The Moon at One Mstte^ u) Xtiltet la Lune a un metre (1893). This shot is joined onto the fiat one by a straight cut. Note the displacement of the furniture,
and thai ihi* j> a M-huili sec.
i ém $m Thc m ^ if** ícenC£ nlmcd for
úé and subsequent long films by Melies extended to the films' largc-scale con si ruction, because they all ended with an apotheosis added to me strict narrative, and this feature was taken over into the Pallié films modelled on them in the next century,
Trick tiTccts
Although there is no question that Georges Melies' trick films were the source for a wide diffusion of trick effects during the first decade of the cinema, his origination ol all (or indeed any) of these trick effects is by no means certain. The apparent transformation of objects in the middle of a shot bv slopping the camera, and adding or subtracting the objects in question from the scene before starting the camera again, was first carried out in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots made by the Edison company in 1S95, and this Him probably reached Europe with the Kinetoscope machines well before Melies started lo make films in IS96. Mis 11 ryl film using the stop-camera technique was Escamotage d'unc domcchez Robert-Houdin (IS96),
As for trick effects depending on super imposition, some time before July IS98 G,A, Smith in England made The Corskon Brothers. This film was described in the catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company, which look up the distribution of Smith's films in t900, thus:-
I(One of the twin brothers returns home from shooting in the Co rs i can mountains, and is vis i led by the ghost of the other twin, liy extremely careful
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: lS9S-im
photography the ghost appears quire transparent. After indicating that he has been killed by a sword thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A vision' then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow. To the Corsicans amazement, the duel and death of his brother arc vividly depicted in the vision, and finally, overcome by bis feelings, he falls to the floor just as his mother enters the
The accompanying frame enlargements in the catalogue show frames including the two main effects. The ghost effect was simply done by draping the set in black velvet after Lhe main action had been shot, and then re-exposing the negative with the actor playing I he ghost going through the actions at the appropriate paintj which was already a well-known technique in still photography, and referred to as spirit photography'. Likewise, the vision, which appeared with in a circular vignette, was similarly superimposed over a black area in the backdrop lo the scene, rat her than over a pari of the set with detail in it, so that nothing appeared through the image, which seemed quite solid. This idea too was already used in lantern slide shows and graphic illustrations to suggest visions, and also sometimes to suggest parallel action, Nevertheless, Smith applied for a provisional patent on these techniques as they applied to film, but this did not prevent other film-makers subsequently usin^ these ideas when they felt inclined. Although at this date Georges Melies had been making trick films for more than a year, bis films seem to have used the 'stop camera and substitution of objects' technique exclusively, and his first films depending
on superimposition on a dark ground, which were la Cawrnc man J he and Thiamine de ictes were made just after This Corsican Brothers.
The only surviving film of this kind made by Smith is Sama Clans, made later in 1S9S. Here the 'dream vision' of Santa Claus on the roof getting down the chimney, as the catalogue again describes it, appears lo two small children asleep in bed on Christmas Eve. In this case, the circular inset vignette could also be taken as a depiction of parallel action, even though not described as such, since when it vanishes after Santa has disappeared down the chimney, he then appears out of the fireplace on the set, and fills the children's stockings with presents.
Melies actually made very little use of total direct superimposition, but he greatly elaborated the use of superimposition
WW STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: IS95-IS99
on visible black background areas from I'Homme de tctes (1898) onwards, principally lo produce dismemberment and displacement of parts of the human body. These devices all depend on winding back the film and making a second exposure in the camera, and make no demands nn film technique beyond that,
G.A. Smith also made the first Films with the trick el feci of action running backwards in time, One motive for making reverse-order prints was supplied bv the public interest in the custom thai the Lumiere cameramen/ exhibitors had ol winding their actuality films backwards through the projector alter projecting them i or wards in the normal way, and so reversing the course of the actions of the people and objects in the Film. A Favourite lumiere subjeel for this treatment from 1S96 onwards was ihe actuality les Rains de Diane a Mi ion, which showed swimmers divine into the water. Hut as already remarked, some types of projector could not be run backwards, and hence the desire to have reverse sequence prints. In the first examples from G.A. Smith, the trick was done by repeating the action a second time, while lihning it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of tin First. The first films made using this device were Tipsy, Topsyt Tur^y and The Awkward Sign Painter. The Awkward Sign Pointer showed a sign painter lettering a sign, and in the reverse printing of the same footage appended to the s tan r lard print i the painting on the sign vanished under the painter's brush. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's lite House That Jock huih, made bclore September 1900. Here, a small boy is shown knocking down a castle just constructed by a little girl out of children's building blocks. Then a title appears, saying Reversed3, and the action is repeated in reverse, so that the castle re-erects itself under his blows,
Robert Haul made a contribution to trick effects with a somewhat similar technique in Upside Down: or, the Human Flies made some time before September IS99. This shows people in a room set jumping from the floor onto the ceiling, where they walk around upside down. This was done by making a trick cut on action as they all jump upwards to a second shot made with the backdrop showing the wall behind thern and the Furniture upside down, and shot with the camera inverted. This idea was copied, with variations, by the Pathc company and Georges Melies in 1902 in la jou-brette gen sale and V Homme-metuchc respectively.
Printing
At ihe very beginning, the printing of positive film from negative film was done by passing the developed negative through the gate of a projector or camera with its emulsion in contact with the emulsion of the unexposed positive
39
lilm strip, while shining light ihrough the negative ima^e onto the positive. This was the standard form of contact printing, and exposure was regulated either by the distance ol the light source Trom the printing-gate aperture, or by the speed with which the two films were cranked through. Purpose built printers were produced From 1896 onwards on the pattern of various projector and camera film trate.s and movements, but it was realized almost immediately that the only type of mechanism that gave good registration between the positive and negative was that with an intermittent claw pull- down, as in the Lumiere camera/projector
Actuality Into Fiction
The starting point for the influence of actuality film and its exhibition em fictional film has to be, as far as present knowledge goes, the claim by Francis Doublier, one of I nmSere's travelling cameramen/e>Lhibitois, thai in IS% he showed a scries oí actuality shots of soldiers, a battleship, the Palais de justice, and a tall grey-haired man. as a Film of the Dreyfus case. Such multi-shot assemblages, of which there were quite possibly others in the first few years, were no cloubi helped in their public a tee] nan re by the continuous spoken commentary that usually accompanied the projection ol iilms. The next ,step was the reproduction ol news events on film, or 'drama documentaries' as we would now call them. Here too Melies was the man who got in lirst, with his series ol single shot films on the Greek-Turkish War made in 3 89S, and then his similar series on the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbour during the Spanish-American War. These latter Iilms were, as entered in the Star Films catalogue ol IS98: No,!+3 Collision and Shipwreck at Sea; Nos. 144-145 The Blowing-up oj the 'Maine' in Havana Harhout\ No. 1+6 A View of the Wreck of the 'Maine'; and No. 147 Divers at Work on the Wreck of the 'Maine'. No doubt these lour Iilms were olten spliced together by their purchasers and exhibited as one lilm, bul in any case during the next year Melies made I'AjJaize Dřev] us usint; the same form of single-shot scenes without continuous narrative connection between them, and this was sold only as a unit. Méliěs did little with reconstructed actualities after this, though they had a brief and limited attraction for some other film-makers lor a lew years.
The Multi-shot Film <™d Film Continuity
The earliest film that we can be certain ua.-, made with more than one ^cene was R.W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, shot around April IS9«. This film was undoubtedly made up of two scenes,-each consisting ol a single shot, and was lil med on constructed sets. So far it seems that only the lirst >hotf which shows an old couple lunching outside jn art gallery, and then following other people in through its doorway,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: IS9S-1S99
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1S95-1899
■i
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geena of/tofcm ftiu/'j Come Along, Do! (1S98).
survives. However, there also exist stills made from Ira me enlargements showing both the two scenes, and it is clear that the second scene was shot on a set representing the interior of the gallery, where the old man closely examines a nude statue, until removed by his wife, The two shots arc illustrated on the next page The probability is that these two shots were joined by a simple splice, since there is no sign of the beginning of a dissolve after the actors exit the frame in the first scene, hut the exact nature of the transition still remains to be determined. This film was preceded by Melies' Saavciagc cn riviere from early in 1896, which was twice as long as the standard length, and sold in two separate parts, but we have no way of telling whether it was really in two different seencs, or the nature of any action continuity between the two parts. In any case, the available
The set representing the railway carriage interior of G./f Saitoh's The Kiss in the Tunnel (IS99). The scene is again shot on an open stage under direct sunlight
41
The second scene of Come Along Do!, os shown in aframe enlargement in Paul's advertising material of the time.
evidence still says that Paul's Come Along, Do! was the first film matte up of more than one scene joined together and sold as such.
About July 1S9S Paul also produced a series of four films, each made up of one scene done in one shot of 80 feet length, under the general heading of The Servant Difficulty. These films were sold separately, but dealt with a series of incidents involving the same characters. But such things were exceptional in R.YV. Paul's output, which both before and after 1900 was mostly actualities, or single shot knockabout comedies. So in fS99 the development of the multi-shot fictional film was definitely on its way in France and England, but not in the United States, where the Edison company was still only making single shot knockabouts and inferior imitations or Melies' single shot trick films. Melies"
1 he third and final shot of the surviving print oj'G.A. Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel. This shot is part oj a 'phantom ride' taken from the front of a train.
The first shot of the Bamforth company's The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899).
I'Affaire Drejjus and Cendrillon have already been mentioned, and in the latter, though it is more nearly a continuous narrative than the former, the causal narrative connections from one shot to the next are still to a considerable extent obscured by long processional entries and L-xits irrelevant to the main line of the story. And in Cendrillon there is no action continuity across the dissolves that separate the shots.
The next Rim after Come Along, Do! developing action continuity from shot to shot was G,A. Smith's The Kiss in the Tunnel, made before Movemher 1899. The Smith film shows a set representing the interior ol a railway carriage compartment, with blackness visible through the window, and a man kissing a woman. The Warwick Trading Company catalogue instructs that it should be joined into a film of a 'phantom ride* between the points at which the train enters
The first shot of the Bamforth company's Women's Rights.
The second shot of the Han forth The Kiss in the Tunnel.
and leaves a tunnel, an event which many 'p ban torn rides' included, and this is indeed the case with the surviving copy of this film. (G.A. Smith had made a 'phantom ride' film, which was the result of fixing a film camera on the front of a train, the year before, as had oth^r film-makers, hut it is difficult to tell which 'phantom rfdeT is which amongst the lew that still remain out of the many that were made in the lirst decade ol cinema.) In any cane, the catalogue instruction as to the point at which the out should be made shows dial the concept ol action continuity was understood by Smith. A month later, the Bamforth company made an imitation of Smith's film with the same title, which developed the idea even further. Ban]forth & Co. were a well-established firm making and selling lantern slides and postcards in Wolmfirth, Yorkshire, before the owner, James Bamforth, took them
The second shot ^ Women s Rights, with actors moved to
the other side oj the fence.
42
-
mm
ftlm^aking. Their version of G.A. Smith's The*is* in the Tunnels made at the very end of I $99. This put their versionof the scene inside the railway #riage'between two specially shot scenes of a train going into a tunnel, and then coming'out the other end Since these shots in the Bamfortb film were objective shots, with the cam era beside the track, rather than 'phantom ride' shots, they made the point of the continuity or the action quite clear, rather than forcing the viewer to work it out by logical deduction.
■Bamforth also made a film called Women's Rights about the same timc\ which could be consiercd as an embryonic attempt at reverse-angle cutting, The action involves two women presumably arguing about the subject of the title in front of a fence. Two workmen creep up behind the fence, and then, to show their actions, the camera is stopped; ami the two pairs of actors change position, so that we are ostensibly seeing the other side of the fence. The workmen pull the bottoms of the women's skirts through a crack in the den ce, and nail them to it. The stop-cam era process is repeated a second time to show the :first side of the fence and the women's reaction tothis. Because the film audience can clearly see that the view is always from.the same side of the fence, this notion was not very successful.
Finally, another film in the Warwick Trading Company
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FILM STYLE ANB TECHNOLOGY: 189S-IS99
catalogue dating from 1899, Fire Coll .and-Rescue by Fire Escapes, shouldbe mentioned, as the tide and length of 17S feet show that it must have been made up of more than one shot - in fact at that length fairly certainly of at least two shots. Given subsequent developments, the obvious conjecture is that it was made by James Williamson.
Conclusion
As might be espected, with the limited and sporadic nature of film production by most of the film-makers except Melies in thefotir years up to 1-9G0; there is not much purely filmic evolution - in the sense that the distinctive features of particular films derive more from other films than from external sources. The copying of subjects that has already been mentioned as taking place - by Melies of Lumierc and Paul subjects, and by the Edison Co. of Melies - was no more than simple plagiarism, and did not give rise to the variation, elaboration, and combination that was to be a powerful motor for the evolution, of film form from 1900 onwards. Most of the features of films made before 1900 can be strongly connected with those of pre-filmic media, but with The Kiss in the Tunnel and its continuity cuts from real exterior to studio interior, the first purely filmic device had certainly arrived.
-i
8. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
It seems to me that in the years 1900-1906, before the Nickelodeon boom and subsequent world-wide increase in film production, chat the commercial pressures on the evolution and development of the forms of cinema were low. The only absolute demand from audiences was that the films be photographed (and printed) sharply in focus and with the correct exposure. Even after 1900 there were still substantial audiences somewhere for just about anything that moved on the screen. Despite the absence of any noticeabie changes in the conditions of film exhibition, there was from the beginning of 1903 a sharp increase in the number of longer multi-scene films being produced, though the total number of titles did not increase that much. There was, nevertheless, an extremely rapid evolution of film form, and I take this to be an instance of the way that many developments during the first decade of film history depended largely on the individual wills of the film-makers.
In my approach to these developments, the descriptive norms are provided by what most films come to be like, and all the surviving films are taken into consideration as far as possible, without respect to their artistic worth. M ore than 1000 fictional films still exist from the years 1900-1906, and I have viewed most of them, and mostly more than once. This is quite easy to do, because they are in general very short, many hundreds of them consisting of only one scene done in one shot. When they are seen quickly over a week or two the genetic interconnections between them spring to the cye+ Indeed one way of looking at the rapid formal developments in these early years (and later years too) is by analogy with biological evolution. (Of course, the developments in Him form, like all kinds of cultural evolution, are more like the Lamarckian than the Darwinian concept of evolution, though without exact correspondence even to the former,) This shows itself in the way that novel features which suddenly appear like mutations arc sometimes rapidly taken up, forming a line of descent, while on other occasions original devices die out because they have some unsuitabílítv of a technical or
* if
artistic nature. One obvious instance of this last effect is the use pf dissolves to join all the shots of a film together, which had a fleeting vogue at the beginning of the century.
On the other hand, looking at the situation from the point of view of the film-maker, I find it useful to follow E.H, Gombrich in thinking in terms of artistic problems,
and then the solution to these problems being created bv using models derived from other films, or indeed other art-works in general. In this period one of the cruder problems was how to make longer films which would be readily understood by audiences, and apart from the obvious solution of filming well-known stories of sufficient length, another rather simple-minded approach was to use repetitions of actions and events. Many examples of this can be [bund in the early 'chase' films and films about keyhole-peeping.
Studtos
Initially, staged interior scenes were filmed in the open under direct sunlight, and even after 1906 one can st;<j many films made by the minor companies shot under the same conditions. Amongst many surviving examples can be mentioned The Missing Legacy (All Collins, 1906), and The Hundrcd-Ta-Onc Shot (Viiagraph, 1906), However in IS99 Georges Melies had begun to shoot his films with the direct sunlight falling on the set diffused ami softened by thin cotton sheets suspended over the stage, aw can be seen in FAjfatrc Dreyfus, for instance. Other major companies then also took up the use of glass-roofed and glass-walled stages with the sunlight dill used either by thin cotton sheets stretched below the poof, or by the use of ripple glass covering the roof and walls, or both, At first only ihe European companies followed the Melies model exactly, with glass walls as well as ceiling to their studios, and even they did not use cotton diffusers that could be pulled across under the roof to soften the direct sunlight until alter 1902. With the continuing expansion of their production, Hathe opened an even larger studio in 1905, and in this they built remarkabir extensive sets for some of their films. Then having built these big sets, they showed them oil with wide panning shots. The scenery lift in this big studio can be seen disguised as a mine lift-cage to make up part of the set in An pays noir. Pa the also bui.lt a large-sized tank in their studio grounds in 1904, and ink was used to stage scenes requiring action in water, as in Un D/am dans ks airs (1905), in which the gondola of a balloon was filmed falling into the water in. front of a painted back-drop representing the sea stretching to the horizon. This tank also sometime* had elaborate *cts built around it; for instance one showing Venetian pafo/ti and canals in Un Dramc a Vattist! (\^i)7).
FILM STYIEAND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
44
Photography and Lighting
The transition from filming under direct sunlight to filming under diffused sunlight tool place at Pathe in 1902, and ai fiiograph and Edison at about die same time. The first company to use artificial light to any extent was probably Edison, after they built a new roof-top studio in New York in 1900. it seems to me that this studio was a confused compromise between their original 'Black Maria, which used direct sunlight through clear dass onto its small set, and the standard cons tr uc t io n of as till photograp her'ss tu di o of the time. Certainly there are clear signs of extra arc tiohting from overhead on the Edison film Why Jonas Discharged Hit Ckrfut and what looks like mercury vapour lamp Lighting on Tim Mystic Swing and Uncle josh in a Spooky Hotel, all of which were made in 1900. As far as the second two films are concerned, it is possible that the soft lighting with rapid falhoff in intensity coming from the side may be from a small area of glass wall in the inadequate studio mentioned above, but the very poor quality of the prints available make this difficult to tell. The arc lighting units used were mostly based on the kind of arc tamps used for street lighting at the time, if they were hung overhead, or the on the kind of are floodlights on floor stands already used by still photographers. In the United
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
A rack of mercury vapour tubes (Cooper-llewkts) suspendedfrom the ceiling of a
studio.
States the mercury vapour lamps were usually referred to by the name of their principal manufacturer, Cooper-Hewitt, which produced them for indoor lighting in large industrial buildings. Mercury vapour lamps were large glass tubes about three feet long and three inches in diameter which produced monochromatic blue light from mercury
A studio interior scenefrom The Silver Wedding (F.A.Dobson, 1906) lii almost entirely by the soft      from a rack of Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapour tubes %/> oi the left side and just out of shot. Were the very rapidfall-off in brightness
away from the source.
45
One of the staircase shots in Par la trou de la serrure (Pathe, 1905) hi by diffuse daylight and light from at least three arcfloodlights. Note the sharp-edged shadows of the man and the bannisters cast onto the wahsby the arc food lights.)
vapour ionised by an electric current passing through it, on exactly the same principle as modern fluorescent tubes, though without the white phosphor coating which produces white light as well in these latter. Mercury vapour tubes were invariably used in groups of several tubes held side by side in large wooden racks, which gave lighting somewhat similar to that from a very large version of the 'soft li^ht1 or 'North light' used nowadays for film lighting, and very similar to present-day 'Kinoflo' fluorescent lights.
By 1903 extra artificial lighting is certainly visible in a lew films from all the three major film companies, such as The Divorce from Qiograph, and Lotion miraculeuse from
Pathe. By 1904, Uiograph was using a completely enclosed studio entirely lit with many racks of Cooper -Hewitts suspended from the ceiling and on vertical floor stands; indeed so many that the effect was quite like the overall diffuse daylight illumination in the large glass studios Pathe and Melies were using. At Pathe arc lights were frequently used to supplement the diffuse daylight through the studto roof and walls, as m scenes shot on the Pathe staircase from Par k iron de io serrure (190S) onwards.
When the French Gaumont company expanded production and built a large new glass studio in 1905, they also installed arc floodlights, just like Pathe, and likewise
One of the deep sets, with action on many levels, in la Vie du ChristT with txm light from arc floodlights above and onfhor
yiands.
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
The studio set showing the scene in tne gypsy's attk in belied by Rover {Lewin Fitzhamon, 190S). This is lit in part hy arcfloodlighting simulating the light through the window, and casting the multiple shadows just visible on the hock wall.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
47
Studio interior lit solely by the light Jrom a small electric arc concealed in the lantern held by an actor in False] v Accused (Hepworth Co., 1905). The power cable taking current to the arc is just visible danglina below it.
used them on floor stands to put extra fi II lighting onto the figures from the from, at least some of I he time. The first big Gaumonl production, la Vic dii Christ, made in 1906, used rather large and complex sets for the lime, and on these there was a fair amount arc light used for fill on the figures, and also to get some light into the dark corners, The resulting patterns of lighting arc sometimes quite striking, but it is not clear to me whether these were merely a matter of reproducing the look of the engravings on which the scenes of this film were based. Certainly, other Gnumont films of this time are nowhere near as interesting from the lighting point of view, though the compositions
their cameramen produced when framing exterior scenes are usually quite elegant.
The use of arcs to create effect lighting really begins in 19G5, with such Alms as Edwin S. Porter's The Seven Ages, in which the scene representing 'Old Age' has a fire effect done with an arc floodlight hidden in a fire-place before which an old couple sit, illuminated solely by its light. Another very early attempt at a lighting effect is the use of the sun rejected in a small mirror to produce a patch of bright tight which is intended to simulate the light from a lantern in After Dark: The Policeman and His Lantern, a C+A. Smith film ol 1902. An entirely different approach to the simulation
In fát madcNhotfrotn^ drame en mer
sluing onto a inking ship issimuiatedfy . ^p-^ black *ašk placed inJront oj
a sha
the camera fens
of a beam of light occurs in a Pathc film of 1905, Un drame en mert in which a scene lit by a beam from a lighthouse is revealed within the confines of a diagonal band delineated by a mask in front of the camera lens; this being supposed to represent the outline of the beam of light.
Returning to the eruption of effect lighting in 190S, another extremely interesting example is in Falsely Accused, from the Hepworth studio. In this film a man searching a totally dark room by lantern light is photographed doing just that, the sole illumination of the scene coming from a tiny electric arc concealed in his lantern! It was several years before this technique turned up in lilms again. There would seem to have been someone at Hepworth aware of the possibilities of availabledighl photography, because in the same year Stolen Guy includes a bonfire scene lit solely by thu light from the bonfire.
Some moderately innovative camera work was a Isob rind done at this time by G.W. Bitter and F. A f Dobsonat Hiograph. 1906 saw the appearance of The Paymaster photographed on location by Bitzer, and featuring an available-light interior scene in a watermill, in which sunlight coming through tht: windows from the side produces a strong chiaroscuro eflect. In the same year F.A. Dobson produced The Siher Wedding and The Tunnel Workers doubling as director and cameraman, as was quite common in this period, and in these films, more by the nature of the sets he had constructed than by the sources of light used, he accidentally created scenes in which foreground figures went into silhouette at some points; scenes ofa type thai were not extensively exploited till a decade later. There arc similar effects, which likewise may be more accidental than intentional, in some Edison
studio scenes as well, and in this case the lights are arcs suspended above the back area of the scene, with little light on the foreground figures. Fx am pies from 1905 include The Watermelon Patch and the scene showing The judge' in The Seven Ages. Partial uses of arc lighting also occur in the Hepworth company's Rescued hy Rover^ in which the scenes in the gypsy's attic are illuminated by a pair of arc floodlights simulating the light from the window at the side, though only as an addition to the general diffuse natural light, and in The Firehug (Biograph, 1905) arc floodlights are used on the emblematic shot of the firebug himself brandishing a lighted torch.
At least one cameraman with the Vitagraph company began working on effect lighting in 1906. In Foul Play there was a moderately successful attempt at simulating the light coming from a property lamp shown within the shot bousing arc floodlights just outside the edge of the frame, and on the evidence of production sEiils this kind o I work with lighting seems to have continued over the next couple ul years at VÍLagraph,
Coloured Films
in the 1900-1906 pi-riod alj-over tinting and tuning of prints was not generally used, but there are examples of what were to become tlm standard tints appearing in some films. The first and last shots of Williamson's fitéí, which show the exterior ol the burning building, are tinted all-over red in the surviving print, the sky sceneN in FLU". Paul's The ? Motorist ft906) are tinted blue, and there jre also some examples of night-time scenes being limed jfí* over blue. But a large number oiiilms, almost entirely Iraeft
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: J900-1906
Early model of the Pathe Studio camera in the 1909 Pathefilm Max - Cinema tog raphe. The camera is attached directly to the tripod, even though panning and tilting heads had been available for several years. But the camera isftted with a cylindrical lens hood over the lens, which was a new idea in 1909,
Mclies and Pathe, were made available with their images haiidi-pamtcd frame by frame in several colours. Such prints cost 3 or 4 times as much as the same film uncolouredT and the subjects treated were usually of the fantastic or exotic-historical kind. Even though- the hand-applied colours did not exactly correspond to the various ostensibly coloured surfaces in the image, and also jiggled'about from frame to frame, they added.greatly to the appeal of these films both then and now, compensating to some extent for the way most of them were conducted entirely in Very Long Shot, In the case of Mclies' films the effect was .particularly suitable given the broad and simplified style of scene painting he used, and the combined effect of colour and flat scenery quite transforms a film like icftcyaumc desfecs (1903), giving it the look .of a scries of popular 19th, century block-coloured1 woo dL cuts which have been animated
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The Pathe Studio Camera
Although it did not come into wide use for several years, thePathe studio camera first became available from 1903', lis design was olbscly based on thai of tile original Lumiere camera, but it was rather larger, and! it also hada few extra features. The main body of the Pathe camera was made of wood., and measured about 12 inches in height, 8 inches in WKlth, and1 .bout 4 inches from front to back. Instead.of havmg just asinglt smal] containing the unex-
posed negative mourned, on .the top of the camera as with the Lumierc camera, ,l,m wcrctW0 ^
H*K ^capable of holding 4Q0feet offilm, mountodoL behmd. the otheroi, topof the camera body ^JMB like the Lumieiecamera,.the crank handle dnv m m *##jm#m m m M * the camera
rather than the side, fas was to become usual with later cameras), and the claws pulling down the film were driven by the same double cam mounted on a single shaft as in the Lumiere camera( However the Pathe camera also had a toothed sprocket-wheel mounted above the gate aperture which pulled the film out of the feed magazine before it passed through the gate, and also drove it up into the take-up magazine after it had been exposed, as was necessary for the transport of film from the larger rolls being used. A loop of film ('Latham loop') was formed between the feed side of this sprocket wheel and the top of the film gate to allow for the conversion of the continuous movement of the film off the fcedroll into the intermittent movement of film through the film gate, and a second Latham loop performed the same function for the film leaving the gate and goin^ up onto the take-up roll over the other side of the continuously rotating sprocket wheel. The drive for the take-up magazine was;providcd by a flexible band driven from a pulley wheel in the camera body which turned another pulley attached to the axle supporting the take-up roll of film. The Pathe camera also had a footage counter to measure the approximate amount of film that had been driven through it.
Critical focussing of the image on the film was obtained by removing the film from, the gate, and then putting a rectangle of thuvgroundglass in the film aperture. The inverted image formed on the ground glass surface was inspected by a magnifying lens. Thisprocedure could only be carried out between shots, as the back of the camera had to be opened to ;put,thc focussing glass itl piacc. A supplementary view-finder attached to the side of the camera had to be used for checking what was in frame while the shot was actually be-mg taken. At some fairly early stage this became an optical
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
arrangement inside a rectangular tube with its own separate lens and ground glass screen showing an inverted image,
The Williamson Camera
The standard Williamson camera, which first appeared in 190+, was a simple rectangular wooden box about 20 inches high by 20 inches long, and about 6 inches in width. The crank handle driving the mechanism was in what was to become the usual place on the right hand side of the body, and as with the Lumiere camera, one complete turn of the handle exposed 3 frames of film. The camera was loaded from the left hand side, with the feed roll of unexposed film carried inside a rectangular wooden spool box that
—Fin or Cfaw Movement
—Williamson Claw Movement
(Above) Standard imerior layout of cameras of the English type, including the Williamson camera. A and] arefeed and take-up magazines inside the camera body, MN is the telescopeforfocussing on the image on the film in the gate t and F is the claw mechanism.
(Below) Close views of the standard English daw mechanism and the Williamson variant with the curved path for the pivot at A.
49
was placed in its turn inside the main camera box. The film was pulled out of the spool bo:c (or magazine) by a sprocket wheel inside the main camera compartment, and fed down into the gate. The intermittent mechanism pulling successive frames of film down between exposures was a pair of claws which engaged in one sprocket hole on each side of the film, and their up and down motion was produced by their being on the end of a lever attached at its other end to a pivot on the edge of a continuously rotating disc. There was also a ccnlral pivot rod on this lever that slid up and down in a slot attached to the camera body near the gate, and because of this the rotation of the end of the lever attached to the disc gave its claw end an oscillating movement that drove it into the sprocket holes in the film during the down stroke, and then lifted the claw away from the film on the up stroke whilst the film was stationary and the exposure being made. Owing to its simplicity, this type of intermittent movement came to be used in many early cameras, and indeed it has persisted in use up to the present day, but the Williamson version included an extra subtlety in that the slot in which the central pivot of the claw lever arm slid was curved rather than straight. This produced the optimum path for the claw tip on the pull-down part of its stroke; a straight line parallel to the film plane.
After exposure the film was driven through another sprocket wheel, and then taken up into a second spool box of 400 feet capacity just like the feed box. The image in the film gate could be viewed and focussed only when the camera was stopped between shots, and this was done by replacing the film in the gate with a strip of special film which had the emulsion removed and ihc front surface roughened to matt trail slue ency. The image on this focussing film was viewed through a telescope running from behind the film gate to the back of the camera, between the upper and lower spool bo*:cs. Since at this period there were still no standardized lens mounts, even for cameras from the same maker, lenses had to be individually calibrated by their owners, but once diis had been done it was possible to focus them by the distance scale their owner had engraved on them, with-out inspecting the image in the gate. Approximate framing during the course of the shot relied on a supplementary viewfinder fixed to the side of the camera. This lack of any precise means of determining the framing must have constituted some sort of pressure against the frequent use of panning shots, but it certainly did not prevent them being used at all, as some film* of the period show. Like the Lumiere and Pathe cameras, the Williamson camera and other similar English cameras ran just as well backwards as forwards, so permitting dissolves to be made in the camera M desired t Nevertheless, in English films of this period there is very little use of dissolves made in any manner.
so
fiu^^ of the Williamso, and
other similar early English cameras were widely made over the next decade by various companies in other countries ot ^industrialized world; for instance by Erne ma nn in-Ger-im and they were u*<% many film-makers for shooting fictional films, and used even.more for shooting 'topicals or for actuality filming.
tfhc Biograph Camera
The American Mutoscope and Biograph company depended on a camera designed for them by W.K.L. Dickson, who left the Edison company after doing most of the work in creating the Edison camera and viewing apparatus. To completely avoid the Edison patents, the Biograph camera had a very peculiar mechanism for film transport. The film was pulled down through the usual gate in which it was exposed by being squeezed between a pair of rubber covered rollers which rotated once for each exposure. Kail way round each revolution the rollers lost their grip on the film because their rubber covering was cut away for half their circumference. Thus the film was stationary while the usual shutter opened in front of-the gate aperture and the exposure was made, imperforated film was used in the camera, and'when the film strip came to rest for the exposure, a pair of circular punches cut through it to cut out two round holes on> each side of the frame; Because of the nature of the rubber rollers, the amount that the film was pulled down for each exposure was rather irregular, and hence the spacing of the sprocket holes cut in it down the length of the film likewise. This defect was compensated Tor by the special'printer Biograph used to make positive prints. This was rather like ordinary printers, except that the moving claws that pulled the negative and positive through the printer aperture were spring loaded, so that they could go through the regularly spaced prc-cut perforations in the positive stock and! slide on the negative underneath till the two sets of hole were brought into registration, when the claws went right through both sets, and dragged both positive and negative together to the .point in the printer gate where the positive was exposed. This method worked quite
wellT and the vertical registration of Biograph films is quite good, though the sideways registration of the image with respect to the perforation in the positive is not so good, and a slight weave of the image from side to side fi visible on close examination, Overall, the image steadiness of films shot with the Biographcmera i,uot that much better than ^^^^^mm^^ or later with a
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Camera Movemchts
Pamiing ** $4 £ dramatic films made be.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
fore 1903, although they were well established in actuality filming by 1900- Those few that do are mostly in the nature of framing movements: i.c, pans of limited extent made to keep an actor who has unexpectedly moved towards the edge of the frame within its bounds. One such framing pfc amongst a very small number in the production of the period occurs in-Caught in the Undertow (Biograph, 1902), but in general shots on both exteriors and studio interiors were taken with a fixed camera,
The first sign of a quite different approach to camera movement occurs in an earlier Biograph film, Love in the Sub-wrhr (1900). In this one-shot film, the camera pans (or "pan-orarns', as it would have been put at the time) with a woman being followed down a street by two men, until finally its motion discovers a policeman in their path. This use of an extensive pan to reveal the unexpected, either in the narrative incident or the background scenery, began to be really developed from 1904. in that year a new element in the plot is even more subtly revealed by a pan following the leading character in Biograph's The Lost Child, and Porter's Stolen by Gypsies (1904) and Maniac Chase {190S) use extensive pans that reveal more and more striking and unexpected backgrounds as they follow the action. Not surprisingly, ail the examples of pans so far described, some of which cover more than 90 degrees, occur on real exteriors, but in 1905 the Pathc film-makers took up this use of panning shots and applied it to large-scale studio sets. In the context of the films of this period it is even more unexpected to see a slow pan which is following the action reveal a more and more extensive set filled with more and more actors, as happens in such films as h Pouh aux oeufi dor (1905) and Au pays naif (1905), and a number of others, Eor a few years this use ol wide slow pans on studio sets was common in big Pathc productions, but not in those of any other company.
Tracking Shots
tin like the extensive use of pans by Porter and the Pathe film-makers, which formed a small-scale evolutionary trend ■forsome years, there were only a very few isolated instances or the use of tracking shots in the 1900-1906 period. Biograph produced a series of three single-shot films starting with Hooligan in jail (1903), in all of which there was a slow track in from Long Shot at the start of the scene to a Close Up on.the principal character's face. These films, the last of which was made at the-beg inning of 1904, seem to have had no progeny, and conclude the matter of tracking on static scenes for the next several years.
The use of tracking shots to show a view of a more or less static scene from the front of a moving vehicle was not generally taken over from 'phantom ride*' to fictional films in thic period, but there were nevertheless a very few isolat-
or/ STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
ed examples of the parallel tracking shot which shows one moving car taken from another preceding it or following it, starting with The Runaway Match {Alf Collins, 1903). The 1905 American remake of this film as Marriage by Motor-Cor uses quite an elaborate scries of these shots.
Trick Effects
It is my opinion that excessive attention has been devoted to early trick films, and particularly those of Georges Melies, especially in view of the fact that they proved a dead-end as far as the development of the cinema is concerned. Nevertheless, such films still formed a substantial part of production in the early years of the century, though the decline in their commercial importance was already evident by 1906. This is not io say that they have no other interesting qualities; just that enough is enough. The basic techniques that Melies and everyone else used had already been developed and established as standard before 1900, though there is one exception to this which will be noted below. There is no necessity lor me to describe these well-known techniques, which can be summed up as; stopping the camera and adding or subtracting elements of the scene, superimpositions ol various kinds made in the camera, including those made on a dark field within the background shot, and later on superimpositions on a white Held made in the printer. Their occurrence and execution are always quite obvious, particularly since no cameras of the period had perfect registration of the image, and hence the two parts of a s up c rim posit ion always move with respect to each other. Til ere was no development in what Melies did with these techniques either, with the possible exception of their use in his science-fiction fantasies,
The transference of Melies* techniques to scenes shot in real surroundings (rather than on a stage set) by English film-makers also has its place in the history bonks already, but since it largely happened after 1900 some discussion is in order. The earliest examples were made by the Kepworth company in that very year, and include Explosion of u Motor-Car and I low h Feels To Be Run Oter. The effects in the first were achieved in the standard way by stopping the cameraT substituting an imitation motor-car for the real one, then starting the camera again and exploding the imitation car, and so on. In the second film a motor-car drives straight at die camcra,and when it is right up to it and out of locus there is a cut to a black frame decorated with stars and dashes and exclamation marks, and then a cut to the title 'Oh, Mother will be pleased'. The British motor-car trick fiJms can be related to the extra-filmic tradition of British nonsense, and lead me to mention the climax of this sort of thing, which was The Big £ira/W, made by Williamson in 1901. In this, a shot from what is meant to be a stili photographer's Point
of View shows a pedestrian approaching till his head fills the screen, at which point he opens his mouth to almost full screen size, then there is a cut to a shot of the photographer with his camera, all of which we had not seen in the previous shot, Tailing about in a black void, and then a final objective shot of the pedestrian in Long Shot walking towards the camera munching. An interesting technical point concerning this film is that the focus is adjusted to keep the ima^e sharp as the actor approaches the camera. Such adjustment of focus during the course of a shot is extremely rare before World War 1, though there are a few other early examples in this period, such as Magic Bottles (Pathe, 1905).
Mepwortli also made The Bathers in 1900. This simply shows two bathers undressing and diving into the water, then the action apparently reverses in time, and runs its course backwards to the initial state. The reversed second half of the Jiirn was made using iVamediy-frame reverse printing. The 1903 trade advertisements for films such as The Robbery of the Mail Coach and Mitt in Wonderland give the tact that they have been shot with '...all natural scenery' as sell ing points, antl from this and other indications, a comparison was clearly being made with Melies' long films. Ah though this form of advertising suggests that audiences at the time may have preferred the British approach, it does not make it absolutely certain,
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Optical Printing
Cecil Mepworth was one of the most technically able of all early film-makers, and he developed a way of making films with reversing action without having to stage the. action that was to go into reverse twice, as had he en the case before. The solution was to project the image from one frame of a negative in a projector onto positive Him in the gate of a separate camera with the lens removed: the projector lens being pulled out till the image was of the same dimensions as die original frame/fhen the film negative was moved forwards one frame, the positive moved one frame in the opposite direction, a second exposure was made, and so on/fhe arrangement I have described constitutes what is now called an optical printer, though on the rare occasions that one was used in the early decades it was referred to as a 'projection printer'. With this device Hep worth produced some rather complex treatments ol reversed motion such as The Frusirtited Elopcmtni (1902;, in which the actions reverse for short sections within the shot a number of times.
After this I have seen no visual evidence for the use of an optical printer for the next decade or so. On die rare occasions when one was reputed to have been used die result could have been achieved just as well by masking and the use of a contact printer in the standard way
were
secí
52
Camera Speeds
The camera speed used for filming had not stabilised in the carlv years of the century, for although all French films and some others from elsewhere had settled close to 16 frames per second, there were quite a number of English films which were shot nearer to 24 framed per second. On the other hand, a large number of Edison and Biograph iilms cranked far slower, even as slowly as 1042 frames per cond. By 1906 there was beginning tobe a closer approximation to 16 frames per second in all quarters,
Given these facts it is not surprising that intentional departures from a standard camera speed for expressive purposes were extremely rare, but I can report at least one interesting exception to this generalization. In The Indian Chief and the Sctdihz Powder made by the Hcpworth company in August I9QI, the beginning of the scene, which shows an American Indian drinking a large quantity of Seidlitz Powder, was filmed at about 16 frames per second, but when the Indian's stomach blows up like a balloon with gas the camera speed was increased to more than double this. The result was that the leaps he makes are in slow motion, which gives a balloon-like floating quality to his movements. It seems likely that cranking slowly ('under-cranking') to give accelerated moli on had first appeared; be fore 1900 in;R,W. Paul's Qn o-Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899), and there are certainly also one or two other examples of this technique prior lo 1906.
le Frame Filming and Animation
1 he most important development in trick effects dur ing this period was the introduction of single-frame film-
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
It appears that the first stage in this development was the object animation carried out in Porter's How Jones Lost His Roll and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog of 1905. In these two films cut-out letters are made to move about to form words by shifting them a small amount between each single frame exposure, so
introducing at one sti oke \\ hat was to he the standard filmic animation technique. For this purpose a camera with specially adapted gearing was needed, so that one turn of the crank handle exposed only one Trame of film, rather than the eight frames per turn that was now standard. (Any attempt to produce the same result with an unmodified camera by turning the crank exactly one-eighth or one-quarter of a turn will inevitably produce some uneven exposure or 'flashing1 of frames within any reasonable length of film put through.)
However it must be noted that it is possible to produce scrambled letters moving into place in other ways than that used by Porter in the films mentioned. The simplest of these is to lay the complete words out on a sheet and then shake it while filming the words with an inverted camera running backwards. When the resulting film is turned end for end and projected the letters will be seen to leap into place. This technique can be seen used in a French film of roughly this date, and it is quite likely that the advertising films which Georges Melies claims to have made in IS98 with letter? forming words also used this technique. Vet another possibility for moving objects about slowly is to use a series of shots about a fool or two long joined by short dissolves, as Melies did in a film from 1904 which does survive, le Roi du maquiflagc. This shows what would nowadays be thought of as a 'Wolfman type facial transformation with the gradual
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900^1906
■
Cinema screen effect done by matting in a second exposure made on the original negative in Robert Paul's Tht Countryman and the Cinematograph. (1901). The cameraman did not succeed in ;3%?t]^ foregroundscene and the background scene the same exposure, andhence the darkness oj the latter.
Thejirst shot of As Seen Through a Telescope, showing a man using u telescope to watch another mart helping o woman onto a bicycle.
appearance of hair all over the face, and it is achieved by just such closely spaced and even dissolves between each stage of the addition of more hair.
The true single-frame animation technique was applied to a series of drawings by J. Stuart Blackton in 1906 to produce the first truc 111 med animated motion pictures in one section of Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, and it was only after this that single frame animation technique was used in European films. Claims that this happened earlier appear to be bogus.
Other Special Effects Technic]ties
The use of vignetted images inset within the frame, along the lines ol G.A. Smith's The Corsican Brothers was further developed by Robert Paul in The Countrymen and the Cinematograph (December 1901). This film shows an unsophisticated spectator at a film show of the period who lakes what he sees on the screen for reality, and then tries to get into the action, demolishing the screen at the end of the filmT The scries of scenes on the cinema screen were shot as super impositions by double exposing the ongiuaj negative with a rectangular mask Or matte in front of the lens to confine the screen image to the appropriate area. Edwin Porter made a copy of this film a month later, called Uncle josh at the Moving Picture Show. His imitation even contains the same subjects shown in the film within a film in The Countryman and the Cinematograph - a dancer, a train, and a courting couple, Porter also introduced another variant on the use of mattes in The Twentieth Cent ary Tramp (1902), in which the frame is split into two fields by a horizontal mask line, with the upper area showing a stationary airship shot on a studio set, and the lower part a panning shot across a city
The second shot of As Seen Through a Telescope, which is a Point of View shot simulating the view through the telescope
with a circular vignetu mash.
skyline to give the illusion of contrary motion of the airship through the sky. The upper half of the shot was masked off while the lower half was exposed, and vice-versa. This procedure would nowadays be referred to as using a matte and a counter-matte in succession, Porter repeated this trick in the better-known case of Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, and after several more years it came to be quite commonly used. Some other early attempts to handle similar stories involving Hying, such as Rescued in ;l/jJ-/h'r (1906), used simple superimposition with white-coloured Hying machines and people in an attempt to minimize print-through of the background scene.
Scene Dissection
The practice of dividing a scene up into a number of shots was pioneered by G. A, .Smith in Grandma's Reading Glass (1900), in which the various objects a small boy is shown looking at with a magnifying glass in the establishing shot are cut inlo it as Gig Close Up* of the objects seen from his Point of View (POV). As the Warwick Trading Company catalogue put it at the time: 'The conception is to produce on the screen the various objects as they appeared to Willy while looking through the glass in their enormously enlarged form," In the Big Close Ups of the objects the actual mag-nifying glass is not used, but its field of view [s simulated by photographing the object of interest inside a black circular mask fixed in front of ihe camera lens. In 1901 Smith repeated this device in As Seen Through a Telescope, which shows a man with a telescope spying on another man who is taking advantage of his helping a woman onto a bicycle to fondle hcr ankle. Into the Long Shot incorporating all this actions inserted the ostensible view through the telescope, which is
FILM STYLU AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
S4
■
Thcfirst shot of C.A. Smith's The Sick Kitten (1903), which is an identical remake of The Little Doctor of 1901
represented by another Big Close Up shewing the lady's fool inside a black circular mask. Unlike the previous film, there is only one cut-in POV Close Up rather than several, hut in the development As Seen Through a Telescope made later in the same year by the Pa the company, Ce out je wis de man sizicme, the man uses his telescope to spy through a number of different windows in succession, so combining the structures of both earlier Smith films. Also in 1901, G.A. Smith initiated the other major form of scene dissection with Hie Link Doctor. In this film,, which now only exists in the essentially identical rcslaged version, of 1903, The Sick Kitien, there is a cut straight in down the lens axis from a Medium Long Shot of a child administering a spoon of medicine to a bitten, to a Big Close Up Insert of the kitten with the spoon in its mouth, and then back toihe Medium Long Shot again.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
The close shot of the kitten an straight m to the master shot
o/The Sick Kitten,
As this is an objective shot of the kitten there is no masking as in the other films, and the matching of the position of the kitten across the two cuts is not perfect, as is hardly surprising given the nature of kittens, but it could be worse.
An interesting example of the evolution of filmic devices through copying and modification is given by Edwin S. Porter's Gay Shoe Chrk (1903), which combines, as often with Porter, features from two or more previous films. This film, which shows a shoe salesman taking the opportunity to fondle a female customer's ankle in a Big Close Up Insert cut into the main scene, combines the general construction of The Little Doctor with the subject matter of As Seen Through a Telescope.
Another line of development of scene dissection using the POV shot goes through the Pathc film Peeping Tom
Hi
One of the series ofPoim of Vic- shots Kith keyhok shaped mŠ. M m the master shot of "Peeping Tom.
77)£frame before the first cut it) to a close shot in Mary Janes Mishap (1903). The octresss holds this position for I 1 frames in an attempt to match with the following shot.
(1902), which shows a man peeping through a series of keyholes, with what he sees shown inside a keyhole-shaped mask cut in at appropriate points. In A Search for Evidence (Biograph, 1903), the series of keyhole peepings and associated POV shots lead a wife and detective to a confrontation with her unfaithful husband inside the last of the rooms spied on. In the previous films of this type, the person spying through the keyhole never entered the rooms, which were shown exclusively inside the POV keyhole vignettes or masks, but in A Search for Evidence the wife and detective open the door, and as they go through it there is a cut on action and change of camera direction through 90 degrees to show them actually going inside the room from an objective camera position also inside the room. Amongst these early peeping films there is one which does not have the Point of View shots shown inside a vignette. This is la Title de bain indiscrete made at Pathc in 1902 quite early in the series. In this film, the bath maid in a hotel peeps at the occupants of the bathroom through the transom window above the door. The angles from which the inserted shots are laken do not really match her line of sight at all, and this is also the case Tor the only other Pathc example ol the unvignetted POV shot from these years so far found. This is Fauvrc mere, noted by Richard Abel in an article in Screen (Vol. 30, No. 3, Summer 19S9). Here a little girl looks down out of an upstairs window at a passing military band, which is shown in a stock shot taken from pavement level with a panning camera. However, there is a British example of the use of the true Point of View shot in Alf Collins* A Runaway Match (1903), where the advertisement makes clear that these shots of the pursuing and pursued cars taken Irom each other in succession were meant to be the characters' respective views. And they are from the correct angle, of
Thefollowing frame, with a cut in to a closer shot.
course. The American remake of this film about three yean, later also includes repeated true POV shots. Comparing the large number of films with vignetted POV shots made in the first decade of the century with the handful of intermittent examples of the unvignetted POV shots and 'almosť POV shots, it would scum that most early film-makers had some conceptual or aesthetic difficulty with a device that now seems so natural to us.
The Pathe Staircase
In the process of making longer films by the use of repetitions of the Point of View shot with keyhole mask, the Pathe company built a staircase set to give a home to all those doors with keyholes in them. Ono.- having constructed this set, Pathe retained it, and used it whenever possible in their iilms subsequent to its iirst appearance in Peeping Tom (1903). After they had exhausted the keyhole idea, they just used this staircase set to give them an extra shot between a shoL showing a character entering a house in an exterior scene, and then the inevitable shot of him entering a room interior set. This simple way of making a longer film was noticed by some American lil in-ma kurs in the next few years, but it led thum in quite dilferent directions.
The insert Shot
M this point it really becomes necessary to distingui>h between the true Close Up and the Insert, which I define, following later nomenclature, as a close shot of some object or part of an actors body other than the face. ThiN di>tmc-tion seems to have been made by tht end o I this period, for there were studios such as Viugraph. where from 1906 onwards the insert os 1 have defined it was used, but not the true Close Up or Medium Close Shot of head and >houi-
-
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
to
S6
A frame part of the way through the progress of a vertical wipe from a scene the following imcrtitie in Robert Paul's Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost (1901). Part of the setfrom the previous scene remains visible at the bottom of the frame
dersr The use ol" a close shot of a letter or other text at the point where it is written or read in a film obviously makes a vast difference to the possibilities of film narration, and early examples of textual inserts that must be mentioned include the tombstone inscription in Mary Jane's Mishap, a cut to a Close Up of a notice on a gate in Chien de garde (Pathe, 1906), and an insert shot of a document in Buy Your Oun Cherries (R.W. Paul, 1904), A very special use of the Insert Shot appears in G,A. Smith's As Seen through an Area Window (1901). This shows the view through a basement window of feet going past on the pavement above, and through their movements the course of characteristic incidents can be deduced. I would guess that this idea was a transposition of a standard vaudeville routine done in die theatre with the front stage curtain raised a couple of feet, but I don't have the evidence yet. In any case, no continuation of the idea has been found later in this period, though there are developments of it after 1907. The more general use of inserts to show clearly details that were important to the story increased after 1903, as in The Missing legacy (Alf Collins', 1906), ^Falsely /k^rf (Hep worth, 19QS), and many others, and from this point on we can consider the usayc well established.
Gut-inClbsc Shots
£ with other device*, 1903 Saw the rca] bcginm„K 0r
httk-known mate- work, Mar,-        AJi!Lm M . r C A Smii.....u f- ' J      '"«M>. again Irom
Z«    TSW,K'of this  «* S^Sa
Long Shot of Mary Jane lighting the lire to a Medium Close; Up of her. The matching of the actress's position across the cuts is not perfect, but careful examination shows that she is taking trouble to hold an exact position at the end of the first shot, which she also assumes within a couple of frames as the camera starts turning at the beginning of the closer shot joined to it, and so on for succeeding cuts. In other words, the idea of position matching across a cut within a scene had already been arrived at by G.A. Smith. Exactly the same observation can be made in some Pathe films of succeeding years- for instance Ursus et son laureau latitat (1904), in which a CEose Up is used to bridge a hitch in the execution of a stage act in which f Ursus1 wrestles a bull to the ground. He can be visibly seen taking direction as to how to strike the correct matching pose when the resumed Long Shot starts again.
It seems likely to me that the idea of position matching across a cut within a scene arose naturally from its use in those earlier trick films which involved transformations by substitution of one person or object for another after stopping the camera and then restarting it on exactly the same shot. Curiously enough, the first major exponent of this trick technique, Georges Melies, never really took up the use of cuts to a closer shot within a scene, and a further oddity is that although trick substitutions in which a cut was made 'on action1 when replacing one bodv with another were quite standard, the generalization of this to cutting on acfon to a closer shot, rather than to a held position, was never made in this period.
To give some further indication of the rapid spread of enttmg in to a doser shot within a scene, I will just men-
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
tion a few more titles out of many ~ most of these showing a cut in to Medium Shot from Long Shot - The Strenuous Life (Edison, 1904), Th Widow and the Only Man (Bio^raph;
1904) , la Chaussette (Pathe J 90S), Here a la lane (Pathe,
1905) , etc.,etc.
Shot Transitions
Prom Ccndnllon (1S99) onwards, Georges Melies used dissolves rather than cuts from one shot to the next in his films, and despite examples of what was to become the standard approach of using a straight cut for shot transitions being already available in the work of contemporary English film-makers, Edwin Porter and others took up the use of the dissolve as the standard form of shot transition. For instance, in Life Rescue at Long Branch made by the Edison Company in 1901, the transition from a Very Long Shot of a beach resuscitation to a slightly closer shot of the same was made with a dissolve, and in Porter's The Life of an American Fireman (1903), all the shots were joined with dissolves.
The adoption of the Melies dissolve was not confined to the United States, for all the shots in the Pathe Hisioire t/'un crime are joined with dissolves, and in Alice in Wonderland (Hepworth, 1903) there are a number of transitions of this kind, including dissolves to a closer shot within a scene, and also dissolves when the actress walks out of one shot into the next. This is despite the fact that the position matching from one shot to the next in these cases in Alice in Wonderland was not too bad for the date when the film was made. In November 1901 Robert Paul made a great effort to outdo Melies with his film Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost. This was, as he described it in an advertisement in The Era (20 November 1901), 600 feet long, and in '...twelve tableaux, dissolving or otherwise." Further, it had pithy letterpress titles on the film, which give the clue to each of the principal sections. These short introductions are imprinted on the film in a novel or pleasing manner, some of them appearing with a dissolving effect between the various scenes, others being disclosed by a rolling curtain, as if projected by a biunial lantern/ Most of this film survives, and it contain* all the advertised features. The 'rolling curtain' effect is what we would call a soft-edged vertical wipe, and this is fairly well executed twice within the surviving material, around Scene If. As the advertisement implies, this kind of wipe efiect was already commonly used on magic lanterns, but it was much more difficult to bring olVon film, and in fact close examination of the examples in Scrooge; or, Marley's Ohosi show that in one case the blurred overlap between the outgoing and in-coming scenes separates to leave a dark gap as the edge of the wipe moves up the screen. In the transitions to and from the later scenes in this film, Paul dropped the wipe efiect, and used the simpler dissolve, and as lar as I
know, he never used the wipe again. The next occurrence of wipes, less perfectly done, is in G.A, Smith s Mary janes Mishap (1903). There are no more dissolves in the other surviving Paul films either, and virtually no other European examples ofsuch use of the dissolve outside the films of Melies. American examples which use dissolves to join shots together pretty well vanish alter 1903 .is well.
Only Georges Melies persisted in usina dissolves between every shot after this date, (it must be emphasized Melies was not using the dissolve to indicate a time lapse between shots in his films, since many of them occur between shots in which there is no time lapse possible between a character walking out of one shot into a spatially adjoining scene. Examples of this can be seen in Barbe-Blette (1901) and lc Voyage dans h hnc (1902). In fact the use of the dissolve lo indicate a time lapse did not begin to be established as a convention till the end of the nineteen-twentEes.)
The use ol Jades was very rare in the early years of the century, but there are examples to he seen in one of the surviving prints of Mi Baha et les yuarantcs voleurs (Pathe, 1902), where they begin and imk\ each scene, and also similarly in Williamsons The Old Chorister (1904) and the Gaumont la Vie du Christ (1906). Those lew fades that occur in Mice in Wonderland are probably unsuccessful attempts at making a dissolve in the camera by fading-out, then winding back and fading in on the next shot. The earliest cameras did not have footage counters, and a mis-counting of the number of backward turns with the crank handle could easily create a separate lade-out and fade-in rather than a dissolve. For this and other obvious reasons the use of dissolves made in the camera between every shot was not an efficient procedure of film construction, and neither was making dissolves in the printer by the same process for every separate print ol the film produced, so it is no great surprise that the usage disappeared after 1903,
The Cut as Shot Transition
Anrl it was displaced by the English film-makers' use of simple cuts to join shots together, with action moving directly from one shot to the next. The earliest important example of this was a new version of The Kiss in the Funnel made for the Bam forth company at the very end of 1S99, which was a slightly varied imitation of G.A. Smith's film of the same title made a month or two previously. The tfamlorth film actually show* die train going into the tunnel in Very Long Shot, rather than the view from a camera mounted ©a the front of it, then it shows the events in the interior of the carriage as before, and finally thi: train coming $ii oi the tunnel, again seen in Very Long Shot.
The continuation of the development of action continu-ity through shots cut directly together occur* in a *erte* o\
1901 má im Roberl pauľs * w4°nd thc ,,Wí
m* m& wiiiiam^onv     »4 wm mm SgSftfi
Stop Thicjl, and M The Robert Paul film is made up ot two shots, with the principal characters walkmg out ol frame at the end of the first shot, followed by a cut to a room somewhere else, into which they then enter. In other words, it uses the same continuity structure as Pauľs earlier
Com Along, #8$
Attart oií o Chine* Mission Station - Bhcjochis to the Rescue develops the dissection of a continuous action by breaking it down into a series of shots taken from different camera positions that had been begun in the G. A. Smith films. This film has often been discussed on the basis of the description and frame enlargements in the Williamson and Warwick Trading company catalogues, but now that a print of the film itself has finally re-appeared, its importance can be seen to be even greater. The full catalogue description of the action appears in Low and Manvclľs llhtoty of the ftrif-jsh Film: 1S95-19Q6, hut the essence of what happens in and outside the grounds of a large house is as follows;-
1. Chinese Boxer rebels arc attacks no the outside wooden gates of a mission station. They break through, and rush into the grounds away from the camera.
2. In the grounds of the house a European family are taking their case. When the Boxers rush past the camera towards them the missionary sends his family into the house, and he defends himself against the attackers, who finally kill him, H ts wife appears on a balcony and waves a handkerchief.
3. In a shot taken from the opposite angle, showing the open gate to the garden from the inside, we see a troop of marines, led by an officer on horseback, approaching the gate, which they rush through. Inside the gate, they pause, fire a series of volleys past the camera, then rush towards and past it.
4. This is the same camera set-up as shot 2,, showing the garden and front of the house, with woman on balcony and besieging Boxers. The marines rush past the camera into the scene and engage the Borers, There is more varied action in this scene, but although.the latter part of it is missing from, the surviving print, it clearly contributes nothing furLher from the point of view of film construction.
■ .-4
A more comply teipibn oľ it,e film m bc read in m book, Muring inio Pictures,
«M>*       mm lhe altcmilion oľshots fr
directions of.camera amil^ ik, r-i   c W uimtra angk:, the film has a ereater feclmu r,r
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 19Q0-19Q6
G.A. Smith, Some subsequent films by James Williamson keep this feeling, but they are not many, and none does it much better than Attack on a Chinese Mission Station.
Williamsons Stop Thief! takes action through more widely separated spaces, and is the source of .subsequent de-vclopmcnts in "chase films. It is made up of three shots. In the first shot the thief is chased out of the side of the frame, and then in the second shot set in a different place he runs in one side of the frame and is chased towards the camera and out of the other side of the frame, and then he runs into the third shot, where he is finally caught; all of these shots being joined by simple cuts. Fire! introduces this feature into a more complex construction. In this film an actor moves from a scene outside a burning building by exiting from the side of the frame and into a shot outside a fire station, then the fire cart moves out of this shot and next appears in the distant background of a shot of a street, advancing forward and out of frame past the camera, From this point the film moves back to the burning house, though not to the real exterior as before, but rather to a set showing a room inside the house, A fireman comes into the room from the top of a ladder outside the window, picks up a helpless occupant1 and starts to lift him through the window. At this point there is a cut to the real exterior again, with the victim being lifted through the window and carried down the ladder. In the absolute sense the continuity of action across the cut from inside to outside is imperfect, as there is a second or so of movement across the window still missing, but even to the modern eye, the cut boh smooth, in the same way that contemporary editing often elides small parts of movement invisibly. The film ends with more movement towards the camera and out of frame past it. The only other surviving films from 1901 that have continuous movement from shot to shot arc French, namely the Pathe company's Hisioirc dun crime and Mclies' Barbe-bleuc, and these were made later than the first of the Williamson films. Also, in these two French examples the transitions from one shot into the next arc covered with dissolves, as already remarked, rather than being straight cuts,
The consolidation of Williamsons methods of fil m construction was carried out by other British film-makers in J903. The first of these was Daring Daylight Burglary, made hy the Mottershaws at the Sheffield Photographic Company at the beginning of the yean This film starts with an on-looker leaving the higlvanglc first shot of a burglar breaking into the back of a house and running off into the next shot of a street elsewhere in which he alerts the police. Then there ■s another straight cutback to the original-scene, and after a couple Of shots a chase develops that is carried through several more shots, giving an overall structure to the film -hid. adds that of Stop Thief! to the end of that of FircL
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
Oaring Daylight Burglary was one of the most commerciallv successful films made up to that date, and it was distributed in America by the Edison Company under the title Daylight Robbery several months before Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery. That Porter saw Daring Daylight Burglary is proved by the inclusion of the same trick effect, whereby a criminal throws a dummy purporting to be an actor off a height; a roof in the Daring Daylight Burglary, and the top of an engine tender in The Great Train Robhery.
The Emblematic Shot
Although The Great Train Robbery lacks the elaborated chase structure possessed by Daring Daylight Burglary and Other English films such as The Pickpoeket. ^ A Chase Through London (AIf Collins) and Desperate Poaching Affray (William Maggar), which were made before it in 1903, it does possess original features of its own. The most important of these was the addition of what might bc called an 'emblematic shot', which in this case shows a Medium Close Up of a cowboy bandit pointing a gun straight at the camera. This shot, which could bc placed either at the beginning or the end of the film by the exhibitor, does not represent any action which occurs in the body of the film, but can be con-sidcred to indicate the general nature of the film. At any rate, when this device was copied subsequently in many other films, that was clearly the way that it was used. For instance, in Raid on a Coiner's Den (All Collins, 1904), the first shot shows a Close Up insert of three hands coming into the frame from different directfons; one holding a pistol, another with clenched fist, and the third wearing a police uniform sleeve and holding a pair ol handcuffs. These things suggest, without actually representing them, some of the principal features of the film. Similar instances oc-
cur in the famous Rescued by Rover (Hepworth, 190S), and various other films of these years, and the device continued to occur up to at least 1903, being used in some of Griffith's first films, amongst others, though by that time it was more likely to occur at the end of the film than at the beginning. In this position the emblematic shot shades into a kind of miniature apotheotic shot, and a connection is suggested with the extra shot showing a standard kind of theatrical apotheosis that always concluded the Melies and Pathe multi-shot fantasy films at this period. Whatever the case, such initial or final shots in films like Rescued by Rover arc quite distinct from the body of the film, even though the participants shown posed together are also present in the preceding or succeeding shot that is part of the action of the film proper. The emblematic shot seems to have first appeared In embryonic form in Porter s Rube and Mandy at Coney lsfondt copyrighted in August 1903, which is made up ol a scries of disconnected scenes at Coney Island, conclude ing with a close shot of Rube and Mandy eating hot dogs and grimacing at the camera.
The Chase Film
The style ol overall construction stemming from Firt* that has been described above continued to be applied over and over again in the years alW 190 J, and applied to ni-w versions of the subjects already treated without much variation. Though Stolen by Gypsies (Edwin Porter, 1905) has the chase in the middle rather than at the end,
But the genre of comedy chase films descending from Stop Thicff are invariably simpler in construction than the dramatic films incorporating chaser, for they all just have a simple linear movement of the action through shots set in a succession ol different locations, without cutbacks to an
Visitors are shown exiting top left up some stairs in Georges Mclies le Voyage dans la lime (1902). The dissol™ to the next scene is faintly superimposed in the centre of the image.
About 20 frames later the dissohe has just finished, and the visitors are emerging with time continuity up the top of the si a in onto the roof above the prevtoojmm'.
60
established scene. The most famous and influential of these comedy chase films was fliograph's M of 1904, and this was followed in the first place by total plagiarisms from mm later in the same year - ftft ■ W WKHfl BS * IN/c RK$gi Columns 4the KU York Heroic and
from Pathe in 1905 - Dis fimmcs pour on mari, and then by .light variations such as the Pathe Chien dc garde of 1906.
Films using the chase construction all seem to be original dim subjects, and they are nearly all without intertitles between shots. But there was also a category of films adapted from stage or literary works, or even actual events, in which a more complex narrative was handled within several minutes running time by using narrative or descriptive titles before all (or most of) the scenes. This form was of course established before I90G in some of Melies' longer films such as VAjfaire Dryfus, and after 1904 it was sometimes combined with chase construe lion, as in the Pathe film Au bagne (1905). This film starts off with separate scenes depicting aspects of convict life, each preceded by an explanatory title, but when one convict escapes, a chase is carried through a succession of shots cut directly together. This sort of construction obviously leads on to the flexible form which became usuaMn subsequent years;
Before leaving the subject of overall Film construction, it should be mentioned that more than half the fictional films surviving from before 1906 consist of just one scene done in one shot, and of course these have no relevance as far as film construction is concerned.
Directions
Georges Melies seems to have realized fairly quickly the importance of correct1 directions of entrances and exits for the smoothness of film continuity, even though he was using
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
dissolves between every shot. Certainly by Ic Voyage dans % junc (1902) he was consistently using an exit frame right followed by an entrance frame left, and vice-versa, when the characters moved out of one shot into another set in a differ ent, but adjoining, location. This was not the case for most other film-makers at this period, though obviously anyone who stages the directions of entrances and exits purely at random, without having thought about the matter, is g0^ ing to get them 'right' some of the time, just by chance. It must have been slightly easier for Melies to come to grips with this problem, because he was working in the one single place, his studio stage, whereas most other people making muiti-scene films were working in a number of different real locations in succession while making the one film, and these locations must have tended to suggest the way the action in each shot should be staged.
In multi-scene films shot on real locations the transition to the next shot was often cued by movement forwards out past the camera, as was already established in Williamson's Fuel, and in the next shot the actor or actors would be discovered already within the frame in a new location. For this type of transition it is almost immaterial on which side of the camera the exit (or entrance) is made. However, if the actors are discovered moving strongly in one direction not too far from the camera in the next shot, it gives smoother continuity (according to subsequent ideas), if they exit in the same direction.
In general in this period, as far as action continuity is concerned, one has either a series of shots with axial movement towards the camera from the far distance, or alternatively a scries of shots with movement into the frame past the camera and moving away into the far distance, but the subtler combination of movement out of the frame past the
mm. come -faty Lbe sote< and tomrds anJ
wmm. m ism é* | mmm AtUck on a m
ncse Mission Station (1901).
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
camera followed by a shot in the opposite direction with movement into the frame past the camera, as in Williamson's Attack on a Chinese Mission - Kluejackets tú the Rescue and Haggars Desperate Poaching Affray, is extremely rare.
Cuts to Other Directions
Shortly after the 1S99 Ram forth film, Women s Rights, which has an unsuccessful attempt at simulating the effect of a reverse-angle cut, Williamson achieved the real thing in Attack on a Chinese Mission Station, as already described, and then in tbc Pathé film, Histoire dun crime {1901), the transition to the Hnal shot is done by reversing the direction
Ufa Se scene through the open gate to the execution vard
painted on the backdrop with a dissolve to the exact opposite direction, with a match on the actors in static positions. Following this there are occasional films made through the next few years which show successive scenes with action through a door or window from opposite sides of the wall containing the opening, nearly all of tbern made on studio
There is a cue to the next shot, token in almost the opposite direction, and the marines are picked up going past the cam-
era, and awayjram it.
in 1903 Alf Collins made a group of films which use a cut to a different angle within a scene, all of them shot on real exteriors. The first of them may well have been the film currently only known by the descriptive title The Interfering Lovers. This film begins by covering action on a park bench in Very Long Shot, and then cuts in closer to Long Shot with a simultaneous change oi camera direction of 60 degrees, so covering slight discrepancies in actor position between the two shots and ensuring a smooth transition (as seen in subsequent terms), A cut oi identical nature occurs in Collins" 1904 film, The Child Stealers, but before that Collins had also made cuts with angle changes in The Pickpocket - ,1 Chase Through London (1903), and in The Runaway Match (1903J. In the latter film the cuts are in Tact reverse-angle euLs, from the pursuing car to the one pursued. Thuse cuts within the scene are reproduced and elaborated in an American copy ol this film made a year or two later, Marriage by Motor-Car. Collins also made a film in 1904, The Electric Shvck (or The Electric J$el!}7 which had a cut to the reverse direction from the other side of a wail to cover the action going through a doorway, and being him, he did it on location rather than on studio sets. Despite the existence of these iilms, and also a Tew others which use cuts to the opposite angle on the other side of a wall during comedy chases, there was no general adoption of the use of cuts to a different angle during this period in any way comparable to the use of cuts straight in to a close shot.
Other Forms of Shot Transition
Mary janes Mishap, which has already been mentioned, includes a pair of vertical wipes to elTect the transition intok
61
and out of, a closer shot of the inscription on her gravestone and as well as this there are a few cases where lades were used intentionally in the years between 1900 and 1906. One fairly trivial instance is their use to begin and end each scene in la Vie du Chrhu made by Victorin Jasset for Gaumont in 1906. In this case every scene is preceded by a narrative title put in between the fades. In The Old Chorister (\905)t scenes are joined directly by fade-outs and fade-ins.
Another unique occurrence in these years is the use of a focus-pull transition in Let Mc Dream Again (1900) by G,A. Smith. In the first shot of this two^shot film a man is seen kissing a beautiful woman in Medium Shot, then the lens focus is changed to reduce the image to an out-of-focus blur, followed by a cut to another shot similarly out of focus which then pulls into focus to show the same man in bed kissing his ugly wife, from whom he recoils in revulsion. When this film was remade by Pathe in 1902 as Reveet rcalue\ the focus pulls were replaced by a simple dissolve. This ^ives just one instance of the. superior technical skill of the English filmmakers at this date.
Drcnms, Memories, Visions, etc*
The filmic structure, and indeed the basic joke, (diet Me Dream Again came to be copied, elaborated, and extended over the next few years. The beginning of what was to be the standard form is already apparent in Hoaligun'i Christmas Dream (Biograph, 1903), in which the transition to the dream is made with a dissolve, but the transition back to the original scene and reality through an unexpected wakin« is made with a cut. The number ol shot-scenes contained within such dreams gradually increased over the years; there are two shots within the dream in le Cauchemar du ca'id (Pathe, 1905;, and many more in A ad the Villain Still Pursued Her (Vitagraph, 1906). Although the dissolve Into the dream, followed by the straight cut out of it, was mostly used at this time, there are a few lilms such as Robert Pauls-A Dancer's Dream (1905J and Vilagraph's A Midwinter Sighti Dream of 1906 which use a dissolve to get out of the dream as well.
The use of a small vignette scene representing the dream or vision, inset within part ol the Irame showing the main scene, continued to be used into the new century, and amongst the examples are Porter's The Life of an American Fireman and Jack and the Beanstalk, In lhe!?e film>. as in the earlier C.A. Smith films, the inset scene was produced photographically by masking and double-exposure, but in the Pathe film llistoire d'un crime the effect was product:'! by the stage device ol having a series of small sets revealed behind a hole in the backdrop to the main set. On these invl svt> the series of dream memories wa* played outh which i> further confirmation that the Pathe film-makers had a lot to learn
62
at the beginning of the century.
The rcprccnulicn of spirits, «ggfi ^ C0"; linuc<l to be done by simple ^imposition as bcior^ cv.mplcs on bo seen in U«cfc jfaft Cabin (Porter. 1903), r/>e 0M Chcrisur (1904), Dri„* W Aef«M<mec (190S), and elsewhere.
Split Screen
Arc You There? (Williamson, 1901) is again not completely intcllieihlc from what is shown on the screen. It is the first attempt to deal with the problem of representing a telephone conversation on film, which it does by a split screen effect. This was created by building a split set, with a division down the centre of the frame separating the two telephones, which arc understood to be in two quite different places. The edge of the wall near the camera now vertically divides the frame as a thick black strip, actually created by a strip of curtain material What is said over the phone is vital to understanding the second scene of the film, which follows after a cut, but again this would have to be supplied by the showman's commentary when the film was projected. I have the feeling thaL there must have been at least one early film following on from Arc You There? which treated a telephone conversation in the same way, but with the split screen effect done in the camera rather than by set construction. This is because there is a strange lapse of several years in the surviving films before this way of treating a telephone conversation reappears in 1907H The only other presentation of both sides of a telephone conversation before that date is in the American Mutoscope and Biograph company's The Story the ftioaraph Told (1904), in which the scenes at both ends of the line are totally superimposed on each other over the whole area of the frame. This makes it very difficult to decipher what is going on, and was obviously a had idea;
Cross-cutting Between Parallel Actions
It should already be clear that the practice of cutting away to a scene set elsewhere for one shot became well established during these years, but the Idea ofdoing so repeat^ edly was not. The minimum requirement for cross-cutting between parallel actions is that that successive scenes of one action "A1 be alternated with the other action 'B' at least twice, on tiie pattern A^B-A B. However an embryonic example of this technique has been noted by Andre Gaud-reault in the Edison film The Watermelon Potch of 1905 In this film scenes of action inside and outside a house occur in th* pattern A-li-A-X-B, where X is another scene not part o the main actions. More fully developed examples occur in the next year which Jo realise the minimal A-B-A-R pattern -I cross-cutting One of the few films Gonccri^ JJ^J
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
in Mid-Air (Percy Stow, 1906), in which the shots alternate repeatedly between aerial events and those actions connected with them on the ground. But something much closer to fully developed cross-cutting is used in The Hundred-h-Onc Shot (Vitagraph, 1906). The sequence of shots in this film moves from a house interior with the family threatened with eviction, to a racecourse where the son wins a bet I hat will pay off the debt, then to a shot of him racing towards home. This is followed by another shot of the house interior with the family in the process of being evicted, followed by an exterior shot of the son driving up to the house in his car, and finally another shot of the inside of the house into which the son enters and saves the day. There is still some way to go from this to true cross-cutting, but the Pathe film-makers got there a year later.
The Action Continuity Problem
But looking backwards at the period, the major problem turned out to be the action continuity problem. Of course a problem does not exist until it is more or less consciously recognized as such, and at first many film-makers did not recognize this one, because of the difference of the cinema from previous narrative media. Neither the stage nor lantern-slide sequences allowed the absolutely continuous visual representation of action moving from one space to another in the way that was possible in film, and indeed the nature of existing lantern-slide sequences could well have helped to delay recognition of the possibilities of Ii im. For the fact is that most of these lantern-slide sequences showed what were essentially disconnected scenes, and they relied on their accompanying text, which was recited by the showman, to provide a continuous narrative thread. For instance, in one of the most famous sequences, Bob, the Fireman, the principal figure in successive slides is obviously a dilferent fireman, but the text nevertheless always insists that he is 'Bob', More than that, the scries of scenes of the fire wagon leaving the fire station and racing to the fire {or fires) obviously take place at different times of the day or night. The same is true for nearly all other slide sequences 1 have seen - the slides each represent a dramatic moment that is explained and connected by the text in prose or poetry supplied with iL To put the matter another way, the lantern slides in a sequence arc merely a set of illustrations to a verbal narrative.
This and other kinds of discontinuity are reflected in the first multi-shot films made by Edwin S+ Porter and other American film-makers, of which the most often discussed is The Life of an American Fireman (1903). The first shot of this film shows a man wearing what might be a uniform coat dozing at an office desk while a circular inset scene showing a woman and a baby appears on a wall. When this Inset scene
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
disappears the man gets up and leaves the room, Tbc next scene shows a Close Lip insert of a hand ringing a fire alarm in a street, but there is no return to the first scene, and no way of recognizing whether the man in that scene takes part in subsequent events. The descriptive text supplied for the film in the Edison Company catalogue describes the man in the first scene as a fire chief thinking of his wife and child, and then of all the people who might be in danger from lire, but there is no way of telling this from the film alone, or indeed what is the connection between this scene and later ones In the film. Now although a commentary was pretty well essential lor full audience appreciation of a lantern-slide sequence, it had already been demonstrated bv 1903 principally by European film-makers, that it was possible to make longer films which were self-sufficient and could be understood by audiences without commentary. One such example was James Williamson's fire! of 1901, which unlike The Life of an American Fireman used the movement of recognizable characters from shot to shot, and action to action, to provide a continuous and comprehensible narrative.
Charles Musscr has pointed out that there is another feature of The Life of an American Tire man which arises from the tendency to conceive of each shot as a detached unit on the model of lantern-slide sequences. This is the way that action that has been completed in one shot is repeated at tbe beginning of the next shot, firstly wdien the firemen leave their dormitory in succession down tbe pole (this sequence of actions being shown again from their place of arrival in the wagon room below), and secondly in a later pair oi successive scenes showing events inside and outside the burning room, with the comings and goings through the window shown In lull from both sides. I shall have more to say about this 'doorway problem' later, hut at the moment it is only necessary to say that the only reasonable interpretation ol these occurrences is that Porter did not recognize any continuity problem in such situations, whereas some other film-makers of tbe period did, and took steps to deal with it.
It must also be emphasized that the cases of repetition of the same action in successive shots that occurred in a small number of films in this period have no relation to the intentional use of a similar device twenty years later by .Sergei Eiscnstcin, since in that case it resulted from a clearly conceptualized intention, whereas in the early years it was an accidental side effect of simpler ideas, or indeed of no ideas at all.
The Doorway Problem
Looking at Williamson's Fire! nowadays, one might think that since he had moved two people though a window on a cut from one shot to the next with a fair approximation
63
to continuity of action, then the problem of how to do this in a film had been solved, particularly when we consider the handling of a somewhat similar situation in Melies' Barbe-hieue made the same year. En this latter film, Bluebeard's last wife unlocks and enters the door to his secret room at frame right, and then there is a dissolve to a shot of the inside of this room with the wife coming through the door at Irame left. In fact a perfect match. But although these two films were widely shown, just two examples were not enough when other film-makers had to deal with similar situations. In Porter's The Life of an American fireman of 1903, two people exit in succession through the window of a burning room seen from inside, with their escapes being separated by a couple of seconds. In the next shot, joined on as in Meties' film by a dissolve, both people are seen coming through the window Irom the outside in succession, which means that part of the action is repeated. Putting oneself back into that period, it is not so surprising that some film-makers had difficulty with getting several people in succession through a door from one shot to the next, since narratives in other media could not provide a uuide. fT just one person goes through a door it could be seen as a case of a positional m.itch, which was fairly well established by 1903 in European films, and indeed there are no European examples of this kind ol repeated action.
Amongst the several American films which showr action repeated alter a cut in this way are examples from both Edison and Biograph, e.g. Next I (Biograph, 1903), but rather strangely these coexisted with other films where the same situation was handled in what came to be the standard way. This happens in Biograph rs A Search for Evidence, made later in 1903, in which the cut is made as the first of the twro people entering a room opens the door. Yet The firebug, made at the same studio in 1905, returns to the alternative of repeating the whole action, as a series oi characters are shown getting through a window both from the inside and the outside.
The existence of two alternative lorms lor dealing with a feature of film construction has already been mentioned in connection with the two methods ol joining shuts together, the Melies dissolve and the British cut, but in that case there was a clear practical and economic reason for pre!erring one of them. This was not the case with the doorway problem, though the logical generalization oi the position match for cuts within one scene does support the result which we know became standard alter I9f_)6. An\ thincr more to be said on this matter reuuires a careful
j        -to 1
consideration and comparison pt0 'he films which were made in this period using all the ways of getting people through a door, L-tc. from one shot to another, which It not a very large task.
_
Smoothing it Out
A much simpler problem m *fe ^ tirnm£ of l1k; cuts between successive shots when the action moved from one into the other When the whole idea of action continuity had just been invented, in Williamson's rW, and other similar Ulms over the next couple of years, there will typically be a couple of feet of Him after an actor has left the frame to move on to the next shot before the cut is actually made to the succeeding location, and: then a foot or two more of the new .shot before the actor moves into it. This seems particularly strange to modern eyes, when the movement from one shot to the next is not horizontal, but a vertical fall under gravity. However, by 1905 a number öf film makers were doing something about Ulis, and making the on to the next shot just after the actor has left the frame. This sharpening up of the cutting around 190S is particularly noticeable in Pathe Ulms, but some of the British film makers were getting quite good at it too- The best-known film which shows the elimination of the delay on movement from one shot into the next is Hep worth's Rescued by Rover T but other examples from 190S include Pathe's Cachcwi dans la mallei, and Dcmcnagcmcnt a lacioclie a bats, whereas Porter's The Watermelon Patch is notable for the sluggish cutting fronvone shot to the next in the earlier 'chase' part or the film, particularly when contrasted with other Pathe chase films from that year such as Chien dc garde. In fact over .the next couple of years, as their production increased greatl)\ Pathe became the definite world leaders in smoothness of continuity as well as in production values.
Inter titles
As the comments above on Robert Paul's Scrooge; or, JJarJejVCAůírindicate, it was in 1901 that the usefulness of having explanatory titles ;p re ceding each scene came to be realized. It may have been MÉlics who first used them, but since there were few multi-shot films before 1903, thev were not used1 much tin after that date. Also, towards the end of this period there arc isolated instances of dialogue titles being out in before a scene in place of the usual narrative title, but the films being produced at this lime were still not long enough to contain a continuously developed complex story in which the usefulness of such a feature would he obvious. The earliest example J have noticed: occurs in Ah Baba et les auaranics voleurs (Pathé, 1902), and here the dialogue title is the minimal but immortal speech, 'Sesame, ouvrc-toi*. Later examples with a single line of dialogue quoted in them include h Yic du Christ (jasset 1906), and Porter s The E^-convia of t904.Therc is an Eng-
lish film of unknown
name produced by the Urban com-
pany in 1906 which contains more than one dialogue title.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 19OO-I906
It is catalogued as 'father, Mother ventsyou\ which Is actually the first dialogue title it contains, well into the body of the film. Gut such films are indeed very uncommon during these years.
Acting ^
It is very difficult to make any generalizations about the acting in the films of this period, with one exception. This is that the acting in the numerous films of the life of Jesus Christ which were made from the beginning of the century was always extremely restrained, and sometimes naturalistic as well. Extremely naturalistic acting, though not common, can also be found in a number of other films, one of the earliest being Williamsons The Soldiers Return (1902). In this particular case the naturalness of the acting was advertised as such in the contemporary distribution catalogues, and so was clearly quite intentional. In fact, a tendency towards more naturalistic acting can be seen in all of Williamson's films. Other random examples of very restrained acting include olograph's The Course of True Love (1905), and Porter's The Kleptomaniac (1905), but it is far from certain that such examples were intentional, for they may well have resulted from letting particular actors do it their own way, without direction, On the other hand, most films had fairly broad, stylized acting from the principals at least, and sometimes wildly melodramatic acting, particularly at key moments in the drama. An obvious example of the latter is Porter's The Great Train Robbery, so that overall it is very difficult to see any consistent patterns emerging, either by studio or director, with the exception of the films of James Williamson.
The Broad View
It must be emphasized chat the films made before 1906 which still exist are only a Traction of the production of that period, and so if a particular feature is found in several of them it is quite probable that it also appeared in many more that are now lost. For instance, if about 30 surviving films made at different times and places during these years have closer shots cut into the middle of a scene, as is indeed the case, then it is likely that there were more than 100 films made with this feature. On the other hand, if there is only a unique occurrence of a particular feature in surviving films, then it may well have been unique at the time. An obvious example of this is the three Biograph films previously mentioned which consist solely of a track in to a Close Up of a character. Now although there were three of them, they were all made within several days of each other to judge by the copyright dates, so it seems fairly safe to conclude that since there now exist no other films using a similar tracking shot before 1906, then there were probably no others
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1900-1906
made at all. And we can certainly conclude that this usage was not well established at this period. Keeping all these considerations in mind, we can say that the major trends in the devcEopment of film form that emerged during this period were the practice of cutting in to a closer shot of one kind or another during a scene, the use of Point of View shots likewise cut into a scene, and the mastery of the rather more complex matter of the movement of action from shot to shot in separate locations, as in 'chase1 films. All of these developments really solidified between 1903 and 1906, and since the proliferation of examples shows that these specifically filmic techniques were consciously mastered, there does not seem to be much point in referring to films in general made during the next decade as constituting 'primitive cinema', any more than an art historian would call the work of Duccio and the Sicnnese school 'primitive painting'.
Other definite formal trends that emerged after 1904 were the use of panning shots to follow action, arc lighting both for effect and for general lighting, and transition to a dream sequence made with a dissolve. There is also the beginning of cross-cutting between parallel actions. These trends I have been describing, though also detectable in American films, were much more firmly established in French films during these years, and in particular those made by the Pathe. company. This must have been due in part to the fact that the multi-scene film was established slightly earlier in Europe than in America, but an associated hindrance to American progress could have been that the film-makers of the two major American companies, Edison and American Mutoscope and Biograph, were simultaneously producing films for both cinema exhibition and for showing in the Kin otoscope and Mutoscope peep-show machines. Some multi-scene films were exhibited in these machines by putting each successive scene in one of the machines in a king up a row in the Kinetoscope or Mutoscope parlour, so that to see the whole film the viewer bad to put a coin in each machine in turn. In this situation it was obviously preferable that the film exist as a series of discrete scenes, each prefaced by a title, and obviously without action passing continuously from one scene to the nextr One typical example from 1903 is olograph's Kit Carson, in which the successive scenes, apart from being complete in themselves, do not have much obvious connection with each other These two points about American film production may also have something to do with the existence of American films having repeated action on either side of a cut.
Lines of Influence
The films made in the years 1900-1906 provide a most striking demonstration of the influence of one film on an-other, and anyone inclined to doubt that it is possible to de-
65
lermine this kind of influence is advised to spend a week or two going through several hundred of them. Apart from the examples of formal influence which 1 have mentioned earlier, there are of course also the large number of re workings of the same subject, such as the numerous films about the kidnapping or children, These may very well start with The Kidnappers (Biograph, 1903), and they certainly continue through Weary Willie Kidnaps a Child (Edison, 1904), which has a similar narrative structure to the earlier film, hut uses exterior instead of interior locales. Then comes a combination of some elements from both these two films into a longer film made in England in 1904, The Kidnapped Child', and then a further elaboration in the we IU known Resetted by Rover (1905), where the new clement is the activities of Rover. Later in the same year there was Stolen by Gypsies (Edison), which adds a developed chase sequence as weEl as Porter pans', and then a number of other variations on the formula, both immediately and later. Sometimes it was a matter of simple copying, and sometimes of variation and elaboration, which might or might not throw up interesting new features.
A very interesting case in point is the Edison studio film Dream oj a Rarebit Fiend (1906), which is quite closely modelled on the Pathe film Rerc a la lune (1905), both in its story and in its form. Revca la lune in its turn incorporates a couple o f e] emen is from M e I ics' Voyage a t ra \xrs I' imposiibie (190 4), though in general if is not that close to the Melies film, and also from Winsor McKay's comic strips Dreams of a Harehit Fiend. The interest in £ differences between Revea la lane and the Edison film are that the former includes a detail insert of a key groping for a keyhole in the hands of the drunken protagonist which is omitted in the Porter film, while the latter replaces a simple shot of the drunk clinging to a rocking lamp-post with a similar shot which has superimposed on it two whip pans across a row of buildings inclined at opposite angles to the horizontal. This extremely striking shot is an isolated example of the representation of a subjective stale by filmic means, and seems to have had no immediate successors. Dream of a Rarebu Fiend also lacks the perfect cutting on action that the Pathe film contains, and this is as typical of an Edison film as the lack of the Insert Close Up.
The Status of Edwin S, Porter
If we accept that all the Edison films of these from 1901 onwards were made by Edwin S. Porter, where does the fact that many of these Edison films were closely modelled on various predecessors from other hands leave our estimate o( his importance?
The answer is implied in ibc discussions of the various films concerned that 1 have given above. Because there wen.-a few features tJiat Porter introduced were either very origi-
66
-
nal or highlv tmm& even when the film in which they were included was otherwise very closely based on previous films, there is no question but that Porter was one of the major figures of the period, but on the other hand, there tfer* a number of other film-makers of whom the same could be said. But there is also no question that Porter did mi originate any of the basic features of film construction -cutting within a scene and continuity of movement from shot to sliot, or indeed film editing in general, Indeed not only did he uci indent these things, but when others had developed them, he clearly had some difficulty handling them properly.
Film and the Other Entertainment Media
Much has been made of the influence of the theatre, the comic strip, and the slide show on the creation of purely filmic constructional devices, the earliest instance of this being A. Nicholas Vardacs Stage to Sewn (1949). A more oencral treatment of the notion can be found in John Fell's Film and the Narrative Tradition, but the problem with this idea is that the devices which are alleged to be derived from other media were used in lilms before they appear in any noticeable way in the other media. For instance, cutting in to a.close shot appeared in films before any example so far found in comic strips or slide shows. Kowever, I think it is well worth looking into this further, pai-t-icuiarly with respect to lantern slide scries, because something may yet turn up;, for instance a source for the masked Point of View shot construction, apparently invented out of nothing in Grandmas Rending Gloss.
.
■Film Form and Society
It has been suggested by Noel Rurch that various features of some of the films of the first decade present a vision of an alternative form of'working-class' cinema which was suppressed: by the middle class, who then produced the form of cinema that developed over the next several years after 1906,1 find it difficult to see the point of these speculations, since it seems to me that the general form-of cinema was inevitably determinedly the noddle class from
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: Í900-I906
the beginning, and whatever its form, there could never be a purely working-d as s cinema anywhere, in Europe, con^ trary to what Burch claims, all the first major film-makers were of middle class origins, from Melies to G.A. Smith and James Williamson, and in America, even if some such as GAV. Bitzer were of more humble origins, by the beginning of the century, if not earlier, they were being paid such large wages that they had definitely entered the middle class. This is an aspect of the generalization that whoever has truly mastered the application of advanced technology - which the cinematic apparatus was at the beginning of the century - inevitably moves up in status and automatically reaps the rewards in ony industrialized society, Beyond that, it should be noted that only under capitalism is technological innovation possible, as the record of the last hundred years shows, There has been zero technological innovation in socialist societies in that period, and they have been completely parasitic on the capitalist world for any technological advance at all. This is very evident in the sphere o I film technology in particular,
It is true that the subject matter of films was biased Iowa rd s ma tcria I from va ud c vi 11 e, m e I od rania, and m us i c b a 11 before 1903, .particularly in America, but that is largely a reflection of the fact that a film only a couple of minutes long is not capable of containing anything more subtle. In any case it should be noted that a large part of the material used in vaudeville, melodrama, and music hall was already being produced by professional writers and composers who were no longer part of the working class in any real sense. The other major sources of the subject matter of the nascent cinema; slide shows, comic strips, and legitimate drama, were being produced by members of the middle class for an audience of mixed composition. Note also that slides for slide shows were being produced on an industrial scale before the cinema came into existence. Once films began to move on to longer running times after 1903 the basic elements of continuity cinema that I have described were truly established, and audiences of all classes voted with their pennies for coherent stories presented in what we now think of as a coherent manner.
9. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
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In the year following the opening of the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905, three thousand of these small, sub-200 seat cinemas opened in the United States, and a worldwide film production and consumption boom was underway. To meet the rapidly accelerating demand, production of fictional films started in Italy, Germany, and Denmark where there had been none before. After a year or two, yet more countries joined in, most importantly Sweden and Russia. Reports of the comments of exhibitors from 1907 onwards in the trade periodical The Moving Picture World show that audience response was heeded by the exhibitors and distributors, and presumably transmitted back, however imperfectly, to the producers, so constituting some kind of selection pressure on the evolution of the forms. But this pressure cannot have been strong, to judge by the large range of competence (as seen from the point of view of the subsequent evolution of mainstream cinema) that continued to obtain in America up to the First World War. in other words, it was still not that difficult to satisfy the taste of the continuously expanding market. Or to put it yet another way, in the previous period the formal developments i have described took place purely through the independent will of the film-makers, and though this was still to a considerable extent the case after 1907, it was no longer completely so.
The word 'art' began to be increasingly associated with lilms in writing about them and reviewing them from 1909 onwards, and this no doubt encouraged some filmmakers to seek originality in what they did. The major event in changing attitudes on this point was the obvious one; the release of the French Film d'Arl company's first lilm, I'Assassinat da Due de Guise in November 1908. This company was formed with a definite aesthetic programme, which was to make lilms writ I en by established serious writers, acted by some of the best stage actors, and supported by music specially written by good composers. Although their films were to be released by Pathe, the latter company nevertheless immediately sot up its own subsidiary, Socictc Cinematographique des Artistes ct Gens de Litterature (S.C.A.GX.), with the same sort of programme. The fact that other companies took notice of all this is indicated by the full titles of some 1909 films. For instance, just after I'Assassinat du Due de Guise opened in New York, Vitagraph made The judgement of Solomon and Oliver Twisty and issued them with the extra descriptive subsidiary title 'A Vitagraph High Art Film', and in Italy there was Cines' La campana,
also made in the latter part of 1909, which had the descriptive addition to the title, 'Artistic Pictures from Schiller's Poem3.
But it is clear from the reviews in The Moving Picture World and The ftfciy York Dramatic Mirror that their film reviewers were often slow and sometimes obtuse in understanding the technical developments which 1 will describe below, and indeed they continued to resist some of these developments long after they had become standard with many filmmakers, so that what little these reviewers had to say on detailed technical points must have mostly been ignored,
(A collection of such reviews can be found in Spellbound in Darkness by George C. Pratt (New York Graphic Society, 1973. This book concentrates excessively on the reviews ol D.WP Griffith's films by Frank Wood, and these are not exactly disinterested in what they have to say, since Wood was selling film stories to Biograph from qui I e early on in Griffith's career as a director. Wood only comments on stylistic developments after they occurred, and presumably only alter they had been explained to him by the people at Biograph, and he seems to have known little about what happened before 190S, or at places other than Biograph later.)
Direct, u n mediated competitiveness between American film-makers scĽms to have become important from about 1911 in producing intentionally conspicuous features in die i r films, and I will refer to some of these instances below, hut here I will just let Vitagraph s Over tbc Chafing Dish (Larry Trimble, 191!), a story told entirely through Close Ups of hands and feet, stand lor all of them.
So in the years from 1907 onwards the evolution of film form was still proceeding very quickly, Because films were still mostly only one or two reels long it is possible to see a large number of them in a short time, and so get a £jood idea of comparative developments in a way that is no longer possible when we reach the period when most films become several reel* long. II one takes advantage of this situation and looks at most of the two or three thousand films' still extant from between 1907 and 1913, one find* that the accepted picture of what happened in tho^e years, based as it is on a few handfuls of films by D.W. Griffith and one or two others from elsewhere, is largely mistaken. 1 he reader who lias reached this point will not be too surprised to discover Lha t the usual idea that Griffith invented most o í the features of mainstream cinema is quite wrong; but more than that, he has not been given credit for all the things
6S
he did develop. However, it must be made dear that I am not challenging Griffith* position »the man who made the ^ films before 1913; to justify his standing in this respect one needs to take other things into consideration as well, A further complication to investigation of this whole matter I provided by the fact that nearly all «TD:W. Griffith * 450 films made for Biograph tip to 1913 survive, whereas only .bout three times that number still exist from all the other American film-makers working In the same period; a period when the total production was about ten times as much. The unrepresentative survival of films is particularly severe Tor the years 1907 and 1908 - from those years there seems to be only a few score films from American production companies other than Biograph in the world's archives, in particular, there arc only about a dozen films from the Vitagraph company, which already had a larger output than Biograph, and maintained this position through the period under consideration. Nevertheless, partly by extrapolation from the films surviving from either side of this gap, one can reconstruct the outlines of what was happening,
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Film Stock
Eastman Kodak continued to dominate the film stock market without making any change in the negative and positive emulsions whichit offered, in rolls of 200 feet length. Minor competition-came from the Lumiere company with a range of negative film from their Blue Label stock, with a speed of about half that of Eastman negative, to their Violet Label1 stock, which was comparable in speed to Eastman negative. In 1907 ulic Pathe company bought up the English company of Blair, and used their production for their own films, supplementing it from 1910 by collecting old unwanted,prints from all over Europe which they stripped and re coated with new emulsion, The German Agfa company, which began producing film stock in 1913, had no appreciable sales outside the local market until after the First World Wan There were a few other small companies making film stock in this period, but their production was small, and-its quality inferior, In particular, the emulsion of the negatives they produced was a lot slower than Kodak negative, and much of it was onlyblue sensitive, rather than drthoehromatic,
A large part of the 35 mm. film stock produced was
still sold by the makers as unperformed, strips, and then
the sprocket holes were punched in it by the purchaser
using special punches bought for the purpose. These were
made by different smallengineering firms in the major film producingcoLm^ usllaM)l ^ r.Jm
or projectors. Although the resulting perforations were meant to have some sort of fairly close correspondence with those used by Edison and: Lumiere, these did differ, and so
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
there was a general lack of standardization in this area. This began to change from 190S, when the new Bell & Howell company of Chicago began to manufacture film perforators for general sale. Designed by Arthur Howell, these were so superior to the competition that they quickly came to be generally used in the United States. In particular, Eastman Kodak bought them to produce pre-perforated film stock for sale, and eventually the shape, dimensions, and spacing of tile perforations Tor negative film produced by the Bell & Howell perforator became the world standard, which remains the case up to the present, as far as 3S mm. camera negative film is concerned.
Production Procedures
Karl Brown's memoirs, together with other sources, give a picture of the way filming procedures were becoming standardized by the end of this period. First the camera was set up in a position that covered the area in which the scene was to be played, and then the cameraman s assistant marked out on the ground or studio floor with chalk or tape lines the limits within which the actors could move while remaining within the frame. The cameraman's permanent assistant, if there was one at all, was limited to menial tasks like this, including carrying the camera, and also to keeping a primitive continuity record. Anything connected directly with the camera, including loading the magazines, was done by the cameraman himself, At Biograph in 1913 the continuity record contained no more than the length of the take, the lens aperture setting, and which side of the frame the various actors concerned made their entrances and exits. The shot filmed was identified by a number giving its order in the sequence of shooting; this number being written in chalk on a school slate held in front of the camera cither at the beginning, or more usually the end, of the shot. The end of the whole footage including the shots made under the same lighting conditions was marked on the film by either opening the back of the camera and tearing the edge of the film through to a sprocket hole, or if the camera was equipped with a built-in punch, by actuating this to punch a hole in the middle of the film. Then a fixed length of film a few feet long was exposed to provide material for test development, and the end of this was marked in the same way. This mark enabled the company's darkroom technician, who was now a specialist who had taken over this job from the cameraman, to separate the test strip by touch, and then give it a separate test development before processing the shot itself.
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Laboratory Procedures
Both negative and positive film continued to be developed in batches, at most in 200 foot lengths, by either the rack
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
or drum method. However in some French companies the continuous developing machines which had first been introduced by Gaumont in 1907 were being used. These ran a continuous length of film through vertical tubes containing the various chemicals. As far as negative development was concerned, the aim was to produce a series of negatives for all the shots that could be printed with the same intensity of the light source in the film printer. Negatives were in general developed to a much greater density than is now usual in still and motion picture photography. One good reason for this was that rush prints were not usually made from the developed negative for selecting takes and editing the film: the original negative itself was projected and handled, and the inevitable scratches resulting showed up much less on the final print when it was made from a dark negative.
Printing continued to be done on the kind of intermittent printers already described until 1911, when the Bell & Howell continuous printer was introduced. In this machine the negative and positive were held in contact while wrapped on the sprockets halfway round the diameter of a continuously rotating drum. Light was shone from an incandescent bulb through an aperture of appropriate size onto the films, and its intensity was regulated by a manually set aperture.
For production of the distribution prints, the shots still had to be handled separately because they were now mostly tinted different colours, and so the individual shots and titles were all cemented together for every individual print by teams of female workers, The necessity of this system removed any demand for the machine processing of positive prints in the way that we have it today, and in fact
69
machine processing was not adopted in the United States for a decade, as far as Teaturc films were concerned.
Film Lighting
As already described, the major production companies were already equipped with what was to be the basic studio lighting equipment for the next (hack - arc floodlights of one kind or another, and racks of mercury vapour tubes. The new, smaller production companies that sprang up in America with the coming of the film boom did not acquire and use such equipment with any rapidity, but often made do with diffused sunlight on open-air stages, or on simple glass-roofed stages. This was particularly the case in California, where artificial tight seems rarely to have been used before World War I. In shooting interiors back East the general tendency at first was just to supplement the daylight with Cooper-Hewitt banks or arc floodlights when there was not enough of it, but with some of the lai^e companies new tendencies depending on the increased use of arc lights gradually developed. The same tendency is apparent in European films of the period, though there were some national diifcrenccs there. For instance, the introduction of the visible use of artificial tight seems to have been slightly slower in Italy than in the U.S., and some of the Italian companies, particularly Cincs, tended toshoot their interiors with the diffuse daylight coming through the tdass studio walls from the side, rather than the Irani, as was more usual in American films. And the Scandinavian companies tended to use arc floodlights more or less exclusively, without any use of banks of mercury vapour tubes.
On the evidence of surviving films and also the film
A scene in the 1907 Vitagraph Jifai Liquid Electricity; or, The Inventor s Galvanic Fluid. The set is lit by diffuse sunlight though the studio roof, shaded off a hit towards the hack. On the right is a Cooper-Hewitt rack on a poor stand, and hanging in on the left, above the actor's head,, is an unlit arc floodlight oj the street lighting type, the actor is manipulating the light from another bare cofban. arc mechanism on the bench, of the kind ordinarily enclosed in a projector lamp-house. Notice that the light from the mercury vapour lubes makes very little if option ugainst the brightness of the day light,whereas the
urc dues.
70
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
A.E. Smith filming The Bargain Fiend in :hc Vitagraph studio in 1907, The street lighting type arcs with their improvised shades hanging from the roof beam are not iirr Note that the set-up has the camera at an angle to the walls of the L-shaped set.
clips deposited in the Library of Congress lor copyright, the Vitagraph company led the way in the USA. (A discussion of these Vitagraph clips, together with reproductions of some of them, can he seen in Ben Brewster's article 'Frammenti Vitagraph alia Library of congress' in Vitagraph Co. of America^ edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, published by Edizioni Studio Tesi in 19S7.) Although the first real Vitagraph
studio was very like the earlier studios built by Mélies and Pa the, with roof and walls made of diffusing gl ass, they were more inclined to use overhead arc lights, rather than arcs on floor stands, to supplement daylight. These overhead arcs were of the standard kind used for street lighting, which had the arc enclosed inside a hanging glass bell cover, and they shone their light equally in all clown wards directions.
A scsne in a drinking den in Vitagraph-s mi film The Mil! Girl, h is mostly lit by Lwo or three arcfloodlights hanging in a row overhead the actors at the iahkt as can be seen from the shadow on theßgures and on the walk There is only a small contribution from the diffuse doylighi through the studio roof.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
The major American manufacturer of such lights was Aristo, and this became the generic term for such lights for a white. They were mostly used hung in on a movable I i[riil: temporary beam of wood where and when needed, which was basically when the ci ay light through the studio ceilings and walls was weak and needed boosting. They were also used mounted on floor stands, cither singly, or in groups on the one stand at Vitagraph, They were fitted with improvised metal reflector sheets half way around them to ensure that the light went only towards the set, and to keep it from shining back into the camera lens. For dates before ]9l2 these lights usually did not make a great difference to the general look of the lighting, anil there is no discernible pattern as to which kind of scenes they were used on in general. For instance, these overhead arcs contribute a targe part of the light to a number of varied scenes — a lowr dive, some factory interiors - in The Mill Girt (1907), thouph always without any attempt to simulate the effect of actual
light in the real situations. The standard lighting method at Edison was very similar, and this general approach, which had most of the supplementary light coming from rows oi overhead floodlights, came to be the model for newer American companies as they stepped up their production. By 1910 arc lighting in this manner is noticeable in films from all the New York and Chicago studios, though not in the films made by the uniLs from these companies already working in the West and South ol the United States.
Around 1912 a new kind of arc floodlight made its appearance, adapted from the type used in photo-engraving. This had the arcs in a metal box with the front open, and was mounted on a floor stand. In America the principal maker of these was M.J. Wohl and Co. At Vitagraph these were mostly used for special effects at first, though at Pathe and Gaumont in Prance similar lights were already being used sometimes by 1906 to produce a significant part of the lighting on an ordinary set. This is most noticeable in
■
ru a* ■     r      j.  , i*    vnr Tirls Dame fE ScWiler-Sorensen, 1912) at the Nordisk studies in Cipcn-
The hlmina of a studio interior scene rom Vor J ids uamt tc. jem. w- ,
. , i t     r r^fV nrr iloodlialns on floor stands are in US& om k t. two on tn<
hagen. The cameraman is Axel Graatkjaer, and three European style arcjlooMgnts on j
riaht.
Of arc lifting TO the illumination of the picture became erster than alanv other studio, and the more so the smaller set that was being lit, The lights used were mostly Lhe kind on door stands just mentioned, and they were arranged in a rough line in front of the set on either side of the camera. There were also some street lighting arcs hung overhead, but these had much less of an effect on the look of the lighting, The standard Gaumont arrangement of lights produced a fairly crude kind of overall lighting of the scene, with the actors casimg multiple shadows onto the set. This arrangement produced a certain amount of separation of the figures from the background, since by the time the light reached the back walls of the set its intensity bad fallen oft a little, and so the walls are slightly darker than the actors when they were several feel in front of them, I Jul" on a small sei crowded with actors, as in the 1908 'Concierge' comedies, it is all a bit of a visual mess.
[n contrast, the look of the lighting is quite different in Pathe films of the same period, for these often show no obvious effect from additional lighting. Nevertheless, there is usually some faint frontal light from distant arcs on floor stands putting fill light into the actors faces in Pathe films, and sometimes these lights are a bit closer, as in the examples ^mentioned and illustrated in the previous chapter. When this happens, the figure modelling is better than in Gaumont films, and'the general effect visually cleaner. The Pathe look is more like, but not identical to, that of the s la ndard A m er ica n studio Iighting.
Lighting Effects
Returning to novel1 lighting effects at Vitagraph, Foul Ploy (1906) has ihe effect of light from a table lamp within the shot simulated rather well by an arc floodlight just out of shot on the same side of the frame. This seems to have becnan innovative idea in movie-making, and the Vitagraph cameramen, returned to it from time to time, though not very frequently, and it spread to films made elsewhere after a fcw years. Not quite so nove| was the use of a small arc light placed inside a domestic light, such as a table lamp, which formed part of the decor of the set. In After Midnight (1908), the dominant lighting 0r a night interior scene is provided by a small arc light conceals in a hanging lamp over a tabic, and throwing light onlo the actors. In this and other similar lighting set-ups in Cupid ^\For fto d
Jetty Gnd-Mb^ whidi-^ffe^ade.early m 190$ there <s always a much weaker generaIdiffuse light over the'
v , v. . -- ^1   ".w scene,
Also. ln AJltr Midmgh, m mM actors cärri(;s a ha. d
in was
arc
repeat of a similar usage
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1907-1913
Falsely Accused, the Hepwortb film of 1905. Exactly who responsible for introducing such lighting effects is not known, but it is possible that it was Smith and Blackton themselves, since they habitually operated the camera on the films they personally directed, at least up to 190S. The orgy of lighting ^fleets ied out at Vitagraph in early 190S also includes a studio scene in 'True Hearts are Mere Than Coronets', in which people stand at an open door lit from a constructed exterior set beyond it by horizontal artificial light simulating the sunset. Vitagraph films also used the standard effect of light from a fireplace, done by hiding an arc light inside it, after the model of Porter's The Seven Ages (190S), but none of the early Vitagraph examples has the expressive force of the device as it was used in D.Wr Griffith s The Drunkards Reformation (1909). However, Vitagraph may well have been the first to give a flicker to the arc light to better simulate the efleet of flames, as they did in Washington Under the American Flag (1909).
Lighting at Biograph and Elsewhere
The standard lighting used at Biograph continued, as it had at the end of the previous period, to be done entirely with Cooperd-Iewitt mercury vapour tube racks in their completely enclosed studio. These were on floor stands and hung from the ceiling. The light from the average rack of Con per-Hewitts was much less than that from one arc floodlight, perhaps a quater as much at a couple of yards distance from the unit, and this meant that quite a lot of them had to be used in a completely dark studio like that at Biograph. The standard set there bad two walls in 'L' shape, i.e. a back wall and a side wall coming towards the front, and the Cooper Hewitts were lined up on the other side and overhead shining down, with usually another couple of racks standing on cither side of the camera at the front. Given the number of Cooper-Hewtitts used, and their width, there was not a great deal of space between each unit, and they came close to being a wall of light. Or rather, two walls and a ceiling of light. This arrangement basically still mimicked the natural lighting in a large old-style still photographer's studio which had a glass ceiling and a glass wall at one side, though the diffuse light straight on to the actors from the frontal racks had no equivalent in still photography. Since the Biograph company persisted with this standard lighting arrangement through to 1912, there came to be a subtle difference in the look of the lighting at Biograph from that used at other studios, where the supplementary lighting was mostly from arc floodlights. When it was necessary to have a set with three walls to hold another door required by D.W. Griffith's peculiar use of action moving from room to room, only * short third wall coming out from the Hats at the back was built. In this case some of the side Cooper-
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 19Ö7-1913
The Biograph studio in New York, with their standard array of mercury vapour tube racks on ßoör stands and hung overhead
to light the set,
Hewitts could not be used, and the back of the set was appreciably underlit compared to the standard arrangement. The Biograph lighting arrangement obviously placed certain constraints on the stagings, of a sort which did not hold in other companies' studios, and may have helped to produce the markedly frontal arrangements of the actors that D.W. Griffith habitually used,
r"
It was well into 1909, alter having made a hundred films without showing the slightest interest in the use of artificial lighting for special lighting effects, that D.W. Griffith and his cameramen first tried their hand in this area. When they finally did so, although only using well-established techniques, it must be said that Griffith's placement of lighting effects within his narratives was singularly forceful. The lirst film in which this happened was The Drunkard's Rcfortnotion, in which the final scene showing the reformed drunkard reunited with his family before the hearth is lit by an arc floodlight bidden in the fireplace to simulate the light of a real fire, in exactly the same manner as Porter's The Seven Ages (190S). The strength of this application by Griffith lies in its contrast with the initial shot of the film, which shows the effects of un re formed drunkenness on family life, using the same camera set-up in the same room. But in this case the scene was lit with the standard general diffuse lighting of the period, with no fire effect. Similar and more elaborated examples occur in Griffiths films over the next year or so; for instance in The Cricket on the Fkarth (1909), in which the general lighting of the set by Cooper-Hewitts is reduced during the scene so that the lire effect
shows more strongly. In Fdoar Mkn Foe and The Stave, also from 1909, a window light effect with an actor standing or sitting by the window frame and lit by broad diffuse light coming through it appears for the first time in a Griffith Mini, though this too had been used elsewhere earlier. This kind of shot of a person inside a room lit by the soft light coming through a window later became a great favourite with American and European film-makers, but it hardly ever recurs in subsequent films by DAV, Griffith,
Another aspect of the expressive use of lighting cfiects is the isolation of important actors in a scene. In Vitngmph's The Life Dramo oj Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, Napoleon and Josephine are singled out by rather stronger lighting in their area of the scene during the proceedings of their divorce. This lilm was released on 6 April l?Q9, on which very day Griffith's A Baby'f Shoe was being shot, which is the first of his films to contain a similar use of lighting to isolate the principát in a scene. Admittedly the Griffith film develops I he idea further, in that the localized area lighting is more strongly distinguished Irom the general lighting, and also i I is produced by lowering the lighting on ihe .surrounding set during the course of the scene. Sapofeon Bonaparte afid ihe Empress Jaxphine also uses atl incomplete fade-out on the scene of Napo I l- on s leave-taking from Josephine, lour months before the first use by Griffith of the fade-out in his FqoU of Fate,
Griffith's Pippa Povést which was made later in 1909 titan the films I have so far mentioned, contains a rather more complex lighting setup, in this Him theefiVci of dawn light
74
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
The scene of Napoleon abandoning the Empress Josephine in fttagrdph's Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine (1909). Here the arrangement of die Set, actors, ond light source produce brighter lighting on the principals.
appearing and shining through PippaS window into her room was achieved by opening shutters in front of two separate lights; one to produce the light coming through the window, and thc other to put a patch*of light on her bed. As well as this the room was weakly illuminated throughout the whole length of the scene by a few Cooper-Hewitts placed at the front. The light levels had to be regulated by shutters, because arc lights and Cooper-Hewitts cannot he dimmed satisfactorily by reducing the current through them, as incandescent lights can. After a certain amount of dimming, arcs and1 mercury tubes arc likely to go out
suddenly and unexpectedly. The lighting of this particular scene in Pippa Passes was certainly done by Arthur Marvin, but the authorship of other complex lighting effects in Biograph films made in 1909 and 1910 is not clear at this point. Certainly after Arthur Marvin's death early in 1911 the subsequent films lit by G.W. Bitzer alone contain very little in the way of effects done with artificial light. These early uses of lighting effects in Griffith films were not always completely successful; for instance in The Necklace (1909), there is an attempt to reproduce the lighting of The Cricket on the Hearth, but the cameraman, whether he be Marvin or
A studio interior sccnefrom Oliver Twist (Vitagraph, 1909), la mostly by diffused daylight, bit with an arc food light just out of shot low loft casting Fagins shadow up onto the wall over thefoot of the stairs.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907^1913
Bit'/cr, does not get the relative light levels from the various sources correct.
Gut all this was fairly exceptional, and even in 1910, the use of effects with artificial light which are clearly intended for the creation of mood is quite rare. In Vitagraph's The Mystery of Temple Court (1910) there is a scene with lower key lighting for a murder, but in their AM Lang Syne more than a year later, two carefully arranged low-key scenes showing two different dark cottage rooms, each lit only by the li^ht from a fire and from a small window, and which are much better handled than anything Billy Bitzer ever did, seem to be done without expressive intent, and must be taken as purely decorative or naturalistic. However, by 1911 there begin to be European examples of well-applied effect lighting for mood from major companies such as Pathe, Nordisk, and then Gaumont. Films to be mentioned include ic Courrier dc Lyon, in which a robbery scene takes place in a room only dimly lit by the light through the window, and a series of lonely low key rooms similarly lit by window light in the Feuillade scries 'La vie telle quelle I estJ, such as that in la Taret with the heroine ending in the depths of despair.
The other major development in the use of artificial lighting that began in 1909, though not in Biograph films, was the first attempt at the expressive use of shadows. Vitagraph's Oliver Twist made in that year has a scene in Fagin's den in which an arc Hood light placed low on the floor out of shot to one side casts Fagin's shadow up on the wall when he gets near itt A [though this effect does not show up too well against the general frontal diffuse lighting of the shot, it is quite clearly intentional, since the arc light was not switched on during the first occurrence of this set-up
IS
earlier in the film. A similar and slightly more obvious use of this device occurs in ben sortc Drom (Urhan Gad, 1911), in which a set or arcs was placed low down on the floor at the front so that at the emotional climax of the scene the actors could cast looming shadows on the back wall by moving forwards towards the lights. This usage, which was little seen before the nineteen-twentics, undoubtedly derives from the theatre of Max Reinhardt, in which it was first used in his 1906 production of Ibsen's Ghosts. No doubt the Vkagraph example also derives from an unknown American theatrical source. But the standard use of lighting features like these could not be developed to their full extent until it became the practice to eliminate the contribution of daylight through the studio roof, and film interior scenes entirely by artificial light, which was not to happen Tor another several years.
Some slightly different examples of sinister mood effects from 191! Danish films are described below.
Location Lighting
All the work just discussed was done on studio sets, but another area in which there was a slight development over these years was in using available light in interior scenes filmed in real locations. Although there had been a few extremely rare and isolated examples of interior scenes shot on location without extra lighting added, it was not until 1910 that a small tradition of using the technique developed. Exactly who started it is not certain, but the earliest example from this year that I have seen is in D.W. Griffith's Ramona} where a scene in a chapel is shot using available light. The only other Griffith film using the
Location lighting men arcfloodlights in a real bank vault in Coronets and El carts (Vitagraph, 1912).
64
FILM STYLU AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Ved Faengslets Port (\3\}}The light from the table lamp left, is simulated by an arcfloodlight offscreen left, and a woman in pan of the set out of frame is refected in the mirror cenrre-right, She is also lit by another arcfoodliglu.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1901-1913
Another low key scene in Dr. Gar^ el-Fíama JÍ (Schnedler-Seirensen; 191 2) done purely with controlled daylight.
idea during thai year, and maybe for ever after, is A Child's Stratagem, released in December. In this film a scene is shot in a tram also with available light, Other examples occur in The Telephone, made at Vitagraph in the middle of the year, in which one scene takes place in a large New York telephone exchange, without any extra artificial light being added, and interiors In a real police station in Clancy, made late in the year. In 1910 there are also shots taken inside a railway carriage on the move in k MalUem qui no pas tjcu
made by Lux, a minor French company, and the German Mainifffundcft; oder. Von Smfe to Siufe - die Leibcsbeichte tints Probicrsmamscll^ where a cafe interior was also shot as found. I suspect there were other such cases in the many French and Vitagraph films from that year now lost. From this point onwards the technique, though infrequently used, can be considered to be standard.
The Vitagraph cameramen seem to have had the edge when it came to putting film lights into real locations
A sidh scene lit in low-key by the cornerman Georges Spccht in the Gaumom company's Roman d\m mousse (Leo nee Per ret, 1913). 'Ihe hghi comes in pan from a small arc in the standard lamp behind the actors but also from.on orefaodligh in from of ihn camera and to iht right.
which were too dark for filming with the available light, and a prime instance ol this is in Coronets and Heart*;(1912), though this is not the only example from Vitagraph. In this film there arc three scenes shot in a real bank, two of which arc down in the bank vault, and in these the action is entireEy lit by sets of arc floodlights specially brought in. 1 have seen nothing like this anywhere else in about one and a half thousand films made between 1906 and 1914.
Scandinavian. Lighting
Another of the aspects ol Scandinavian lighting in which they were sometimes slightly ahead of American practice was in the simulation of lamp light. In 1911, in films such as Vcd Faengslcts Pon1 the cameraman Axel Graatkjaer was achieving a more convincing rendering of lamp light than the earlier American attempts, by more precise control ol the placement" and relative intensities of the lights, though the basic set-up was no different, with a floodlight just outside the frame, A couple of years later it had become quite usual to put small arcs inside oil lamps to produce a practical light source casting a photographically effective light in such lilrns as ingeborg llolm (Victor Sjostrom, I9H) and Det Fkmmchghedsfilde X (Benjamin ChriMensen, I9B), and Roman ifun mousse {Leonce Perret, J913}. A variant of this lamp light effect has the arc light source above the top of the frame casting light straight down onto a .small area of the scene beneath, without there being any ostensible source of light within the shot. Here the earliesL example I know of is m a Nordisk film, Den hvidc Slovehandeh sidstc Offer (1911). Like many other Danish innovations, one can see this being
diffused into German films a few years later in Der Student ion Prog (SteNan Rye, 1913), Another Danish interest was in light changes within the duration of ilit: shot ostensibly caused by the actors switching the mom lights on and oil". This technique had first appeared in American films earlier than I909h and was done with a stop-camera effect and an almost invisible cut in the shot while the lighting change was being made, iiut again the best Danish cameramen were able to produce a more convincing result by 19JI, and the incessant use of this effect came to be a feature of Eenpmin Christensens films.
Yet another of the Danish interests in lighting was in doing low-key efleets with controller! daylight, as in lledrogei i Dodcn (Dr. Gar-FJ-llama 1) made by Edouard Schnedlcr-Surensen in 1911. In this film a small patch of direct sunlight illuminates the point of interest in a macabre interior scene of a coffin in a crypt being opened, while the surroundifig set En the shot is heavily shaded oil Jrom the fight so ft* to he dark and murk v. Similar effects continue intermittently through the succeeding years in Den Jlyyende Cirkui (APfrtd Lind, 1912,1, and other films. 1 his particular sort of lighting seems to have been unknown in other countries at thii lime, and together with the lighting Irom a km angle already mentioned, and ajso other features of Danish camerawork, form*: a major influence on what is usually called German 'Expressionisth cinema.
(The word 'Expressionist' has been so abused by being attached to so many disparate things that I propose to use instead the term Yxpressivist1 to describe such lighting effects and also other relate*I filmic devices.)
UgH STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
A scenefilmed ' con t re-jour' (against the light) in the Ones companyfilm Patrizia c schiava of 1909. The sand on the beach is scattering hghi onto the back of theforegroundfigure, so thai detail can be seen in his clothes, and the exposure has been calculated to allow for this. The other alternative would have been to [posefor more detail in the scat and let
him go to silhouette.
FÍLAÍ STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Silhouette nnd ContFC-jour Effects
The exact way silhouette effects came to he intentionally used in an integrated way in film stories is still not clear, hut at the moment, 1909 seems to he a crucial year. The Italian Aquila company made a film with the a figure in semi-silhouette against window lighting in Fhriona de iys early in the year, and D.W. Griffith produced some much more striking examples shortly after. Mis In Old Kentucky has a skyline silhouette showing a sentry at his post, and there are semi-silhouette figures in lines of White on a Sullen Sea,
though in both cases they are used purely pictorially, without strong expressive connotations. The only example after this date of this feature in Griffith's fJiograph films that I am aware of is a shot of figures silhouetted against the sunset in The Ycaui Cur (1911). Italian film-makers developed the centre-jour technique further in the Cines Patri/.ia eschiava^ from near the end of the 1909, which includes a number of striking camte-jour shots of boats on the sea. Cave mouth contrc-jour shots are found in ll Cid (Cincs, 1910), and at the end of the Milano company's version of VInferno (1911).
The final shot in the Milano company's IWerno^H), with Donu and Virgil mmmi agvinst the Ugh 01 a can wouth -as they emerge from Hell.
The significant action in this scene is shown as a shadow on the wall in Satana (Ambrosio, 1913).
This last example is finely judged as an expressive effect, given its correspondence to the last four lines of the poem. But by this date a number oiother film-makers had taken up the idea, principally in Europe, mostly using it for pictorial purposes, though with a gradual move over to more expressive ends. Rims to be mentioned in this connection include Ehpeditficen (August lilom, 1911), and Dodspringcr til llestjra Cirkushuplcn (Schnedler-Sorensen, 1912), in both of which the silhouette cllccts were again achieved by shooting figures in an unligbted room against the fully day I it exterior seen through a large window. An even more force! u I use of .silhouettes brings us back to America in 1912, with an Indian burial shot in skyline silhouette in Francis Ford's The Indian Massacre.
By 191 í the technique was becoming lairly standard, though still infrequently used. Many examples can be lound from Italy (L'amro funesto,jonezn<\ La lamp ado dell nvnno), but the idea had even got as far as Russia (Sumerln /henskoi dushi). Leonee Perret's Roman d'un mousse (191 3) makes a special feature of silhouette shots, and the influence of this was carried over into one of the films inspired by it, Benjamin Christensens Oet Ikmmelighedsfulde X (I91+), in which silhouette effects done both with daylight and artificial li^ht, as well as \\\ú\ all sorts of extreme chiaroscuro of other kinds, arc used throughout its entire length. Mere these effects are definite!v used to contribute to the atmosphere implied by the title.
Shadow PI a y
The only example of shadows being used expressively in this period that I know about are in Luigi Maggi s Satana of 19] I, In this the scene of the scourging of Christ has die main action taking place off-screen, but the actions can be seen by the shadows the v cast within the picture I rame.
The Influence from Still Photography
Backlighting on exteriors and interiors had appeared in still photography before it ever did in motion pictures. Martin Bray has located examples from the turn of the century in the work of Constant Puyo, a well-known French member of the Tictorialist' movement in artistic still photography. Backlighting seems to have been his speciality, and he created numerous examples done both outdoors and in the studio. He habitually shot exterior scenes in the country with a clothed or unclothed model in the middle of them lit by the sun from behind, and exposing for the front of the figure, without any extra fill light. In studio photographs he shot close shots in the same General way, but here the backlight was usually an arc floodlight either above the model or behind her, as in one of his best known photographs, Effci de lumiere. As well as that, in these studio photographs there is some extra filt li^ht put onto the face Irom the front in one way or another. Very few of the other well-known photographers of the time used this technique, but there are some photographs by Clarence l-L White, a prominent member of the American 1 Photo-secession" gruup, which also use backlighting from the sun on exteriors. However, these are a arranged in such a way that the backlighting from the sun produces less of a rim -lighting el lect, and is does not particularly draw attention to itself from a little later, Bray has found examples of fully developed 'three-[Joint lighting", with a backlight, plus a kcyljghi and a fill-light from the front; for instance in a studio picture by Eva Watson, Head of a Young Girl, published in the January 1905 number of Stieglit/s Camera I York. Nevertheless, these were not common techniques in still photography, and it was several years before they begin appearing in cinematography.
Backlighting with Reflector Fill
The introduction of backlighting with extra III blighting shone onto the front of the figure from the camera side represents another small mystery. As is well-known, credit has been claimed for this idea on behaii ol D.W. Griffith by Billy Bitrer, but there are much less well-known counterclaims on behalf j,S, BJackton by bis daughter Marion and bv Norma Taimadge. Although most of the Vitagraph film<v are now lo*t, Washington Under the lirtti.ih Flag, which wa* made in the middle of 1909, and released on June 27. rhjes have exterior scenes lit by the sun overhead, but slightly behind the actors There to al>n a eertjin amount oi light bouncing back and up into their faces from something, but it i^ possible that this is a natural accident, rather than specially arranged. The point h that U is pov>ible iu produce an effect thai looks rather like reikctor fill-lighting under certain special location and atmospheric conditions by
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
One ojiht scenesfrom Washington Under the British -Flag (Vitagraph,
j 909) 4$$ iS backIit h)'lhc™^ rbET* is also light being relemd bock op onto the figures from some very hghl coloured surface in front of the actors, and below the bottom of theframe.
'splitting' the exposure. This means setting the aperture to half-way between the correct exposure for shooting with the sunlight and the correct exposure for shooting against the sunlight. Under hard sunlight from the back of the scene this usually results in over-exposed backgrounds and slightly under-exposed faces, but under diffuse or hazy sunlight the result can be quite good. Anyway, the effect in Washington Under the British flag is much the same as when the technique became standard in outdoor filming in American films a year or so later, when-such scenes were usually taken with the sun somewhat lower down from the
zenith. The first D.W. Griffith film in which there is any possible backlighting is-The Message, which was shot after the Vitagraph Him and released a month later. This is the first of a small group of films which he made at Greenwich, Connecticut, around the beginning of June 1909, and there may also be similar weak backlighting in the others, which include The CardiiwTs Conspiracy and Sweet and Twenty, but it has not been possible to confirm this, as the only prints available at the moment are 16 mm. copies from the paper prints deposited for copyright in the Library of Congrcsss and the quality of these is rather poor when compared to
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
good 35 mm. duplicates from an original.
(It is worth remarking in passing that one can miss details of the lighting even when viewing good 35 mm. prints on a viewing machine; often only high intensity projection can reveal such finest details as whether reflectors or artificial light were used in location exterior lighting.) But if this was indeed intentional backlighting in these films., the mystery is why the technique was not used in the other Griffith films made on other locations around the same time, or in the fifty films he made afterwards through the rest of 1909. The c|uery as to the exact method, if any, used in this group of Griffith films from 1909 arises because there were contemporary reports of arc lights being used on location exteriors in British film-making, although I have seen no visual evidence of this. But in American films there is a surviving Vitagraph film from 1909 which has arc lighting on an exterior scene. This is ftcuy's Choice, in which a garden scene shot under dullish daylight has the light on the figures boosted and sharpened by the light from an arc floodlight just out of shot.
In any case, after the mysterious hiatus, the use of backlighting on exteriors came back to stay in Griffith's films with The Threads of Destiny; one of the first he made on the Biograph company's first trip to California in 1910. There is no question but that the process was now one of reflecting sunlight coming from behind the figures of the actors back towards their faces with a sheet of matt white reflecting material. The credit lor applying this device to film has been given to Billy Bitter, but Arthur iMarvin was also on camera during this trip, and in any case the technique of reflector fill-light had been standard in studio
SI
portrait photography for about a decade.
The use of reflector fill-lighting on exteriors spread to other American cameramen over the next few years, and by 1914 it was applied quite generally on location filming whenever it was possible and appropriate. This was not the case in Europe, in part because the light there is less suitable, with relatively few days of bright direct sunlight each year. Even late in the 'twenties one sees major European films all of whose exteriors are shot with direct frontal sunlight.
Figure Lighting
Backlighting of the actors combined with PI Might Irom the front is the start of figure lighting as a technique independent of the general lighting or the scene, and from the beginning it was used to make the actors look more attractive regardless of other considerations bearing directly on the particular narrative. Right at the end of 1910 Bitzer and Grilfith made the obvious application of the technique to a studio interior scene in the same way that they had been doing it for a year on exteriors. The film was Faic's Turning, but thereafter it was used only infrequently by them in the occasional single scene in a film. For instance, the well-known shot of (Mae Marsh in the hall of her parents' house in Birth oj a Notion is the only occurrence of this technique in interiors in the whole ol that film. Other studios did not take up this technique for interior photography at all within the period wc are considering.
However, a variant of this approach did begin to appear amongst the interior shots lit in the established simple frontal style in some of the lilms from other major companies in 1912 and 1913, This was what one might call 'three-
Extrafill liglu put onto thefigures from on arcjloodlxght out of shot to the right man exterior scenefrom Betty's Choice (Vitagraph, 1909)
The cambiridton of 'three-quarters back1 light coming from the left behind the characters in theforeground, plus the more usual lighting from sets of arc floodlights from the right and left front. A studio interior scene in Vitagraph's Coronets and Hearts (1912).
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
A studio interior scene from A Brother's Devotion (Vitagraph, 1910), showing the Vitagraph angle and staging up to the 'ninefoot line. The lighting is partly from general diffuse light, and partly from a group of arc floodlights on floor stands out of shot to the left. Note the rapidfall-off in light level towards the hack of the set, prodacing a degree of separation of the figures from the background.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
For the Medium Close Up cut into the previous scene on the opposite page, the camera has been moved almost straight in, and an arcfloodlight has been addedfrom high leftfront. This light is doing most of the lighting of theface, and the exposure has been adjusted to take account of this. So the background has got relatively darker, the mismatch in the position of the actress across the cut is quite typical of Griffiths practice.
quarters back lightings and was applied from arc floodlights ami sometimes Cooper-Hewitt banks on floor stands (i.e. a I about eye-level), and placed rather behind the actors and off-screen at one side. This arrangement produced marked figure modelling as well as separation from the background, as one can sec from the illustration.
The exact evolution of figure lighting over these few years is not yet completely clear to me, but the example illustrated, a nil! others like it from 1913, may have alternatively evolved through the gradual movement of lighting units from the quarter front position to a side position, as in the illus-
tration from Vitagraph s A Brother's Devotion (1910). This scene is largely lit by groups or arc floodlights ranged out of shot at the left, and this arrangement already producer quite good figure modelling, Because of the rapid fall-off in intensity towards the back of the set in lie rent in floodlighting, it also gives fairly good separation ol the figures from the background, and that to a greater degree than the standard overall frontal lighting of the period. By 1912 much stronger lighting from directly at the sides, and producing nearly all the illumination on the scene, can be seen In a number of films, particularly those from the Rex
This scene from D.IK Griffith's Friends (1912) is hi with the Cooper-Hewitt arrangement usual at their New York studio - lights left, above, and
i
company, where the light was applied in this manner from both sides. Examples can also be found in the films from other companies made in 1913, but like all advanced work with artificial lighting in this period, these were confined to films produced in the New York area, and only a limited number of those at that. After this development of side lighting it may be that the move to three-quarters back lighting seemed the next olwious move, and was made as such.
As this work on figure lighting developed at other studios, Bluer and Griffith didhzvv. one or two tries aL It, as in friends
made in July 19]2, In this film, as in a few others from this time, Ritaerdid use arc lights to get some light into the back corners ol a set with a staircase built in. (Sets with a proper staircase built into them are extremely rare in Biograph films, probably because the small size of their New York studio made this difficult.) But more importantly, Friends has some Medium Close Ups of Mary Pick lord cut into a couple of the scenes, and when these were taken the lighting was adjusted from that in the general shot of the scene, which was the usual Biograph Cooper-Hewitt arrangement. An arc floodlight was brought in from side front to the
front.
l.ow-kev lighting in Conscience (Vitagraphr \9\l).Thescene i$ -ofely lit hy a group of arc floodlights in the alcoves out right, and also out left in the back alcove. There is also a .i ingle weak arc light out left to light the man
sitting tn the chair.
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Nero plays while Rome burns in Quo Vadis? (Enrico Gtiazzoni, 1912). The shoe is lit solely by an arcfloodlight well below the camera angle shining upwards.
actress, and with the exposure adjusted for the now higher light level, the background1 to the shot became very dark. This is the earliest obvious example of this kind of lighting readjustment (or ■ cheating1 > as it came to be called), that I have noticed.
Around 1912 there was a definite move in all the major film-making countries towards having the majority of the lighting in studio sconce provided1 ;by artificial light, rather than by the diffuse daylight through the Studio roof and walls;, which was the usual case before. -However, this is more visible in the films-of some companies than of others, and of course Gaumont had already arrived at this position on their own several years before. The other important exception was Biograph, but in that case the Cooper Hewitt lighting in their New York studio almost perfectly mimicked the diffuse daylight in other company's studios, so from a visual point of view it was not an exception at all. This change over to a greater contribution from' artificial light was accompanied: by greater diversity in exactly how the light was applied to different parts of the scene.
As far as standard' studio lighting was concerned; Vitagraph was the most advanced company, and a good example of the best practice there in 1912 is:providcd'by the film Cameiuw. A key scene in this film is the first genuine exaniple of low-key lighting (ix^most of the .frame is very dark) that I have seen done solely with artificial, lighting In other scenes in this -film the dominant lighting is ifrom small! groups of arc lights on. either side of the camera at about 45 degrees to the lens axis. When an actor is closer to one set ol lights than the other, that set ol lights act* as the key.(principal) light, andthe others as fill light an^viee
versa. This approach gives a fairly natural fall-off in light intensity towards the walls of the set, and much improved modelling of the features. It also gives fairly good separation of the figures from the background, though not as good as that with overhead back-lighting with its bright rim effect. The same approach was also sometimes applied by Vitagraph cameramen to location interiors, these being totally lit with arc floodlights for the first time ever, as in scenes in a real bank vault in Coronets and Hearts (] 912).
Parallel developments in lighting tO'thosc ['have described can also be observed' a year or so later in the films of the major Trench companies, particularly Gaumont. There arc 'lighting was regularly used to touch up the modelling of parts of a large scene in the previous period, and can be seen continued in various films From The White Slave (1:909) to Good Jot Evil (1913). 'Italian practice, which at the beginning ol the iperiod entirely followed French models, and in the middle of it shows influences from Vitagraph and Nordisk as far as contemporary subjects are concerned, Anally developed an element of individuality in some aspects of film lighting; One example of this is the use of lighting applied ifrom a low angle in Guazzoni's Quo Vadis? (1912), This usage was then carried further in Cabiria7 where the effect was similarly natural is tically motivated by a large-scale fire out of shot. In another scene in Cabiria the source of this low-angle lighting was actually in the shot, and the aim> was apparently to-suggest a weird atmosphere. Semi-silhouette effects also occasionally appear in Italian films, Finally, the most massive use of arc lights up to this date took place on some of the giant sets of Cabiria,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Advanced and Retarded Styles
The photographic features which have been discussed in the previous few pages were not, at the date of the particular films mentioned, typical of most films made in that year. However they did come into use a few years later in the majority of films made in their place of origin, and for this reason 1 find it useful to describe them as advanced stylistic features. In this context this expression is purely descriptive, and does not imply a value judgement. On the other hand, particularly in this early period, there were always a minority group of films that were still using the forms of the majority of films of an earlier period, and such forms and features 1 will describe as retarded. Obviously, what constitutes advanced and retarded features keeps changing with the time and place of production of the film under consideration, as the norms applying to the majority of films change. An example of a retarded photographic feature is given by those films made in 1908 or later in the U.S.A. which have their interior scenes still shot solely under direct, undiffused sunlight. This feature was still so common in European films in 190S that it does not constitute a retarded feature in that context, though it does by 1913 + The concepts of advanced and retarded features also have application to other dimensions or aspects of style such as the amount of cutting within scenes, and so on.
Tinting and Toning
During the years 1907 to 1913 the conventions of tinting can be observed stabilizing, and the position was being reached where most films were coloured in one way or another. In 1907 the use of blue tinting for night exteriors actually shot in full daylight, as they all were, was fairly standard, as was the use of red tinting for interiors being consumed by fire, and both can be seen in Vitagraph's The Mill Girl. By 1913 the other standard colour was orange or amber (yellow-brown) for candle-lit or lamp-lit scenes. Green tinting was sometimes used for weird or gruesome scenes, and light pink for early morning, but daylight exteriors and modern interiors understood from the context to be lit by daylight or incandescent light were usually left untinted.
The use of toning - the alteration of only the black silver part of the image by chemical treatment - was less common because of the greater cost of the chemicals involved, and films such as The GreoL Train Hold-Up (Pathe, 1910), which has the exteriors toned green and the interiors toned sepia, are rare. The toning is quite effective in this particular instance because grass and forest trees form most ol the backgrounds in the exteriors. Where such tonings exist in the original copies they are virtually never reproduced an modern duplicate prints made from them.
S5
Píithé StenciM"inting
A process Tor mechanically colouring different parts of the image in different colours was developed by the Pathé company from 1905, and reached its perfected form in 190S. This process largely replaced the hand-painting of copies of their films which had been a speciality of the company before 1908, and the new stenciUinting continued to be used by them on some films up until the nineteen-thirties. In the years we are concerned with its use seems to have been restricted to trick films and exotic and historical subjects, both fictional and documentary. Pathé also re-released some of their popular films made earlier than 190S in stencil-tinted form, which has created a certain amount of contusion. The technique involved taking one positive print Tor each colour that was to appear in the film being stencil-tinted, and then cutting out the areas in every frame that were to be coloured that particular colour, so forming a stencil, (or rather a scries of stencils), for every frame down the length of the film. The stencil film Tor one colour was then run through a machine sandwiched against an uncoioured print, while rotating brushes applied dye of the appropriate colour to the film through the stencih The other colours were applied through their own lengths of stencil film in successive applications on successive machines. Although the labour involved in cutting the stencils was considerable, the efficiency of the subsequent stages made the process worth-while in view of Pathe's large sales worldwide h At First the cutting oT the stencils was done directly with a scalpel, but in 1907 an improvement was introduced, in which the frame being worked on was projected onto a screen, where the operator traced the outline of the area to be cut out with a pointer linked by a reducing pantograph arrangement to an electrically driven vibrating needle which actually cut out the small required area on the film frame itself. The process must also have helped the appeal of the 'Film ďArť series after 1908, for these films were otherwise somewhat retarded in style,
The colours in surviving copies of Pathe stencil-tinted films made using the improved method after 1907 arc rather pale when compared with those of hand-painted films, and it seems probable that they wrere so originally, and that this was a characteristic of the process. The registration of the colours is quite good from frame to frame, even on the garments of moving figures, so that the general effect is as if the carefulJy hand-tin ted photograplis or post-cards so common at the beginning of the twentieth century had come to life.
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The KinemacoJor Process
The only genuine colour process to become a commercial rcalitv before Technicolor was the Kinemacolor process,
S6
m
which was Helped by G.A. Smith from an earlier unsuccessful attempt by iRMMt «•# *^a three-coiour ^ve process. This in its turn was a direct application of the Clerk Maxwell system of three-colour still photography which was in use at the turn of the century.
To reproduce approximately the full range ol colours in natural scenes, analysis and synthesis in terms of three correctlv chosen spectral colours is necessary, but until the niueteeivthirties only markedly imperfect two-colour systems had to suffice in films. In the Kinemacolor process in its final form the film was shot with an ordinary Moy-Rasiie camera slightly modified by having an extra co.axial disc with two gelatine filter segments mounted behind the ordinary shutter. This was geared to revolve at half the shutter speed so that for the first exposure the red filter was interposed in front of the film frame while the shutter was open, while for the next exposure the green filter was in front or the frame, and then the cycle continued to repeat for successive pairs of frames. Various filter combinations were used for different types ofsccne an Might cond itions, the most usual being a red and cyan (blue-green) :pair, which indeed in principle should give the most satisfactory combination for a two-colour system. The red frames gave a record in a black and while silver image of the- intensities of the red light from various areas of the scene, and the alternating green frames gave a record of the complementary intensities of green (or blue-green) light from the appropriate parts of the scene. The negative used'was ordinary orthochromatic film specially sensitized by the Kinemacolor company to produce a panchromatic emulsion which would respond to red light as well as to blue and green. The exposed film was developed and printed in exactly the standard way, and the result was a positive with a succession of black and' white silver images, of which the odd ^numbered ones had light areas corresponding to the most intense sources of red light in the picture, and the even ones had their lightest areas corresponding to the most intense sources of blue-green light. White areas in the original scene producedan equally light area in both records.
The Kinemacolor film was projected with a projector of one of the standard designs, but having the same modification of ancxtrafiher disc coaxiaho.the shutter as in the Kinemacolor camera. Both taking and.projection speeds were 11 frames per second, andthcshortened.exposurc time
resuhing^lustheextraJightabsorptionbythecamerafiher, Wm that films could only be satisfactorily shot under bright sunlight. This ruled out scenes made under the best studio bghung conditions of the period. The limited number of ficnona aims made by the Kinemacolor compauv were also unsatislactory i„ other respects, and this was responsible
FILM STYLE A ND TECHNOLQG Y: 1907-I913
competing colour processes the other faults of Kinemacolor were less noticeable at the time. These faults included the inability to reproduce certain colours, particularly blue and yellow/ and also the colour fringes produced by objects in last motion. Since the red image was taken and projected 1732nd. of a second after the corresponding cyan imag^ a fast moving object had time to change its position in the frame, and hence be seen as two separate red and green objects. This 'motion fringing' was the downfall of many later attempt at colour cinematography, particularly those usinsj an additive system of colour combination. As well as this," all additive systems, including Kinemacolor, which by their nature reproduce white light by adding together red, green, and blue (or red and cyan) light from separate intake records, give less brightness on the screen than either ordinary black and white film, or the subtractive colour processes which were ultimately successful. However, the most irritating characteristic of the process, at any rate to my eyes, is the heavy flicker noticeable on scenes which included a large amount of white, or near-white, in the picture area, as a result of the alternation of bright red and green frames on the actual film, (The eye does not actually distinguish the separate red and green frames of course, but
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
for the final demise of the
process, for in the absence of
The Debrie Parvo seenfrom thefrom. Now the supplementary viewfinder attached to to the right side of the body. This consists of a small square diverging lens at thefront of the camera, and a set of ptepsight holes at the hack to allowfor
different degrees of parallax correction.
The Dcbric Parvo seen from thefront, with the door to the compartment holding the 400footfeed magazine open, and also thefront containing thú shutter and Jens If ted up to show theflm path,
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the impression of white synthesised by the brain seems to flicker violently.)
Kinemacolor was exhibited successfully from 1908 to 191S in the larger cities of the major film distribution areas, most of the films shown being documentary subjects. A two hour film of the Delhi Durbar of 1911 was particularly successful.
Cameras
A new camera of major importance, the Debric Parvo, made its appearance in 1903, though it was not extensively used till after 1914. This was largely because it was much more expensive than the existing cameras. The Debrie Par vo was t h e s ma I les t p ro fession a I - q ual i ty ca mer a aval I ab I e, being entirely enclosed within a rectangular wooden casing measuring 6 inches by 8 inches by 10 inches. Unlike other cameras of the time, this wooden casing was no more than an enclosing shell, and the gears, film gate, etc, were mounted on, and contained within, a metal chassis. The film was fed from one pre-loaded 400 foot spool box inserted into o nešidě of the camera, through the gate and into another spool box inserted into the other side of the camera coaxially with
87
the first. The gearing and claw movement were between the two boxes. The Parvo had a one turn - one frame1 animation crank-handle position, and a shutter with adjustable opening, as was now the case Tor all professionally-used cameras, and the usual eyepiece at the back of the camera for framing and focussing the image on the back of the film before shooting. Its supplementary view-finder for use while actually taking a shot was a simple rectangular negative lens fastened to the side of the camera at the front in which, when the eye was placed behind a peep-sight at the back, a tiny reduced erect image of the scene in shot could be seen. This arrangement left something to be desired as a means of checking what was in frame during die course of the shot. The Debrie Parvo design was copied by the German Erncmann company in 1909 for one of the models in their
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The Bell Si. Haire J! studio camera on its panning and tilting head, The camera has been slid over to the right oj the head into the fine focussing position, with the taking lens rotated to the left side of the turret. Thefocussing eyepiece is immediately in front of the crank handle, The gears producing the tilting movement of the head can be seen an the circular base.
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.Wing « to he «UM « * ?^f£ £3 (luring &« years;i i^KM***? ™^»^ "f x^l-inverted image on a* a tube fastened to the side of the camera. This image had the
from various directions. The inversion of the image, though no oreat encouragement to making .panning shots, was not * great a disadvantage as it might seem nowadays, since all cameramen at tins time had been still: photographers, and were quite used to working with inverted images on the ground-glass backs td"the still cameras of the period.
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The Belli & Hoi veil Camera
By 19 f Ol he Bdl& hlowelkompanyofChicago were well established^ the major maker of 111 m, perioral ingmaeh inery in the United. States, with a very superior product, and in that year they produced their fittt film camera. This was built on. the English pattern inside a rectangular wooden box, with the magazines for the film also inside. It had one unusual feature, which was that the lens was mounted on a plate which could be shd up and down vertically on the front of the main camera casing. This acted in a limited way like the usuali rising front on a pilate camera for still photography, and1 enabled the converging verticals in the image lo be corrected when taking a.shot centred above os below the horr/ontat-, A few models were sold'.-to the local" film companies in Chicagoj Selig and Essanay, but these companies did .not adopt it as their standard camera, After considering their experience with this model, and'also what cameramen seemed^to consider desirablein-an ideal camera, Bell & HOwell designed, the 2709 model, which was first made available ini-Wlik
This camera was unusual in being constructed" entirely of incta I, wittathe body m ach ined from■cast aluminium, and it was approximately IS. inches tali including the magazines on tqjii .VS inches ilbiig, and;% inches wide. Its,total weight was about 27 lb. The gears ran1 in-ball.hearings at the crucial ipoints, and: tlie variable qpening of the shutter could be changed: while Che camera was running, somaking fades in ihecamera;possifele at any lens aperture, The'film movement was quite different to any that had :bcen before; a 'shuttle gate1 lifted: up me film away from:thefroin of the gate onto the clawsi: which then moved it forward, after which the shuttle gate pulledhit dowp^olT the claws .onto the fixed register ;pms;protrudiug from the hack of the gate aperture plate. This was in fact the first camera to have register 3** Mdi^ ®*       completely steady and m a pLise
evenly spaced perforations in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
the film, and it was alone in this for a long time. (Although the olograph camera had punches cutting the perforations as the exposure was made, and so holding the film steady, its pull-down mechanism.using rubber pinch rollers did not give perfectly even spacing of those perforations.) Another important feature that was built Into the Sell & Howell was an accurate frame counter which facilitated the making of accurate dissolves and other special effects. In fact all the features of this camera so far mentioned contributed to making it outstandingly suited to filming special effects of every kind. The lenses were mounted on a rotatable turret with space for Tour lenses, which was fixed on the from plate of the camera. Focussing was accomplished by rotating the turret through I 80degi ccs so that the lens which was to be used in taking the shot was in front of the ground-glass screen on the other side of the camera, where the image on it could be viewed through an eyepiece to the side of the camera. Before this was done the camera was slid sideways on the special baseplate on which it was mounted so that the lens was restored to the position in space that it would occupy when the shot was actually photographed — the two displacements by rotating the lens turret and moving the body cancelling to eliminate the parallax that would otherwise occur. The camera also had a supplementary viewfinder system for use when the shot was actually being taken. Although the Bell & Howell camera was first made available in 1912, very few cameramen acquired them before 1914, despite their many advantages. This must have been because of its very high price, in the region of $2,000,
Camera Movements
Although the unsatisfactory view finding arrangements on the cameras in regular use must have provided some pressure against the free use of panning shots in this period, but they did not prevent skilful cameramen from occasionally making them.- Although the majority of films were shot with a totally static camera, the place the occasional .panning shot is most likely to turn up is in the exteriors of American Westerns, where the uncertainty as to the precise movements of the actors in action sequences demanded the ability to adjust the framing during the shot. Danish films also include occasional framing tilts and pans, and1 even fully developed pans, even on interior scenes, from Kavcnns Brud (Viggo larscn, 1907) onwards. Taking production for this period as a whole, camera movements are more;likely to occur than they were in the previous several years, even if they are still not common, and in this respect DAV. Griffith's films conform to the general pattern, with about one in ten containing a camera movement of sonic kind to keep the action in frame. However, a few of them are exceptional, in that it can be seen that pans supplied by
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
the cameraman at the end of the shot have been cut off in the editing, as in The Drive fir Life (1909) and The Massacre (1912), presumably in the pursuit of an increased cutting rate to speed the action.
An example of the kind of conscious virtuoso effect which I mentioned at the beginning or this chapter as beginning to be introduced into films in these years is provided by the complex series of pans and tilts within the length of one continuous shot following a group of horsemen on a zigzag path down a hillside in Allan Dwan s The Fear. The extensive pans over tlie landscape (not following action), which be^in and end Griffith's The Country Doctor (1909), are completely exceptional in his work, and I have not seen anything else of this nature from this period, except the 270 degree pan round the deck of a liner in the middle of Captured by Bedouins (Sidney Olcott, I9i2), American film-makers had a strong prejudice against wasting valuable screen time on atmosphere, when it could be used to accommodate more central story material.
Tracking shots of any kind were still extremely rare, and it was only in 1912 that we can see the beginning of a real tradition in their use. I think that film-makers in the silent period, and to some extent later, made a distinction between those tracking shots that followed people around in some way, whether with the camera on a special carriage moving beside or in front of walking actors, or on a powered vehicle moving along with another powered vehicle containing the action, and on the other hand those tracking shots which moved the camera relative to a fixed scene. Some film-makers have undoubtedly gone on record as condemning the latter variety as drawing attention to the technique of filming, and their relative rarity in the silent period suggests that this feding was general. Nevertheless, there are rare examples of the use of tracking relative to a quasi-static scene in this period , and a number of them come from the Hep worth (or Hepwix, as it was now known) company in Britain, In the earliest of these surviving, An Old Soldier (1910), the camera tracks very slowly in and out over a small distance almost imperceptibly during some very long scones. There seems to be some sort of relation between these moves and the dramatic course of the action, so presumably they are intended to have the kind of intensifying function that became standard much later. There are other Hepwortb examples from 1910 and through to 1912, and these include Church and State and The Deception, though in these the tracks in and out are even smaller in range.
Also m 1912, in the United States, we have the very impressive instance in The Passer-by (Oscar Apftl, 1912), in which the camera tracks slowly in from a Long Shot of a man addressing a tabk* of diners to a Medium Close Up of him, which then dissolves into a flashback of the story he
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is narrating, and at its conclusion the process is reversed. I think there may well have been other examples of this sort of thing at the time, for the handling is quite assured in this film. The next case of a tracking shot used on a more or less static scene that comes to mind is towards the end of Traffic m Sauk (1913), where the camera tracks sideways in front of a row of prison cells containing some of the villains of the piece. In the Hep worth company Ai the Foot of the Scaffold (1913), the camera tracks sideways from one room into another past the wall dividing them/to follow an actor who goes through the door joining the two rooms. Despite all these earlier examples, there is no question hut that the really influential use of tracking shots on quasi-static scenes occurred in Cabiria, made in Italy by Giovanni Pastrone in 1913, but not seen elsewhere till the next year. This film contains a number of slow diagonal tracks into spectacular scenes from Very Long Shot to something only a bit closer, and so great was this film's fame that the tracking shot on a quasi-static scene was referred to in America for seme years afterwards as the 'Cabiria movement'.
The more common kind of tracking shot, with the camera moving alongside pr in front of a moving vehicle, has a sparse but continuous existence carrying through Irom the previous period and the elopement chase films. Hep worth again contributed examples in John Gilpin's Ride (190S), but some of the most striking examples after 190S occur in D.W. Grifilth's films. In his The Drive for a Life, a ear-muunted camera tracks in front of another car containing an amorous eouplcj and the shot continues while a cab containing the mans abandoned mistress drives up behind and observes the couple until their car drives out of shot, leaving the m is I r ess's chagrin to register before the end. It is in the detailed way a piece of staging is invented and worked out here, a.s in a hundred other differently unique cases, that the achievement ol D,WH Griffith lies, and not in hishavfng been the first to use the parallel tracking shot, or anything else for lhat matter. But it is from 1912 that the use of the parallel tracking shot really increases En films from all the major lllm producing countriest usually following action on cars or trains, txamples include Griffith again in The Gitl and Her Trust using a car-mounted camera to film a train running alongside, SchnudlenSorensen In Denmark filming a trolley ahead from a train lb I lowing it, and so on.
Camera Speeds
The impression of Hrush and turmoil" in Griffith's films that troubled some critics, but not anyone else that we know about, may have been due in part lo the curious fact that many of them are shot slower than 16 Ira me* per second throughout in this period most other American and European cameramen had settled down to this steady
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inking speed (though perhaps just slightly faster at Viuoraph and some of the European compamcs), hut -many ofGritrith\srdmsmadcin 19)3 are shot at around 14 frames per second, or even a little lower. The result of this would he that if the projectionists ran. them at the same speed as other films, the actors would have moved about appreciably faster than was natural. 'Kevin Brownlow has suggested to me that Griffith used the slower speed so as to get a longer film into the length of the single reel to which the olograph management limited him, and since these 1913 Griffith films art all very full reels, being very close to 1000 ft., this seems quite plausible.
Slightly later, in I9J4T Griffith went on record as expcclin^projectionists to give him expressive variations in their cranking speed-logo with the nature of particular scenes in his films made in that year, but since many reminiscences tell us that what projectionists did was not predictable hy the film-makers, J think that the chances were that a film that was shot slower than 16 frames a second stood more chance of being projected too fast than one shot at 16 frames a second, and the chances of getting expressive variations throughout the length of a film were very poor.
Expressive variations in cranking speed of a crude kind that were made by cameramen, hot .projectionists, had already begun hi this period, as the undcrcranking of chases and slapstick scenes was already being used in comedies. Severe undercranking down to several1 frames per second was also being used-to make a particular joke in comic scenes about people moving much faster under the effect of some peculiar stimulus, .as in Liquid Electricity (Vitagraph,
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Special Effects
Various special: effects techniques that had earlier only been used in little 'trick' films came to be used in substantial dramatic films in these years. One instance of this is provided'by that variety Of composite photography in which the upper part of the frame is masked, off in the camera while a scene occupying the lower ,part is filmed, and then.a second! exposure is made onthe same length-of film, with the inverse masking of the lower part oftheiramc with a counter^matte, There are a number of examples of tliis in obscure films of the period, but the most spectacular examples are in some of the big Italian films such asO^rn* and Cabin*. In these films a scene in- a real landscape is extended by painted or model sets in the upper-pan of the frame. Although* was possible with care to get apparently seamless images, a, in the first film mentioned, usually there was a Wy black line between the two parts of the eombmed image, representing inaccurate relative positioning" of the matte and counter-maUe on ,he successive
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
exposures. Another problem was caused by relative motion of the two parts of the image; that is, a jiggle due to poor registration of the frames of the film in the camera gate, This is inevitably worse in cameras without registration pins, as was the case for all makes at this date, particularly when they have seen a lot of use. However, it was possible to reduce this fault considerably by careful choice of the camera used.
This was done in the Pathe. trick films which continued to be made on the Melies model throughout the years 1907-1912, presumably by picking out those brand new Rathe cameras with the best registration as they came off the production line. Although these Pathe trick films mostly used techniques pioneered hy Georges Melies, they brought greater precision to their exec union as far as trick position matching and cutting went, as well as in image registration. They were also shot closer in and used more attractive performers than Melies did, so beating him on his home ground. A number of these Pathe films make use of miniature human figures interacting with a fulhsizcd one on the pattern of a Robert Paul film of 1901, Lilliputians in a London Restaurant, though they surpass their model in precision, as can be seen in les Pantins de Miss Hold (1908).
The basic technique of making objects move by single frame animation had ibecn well established by Edwin S. Porter and J, Stuart Blackton in earlier years, but when Scgundo de Chomon and other Pathe film-makers finally came to understand the method in late 1907 they applied it to making transformations in clay sculpture and silhouettes as well as for moving solid objects about. In Sculpture modcrne (1908) figures of birds, people, etc. made in modelling clay gradually metamorphose into one another, apparently without human intervention, by the use of small changes made to them between the exposures of a succession of single frames,
There is a Pathe film of unknown original title in the Moscow archive which dates from around 1908, and which is an anthology of just about everything that the trick film unit of the company could do at that date. Its basic framework is a standard live-action nauntcd inn' storv, but it includes sequences of simple stop-camera tricks, frame by frame object animation, live action silhouette projections, and also the novelty of objects animated as siJhouettes, in what wc now think of as the Lotte Reinigcr manner. This was pretty well a clean sweep of the animation field (though they missed out computer animation), and as icing on the cake the film also contains numerous cuts in to a closer shot during the live action sections. To be perfectly honest, all this adds up to a rather messy film overall, and even with these new techniques the trick film staggered to its commercial doom over the next few years.
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Glass Matte Painting
Although strictly speaking the technique of glass matte painting was invented in 1910, it was not really used in fictional films till after 1913, so I will deal with it in the next chapter.
Camera Lenses
By 1912 Zeiss lenses of 35 mm. and 40 mm. focal length were available, but it is very doubtful that they were used to any great extent. Certainly I have seen no definite visible effect of the use of any lens as wide as 35 mm., but I cannot be absolutely sure, since the stagings of that time did not have things up close to the camera during a scene, and in any case the tiny amount of perspective distortion produced by a 35 mm. lens when compared to the reproduction with a 50 mm+ lens is very hard to recognize. Some cameramen at the time referred to a 40 mm. lens as a wide-an^le lens, which it certainly is not in the sense of producing perspective distortion, since that focal length gives correct perspective with an image of the silent film size. It also seems that some people regarded a 3 inch lens as a standard lens during this period, but this seems to be a reflection of newsreel and 'topical1 film-making attitudes rather than being the best professional practice in fictional film-making. The 35 mm. lens I first mentioned had a maximum aperture of f4.5, but the maximum aperture of 2 inch lenses was around l'3.5 at this time; the principal manufacturers being Voigtlandei, Busch, Dallmeyer, and Taylor-Hobs on besides Zeiss. The only appreciably faster lens was a Dallmeyer 3-inch lens with an aperture of f 1.9, but though this may have been used in actuality filming, there is no reason to suppose that it was ever used for fiction films, particularly since it would have given poor definition at its maximum aperture. In fact even the standard lenses of the time had noticeably inlerior definition at maximum aperture, as can be seen in the famous scene in Griffith's Pippa Posses (1909) in which the dawn light comes into Pip pa's room. This was filmed with just sufficient light to get an exposure, and hence at maximum aperture, and the effect on the image definition is quite noticeahle. Long lenses ol several inches focaF length continued to be readily available, but they were still not used except for wild-life filming,
Shot Transitions
Although all the special forms of transition from one shot to another - fade, dissolve, wipe, and iris - had appeared as isolated instances in earlier years, it was only in this period that we can see the beginnings of their general use by film-makers. Fades continued to be fairly rare until 1912, mainly occurring to represent transitions into or out of dreams, as in the Pathe film Reves d'agent (190$). But in
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1909 the Vitagraph film Life Drama ofNapohon Bonaparte end the Empress Josephine, released on 6/4/1909, has a fade-out which does not go to complete blackness after Napoleon says farewell to his Empress Josephine, It could be claimed that this use or the fade-out has an emotional function as well as indicating a time lapse, since there are other time lapses in this film which are just bridged in the usual way with an inter title. When D.W. Griffith first took up the fade a few months later in Pooh of Fate the fade-out was used to end an exterior scene which was supposed to be taking place at the end of the day, and it seems possible that here the lade was. intended to represent sunset taking place. Certainly the next scene starts after an intertitle indicating that it is now the next dayT hi lines of White on a Sullen Sea there is a fade-out, used to indicate a time lapse, but over the next year or so there are only two or three fade-outs in Griffiths films, and they are either at the end of the film or at the end of a sequence. In the latter case they represent the beginning of the convention that a fade-out represents a time lapse between shols. By 1912 this usage was beginning to become common in American films, often with the fade-out followed by a fade-in, rather than the straight cut to the next shot as had been the case earlier, e.g. The One She Loved (D.W. Griffith, 1912) and The Flaming Arrow (Bison 10!, 1913). Ilowever it must be noted that in 1913 there were a number of films which also use the same transition of a fade-out followed by a fade-in to indicate a Hash back of the kind I have described in a previous section. Although some European film-makers had been involved very early in the development of the flashback, and indeed used fades for this in the two films olft*Inferno, they were a bit slow on the whole to take up the fade, and it is only in 1913 that wc get an a iatr number of films using fades for time lapses, or to go. to a mental image represented in a single shot. The one exception to this generalisation was the British l-Iepworth company, which around 1912 seems to have adopted a policy of taking all, or nearly all, the shots in their films with a fade-in at the beginning and a fade-out at the end. Olten these fades were trimmed off in the editing, sometimes only partiallv, but whichever was the case, rJie id'rt didn't help the speed of the narrative in Mepworth fiJm.s In the American production of the period there are a Jew films which contain fade-out - faded/is used boih to indicate a transition to a flashback, and for lime lapses as well, as lor instance in The Tiger (Fred Thomson, 1913). Clearly the context determined the meaning of the types of transition used, then as later, h is also quite possible that some of thesit fades are really faded attempts at dissolve* made in the camera, as had happened in earlier times, for camera* were stilJ not fitted with accurate footage counters.
Dissolves were stiJJ used sometime for indicating the
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*«gptB into a mm km   v*™6*but mofv
they were used tor indicating entry or exit into or out ol a l^hback, and hardly ever for indicating a time lapse. Just about the only other thing that I have found a dissolve used Tor during these years is as an alternative to ihe cut in going to a parallel action, and this only in two European films. These are the Hepworth company s .1 Womb's Treachery made in 1910, and in the well-known FEnfim dc Paris, made in 1913 by Leoncc Pcrrct. Given that there are a few other European films made after 1913 that use the same device for initiating a sequence of parallel action, I think there may well have been other examples of this before 1913 in films now lost. Besides all the preceding, there are a few curious uses of the dissolve in Vitagraph films. In their famous Haunted House of 1907, a dissolve is used to bridge the transition from the exterior of the house, shown in a model shot, to the interior, which is a studio set, and in The Raitle Hymn oj the Republic (19II), dissolves join each image illustrating the pocin. This latter usage could obviously be considered to be a hangover from the lantern slide show conventions, but at the same time it might be thought to look forward to the montage sequence, which was not very far away in the future,
The use of the iris-in and iris-out also begins during 1913, but the priority for this between DHW. Griffith and the Thomas I nee company remains uncertain, for both made a few films in that year that include irising, for example just Gold-(Griffith), and in the Nick of Time (}K,R.-Broncho),
B oth iris i ng a nd fad i ng requ head aptat i on s t o the ca mei-a lens; the former the addition of an extra-large variable iris diaphragm a few inches in front of the lens, and the latter some sort of internal adaptation permitting a complete closure of the internal aperture control-diaphragm if a fade to complete slackness was:to be achieved in all circumstances. Under studiocond it tons, when the aperture being used was about fS.6, it n-flj possible to achieve a reasonably complete fade-out by reducing the ordinary lens aperture to the minimum possible value, which was around f32 to l'45, but on exteriors, when working as was usual at about fl 1, this approach would1 not give complete blackness at the end of the fade. In fact the unsatisfactory results of attempting an aperture fade on exteriors can sometimes be seen in the films made when fades first became popular.
The addition of an extra-large variable iris diaphragm in front of the lens was certainly more convenient than the internal adaptation of lenses, since one design could be fitted toany camera,-regard less of the particular lens being used. This may well explain why irising rather than fadinp became so popular for a few years after 1914 Before that dat« neither irising nor fading were used in European films m the way I have described above.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
The only way-in which it was possible and convenient to make fades, other than in the camera at the time of shooting (for production volumes now forbade making fades in the printer for each separate print), was by a chemical bleaching process on the developed negative. The beginning and/or end of the shot was lowered slowly in to the bleaching solution, and when the point where the fade was to start was reached, the negative was immediately slowly pulled out again. The result was that the silver image was completely removed at the very end of the shot, and the negative was quite transparent there, while at intermediate points the negative image was lightened to various degrees. When prints were made from this negative they had various degrees of darkening along the way to total blackness at their ends. Chemical fades can be detected in some films from 1913, because the process, which continued to be used in cheap little film laboratories into the 'thirties (as in Renoir's Tflrti), was slightly uneven in its effect over the area of individual frames, and this enables it to be recognized. For this reason it was not used if it could be avoided, but it was certainly much commoner in the 'teens of the century than later. The final fairly obvious point to be made is that for dissolves to be made in the camera, which was the only efficient way at this period, the camera must be capable of being cranked backwards. The Biograph camera was not, so there are no dissolves in Biograph films.
High and Low Angles
In the previous period we find the occasional rare use of a just slightly depressed or elevated lens ang^ but these were always in shots taken at a considerable distance from the actors, and arose out of the nature of the specific location that was being used. Such was the case for instance in Darina Daylight Burglary (1903) and 77fc Pickpocket - A Chase through London. {1903.), which were d escribed in the previous chapter. This sort of thing occasionally appears in this period too, usually in the form of a slightly low angle shot ofa window which features in the Him story. The opposite kind of high angle shot made more or less necessary by the surroundings of the scene, or alternatively done to show clearly what is going on, is also used on rare occasions, as in a high angle shot of horses in the 1907 Pathé Voyousde ľoucst and the shot of Brutus' funeral pyre in the Vitagraph Julius Caesar (190S). This sort of thing was not to be found on studio interior scenes of course, as it would have produced obviously converging verticals in the set, which everyone was intent on avoiding, However, extreme high and low angles now began to appear on rare occasions on location exteriors. Such shots fall under the concept of the 'cinematographic angle', which I owe to Jean Mitry, This denotes those types of compositions and Framings which did not, and
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-19L
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Low angle shot of a ship on location in Back to Nature; or, The Best Man Wins (1910)
could not, occur in the still photography of this period and earlier. Marked departures from a horizontal lens axis often produce images which can be rendered comprehensible and acceptable in films because the activities in them are already understood from the previous movements of the narrative and the actors in it, which would not be the case in a still photograph. It appears from the examples he quotes that miry believes that such composition only began to appear in films around 191+, but in fact numerous films show that it was some years before this that such features had begun to appear occasionally. Extreme high- and low-angle shots first appeared to my knowledge in the Vitagraph film Back to Nature (1910), which shows a fifeboat floating beside an
High angle Paint of View shot in Back to Nature; or, The Best Man Wins (1910). A rain effect has been scratched directly onto the ncgathe, and a lightning fash painted on as well in this fame,
ocean liner in a shot taken downwards from the ships deck, and then the opposite angle of the watchers at the ships rail taken from the lifeboat. This pair of steep high and low angles could be taken lo be a pair of Point of View shots, since the people in both places are watching each other, but there is also another high angle shot in this film taken from the bridge of the liner of the action on the deck, which is certainly a purely objective shot, since there is no kind of shot showing anyone on the bridge on either side of it. There are a small number oI other American films from the next few years that include a true high or low angle shot, virtually always as a part ofa Point of View construction, such as the Vitagraph Cardinal Wolslcy (193 2). High and
Low angle shot in Dc Fire Djeevle (1911 )> which precedes the high angle shot shown right to form on off-eyeline reverse angle pair.
bligh angle shot in Dc Fire Djíuvje (J91 \)f which complete; the off-eyeline reverse angle pair with the previous shot.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
A tow angle shot, of one of the principals in Ralph Inez's Strength of Men (1913).
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
low an^lc shots arc very rare in European cinema, with the exception of some Danish films, beginning with Be fire fyacvk, which was made by Alfred Lind, Robert Dincscn, and: Carl Roscnbaum in 1911. Since this film dealt with the lives and passions of circus trapeze artists, the use of high^ and low-angle shots would arise fairly naturally in the filming of their act, but it is clear that the use of extreme angles was consciously pushed much further the next year in Schnedler-Sorensen's Dfídspringet Hi Fhsijta Cirkuskuphň and1 Den Staerkcste*
(These extreme angle shots, together with the strong chiaroscuro lighting efľects which I have already described, plus some favourite Danish subjects such as the 'fiendish master criminal1 thriller, all had a strong influence on what is ofl c n u n for tu nately re fcr red to a s 1G e r,ma n E xprcssion i st cinema'. This happened because up. to 1 #16 the Danish film industry, together with the Pathc company, dominated the whole Northern European market - 'Germany, Russia^ and Scandinavia. The Pathé Rims did not include the stylistic featu res T have ju st inent ionc )
D.W. Griffith's films arc not stylistically advanced-at all in tins respect, and it is only in 1912 that the few well known high angle Extreme Long Shots on Western landscapes appear in some of his .films. By this time some other American producers were beginning to follow the Vitagraph lead in the use of extreme angles, and1 in 1913 this feature is beginning to appear in European films from countries other tha,v Denmark, lii 19-1B even a film from distant Russia could now include a true objective high angle shot of a courtyard. (Bauer'SSumcrJti thenshi dushi.)
But as films came to be shot from- closer in to the actors, even slightly low- or.high- angles come to be visually
significant. In Vitagraph films again we have a low angle shot of a couple taken from fairly close on an exterior scene in Poet and Peasant made by William V, Ranotis in 1912, and the next year a pair of Medium Shot low angles of the two principal men in Ralph incc's Strength of Men. In fact, the Moving Picture World review of this film is the first mention 1 have been able to find of camera angles* in connection with films. Strength of Men also includes some extreme high angles shots as well.
The Vitagraph Angle and the 'American Foreground'
Besides their influence on the polishing up of action continuity across cuts, the Pathc films of 190S-190S also had subtler influences on American films, One of these was in the matter of the height cameras were used at in shooting ordinary scenes. Ben Brewster has noted that for some years before 1907 many scenes in Pathc films were shot with the camera at waist height, whereas most other films were usually shot with the camera at shoulder level, which was more convenient for the operator. In both cases, the lens axis was kept horizontal when shooting on studio sets, so that the vertical lines in the sets stayed parallel to the sides of the film frame and did not slant, as correct1 still photographic technique had long required. With most still cameras it was possible to use the camera at any height with horizontal lens axis and still get the required height of a scene into frame, while also preserving parallel vertical lines in the picture, This was because they usually had a Vising front', with the lens mounted on a board that could be slid up and down vertically with respect to the photographic plate, so producing the framing that would result from a tilt, but
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A shot from the final sequence of I Assassin at du Due de Guise (Calrnettcs & le Bargy, 1909), showing the Due de Guise about to walk from one antechamber of the royal palace to the next behind.
removing the optical effect a tilt generated in a rigid box-earn era. At the beginning of the century there had been one or two British movie cameras that had the lens mounted on a sliding board which could be moved up and down on the front of the camera, so producing the exact equivalent of a rising front still camera, and as previously noted, the first wooden box Bell & Mo well camera had this feature as well. However, it is clear that this was considered an unnecessary complication in movie cameras, and the simpler solution of shooting everything with the lens horizontal, when there were conspicuous rectangular features in the background, was the one adopted.
When the actors are distant from the camera, as was mostly the case for films made before 190S, the camera height makes no visible difference to the look of the image. But if the camera is close enough for the actors to fill most of height of the frame, and if they are also disposed in depth within the scene, the waist level camera position gives a very distinctive look to the image, with the actors in the foreground markedly overtopping the actors in the background. The film that demonstrates this development in the most obvious way is the famous VAsiossinat du Due de Guise, made by Calrnettcs 6c Le Bargy at the end of 1908 for the Film d'Art company, because it has the camera slightly closer to the actors than in most previous films, so that they fill most of the height of the frame, and also because there is a certain amount of staging in depth in it as wclh In 1'Assassinat du Due de Guise there is a definite sensation of looking up at the actors* as though from the stalls of a theatre. It certainly struck some American critics at die lime, as they described the appearance of the actors in it as like 'heroic figures'. As already remarked, the Vitagraph
¥%gr&±^* v-
The immediately following shot in I'Assassmat du Due de Guise, cutting to the opposite anglefrom inside the room that the Due de Guise is about to enter. The camera is set ot
waist tevch
company signalled that they had taken note of TAssassinai du Due de Guise by giving two of their films made just after FAssassinat du Due de Guise had appeared in New York, namely The judgement of Solomon and Other Twisti the extra descriptive subsidiary title "A Vitagraph High Art Film'. 1'Assassinat du Dae de Guise also introduced into films another stylistic component which was gradually taken over as part of the characteristic Vitagraph 'look' from 1909 onwards. This involves allowing the actors in the foreground of a group to turn their backs to the camera if it is appropriate to the action of the scene, as with a group of people in a real scene caught unawares. Whereas in the vast majority of French and American films it was, and continued Co be, the practice to keep the central foreground clear of actors, and also to allow any actors in the foreground to angle themselves at least side-on to the camera. The extreme case in the way actors were placed within the shot in films made up to 1914- was to allow them to play directly to the camera lens, and this can frequently be seen in European dramas, though much less so in American films. (In comedies address to the camera has always been permitted.) Amongst American film-makers, D.W. Griffith was notable for tin-way he persisted with a frontal organization ol his stagings right through into the * twenties, even when everyone else had followed the Vitagraph example.
Shooting Closer
In 1907 and 190S the most common way to shoot a scene was in Long Shot, with the actors shown at full length with a fair amount of space around them. However, already bv 1907, some American films, particularly those from Vitagraph, have the camera closer, with many scenes staged
t\^thc mm mm w4thc fu" hcisht 01 thc
(Full Shot), eg fr*ntt>ra <h ftinini and 77* Girl. This is alsc-mie of many Paths films made at the same time.
In 190? there was still very little cutting in to a closer shot in the middle of a scene, and most shots in most films wore taken at Long Shot or Full Shot. However, there were the first signs of a movement towards shooting the ordinary master scenes in American films from even closer, so that the feet of the actors were cut off by the bottom ofthc rrame. This seems to have developed as a competitive thing between the Vitagraph and Biograph companies, with a number of scones in a minority of Vitagraph films being shot with the actors working up to what the company called thc 'nine foot line', towards the end of the year. This was a line, or in the case of studio scenes, a plank, laid down nine feet in front of the camera lens, and at right angles to the lens axis, and it represented thc closest the actors were allowed to come forwards towards the camera. With the usual studio lens aperture setting of fS.6 to fS a standard SO mm. lens would give sharp focus from nine feet to aboutSO Teet if the focus was set at IS feet. There are some Vitagraph films made in 1909 that begin to show the effects of this practice, such as Romance of on Umhrella1 hut the stagings in them do not take the actors quite 3S far forward as the nine foot line, though sometimes they do get to within 11 feet of the camera. At thisdistance the bottom of the film framccuts the actors off at the thighs, and the top of the frame is about a foot above their heads. (The exact height included within thc frame for the silent aperture when a standard SO mm. lens is used is 3 foot 9 inches at 10 feet, since of course the actors would not stand right on the nine-foot line, particularly when it
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907^1913
was a plank of wood, and in the case of the usual European forward limit of4 metres the height within the frame would be S foot 2 inches at that distance.) At the same time, a small number of liiograph films have some scenes in them shot with actors cut off at the ankles, which corresponds to them acting up to a line at 12 feet from the camera. In 1910 thc nine foot line became fairly common in Vitagraph films, and as thc year wore on this closeness began to be adopted in Biograph films too.
Emblematic Shots and Cameo Introductions
In Europe in 1910 such closeness of camera was still unknown on master shots. These were still being taken at Full Shot at the closest, though there were of course thc rare closer shots cut into the middle of a scene. The other important exception to this generalization was the continuation of the tradition of the use of a close emblematic shot to begin or end a film. As in the previous period these can be recognized by the fact that they are not a continuous extension of thc narrative, and generally are posed, with little or no movement. For example, the last shot of D.W. Griffiths The Curtain Pole shows the protagonist filmed in Medium Shot against a blank black background biting a chunk out of the pole in question, with no relation to the action in the previous shot. The introductory emblematic shot also continued into this period, and a gradual change of its Style took place. Vitagraph 5s Shakespeare's Tragedy. King Lear begins with a posed shot in a special set of the principal characters in the play, with their names lettered underneath them on the set. Another striking example was Luigi XIf re di Fronch (Ambroslo, 1909), which starts with a posed
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One of the earliest occurrencesof 'nine-Jooi line' and the Yilagraph angle, with the camera at waist level, can be seen in this studio shot from The Romance of an-UmbreUa.(T909).     lighting h sokly diffused daylight from overhead, and thtre is no artificialfill light from the front.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Staging of the action right up to the nine foot line in the Vitagraph film Daisies (1910). This shot also shows the characteristic Vitagraph willingness to kt the actors turn their backs to the camera, if this happens naturally. In this seem, the woman in the background is rather unhappy, as you might guess.
Medium Shot of Louis XI in front of a background of hanged men. There arc other examples of this sort of thing amongst surviving films, and over the next few years it modulated into the much more familiar introduction of the main characters in a series of cameos. These were moderately close shots of the principal characters in the film shown in front of a black curtain, and perhaps also enclosed within a black vignette mask. Sometimes the actor playing the character would be identified by a title at the bottom of the frame as well. Examples can be seen in Zigomar, peau d'anguilh (1913) and other films from most countries. However, such things only occurred in a minority or movies.
Getting CJoscr Still
It must be understood that in the analysis of closeness of filming, I am basically concerned with studio scenes, for there was a general tendency to keep the camera further back on location scenes at this period and later, presumably because it had cost the production company a certain amount of extra money to ship their actors and technicians to perform in front of these novel backgrounds. The other caution that must be observed in analysing camera closeness is that the frame in nearly all 16 mm. prints of silent films is cropped at top and bottom and one side, because they have been printed down from 35 mm. as though they were sound films. The result is that a 16 mm. print usually gives the impression that the camera was quite a bit closer than il actually was when the film was shot,
As Vitagraph adopted the 'nine fool line' there were occasional mistakes made, because it required care ful adjustment of the focus under studio conditions to have the
depth of field just cover from 9 leet to the farthest part of thc set, about 30 feet away. For instance, although the action is staged up to the nine foot line in Victims of fate, made at the beginning of 1910, the foreground is out of focus in one set-up.
In 1911 and 1912 the trend towards using more and more shots taken up to the nine foot line continued at Vitagraph, and at ftiograph Griffith did likewise. By 1912, Grilfith had perhaps drawn a little ahead in the number of scenes in his films staged right up to the nine foot line, but thc cFfecl of this on the look of his films was quite different. This was because the camera height in his films now tended to be mostly up around the head or shoulder level, and also because his stagings sir II had the acting strongly organized towards thc front. The exact balance in this closeness of shot competition at this time is hard to determine, because both companies made some films which made little use of the features I am discussing, and in J9I2 Grifilth in particular was still quite capable of making films such as billy s Stratagem and Mart's Genesis, which were nearly entirely conducted in Long Shot and Full Shot.
Over the next few years more and more of the Vitagraph films show stagings that make use this 'nine fool line' setup, but il is not until that one finds some shots in them that have the actors standing right on the nine loot line, at which distance thevare cut offal the hips.
American film producing companies besides olograph followed the Lrend towards shoofing closer (n, but more slowly, in fact a year or more behind. Edison and Essaruy were closest behind the leaders, then Kalcm, followed by the rest. Bui no other company made as much use yFactor.s
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portioned with their backs to the camera. The use of actor Lupines with some natural back turning did begin to — in a few Edison and Essanay lifms in 19M, and more so in 1912, but elsewhere there was virtually none ol it. Tom Gunning has noted that there are some examples ol actors turning their backs to the camera in Griffith films, but in mv opinion they arc very few indeed compared to the \fitagraphpraciice/Gunningliasalsopostulatedadinerc.ice
m ihc expressive application of the practice in the two company'* films. He considers that in Vitagraph films the hack turning occurs at dramatically unstressed moments, whereas in the Grifilth films it is applied only at the most dramatically effective moments, such as when a character has been made particularly unhappy. 1 agree that there might be some tendency in this direction, but nevertheless, the back-turning technique is also used in Vitagraph films in an expressive way, for instance in Daisies, when one of the oirls has just received had news in a letter.
Despite the fact that this kind of natural staging with some of the actors having their backs to the camera had first appeared in a French film, French and other European filmmakers proved unable to develop the tdca> and they also kept their limit on actor closeness at 4 metres, though they did respond to the closer camera placement in Vitagraph and other American films over the next couple of years after 1909 by sometimes moving the actors right up to the 4 metre line. When French films finally began to use a true Medium Shot or nine foot camera closeness, in a few rare shots cut into the course of a more distant shot about 1913, they referred to this as the 'plan amcricain\ and in the United: States the distinction was now being made by the terms 'French foreground* for the 4 metre line and 'American foreground- for the effect of the full use of the nine foot line,
fly 19J2 the Vitagraph angle was being used for most of the scenes in Vitagraph films, and then some Vitagraph films began to include scenes that slightly departed from the company's standard camera set-up by being shot with the camera even lower than waist levels as in The Spirit of Chrittmas and others.
Although the Vitagraph company was easily the most important American company in the European market, the 'Vitagraph angle' was not taken up in its ;pure form by any European film-makers. |,y France in 1913 even the most advanced' among them were still confining themselves to the rare cut in to Medium. Shot (the '-nine foot line1, but without the low camera position)-in the course of a scene wh.dv would otherwise be shot from further back at the lour metre line at .least. The same is true of the Danish cinema, but in Sweden in 1913 the limited staging.in depth M      USed in *« Vitagraph films - from Medium Shot
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907A913
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
to Lous Shot - was extended by MauriU Stiller and Victor Sjostrom to action moving back from Medium Shot into Vcrv Long Shot in some exterior scenes, and even in some interiors. A good example of this is provided by Sjostrom s Ingeborg fcfolm.
(fogeborg Holm is also interesting because, although it is stylistically retarded for its date, in that it contains no cuts within its scenes apart from a couple of letter Inserts, it nevertheless shows how such formal qualities can be largely irrelevant to the total aesthetic value of a work. For this film has a dramatic depth and power, resulting almost entirely from the handling of narrative and acting, that is superior to anything that Griffith or anyone else had put together by
1913. )
In Italy too there was some copying of the subject matter and techniques of the Vitagraph films, but again no wholesale adoption of the Vitagraph angle.
Before leaving this subject I should mention that the dominant position of the Vitagraph company in Europe was supported by the fact that from 1909 onwards they were the only American company that actually printed copies of their films there as well as in the U.S.A. This was done in their factory outside Paris, using a second negative which had been shot simultaneously with the negative for the American distribution prints in a second camera set up beside the main camera on the studio stage. There was even a period of a couple of years around 1911 when Vitagraph used a special double camera to produce the two negatives, but this did not last.
By 1913 shooting in closer was becoming a craze, and even Keystone comedies tried using Close Ups and Medium Shots to cover slapstick action, as in His Chum [he Boron. This was of course foolish, for it meant that much of the slapstick movements were taking place outside the edge of the frame, and the whole point of the genre was being lost. The Keystone film-makers grasped this point almost immediately, and returned1 to using mostly Long Shot by
1914, but this brief episode is indicative of the extent to which closer filming became competitive before 1914.
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The Insert Shot
From the very beginning of this period it was completely standard practice with all the major film producers in America and Europe to cut Insert Shots of letters and other objects into a scene otherwise conducted in continuous Long Shot, whenever it was really necessary and appropriate. For instance, Vitagraph's Francesco da Rimini (1907) contains both these kinds oflnsert Shot. There are also a number of examplesofa highly specialised form of the use of the insert Shot, in which the entire film story is carried in close shots showing only part of the actors, to be found in this period,
:
99
A scens in The Physician of the Castle made by Pathe early in 190S. It is mostly lit with diffuse daylight, with some touching up from arcfloodlights from the front.
This idea appeared very early, with G.A, Smiths As Seen Through an Area Window (1901), which related an incident revolving round a man making advances to a woman, done in just one shot showing the feet of the people involved. I have seen no sign of this technique reappearing until the Ambrosio company made La storia di Lah in 1909, though Vitagraph's The Story the Boots Told of 190S docs use some close-ups of feet doing this and that as part of a moralising story, but most of its narrative is carried on in ordinary shots of the characters. La storia di Lulu on the other hand tells a story in several scenes by using nothing hut insert shots of the feet of the actors. Unfortunately the narrative organization of this film is rather confused. Later on the American Vitagraph company returned to the idea, with variations, in Over the Chafing Dish (1911) and Extremities (1913), which in their turn may have had something to do with Ambrosio having another more extended try at the same idea in Varnore palest re of 1914.
Scene Dissection in General
From 1907 to 1909 cuts within a scene, other than cuts to Insert Shots, continued to be rare, with the exception of the numerous trick films which continued to be made at Pathe in 1907 and 1908. These films, which mostly consist of just one scene, regularly use at least one pair ol cuts straight down the lens axis from Long Shot to a closer shot, usually with quite good position matching of the actors across them. (I must emphasize that I am not talking about invisible' trick cuts here, which these films also contain in abundance,) Sometimes these Pathe trick films contain quite a number of these cuts in and out, and the closer shots can be anything from Medium Long Shot to Medium Close Up, as in En avam la musiaue (1907) and Sculpture modernc
This Medium Close Up is cut into the main scene, and both the background and lighting have been adjusted, with an arc floodlight put close in to light the man fully,
(190S). Those two films, and many others like them, were all imported into New York and the rest of America, and anyone attending several cinema programmes at the time that DAV. Griffith started directing would have had great dilficulty in not seeing at least one of them. Despite the fact that this kind ofcut to a closer shot had occasionally been used in Biograph and Fdison films before 1906, both companies, along with Vitagraph seem to have almost abandoned the practice in 1907 and 190S, and the Vitagraph and Edison film-makers did not return to it for some years, in French films from 1903, on the other hand, there are a few non-trick films like The Physician of the Castle which also have a close shot cut into a scene. (For a complete description of this film see my Moving Into Pictures) The best that DAV. Griffith managed in 190S after he started directing was a cut from Very Long Shot to Medium Long Shot once in 77iť Ingrate. However, in 1909 Grilľith did indeed make a couple of films that cut into and out of a Medium Shot in the middle of a scene, but in this case their function was to show an important detail, just as in an Insert. Shot that only includes the object, and not the person using it. {n the case of The Medicine Bonk this is the mistaken choice of bottle made b v a child. On the other hand, in the Pathé films that Max Linde r made from 1908 onwards , such as The Woidd-be juggler (Í90S) and A Young Lady-Killer (1909), the function of the Medium Shot cut into the middle of the scene seems to be to get the maximum out of his facial expression. In 1909 there are more of these, and the usage had spread to a few Italian films, not all of them comedies, In all of the instances so far mentioned, the camera is moved straight in down the lens axis, and the matching of position of the actor across the cuts is nearly always poor. On the odd occasion when the position matching is heller, my feeling is that it is
too
mi<
are
more a matter ofgood luck than good judgement.
The situation did not change much in 1910, with only Í couple of Biograph "films using a cut In to a closer shot in one scene, and also at least two Vitagraph films doing likew.se, while there is rather more of this sort of thing amongst French and Italian films. In 1911, out of 124 American films that I haveanalysed, only tím m ™ to acloser shot in the Jddlc ofa scene, while amongst 130 European films there e no less than 28 using the technique. These are mostly French and Italian films, but there are also three Danish films involved as well. Before being too impressed by these figures, H isr worth remembering that by 1911 American films, and particularly Vitagraph and Biograph CAms, had their master shots taken closer in on the average than European films. And even more importantly, 1911 was the year when some of the Griffith examples of the technique, as in The Battle and The Lonedale Operator, were used at a point in the narrative which would have a considerable emotional impact. Although Griffith may have been the first to realise the dramatic effectiveness of going in to a close shot at the rioht moment, he was not alone in 1931. The director of the Edison company's The Switchman's Towe rents in to a Medium Close Up of the switchman at the moment that he realises that a train is headed for disaster.
In 1912 the idea really caught on in the United States, and film-makers at most of the companies joined in, with 40 films using the technique out of 216 seen, which is now aboul the same as the proportion in European films of that year. This remained pretty much the same in 1913, though there were now a few examples of cuts all the way in to a true Close Up in American films, and also some examples of a change of angle on cutting in, but this was not true of European films. As well as that, the matching of actor positions across the cuts was getting much better in American films, and even to some extent in European films. However, in all this, we are still talking about the use of cms in to a closer shot in only one or two scenes in a film. The above facts explain why Italian film-makers in 191S were dismissive ofthe recommendations in a pamphlet Charles Patné had published in Italy, called Manuále per uso dei dircnori d\ scena iio/jam, as part of his plans to take advantage of 'Italian production facilities. It was bitten by Louis Gasnler, the chief director at the 'Rathe studios in New York, and amongst other things, recommended the greater use of the ptimo piano by Italian directors. The reason for the Italian, rejection of this advice, with the claim that they knew alt about using the pimo piano, was that though in 19IS Ciasnier was meaning what we understand bv a Close Up, wllich had by then come to be frequently used m American films, the Italians understood it as what they had be,n occasionally doing since 1910, which was cutting
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: I9Q7-1913
a somewhat closer shot into the occasional scene. But these closer shots in Italian films were only what we would call Medium Shots, showing the body from the hips up, and were taken at a distance of nine feet, because that was as close as they took anything, except inserts.
It is also possible to break down a scene into more than one shot by changing the camera angle across the cut, as had already happened in a few films in the previous period. This kind or cut continued to be quite rare until 1913, unless the camera was forced away from the standard move straight down the axis by the physical nature of the set or location. An early example of a cut within a scene with a large change of angle is given by Roverens Bmd (Viggo Larsen, 1907), in which there is a cut from a Very Long Shot of a group in an exterior scene to another Very Long Shot from the opposite angle, (This scene is described, with illustrations, by Marguerite Engberg in Irh> Vol. 2, [MoT, l9S4)r It is naturally much easier to do this sort of thing on real exteriors than in studio shots, where special preplanning and set-building arc called for if opposite angles arc to be used within a scene. Nevertheless this point has been taken account of in a pair of reverse angles in Romance of an Umbrella (Vitagraph, 1909), in which the shots are taken from behind each of the two characters interacting, and the set reconstructed to make this possible-Reverse Scenes and Reverse-Angles
To cover the development of reverse angle cutting properly, I have to return to the crucial case of TAssassinat du Due de Guise yet again. For this film contains yet another novel feature that proved to be much more significant for American than for European film-making- This is in the final pair of shots in the sequence showing the Duke's progress through various antechambers in the Royal palace to a waiting room crowded with conspirators. In the first of these two shots the Duke is seen walking away from the camera up to an open doorway through which can be seen the final room and some of the conspirators in it, and then there is a cut to a continuation of the action as he walks through the doorway, which is shot from the opposite direction, so that the conspirators are now in the foreground and the doorway and the room the Duke is leaving is in the background. To obtain these two shots, both sets had to be specially constructed with movable back walls to enable the camera to get far enough back to cover the figures seen full length in the foreground of each shot. This is something no film-makers had thought worth the bother of doing before this date. Although shots taken from opposite directions to a scene had been put together well before this date, as far as;J know this very infrequent practice had always involved at least one of the scenes being shot outdoors on location,
i
i
1
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Í0I
s i § i & ij <■ i
/I studio set representing two different offices in two separate buildings separated by a street in Vitagraph's The Romance of an Umbrella (1909).
which eliminates the set rebuilding problem. Starting with Williamson's Fire! there had always been occasional films which show action on a set with a window in the back wall, with a backdrop behind It, followed by a shot on location of a window seen from the other side, with more or less matching action, or the opposite arrangement. After 1'Assassinot du Due dc Guise had appeared in New York, D.W, Griffith used a variant of reverse-angle construction like that used in The Runaway Match and its imitators in an interior scene in The Drunkard's Reformation of 1909. In this case the cuts are between Long ShoLs of The Drunkard (and the rest of the audience), and Long Shots of the play they arc watching. The shots of the audience are taken from a slightly high angle so that the rows of seats in the auditorium
An exterior scene in The Monogramrncd Cigarette (Yankee, 1910).
The opposite angle to the previous shot taken from inside the office which wasformerly in the background. The man in the previous shot has just walked out of frame in the background
before the cut to this shot.
fill the frame, and no extra set construction u as necessary. It is really only this sub-category of reverse angle cuts which are also Point of View cuts that Griffith was ever easy with, and further than that, he only used them when he was showing characters in the kind of theatrical situation where their use is practically essential. As the years went by the use of reverse-angle cutting became a standard technique in American films, but by the early 'twenties it was clear that Crillith was unable or unwilling to use them freely, and this contributed to the 'old-fashionedh look of his films. Or as ( would put it, his films became stylistically retardeddn this respect. To be absolutely accurate about this matter, there are one or two instances also of Grilllib using reverse-angle cuts in a chase when the hunter and hunted are in sight of
......        T_., ---.
There is then a cut back andforth between the previous angl
and this opposite angle on the scene
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
102
fir * ■,'>t^:-. ■ rr-- .....-i:;
'M l. !■ .--
■■■ív
.1 dialogue exchange conducted in Medium Shot in 1 lie Loafer (Arthur Mack-ley, 1911). The actor is hack-lit by the sun, withfll fight reflected up onto hisface from a matt wftitt board.
each oilier, though still in Long Shot or Very Long Shot. However in most scenes involving a pursuit Griffith shot the hunter and hunted from the some direction, as did most other film-makers at this time.
To return yet again to TAssassinat du Due (k Guise^ the sort of set-up when.1 a scene is shown from two opposed directions in succession immediately caught on in a small way. Vitagraph used the idea from Lime to time, as in Romance of an Umbrella(1909) and Uncle Tom's Cabin ([910), and so did other people, including Viggo Larscn again, in his Rewfotion&hrylfop of 1909. In ail of these cases except Romance f an Umbrella, the use of the reverse scene was quite gratuitous, and added nothing to the exposition of the narrative from any point of view, lly late 1910 the reverse
&2
A       » Mph hté His Last Bglu, she, on locate
m
The reverse angle to the previous shot in The Loafer. This is also lit hy sunlight from the right, and reflector fill from the left. The cut between these tivo shots are repeated in the
scene.
scene had begun to move outdoors, in the Yankee company\ The Manogrammcd Cigarette. However, in all these cases, the camera is well hack Erom the actors, who are in Medium Long Shot at the closest, at about 12 feet distance, By 1912 the device was commonly referred to as a 'reverse scene1 in the United States.
At this point it is important to distinguish carefully between the several fairly distinct classes of reverse-angle shots. The earliest example, as in Roverens Urud, in which the camera Ls far back from the actors in the shots from opposite directions of the same scene, is the least common in modern times. The next major class is of a pair of shots from bellind the backs of the two characters who are interacting, and slightly to the side of the line joining their
ľ*"" 'i-
"Hie o
opposite angle, showing the watcher uhosc Point of
the previous shot ua$*
One of the shots continuing this scene in His Last Fight, in which the Point of View shot is taken from closer in.
eyes (the 'eye-line'), as in Romance af\m Umbrella. This form was rarely used in the decade following its first appearance though there are some other examples in Vitagraph films such as Uncle Toms Cabin (1910), and it is still not the most common form of reverse-angle construction. I shall refer to it hereafter as 'over the shoulder reverse -angles\ lor this is the term used by film makers nowadays, when they have to make the distinction. The major class ol angle - reverse-angle cuts, irom this period forever onwards, was what can be described as in front ol the shoulder1 reverse-angles. In these, each oi the pair ofcharacters interacting appears alone in a reasonably close shot directed approximately frontal 3 y at them, and the presence of the other person whom they are looking at lias to be inferred from previous information. This sort of reverse-angle cutting, first appears in The f.vajcr (Essanay, I9|?j, a Western made by Arthur Mack Icy at the end of 19] 1 in which there are repeated cuts bet vice n Medium Shots of two men talking, both taken from the front with the camera just oil their eve-line so that they drj not look into the lens. It seems quite possible to me that this variety oi the reverse-angle had begun evolving earlier than the example that I have just mentioned, since its handling in The Loafer is already quite assured.
The further development of the In front ol the shoulder' reverse-angle over the next year or so is entangled with the beginning of the Tree use of unvignetted Point of View shots, and seems to have taken place on exterior scenes, and mostly in California. This i* not very surprising, since siudio shootino on the fairlv small sets usual in America at the time presented obstacles to the free use of reverse angle cutting. Many sets were constructed with only two walls in L shape, which made shooting the opposite angle almost impossible, and for those sets with three wails, shooting
MB
And in the matching reverse angle, the watcher is also shot
from closer as the excitement mounts.
would have to stop while a wall was removed, because of the smalt size of the sets, (Remember that even a Medium Shot, Irom the waist up, requires r hat the camera be nine teet back irorn the actor). So we find that there are quite a number of liirns matte late in 1912 on exteriors that have either simple reverse angle cutst or reverse angles which are also part of wardier-POV pairs of shots. Arthur Mackley later made The Shotgun Ranrhman for Essanay towards the end oi 191 2, and this contains manv reverse angles On the i\Vw York šfclš; there are a couple off han ho user films from tate 1912 that have reverse angle cuts, Treasure Trove and In a Garden, and both also contain a f so PQV reverse angles as well as plain reverses. At Vitagraph's California unit, the director Roll in S. Sturgeon had picked up the idea, and used reverses in 7 he Cra\cn, Out o j the VWím.v, and Una of the Sierras, Prom here the idea seems io have got over to the main Vitagraph studios in New York, and was taken up most enthusiasttcallv by Ralph luce, though films irom other directors contain the occasional re veršu angle cut b v 19] 3.
fhs Last Fttfht, which Ralph ínee made in the middle of I9n, is cjuite remarkable in that of the 75 shots that make up its single red, 2S form part ol reverse-angle pairs. Et seem> that it was a number ol years before any other director used such a high proportion ol reverse-angle cuis in a (ilm. Some of the reverse-angle cut* in Fits Last Ftght are between a shot o J "a watcher and a shut repn.scni Point of View
fPOVf, and this category is also rarely represented in this period, though it occurred as early as tta objecti\i*' form oí reverse-angle construction which í have been describing
{Since Ralph Ince plays such an important part in trustor y of the development oi 'continuity cinemar or V lasted I cinema1, I must make it cl^r that his career v,^ not jt all associated with that of his letter-known M^r brmkr.
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Thomas bee, Ralph Incc began &0 actor at Vitagraph before Ire moved over to directing for that company in 1913, and he never worked with his brother, or for his brother s various companies, More about Ralph Ince can bc read ,n
mv Moving Into Pictures.)
~\ m European films made in 1912 and 1913 one finds a Tew extremely rare instances of revcrse^angle cutting, but only under the same severely limited conditions as in Griffith s films. Basically that means in scenes involving a theatre and audience, such as Nordisk's Oesdemona and Et Drama paa Havei of 1911 and 1912. However, most scenes involving a theatre audience's reactions in European films were still1 shot with a small angle change from the front-on view of the static to a shot of the watchers in a box near the stage, or even through the back of abox looking towards the stage, with the occupants turning a bit towards the camera so that liheir faces are readable,
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Point Of View Shots
True Point of View (POV) shots are shots representing what a person shown in a IIIm sees, cut in at the moment when the person 3s looking, and taken in .the direction in which they are looking. There are two categories of such shots: those in which the view is shown in a full-frame shot, and those in which the view is surrounded1 by a black vignette mask, representing the view through a telescope, or binoculars, or a keyhole. This latter sort appeared very early, and in considerable numbers, as has already been described in the previous chapter,, but the former variety only began to appear in any quantity after 3908, so clearly showing that they had an entirely different conceptual status for film-makers of the time. This is another case of something that seems to us to be an obvious generalization of a technical device failing to be made by early filmmakers. Nevertheless, there are one or two cases of what are almost vignetted POV shots from before 1908.1 have mentioned the 190S P.auvre mere, andthen there is Lovejuaten (1907) from Kordisk,. in which shots of hunters looking for their prey are alternated' with shots of wild animals taken in 700 enclosures from a high, angle which completely fails to match, the direction in which the hunters are looking, tt is noticeable that all the vignetted POV shots used in films from the very beginning arc fairly correct in the directions they are taken from, unlike these gropings for what seems to us an obvious extension of the idea.
In 190S Pavhe produced another example, The Shrimp in which- the matching cTangle 0f*hc scene viewed to that ol thewatchcrVlookis rather better than before, and: then
T m ^       m Gm&i a special ease of
die true POV shot which,provcd very influential. This was when showing an audience watching a play or other show
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
The first film in which he did this was A Wreath in Time, made at the beginning of December 190S. In this film there arc shots which show part of a theatre audience in a stage box reacting to a play, shot from the side, alternating with shots of the stage taken head on, and the direction of these stage shots matches the direction in which the watchers are looking fairly well. Several weeks later Griffith made a much more powerful film, A Drunkard's Reformation, in which the audience is shot from head-on in Full Shot, as arc the actors on the stage, so that the shots are reverse angles as well as POV shots. Strangely enough, after this film, Griffith very rarely used the Point of View shot, and when he did, seemed unable to use it in its general form outside theatre scenes. It was only in 1913, when a number of other film-makers were adopting a correctly realised POV structure in general situations, that Griffith managed a few films in which he too got it right, namely The Massacre, OIaft an Atom, and The Telephone Girl and the Lady. Then he seems to have abandoned any further attempt to come properly to grips with the POV shot, and I believe there are none at all in Biah of a Nation, other than in the theatre assassination scene.
Amongst the film-makers who really developed the standard Point of View shot after 1909, the people at Vitagraph played a particularly important part. In their C%/)l; orf Saved hy Wireless (1909), there is a title describing the pleasure that the crew of the damaged ship involved in the collision have in reaching New York harbour is followed by a series of three shots taken forwards from the bow of an unseen ship sailing into the harbour. These are followed directly by a Long Shot of sailors on the deck of the actual ship looking out to one side of the frame and pointing, which implies, not entirely convincingly, that the previous shots were their Point of View. This kind of 'revealed1 POV structure, in which the shot of the looker does not precede the POV shot, but only comes after it, was extremely rare in the beginning, and has remained so to this day, for obvious reasons. The only example 1 have picked up from several hundred films made over the next few years is in Sallies Sure Shot, made at Selig in 1913,
The more conventional presentation of the Point of View shot, as the unvignetted view seen by one of the characters we have seen looking at something in the previous shot, occurs in Back to Nature in 1910, in which we see a Long Shot of people looking down over the rail of a ship taken from below, followed by a shot of the lifeboat they are looking at taken from their position. However, the Vitagraph film-makers continued to he a little uneasy with the device, as a true POV shot is introduced by an explanatory intertitle, "What they saw in the house across the courV in Larry Trimble's jean and the Waif made at the end of 1910. But a few months later, Trimble made Jean Rescue which has
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
POV shots introduced at an appropriate point without explanation. After this, unvignetted POV shots began to appear fairly frequently in Vitagraph films; in fact in five more titles released in 1911 among 31 prints viewed as compared with only three films from the same year among the 93 prints from other American companies that I have so far seen, These latter are The Corporation and the Ranch Giri from Essanay, The Little Soldier of 64 (Kalem), and Edison's The Switchman s Tower\ which is still using a 'What he saw' intertitle to explain the nature of the following POV shot.
The really big surge of interest in the POV shot happened in the latter part of 1912, and in 1912 and 1913 taken together, Vitagraph films continued to lead the way. There are 2S examples among 92 Vitagraph films from those two years, whereas amongst 29S films from other American companies there were only 45 which included anything like POV shots, and more than half oi these were shot from angles which clearly did not actually correspond to the angle of the watcher's sight, whereas only 4 of the Vitagraph sample did. In other words, although film-makers outside Vitagraph were becoming interested in using the POV structure, they were having considerable difficulty mastering it. It is noticeable that Allan Dwan at American Film Manufacturing was one of those who could not get it quite right, and at Essanay, the same is true of a couple of attempts in G.W. Anderson's films, whereas the Essanays directed by other directors get the POV directions correct. Given the importance of integrating the faked wild animal action into many of the Selig company's films, it is perhaps not surprising that their directors, despite their generally low level of competence, were managing to get some POV shot structures correct by 191 3 +
The way that POV shots could be used for the maximum d ra m a tic i m p ac t is be s t i i i u s t ra ted fro m V i t agraph fi I m s - Su ch films are still not very frequent, but William V. Ranous' Poet and Peasant (!912) is one striking example. Here the story is about a country hunchback who secretly loves a beautiful peasant girl, arid the shots in question are cut in from his POV when he sees the girl with a visitor from the city with whom she has fallen in love. In this film the shots of the watcher are as usual taken from the side or back, as afso occurs in Jean Rescues (19\ 1), and Cardinal Wolsey (1912). But we are now at the point where the emerging use of the Point of View shot as a standard constructional device blended with ihc new reverse angle idea, so that the shots of watcher and their Point of View could also form a angle - reverse-angle pair of shots taken from closer in, A very polished example of the combination of the two techniques occurs in tout of the Shadows, made by Rollm S. Sturgeon late in 1912. to this film th e watcher is shown from the front looking oul past the camera in a series of shots which cut in closer to her
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as she becomes more disturbed by what she is watchingunob-Wvcd. This use of cutting to a closer shot to increase the ■mensity ol emotional expression in a scene, rather than just to show something more clearly, dates back to about 1904, and though early examples are extremely rare, one finds * S00d cx^plc in The Physician of the Castle (1908). After this, D.W. Griffith was the person who used the device of relating the scale of the shot to the emotional intensity most effectively, though not till after 1910. However, because of his inability to handle the general form of reversc^angle cutting outside a theatrical audience situation, he was not able to develop the idea further, as was done by other filmmakers in Rims such as Out of the Shadows.
There are just a iew European examples oi the device, but in most of these, the directions are again wrong. The continuing European resistance to using any form ofseune dissection in this period is sufficiently indicated bv the number of scenes in European films which were staged with a watcher lurking behind a bit of scenery in the background, while what he is watching is in the foreground of the same shot, just as it would have been staged in the theatre, rather than by using a POV shot.
Position Matching on Cuts
As already remarked, the Pathe trick films made before 190S have fair to perfect matching of the actors position across a cut to or from a closer shot within a scene, bul as such cut.s became more common in the work of other film-makers, principally in America, the position matching across their cuts was often poor. This was definitely the case in that small minority of D.W, Griffith's films that include cuts within scenes. This* would seem to be due to the way he shot scenes, for according to Karl Brown (Adventures with DAV. Griffith), it was his practice to vary the action in each shot in every lake he made of it. Tim* there would have been no way of remembering the exact movements made in any individual take if it were decided Lo film a closer shot to insert into the master scene. Grilfitbs interest would seem to have been less in continuity, and more in the dramatic effects he could achieve, in particular by eliciting performances from bis actors, as is also indicated by their tendency to play to the from (Lfc, to ward i The Master).
However, there are some Griffith films that Jiave good Cuts on action within a -scene, even quite early, such as After Many Yean (1908), where a cut from a very disiam shot to a Full Shot is done in the middle of the action of the castawav leaping for joy. And of course there is The Sauawi Love (\9U). where multiple cameras were used lo shoot the scene. Before Í911 there are a few signs of filmmakers elsewhere working on the perfecting of cuts on action, as in Vitagraph * The Telephone (1910), where the
106
po^ibilUy of a smooth cut is definitely not due to the use of multiple cameras. In The Telephonethe cut in quest.on is from a location exterior shot of a woman falling away from in open window, to the same action seen from inside filmed on a studio set, the cut being perfect to the frame, and the actress's movements identical The handling of the cutting of movements out of one shot into the next elsewhere in this film confirm that the example of cutting on action mentioned was no accident. Still, progress was slow, and as far as D.W. Griffith was concerned; it is still quite easy to find films from 1912 like friends, where there are substantial mismatches on cuts in and out from a close shot.
As far as directional continuity (having the directions of the actors' movements match as they walked out of one shot into the next) is concerned, there is a noticeable improvement in American films towards 1913, due to the institution of simple procedures to keep: a check on this particular kind of continuity during shooting. For instance, although Griffith's control: of directional continuity was never oood, even in the 'twenties, there was a definite improvement in ibis respect inhis films during the period wc arc considering, presumably due to the introduction of these procedures of recording continuity. In 1911 a film of his like The Loncdalc Operator still has a number of 'wrong' directions of movement from location to location, but by 1913 this was much less noticeable in his films. European directors \vere in general1 worse at handling continuity, and in some Danish films of 1911 and. 1912 one can still see what wc would now call hard 'jump cuts', in which a character who has been left in shot in one scene is discovered in shot in the next scene in a quite different location, without there being any explanatory inter title, however some of the best European directors such, as Victorin jasset and Benjamin Christen sen were definitely mating progress in this respect by 1913.
■' ■ ■ ■ Cutting Rates
The increasing use of the practice of breaking a scene down into a number of shots, along with the spread of the practice of cross-cutting betweenparalleV actions, meant that the number of shots in a film increased throughout the years .1907491* To give some idea,of this process in action, Vitagraph.'s />0ÍIMÍť(7 do ňím,hi contains 14 shots and 8: intertitles, while their Napoleon^ Afan of Dutiny o£ 1909 contains 27 shots and liUnterlife These films are fairly typical of the general mass 0r.production in this .respect but in that same year of 1909 ,D:W. Griffith's Drive for a Life had 42 shots and S intertitles. I do not have many fibres for m* but of these, Vitagraph^ m ^ j hat the fastest cutting, with 35 shots in only 440 feet. In 19 M, still considering one-red films with the usual length of about
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
9O0Teet, we find that The Loafer contains 39 shots including intertitles, and is rather typical at that, while Griffith's The Voice ofihe Child has 90 shots in the same length. Other American examples from 1911 for comparison are The Colonel's Daughter (flex) with 29 shots in 937 ft+, fide Lost Freight Car from Kalem with 39 in 713 ft., and A Cowboy for love from Bison with only 19 in 923 ft. For comparison, some European examples from I9f 1 are Angela tutelar? from Cincs, with 25 shots in 735 ft. and La mone civile from FA I with 27 in 803 ft. An entirely typical Danish example from 1911, Ekspeditrieen, has only 70 shots in four fairly full reels. A Max Under film from Pathe in 1911, Voisin-voisine, has 22 shots in 581 feet, more nearly approaching the American speed, but this is exceptional. French dramas from all companies have far fewer shots in them, as indicated by the Gaumont film Panther's Prey made in 1913, which has only SI shots in 1737 feet. In 1912 Conscience (Vitagraph) contains 49 shots, and by 1913 a film typical of the better end of production, the Than ho user Company's just a Shabby Doll, includes 60 shots in a little less than a reel. But in the same year D.W. Griffith's The Coming of Angeto has 116 shots. Looking at these figures, and also considering hundreds of other films from these years in this respect, the unavoidable conclusion is that D.W. Griffith alone led the way towards faster cutting, and other film-makers very definitely tagged along behind him. This is in sharp distinction to the develop-m c nt of closer camera pos i tioni ng in A m cr i ca n fi 1 ms th rough these years, which was to a large extent competitive all the way.
The increase in cutting rate was noticed at the time, as one can see from an article in The Moving Picture World (August 10, 19.12), which has been republished in George Pratt's Spellbound in Darkness. This article quotes more figures for the number of shots and inter titles of the kind I have given above, but in this case Tor films made in 1912. The author of the article is however rather confused between true scenes, and the shots they might or might not be divided into, and he tends to think of all shots as separate dramatic entities, like the scenes of a play. Because of this, he considers the shots to be much loo short in some films, particularly those from Biograph, Not Tor the first time a critic in The Moving .Picture HWJfailed to understand a stylistic development that was already well -established and successful with the general public, as the magazine finally acknowledged a year later.
As lar as D.W. Griffith was concerned in all this, it must be reiterated that outs within scenes made relatively little contribution to the number of shots in his films, for even in 1912 some of his films have no cuts within scenes at all, e.g. the Three Sisters. Besides the contribution of cross-cutting to the large number of shots in his films, there was also his technique of playing a seenc across a number of adjoining
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
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locations, with cuts at each move from one to ihe ncxL In a number of films, such as The Battle (1911), he reaches the point where a scene which would be played in one location and one shot in any other director s film of this date is spread across three adjoining locations and four cuts.
Another Pathe Example
In 1907 Pathe films were still the dominating presence in the American market, and the film-makers of the two major American companies derived some major stylistic-features from their example. The Vitagraph film-makers took note of the way the Pathe film-makers had been using extra shots of the comings and goings of their actors on the Pathe staircase to increase the length of many of their films. As Albert E. Smith, one of the directors and founders of the Vitagraph company put it in his autobiography, Two Reels and j Crank (1952), lNo one complained about this until it became evident that Pathe was using its goings and comings over and over again. The stories varied, but sandwiched in would be the same goings and comings. This aroused a two-horned complaint: the audiences were getting tired of the same goings and comings, often having little relation to the story, and secondly the buyers weren't going to pay fifteen cents a foot for this surplusage. They said the story was better without the goings and comings, and so they began to scissor them out of the picture, paying Pathe only for what was left/
Now although this anecdote is rather exaggerated in its details, there is no doubl that many Vitagraph films lack transitional scenes showing the movement of the actors *rom place to place, and some even omit the less important
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The camera set-ups used for the scenes in and around the house fa DAY. Griffith sTYiz Battle (1911). in the first shots of the film , the two principals play a continuous scene through the camera set-ups at J, 2 and 3, and then continue back again through 2 to L At later points in the film, action moves in the same way back and forth sideways through the other areas
indicated.
dramatic scenes in their stories, which are merely reported in the narrative titles bridging I he shots. Although the Pathe example had a largely negative eflect on Vitagraph practice, this docs not mean that the flow of movement from scene to scene is not well handled in Vitagraph films on the occasions when it was judged appropriate. It is just that there is less of it than in most of the other American companies1 films.
The Space Beside
At lliograph, D.W. Griffith drew exactly the opposite lesson from the Pathe example, and developed further the practice of transferring part of the action of a seene into adjoining hallways and roums even when this was not strictly necessary, although in his caac what the actors were doing was certainly always relevant to the development of the story. Ben Brewster has suggested to me that the first Griffith film lhat shows a .sign of this manner of staging action is An Awful Moment, and I am certain that it is embryonically visible in The lirolien Locket and A Wreath in Time, which were also made at the very end of 1908, From this point onwards the amount of movement from room to room slowly increases in Griffith's films, until by 1911 it has become obsessive. What this practice gave Griffith was the same amounl of action split up into a greater number of shots, and this greater number ol shots within the same length of film was undoubtedly the major feature of the dvnamtcs of his films. The other way that Griffith used what we might call *dic space beside' was lo provide an extra delaying stage in the advance of the villains on his helpless heroines in his suspense films - the next room had one more door they had to break down while ihe rescuers got closer
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SP cross-cut scene of parallel action. By 1910 he had: also expanded the method to include in the same way action spread backwards and forwards across what were effectively adjoining spaces in exterior scenes. There are innumerable examples of this, and another example can he studied in Moving Into Pictures, but mention of cross-cut ting to parallel action brings us to the other major feature of bis-style that
Griffith derived from Pathe films.
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Gross^Gutting to Parallel Action
As noted in the previous chapter, embryonic cross, cutting showed signs of emerging before 1907, and further examples of its development occurred before its alleged invention by DAV\ Griffith in thc latter part of 1903, The Vitagraph film, Thc Mill Girl, which was released in September J907'has a scene with two chains of action going on inside and outside a house shown in a series of shots which alternate between the inside and outside three times, though really these actions are directly connected, since the pcrsoiv inside the house is reacting to what is going on outside after the first in side-outside alternation. Likewise in le The chez le concierge (Gaumont 1907), the many repeated Cuts between the inside andithe outside of the building are directly connected by the ringing of the bell inside to the actions of those ringing it outside. However, in the Patihc film, le ChcvaJ embolic, made late in 1907, and released at thc beginning of 190S in America, the actions shown inside and outside a house are truly independent. In this film there arc repeated cuts back and'-forth between four pairs of shots showing a delivery man's horse demolishing a grain me rchant s s toe k out s i de t h e ho use, a nd h i s d r i vcr da wd I i ng on his calls to various flats inside (more 'Pathe 'goings and comings'). And [njcvuh chcrcher k pain made aboutthc same time, a similar piece of cross^cutling with a mild suspense element is set up. liut far more striking is The Physician <fthe Castle. This was released in New York on 28 March 1908 under the title A Narrow Escape,,and habits story, and even the staging of one of the scenes, reproduced in Griffith's film The Lonely Villa, whieivhe made in May 1909. Thebasie plot of The Vhysician of the Castle is that two criminals lure a doctor away from Ins home to a local chateau with a false telegram, then break into his house, where his wife and child remain, killing a. maid: in the process. The doctor s wife barricades hcrseir behind a series of .doors with her son; andrings her husband ai the chateau. The two strands of actionhave already Wshown in alternate scenes at this pomt, and' then we get a pair of Medium Close Lips, of the W , wile and the doctor taking on the telephone, using th, method: of representing a phone conversation for th! Jrst tune ever, as far as Jain aware. There Is,hen a cut back
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
After this the doctor is driven in his car back to bis house in a series of four shots, followed by a shot back inside his house ofthc criminals breaking though the second barricade. The rescuers then burst into this scene to save the day. The use of a cutaway to the other end of a telephone conversation can also be seen used in the Pathc version ofľAffaire Drejfus, along with the other alternative way of treating a telephone conversation, which was to use a split screen effect to keep both speakers on the screen at the same time. Both methods slowly became standard methods of treating a telephone conversation over the next few years.
Even at Biograph there was a weak example of1 cross-cutting between parallel actions before Griffith started to direct for them. Her First Adventure made in May 1908 by Wallace McCutcheon, when Griffith was already acting there, has repeated cuts from the kidnapped child and her captors to shots of those pursuing them further hack down the streets they are travelling through.
There does not seem to be much doubt that Griffith saw k Chcval einbaue, for his film Thc Curtain Me, which. was made later in 1908, has some of its action tjuite closely based on the Pathe film, but it also has to be said that his first use of cross-c Utting in The Fatal r/öur, made in July of 1908, has a much stronger suspense story served by this construction than those in the surviving Pathé examples. And it has to-be admitted that whoever made the Pathe films did not recognize the potentialities of this technique, and that from this point onwards Griffith certainly developed the device much further, gradually increasing the number of alternations between the t wo j and later three, sets of parallel scenes, and also their speed. He used a cross-cutting structure in approximately a quarter oľ his Biograph films made in 1908 and 1909, but this usage was only slowly taken up by other American film-makers. Examples from other production companies, such as Vitagraph's The Telephone of 19-10, arc extremely rare until 1913, when cross-cutting began to appear in films from thc Thomas Incc company and some others.
Just why this was so is not completely clear to me, but certainly film stories have to be specially constructed to be suitable for cross-cutting between parallel actions, particularly in one^cel films. Griffith was in a position to do this, since he worked with what were described at the time (1912) as 'on the fla p fan-envelop e stories1. So although he did not invent the technique of cross-cutting, he did consciously develop it into a powerful method of film construction, It is also important to note that Griffith described cross-cutting indiscriminately as the switchback'or'cutback'o. ' flash-back'technique, and that by thc last of these terms he did ™ mean what wc now understand by 'liiash-back\ The true 'flashback* also developed in this
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913 period, but not at all under Griffith's hands.
What Griffith Really Did
There are some aspects of Griffith fs work which have been satisfactorily described and emphasized in the past, and the most obvious of these are the large-scale constructional symmetries in some of his films. Thc best place to read about these effects is in Tom Gunning s book D. Wr Griffith and thc Origin of the American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991), though some films such as The Country Doctor (190S) have been analysed before, by Robert M, Henderson, Vlada Petric, and others. The peak of Griffith's efforts at a complex large-scale narrative structure in the Biograph period was .1 Corner in Wheat, and you can read about the significances of the form of this film in Gunning's book.
Richard Schickel has pointed out in his D.IK Griffith (Pavilion, 198+), that one of Griffith's most important methods was thc invention of striking bits of expressive business for the actors to do. The examples of this are almost innumerable, but a good one that caught my attention is thc enraged and jealous husband in The Voice of a Child (1911) walking around his ofHce chomping on a ci^ar and puffing clouds of smoke out of it through clenched teeth.
One aspect of this last technique which has not been properly brought out before this is that because of the various methods of narrative dissection which he did develop, i.e. cross-cut ting between parallel action and thc use ofthc 'space beside', by 1909 Griffith was moving towards the point where most shots in his films contained no more than one action which was significant lor the plot, in fact at this date there already begin to he shots in his films which contain nothing that advances the story, but just show someone moving quickly through them on the way to the next scene. However, when this was the case, Griffith ahvays tried to get the actor to make a movement of some noticeable kind. This is frequently no more than a brief halt to look back towards their pursuers, or a gesture towards where they are leading their companion, as in What the Daisy Said, or perhaps a pause for a self-satisfied chuckle towards the camera by the seducer, as in The Voice of a Child, and so on, and on, and on.
Another feature of D.W. Griffith's direction that becomes noticeable from about 1910 onwards is that he arranges the action so that one of the principals is left alone, and clearly thinking about their predicament. There then ensues a passage of silent acting, though without formal I'm me gestures, directed towards the front. The earliest sample I have particularly noted, though it is probably not the first, occurs in The Light That Came, when the heroine, who has been badly scarred in an accident, sits in front of
109
a mirror looking at herself. It has already been established, basically by means of narrative titles, that she fears that the blind man with whom she has fallen in love will reject her if his sight is restored by an operation, which could be financed with her savings. The whole plot or the film has clearly contrived to produce this situation, and so to give an opportunity for this piece of solo acting. As the examples multiply over thc following years, they become rather more blatant, particularly since the acting in the big scene becomes more obviously directed towards the front. The recipient of this acting opportunity is usually, though not ahvays, one of the inexperienced young girls Griffith now-started to engage as actresses.
Also from about 1910, there was a move towards shooting Griffith's films with a camera at head height, and together with thc other features of staging which I have already described; the frontal organisation in groupings and the use of side by side spaces, the Taster cutting, and so on, the effect hardens into idiosyncrasy.
Most of the more obvious particular aspects of D.W. Grilfith's style were inevitably adopted by the other directors at Biograph from 1910 onwards, so that Frank Powell, Mack Sennett, and later Tony O'Sullivan and Dell Henderson made films that used a fair amount of cross-cutting, the 'space beside', and general frontal organization. Their films look much more like Griffith films than they look like anything from other companies made at the same time. However, these other directors created at Biograph were much less talented than Griffith at inventing dramatically expressive gestures for their actors, or indeed even non-dramaticaljy expressive gestures. Even Biograph actors who did not direct films under Griffith, but left and became directors elsewhere, such as James Kirk wood, took up the more obvious features of Griffith's style, In particular, the rapid and immense success of Mack SenneIt's films at Keystone from 1912 meant that the major features of the Griffith style were generally adopted in America as the way to make slapstick comedy for quite a number of years, You can read more about this in the article *DAV. Griffith Shapes Slapstick" in Moving into Pictures,
Flash-Back Construction
There are two principal classes of flashbacks: those that show scenes in the past that someone is remembering in their own mind, and those that show past scenes that are being narrated by someone to an audience within the framing scene. This distinction may not have been dear to early film-makers, but since it is objectively quite definite, it is worth making here just to be on the safe side. The earliest known example of a narrated flashback occurs in ihe Cines film U fiohe della nonne, made in the middle of
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Napoleon in the late Empress Jose* phine's bedroom in Napoleon — Man or Destiny (Vitagraph, 1910), with the superimposed tide which has just appeared to announce the transition to the last of theflashback scenes
in this film,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
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Staging in depth with the action about to move from the space behind to theforeground in a location scene in 1c Siege de
Calais (And rcanL, 1911). The camera is set at hip level.
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190S, This begins with a Long Shot of the grandmother of the title telling a story to a group of children, and then there "s a dissolve, without any explanation, to the fantastic .story he is telling them, which continues through a number of scenes, these being joined by straight cuts and mtcrtitlcs. These intertittes do not seem tOibe the grandmother's actual words, but just the briefest of continuity explanations. The flashback is finally left through another dissolve back to the scene of the grandmother telling the story.
The other form of flash-back construction would seem to have developed out of the way dreams were represented in films of the previous period. Dream scenes were already being done in multi-shot form before 1907, and when they showed past events all that was required for them to become true flashbacks in the modern sense of the term was that the person shown having them should be awake rather than asleep. The first film that I know of in which this happens is Vitagraph's Napoleon - Man of Destiny made in 1909, Here, Napoleon is shown sitting in his palace in IS]5 after the bailie of Waterloo, awake and remembering his past life, scenes of which are cut directly into the framing scene after a superimposed title has appeared naming the event to-come. The Him ends with zflash-fonwd to what is, in the context of the film story, the future scene of his imprisonment on St, Helena, The only example of flashback construction from 1910 that I have so far come across is in the Swedish Him, Fanrik Sidh Sagner. This is based on a narrative poem by the nineteenth century Finnish poet, ft, RuncW and the story is presented as a flashback inside a scene which shows actor representing the poet reading k I think it highly Lkely that there was further development of true flashback
construction during 3910, and one reason for this belief is that the scriptwriter George Rockhill Craw, writing in The Moving Picture World (Vol.8, no. 3, 21 January 1911, p. 178), suggests that it should have been used to improve on the script construction of Vitagraph s Three Cherry Pipt. (Of course he does not use the actual word 'flashback', but 'vision*, which had nowr extended in meaning to include what we call 'flashbacks', as well as describing the imaginary or dream visions already used in films.). In 1911 flashback construction got under way properly in Italy, with at least three HI ins. In the Italian Milano company's Linferno,, the story of Paolo and France sea, and also other stories told by the inhabitants of Hell, are introduced and narrated by dialogue titles cut into them, and with the beginning and ending of the flashbacks marked by fade-outs and fade-ins. The same method is used to present the same stories in the competing version of LTInferno, made almost simultaneously by the Helios company, The flashback made its next appearance in a surviving film in Luigi Maggi s Nozze d'oro, from later in the same year. In this Him an old couple on their golden wedding anniversary tell their children thai they will describe how they met, and immediately after the intertitlc conveying this information there is a straight cut to a scries of scenes continuously depicting those past events, which form the body of the film. At the end of the film the Iraming scene is returned to by means of a fade-out and a fade-in. In The Passer-hy, made by Oscar Apfel for Edison in 1912, the flashback was presented in what was to become one of the classic forms; the camera tracks into Close Up on a character who has started to narrate a scries of past events through dialogue titles to a gathering of people, and
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then there is a dissolve on bis features which leads directly to the first shot of the flashback, this is done without any descriptive intertitlc separating the present scene and the remembered scenes, and explaining that the scenes to come happened in the past. Doing flashbacks like this obviously depended on the use of a camera which could be wound back for dissolves, and this method was also facilitated by the recent introduction of dialogue titles cut into preceding scenes to make a preparation lor the llashback.
Examples of true flashback construction like those just described can be found in a few films Irom most
countries in 1912 and 1913, even Irom Russia (Rrotya IKozhoinhi) and Australia (The Sick Stockrider), and for a few years the device stood beside the gradual adoption of cross-cut ting as a way of introducing complexity into I Elm construction. One of the more notable examples of 19] i was just a Sludyhy Doll (Thanhouser Co,), in which one ofa scries of flashbacks includes another llashback inside itself: This is done as another scene inset within part of the frame which shows the main shot of the flashback. A number ol flashbacks in films in this year are just single shot scenes with the transition made by a fade-out and a fade-in. When the
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Staging irt depth in Lúonce Ferret's kJ Roman dun mousse (1913). 77m stvdio interior is largely lit with arc flood lights most of them out right in the foreground room, but there is also one out left lighting the boy in the chair. The light in the rear room U coming from a group of floodlights out
left.
flashback started to become really popu far in 1912, Griffith tried it out just once in Man's Genesis, where a character in the framing scene narrates the main story of the film, which is set in pre-historic times * However, his unease with this form of construction is demonstrated by the fact that when he remade the same story a year later as In Prehistoric Bavs, the past story is represented as a dream.
The Space Behind1
There was another peculiar and distinct form of staging that was developed in some French films of this period, as has been pointed out to me by Hen Brewster. His own account of this phenomenon can now be read in his article 'Deep Staging in French Films 1900-1914', which is included in Early Cinema: space - frame - narrative (edr T. Elsaesser, BFI Publishing, 1990). What was involved was a combination of certain special: features of the set design with die staging of action within it. .In the form in which it arose in interior scenes, the room sets were built with a large door at the back through which eoukMie seen another full-sixed room. Part of the action of the scene, though usually not the most important part, would be .played "in this back space, being visible through the door from the unchanging camera position, This usage, which mav have had.a theatrical origin, is first visible in embryonic form in MM) éu Due de Guise ,(l9eSj), „ul its development can be traced through othenfilmsof the 'Fihn-ďArf genre such
k Sif?C C&iaiS ^ m% Wí^ - variant
orm of the technique, ear Hed out. on exteriors, in which a large gateway with more open set behind it took the place or the doorway to the room behind[
S      OP feW Wm B m of staging spread to
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
Staging in depth and the use of the 'space behind' in Ekspeditriccn (August BJom, 1911). This shot is lit
solely by daylight.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
113
contemporary subjects such as Roman d'un mousse (Leonce Perret, 1913), and inevitably it also spread to the other European countries most influenced by French cinema, which were Denmark, Sweden, andltaly. Amongst a number of Danish examples could be mentioned Ekspcditrican (August Blom, 19M), and it could still be seen as late as 1918,as in Motor Dolorosa by Abel Gance.
This form of staging was rarer in American films during this periodj for they had quickly reached the point of development where any adjoining room, whether beside or behind the one where the main scene took place, would be entered by the camera with a cut if the action moved there. Nevertheless, there are a certain number of American examples of this, particularly towards 1913. The Vitagraph company was the most fond of this type of set design, though even in their films it was a minor feature. They sometimes used a weak form of this staging by making a reverse angle cut that finally entered the room behind after the scene had been going on for some time. For instance, in Uncle Toms Cabin (1910), Eliza can be seen in the background behind the big half-open doors of the back room eavesdropping on a conversation, but after this shot has gone on for a while in the European manner, there is then a cut to the reverse-angle on the scene from behind Eliza, looking into the other room which is now in the background. In these rare American examples the sets were never constructed on the large scale common in the European use of the form.
When Vitagraph used this kind of set with the space behind without it being part ofa reverse scene construction, it was usually for scenes at grand parties, of which they were quite fond. (Not very surprisingly, given j.S. Blackton's taste for social climbing in his private life.) However, in
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A Vitagraph studio setfor The Inherited Taint (1911), with a space behind built to accomodated background action.
such cases, the room visible behind was only used to contain extras dancing, or the like, and not to contain part of the main action. (This could really be considered to be an indoor variant of the Red Indians or fisher folk going about their colourful business behind the main action in the shot, which DAV. Griffith introduced into his outdoor subjects from 1909 onwards.) A particularly fine early Vitagraph example is in The Inherited Taint (1911), in which the camera steps back during the course of the scene as the actors move forwards, so revealing more and more depth in the set. During the war the simpler form of this sort of set design and staging for big party scenes spread to other American companies.
From a general point of view one could consider the European use of the space behind to be an attempt to get more variation in the image during the course of the shot (and of the film) to make up for that variety which was otherwise provided in American films by the greater use ol cutting.
Set Design
The use of the space behind just described obviously depends on the space being created beforehand by the set builders, and indeed designed by a set designer. Of course there had to be such people from the moment films began to be produced on an industrial scale by the Pathe company, and the biggest American companies, Vitagraph and Edison, not to mention the Italian companies, had them as well in this period. At Biograph, the studio sets were so nondescript that it is possible that they did not have a real set designer, and the same applies to the lesser American companies. In most films of this period, it was still usual to shoot the scenes with the camera flat on to the set, but there
The camera is moved backfor a continuation of this scene as
the action movesforward.
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are numerous European films on historical subjects from 1909 onwards where the master shot on a scene is taken at an angle to the sec. The same applies to some Vitagraph films of the same kind, such as Richelieu (1909). All this bespeaks the use of a set designer. Although such films still involved a fair amount of cheating, with pillars and other three-dimensional objects painted onto flat surfaces, the craftsmanship of this was mostty so good that even the modern viewer is not particularly aware of it. The finish on contemporary sets got better during this period, and more importantly, as the camera got closer in, and the genuine solidity of the furniture occupied more and more of the foreground, middle ground, and background, the sense of naturalism increased a great deal, getting close to what we consider normal in a 11 Irm About 1912 a strange concept emerged in the set design for some American films. This involved painting the walls of the set a very dark uniform colour, which came oul on film as a very dark grey, near to black. Although most visible in many Vitagraph films, the treatment can also be seen in films from Biograph and other companies. Í can only conjecture that it was intended to produce extra visual separation of the figures from the background. A minor interesting idea from Pathé was the building of a set representing the interior of a house on two levels, wilh more than one room on each floor being simultaneously visible [o the camera. This kind of multistorey cross-sectional set, like the view of the back ol a doll's house, was used in at least two 1909 films, Why Jones Couldn't Sleep, and Uncfe Richard, and there may well have been more. In the two examples cited, after a scene has started in what seems to be a perfectly ordinary set, a pan or tilt continuously follows a character through the wall or up through theYloor to the next floor. This set design
•FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1907.1913
An example of the influence oflate nineteenth century salon painting in the manner of Alma Tadema on the set design and composition of film images in kalian cinema. This is a shot from Jonc, directed by Giovanni Enrico VidaliJor the Pascfuali company in 1913,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907-1913
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A staging in La sposa del Nilo (Ones, 1911), similar to some of thos later used by DAK Griffith in his spectaclefilms.
concept has kept reappearing in films every several years ever since.
Other Types of Staging
Throughout the years 1907-1913 most films, including those of DAV+ Griffith, but largely excluding Vitagraph films, hat! the grouping of the actors oriented towards the camera and the putative audience after the manner used on the legitimate stage. The degree to which this is noticeable varies, and sometimes in American films it could extend as far as the leading players looking straight at the camera, though this was rare. Even in comedy, American films use acting addressed straight to the camera less than European films, where it was still very common in 1913. To put it another way, by 1913 blatant and continuous direction of the acting towards the camera can be regarded as a retarded feature in American dramatic films.
Although he did not use staging in depth in the strict sense, which calls for dramatic connection between actors in the foreground and others well in the background, Griffith did develop a weaker related form of staging. In this approach extras were placed in the background in Very Long Shot engaged in activities.that provided an atmospheric background to the main action, This is most noticeable in his films on Indian and fishing community subjects, beginning w«h.C«»«fl( the Sioux and Lines of White ana Sullen Sea both made late in 1909. Actually tlnYprocedure can be seen as a substitute for the filming of acted scenes in the force round ol .real situation which had real people going abom their ordinary business without taking too much notice of the camera, as other fihu-makers continued to t,v to achieve on
suitable occasions. Griffith himself had tried this approach earlier, as in LXomance of a Jewess (190S), which has scenes shot in the Jewish quarter of New York, but in later years he turned to completely staging the background action, quite possibly from preference, But in the period under consideration, other film-makers only followed his lead in this to a limited extent,
This leads me to consider the way scenes or mass action were staged at this time. At first theatrical tradition continued to provide the model, as it had in earlier years, but by 1910 other influences had begun to appear, particularly in Italy. In that country the effect of the graphic art of the recent past can he seen in L'Infcrno (Giuseppe di Liguoro, 1911) and La cadura di Troia (Giovanni Pastrone, 19JO), and others. The compositions of Vlnfcrno are largely modelled on Gustave Dore's engravings for La divina cammedio, and in La enduta di Troia the influence is from the Alma-Tadema type of salon painting. However, mixed in with the more derivative approaches to large-scale staging, the emergence of a more purely filmic approach can also be seen in some films. Sometimes this is just a matter of the conjunction of the topography of the location and the relatively unorganized enthusiasm of the extras, and sometimes it is the result of camera placement, as in some scenes in La caduta di Troia. As is well-known, the kalians pushed the staging of large-scale scenes much further in the next few years, and both the Salon Painting strain in staging and the purely filmic approach developed side by side in such films as jonc (Vidali, 1913) and Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913). The kind of composition that is sometimes used to combine principal figures with massed extras in D.W, Griffith's films from
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1913 onwards is anticipated in La sposa del Nih (Cincs, 1911), though this may not be a matter of influence, but rather of directors with similar backgrounds producing a similar solution to the same filmic problem.
Film Acting
AI though the pat tern less diversity of acting styles current in the previous period still continued to exist in 1907, the next several years saw the emergence of greater consistency in this dimension, and also substantia] modifications of the general approach. Some of the last of the pure melodrama poses can be seen in Vitagraph's The Mill Girl of 1907, but already a good deal of the acting of the principals in this film is no longer directed towards the audience. Broader acting from the principals surrounded by naturalistic playing from the supporting actors was quite common, though decreasing!}', in American films throughout this period. The classical mime style, which uses fully extended gestures of the arm with flowing movement*and a smooth line to them in the ballet manner was usually used Tor subjects having a high-class literary derivation, as in Vitagraph's Franceica da Rimini (1907). Interestingly, the acting in the French 'film d'art' was much more restrained, for the creators of this genre explicitly sought a new acting style appropriate to film with emphasis placed on still moments, and they avoided the classical mime style quite intentionally, as can be seen in TAssassinat dv Due dc Guise.
An example of acting from the naturalistic extreme of the spectrum that already existed in American cinema is given by Biograph s hler First Adventure made early in 190S. In this umpteenth entry in the +baby kidnapping by gypsies'
genre, all the acting is so naturalistic thai; it is questionable whether it should he called acting at all, or just behaving Such an acting style may well have been less efleetive with audiences than broad mime, particularly since this film was shot so lar back from the actors. Certainly the acting in D.W, Griffith's first films made a few months later is much broader than in net First Advent ft re, though the very first of his films, The Advertises of Dolly, is essentially a remake of the same liJmT which Grifikh had presumably seen, as he was already working as an actor for Biograph when it was made.
It is difficult to generalize about the acting in Griffith's films made in J 90S and 1909, since although much more restrained acting appears in some of his films from The Stolen Jewels (September, 190S) onwards, there is no consistency in this* There continue to be many of his films, such as Tragic Love (December, 190b") that use very broad acting, and so it continues through the years, h may be that these differences are due to the varying actors used in all these films, with less than complete control over their performances being exercised bv the director, but to determine this lor certain involves a major piece of research. However, it may also be that since Griffith had been brought up on melodramatic acting, he did not worry very much about cls pre<em.v. It is noticeable that Florence Lawrence and Harry Salter give nice light comedy performances in the first half ot ,1 Calamitous Ehpemcnt (190$); performances of a kind that never reappear in Griffith's films, and it is also noticeable that the films of his first year all hive aduh female leadv, presumably inherited as part of Giogryph's sujck company. The transition to the well-known skittering nymphct*
116
comes after this.
It is only at the beginning of 1910 that a fair proportion o the actin* in Griffiths films becomes markedly restrained, but *vcn*then it does not reach the degree of naturalism evident in some of Vitagraph's films such as The Telephone (I9l0).and ffipMwM the Man (WO), It would seem Irom Romance of an Umbrella (1909) that Vitagraph had been ahead of Griffith all the time in this particular. This high degree of naturalism was consolidated by the Vitagraph actors over the next few years, and the best of them managed to project with great intensity, despite the constraints of doing very little physically. Their achievement in this direction was explicitly recognized and admired in Europe, as can be seen from Victorin jasset's comments on the Vitagraph films in 1913, Whetherit was as highly valued in the United States is open to question, and it is quite possible that the broader acting style that was the norm in American filmSj includina those of D.W. Griffith, was more effective with the audience there.
(Following the general principles 1 am using, I do not hold that naturalistic acting is intrinsically superior to stylized acting. Indeed 1 believe that there is much to be said for a very individual style that falls some way short of naturalism, such as that Asta Nielsen developed in this period. Her movements and poseSj winch owe a lot to the stage dancing (though not ballet} of this period, combined with an occasional well-placed 1 thinks1 look towards the camera, formed a powerful instrument of expression in films made by lilrban Gad from Afgrundcn (1910) onwards.)
The generalizations lhat Ihave been making about acting in American films must be understood to be taken against a background of certain differences in the way that various racial.types were presented.at this time - American Indians were presented with broader acting than white men, and Mediterranean types were acted in an even broader way. Again, the acting in historical subjects was everywhere broader than in: contemporary storiCSi anc| ^ difference was also observed in European films,
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Narrative Construction
The vast increase in film production after 1906 inevitably brought specialist writers into film ^making a* part of the increasing subdivision of labour in the interests of increased output, and these people both in themselves, and also as a response to that demand, introduced a greater variety in the types of story used in films. The use of more complex stories derived from literary and stage works of the recent past also contributed^ developments in film construction The general American tendency was to simplify the plot, borrowed irom novels and plays so that they could be dealt with w one red. and with the minimun,0f titling and: the
FILM ST VLB AND TECHNOLOGY; 1901-1913
maximum of straightforward narrative continuity, but there were exceptions to this. As I have already said, the Vitagraph tradition was to incorporate the information that was difficult to film and lacking in strong dramatic interest into narrative titles before each scene, rather than simplifying the story, and this was also mostly the custom in European films of the more seriously intended kind.
Narrative titles in American films also had another indirect function, which was to eliminate what we would now call Fjump cuts' between scenes. For the most efficient use of the 1000 feet of film per reel that was all that was available for standard films, it was very frequently necessary to start the next scene with some of the actors from the previous scene already in shot, even though ihe new scene was taking place later and in some other place. By 190S it seems that there was already a strong feeling in the American industry that this 'jump' in narrative time was disruptive, and so one frequently finds narrative titles between scenes in American films supplying information that is completely redundant. Sometimes European filmmakers used narrative titles in this way, but they were much more inclined to do without any title between scenes, unless more information was absolutely necessary. Hence many European films of the period have jump cuts between scenes. This is particularly noticeable in Danish films, and to a lesser extent in Italian films. European comedies of the cruder kind were particularly likely to include this sort of jump cutting.
As far as the move away from cramming the story from a whole novel, opera, or full-length play into a one-reel film is concerned, it is possible that D,W. Griffith was a major influence. Before he came onto the scene, there were many films that had stories nicely adapted to being narrated within the limits of the form, but equally, there were many that were not. At first, the Griffith Biograph films frequently used stories that were not well adapted to being clearly presented in one reel, but this changed after several months. In any case, by the middle of 1909, Griffith was starting to make some films that had much less story content than any previous films which were one full reel in length. The earliest Griffith film that I have noticed which has sharply reduced content is The Message, made in May 1909, and released 21 June 1909, and the second is the much better known The Country Doctor, which was made a few days later. In The Message, a good deal of the time is taken up with the characters interacting in a not particularly dramatic way while they wander round the farm location. Nevertheless, the detail of their behaviour is well worked out, and there is always a fair amount of visual interest in the scenes, and none of tins actively interferes with the simple triangle story, but rather makes it seem more real. In The Country
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Doctor, the action is no more than various people, including the doctor, hurrying backwards and forwards between the doctor's house, where his child is sick, and a neighbouring cottage, where another child is also sick. From this point on, there are many Griffith films where he seems to be consciously demonstrating how the audience's attention can be gripped with the slimmest story possible. Of course, before this date he had made suspense thrillers like .4 Drive For Life (22/04-/09) which had very slight plots, but that sort of Griffith film always had lots of action events in it, even if the basic story was very simple.
Other film-makers also began working in this way at least some of the time. For instance, although Vitagraph films usually had more plot in them than Biograph films, they could produce a film tike jean Rescues (1911), which had as little plot as any Griffith film. However, such Vitagraph films are usually confined to the Light Romance genre. By 1912 and 1913, there are beginning to be many films from many American companies, particularly Sclig, that rely on applying novel decoration to the story rather than supplying any twists of the drama itself to sustain interest. (In the case of SeJig films, the decoration was the wild animals the company owned.)
Dialogue Titles
In 1907 and I90S, as in previous years, the use of intertitles containing lines of dialogue was extremely rare, and it was definitely not standard procedure. But this began to change towards the end of 1903. An Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cvp and How It Was Won, released 17 October 1908, contains a couple of dialogue titles, and the
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same firm'.. Julio, Coesar, released on I December 190S mcludes three lines Qr dialogue from Shakespeare's play quoted in intertitles, finishing with 'This was flk noblest Roman or them all'. Since there were a number or other Vitagraph films from 190S based on classic stories which are now lost, it is quite likely that some of these also contained other famous lines of dialogue in their intertitles. In any case, starting from 1909, a small number of American films, and even one or two European ones, came to include a few dialogue titles, or 'spoken' titles as d1Cy were called. Filmmakers slowly progressed from putting these dialogue titles before the scene in which they were spoken, to cutting them into the middle of the shot at the point at which they were understood to be actually spoken by the characters. This transition began in 191 2. The logical reason for making this change was thatsince the sceneajmos: always contained more than one person talking, it could be difficult for the audience to instantly recognise who was supposed to be speaking the words that had appeared before the scene started. Once underway, the trend was aided by the move towards the increasing use of cuts within scenes in American films. In 1913 the proportion of American films using dialogue titles at all was 63 out of my total sample of 171 for that year, and only about half of these dialogue titles were cut in at the point when they were spoken. Hardly anv of the films where this happened were D.W. Griffith films, and indeed many of his 191 3 films still contain no dialogue titles at all. Although a few European film-makers picked up the trend towards using dialogue titles, diey did not pick up on the move towards cutting them into the scene at the point at which d"iey were actually spoken until a lew years later.
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fl:* Re "thinks college makes v W0TRen masculine and Ji* forbids Violets j$old^
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A decorative harder usedfor the intertitles in Vitagraph's Dzisks (1910).
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A hint. I dont want paper pictures, Nor mottoes soggy, But candy, or horses, On Valentines Day*
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1907^1913
Extra small drawings placed around the standard Vitagraph titles to illustrate the, events in in the story in Consuming Passions; or, St. Valentine's Day in ■Green away Land (1911).
The introduction of dialogue titles was far from being a trivial matter, for they entirely transformed' the nature of film narrative. Not only does a dialogue title take less time to read than the narrative title it replaces, but whenit is cut into the point at which it is spoken, it interrupts the flow of the narrative far leas. When dialogue titles came to be always cut into .a- scene just after a character starts speaking, and' then left with a cut to the character just before they finish speaking, then one has something that was nearly the same as a sound: filmT or indeed much closer to an audiovisual recording.of a stage play, if one likes to look at it that way. On the other hand, with nothing but narrative titles beiore each scene, one has something tending more in the direction of an illustrated book. Indeed;, a case could be made that as the him stood at the'beginning of this period, though not at the end, it was more nearly a unique aesthetic medium than it came to be some decades later, at any rate as laras mainstream cinema was concerned.
Illustrated Tides
Mlhoughtliey wcreifaii ly lypfcaf of American companies in the way they handledMmcrtitfcs-, Vitagraph did toy with * nwii i,Jta in their presentation in .1910 and 19#. 1« & 10, perhaps in response to the new striving alter 'art' in filmmaking whichhad just begun, they made a few films which had special illustrated: borders round the intmitlcs The most striking example Iron, 1910 was flowte, in ,v!,ich ■the whole plot turned on that flower, and which was present in m0g of the Oh* socncs in forms .„
the mtertideshad a border of daisies> instead of having the standard pieturc W style decorative border. A few
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weeks before this the company presented Flake's Sacrifice, a Japanese subject, in which the inter titles had a border made of bamboo rods, though the bamboo played no part in the story. Another surviving example of illustrated borders on titles is Auld Rabin Grey from a couple of months later, and it is quite likely that there were a some more similar Vitagraph films from this period.
In 1911, the Vitagraph film-makers made a small extra step forward, in Consuming Passion; ort St. Valentine's Day in Grecnawoy Land, which told a story of school-infant love and gingerbread hearts, acted in slightly stylized settings reminiscent of the paintings by the famous illustrator of children s books, The costumes of the children followed the Kate Greenaway style closely, too. In this case, although the border of the intertitles were the same throughout the film, they included drawings of toys and other things which changed in accordance with the course of the narrative. This was a remarkable anticipation of the vogue for illustrated intertitles which only started properly in American films in 1916, and lasted into the early 'twenties, but there are no other early examples of this feature among the surviving Vitagraph films. The most likely explanation for this was that by 1911 the larger part of Vitagraph'$ Him sales were overseas, and the difficulty of reconstituting these illustrated intertitles on the title cards for every foreign language, which had to be remade at their Paris factory, was not considered worthwhile. This last point probably also explains why the idea was only taken up generally in American-films in 1916, when it was clear that most of the foreign market was cut off by the Great War, and also why the practice died out again after the war.
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The Multi-Reel film
As is well-known, the transition to the production of films more than one reel long was a gradual process involving a number of weII-separated stages. Almost from the beginning of film history there were films of the Jifc of Christ that ran longer than one reel, but it Is only in the 1907-1913 period that a substantial number of multireel films on other subjects began to appear. The earliest American examples, such as Vitagraph's Life of Moses (\9^3), were released as separate parts of one reel each in successive weeks, though exhibitors naturally turned to showing these parts together as a continuous film more or less straightaway. The general way such films were structured was to have the dramatic action shaped to give a natural 'act3 break at the end of each reel, and this continued to he usual in multireel films for some time, and indeed was recommended in script writing manuals around 1913. However, not all long American films show this structure, as can be seen in the now well-known Traffic in Souls (1913). Here the incident-packed plot speeds over the reel changes without being particularly shaped to their occurrence.
Subjective Effects
(l is not until the next period that subjective camera effects really start to develop properly, but there is at least one striking forerunner in 1913. This is in the Itala company s Tigris, This film is mostly a rather clumsy imitation of the earlier 'Zigomar' criminal master-mind thrillers made in Prance by Victorin Jasset, but there is one scene in it in which the protagonist is drugged. As the effect lakes hold, this is represented by tilting the frame sideways, then superimposing a series of disjointed images fading and dissolving in and out on a patterned background. This seems a quite remarkable anticipation of the montage sequences which began to appear regularly in films several years later. Apart from this very special case, in many films there are of course quite a lot of ordinary visions shown within one shot as inset scenes, or as superimposed scenes, or both, just as there had been before 1907.
'Symbolism' and the JnsertShot
As a result of the increasing artistic ambitions of filmmakers during this period, poems and other 'literary' subjects began to be transposed directly into films. Griffith's filming of Browning s Pippti Passes is well-known, but the same impulse can be seen at work elsewhere, as in the Italian Cines company's film La campana (1909), based on Schiller's poem Die Ghche. These films are no more than hve illustrated versions of the verses of the poems, which precede the various scenes in them. Griffith was capable of moving on from this to an adaptation of the poetic refrain to
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visual form in an original film subject The Way of the World made a year later, which although it featured repeated inse/t Shots of bells again, was more than a simple illustration of a poem. However it took some years for Griffith to develop the Insert Shot further as a force in its own right, as a way of drawing attention to narrative objects with significant connotations, In his other 1910 films the Insert Shots were still just used to show things clearly, as had been a long established usage. When one of his films such as Simple Charity centred on the role of an object, in this case a girls dress, it was not singled out by heing given its own exclusive Insert anywhere in the course of the film. When one gets the rare Insert shot in his films, it is only there to make an object or action visually clear when that is Impossible in the more distant shot in which the scene is being conducted. Not very numerous examples include the poisoning of the candy in Orivefor a Life (1909), and the adjustable wrench pretending to he a gun in The Lonedale Operator (\9}\).
Later in 1910 Griffith made a couple of films that make explicit claims to 'symbolism' in their titles, namely The Two Paths - A Symbolism and ,1 Modern Prodigal - A Story in Symbolism, but despite their titles, neither contain any special new filmic usages in this area. However, by 1912 there were the First signs of the special use of the Insert which was to prove so important from that date onwards, Early in the year the Italian Amhrosio company released La mala pianta directed by Mario Caserini. This film, which involves a case of poisoning, begins with an Insert shot of a snake slithering over the 'Evil Plant' of the title. Another of the siill very rare examples is in Griffith's The Massacre, which was made at the cud of 1912, This includes an Insert Shot of a candle at a sick man's bedside guttering out to indicate his death, Yet another is in the Ambrosio company version of Gil tfltimi giorni di Pompei (1913). This film includes a scene, preceded by the title 'The thorns of jealousy', in which a rejected woman overhears the man she loves with another woman, and this b followed by a fade to a shot of a pair of doves, which then dissolves into a shot ol a bird ol prey. Unfortunately this is about the only point of interest in this film, which is otherwise much cruder than the contemporary Pasquali version of the book, jonet directed bv Enrico Vídali. The inspiration for the use of the symbolic efiects in Gli uhími giorm di fompei may have been in the originaJ novel by Bulwer Lyiton on which it is teed. The heading of the chapter which includes the original of the scene just described 5s 'The Fowler Snares Again the Bird that Has Just Escaped, and Sets His Ne\> for a New Victim', and other chapters in the book also have metaphorical titles, such as +A Wasp Ventures into the Spider's Web' and yet other similar ones.
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DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION FROM STAGE TO FILM
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theories about how the film screenplay should be structured1 began to be articulated at least as early as 190S, when film production aiid; exhibition had standardised into programmes of single reel films. All of these theories were variants and adaptations of the basic ideas that had developed1 in the nineteenth'century about writing stage plays. These ideas about play construction were in their turn a development of the original Aristotelian conception of what drama should be, and were well: known to, and thoroughly internalized by, most writers of plays. Theories about play construction current at.the end of the nineteenth century became even more important for American film script writing once the long feature film became established in the United States, so Twill quote a summary ofthc main points from thc .most practical and complete of these treatises on how to write a play. This was Thc An ofPlaywriting, by Alfred Henneauin, published by Houghton Mifflin & Go. in 1890. The author, despite having<the same name, was nor the well-known French playwright from slightly earlier in the century. However, this American Hennequin ft*** an acquaintance of George Bronson Howard, who was considered'to be1 the first American play wright of real worth, and' it seems Ihat.Hennequin!s ideas about constructing plays agreed with those of Bronson Howard!, not to mention those of others who followed him,
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Hen ncqu in o n Play writing
Extracts fronv pages 85 to 91 oMiapter XV -"What Constitutes a Story?"
'Every story that has any value for dramatic purposes may be reduced ;to the following formula:-A (standing for oneor more characters); is'..trying to achieve some purpose. A is opposed by B (representing one or more characters), whotries to-earry out hjs,design. After a series of incidents, in which first one and then the other seems to have the upper hand, A finally succeeds in frustrating the designs of B, and: either accomplishes the end-sought, or is killed.
another.
(3) The characters must be self-consistent.
(4) The characters must be selected and arranged that each one may act as a foil to another.
Completeness
A story is complete when it is told so that the listener docs not need to ask what happened before it began, nor care to ask what happened after it concluded.
Unity
Unity in the sensible view isf that all the incidents of the story must be made to cluster about a single central animating idea. One purpose must be seen to run throughout the whole scries of incidents, they must be so woven together that, at the end of the story, it will be evident that one could not have taken place without thc other. This constitutes the unity of action.
Motived Incidents
The incident must be motived. This means that the cause of every incident must be apparent in some incident that has preceded" it, and serves as a motive for it. Every event must be seen to grow naturally out of what has gone before, and to lead naturally to what has comes after. An incident which is introduced arbitrarily, simply for effect, is called clap-trap.'
Next 1 quote extracts from pages 92 to 96 of Chapter XVI "What constitutes a play- means of creating interest*
\l Interest and Pleasure
The story must interest and please. This is the fundamental law or modern drama. It is not forbidden the dramatist to :poim a moral, or discuss a social problem; but these arc side issues, extra-dramatic effects, which he must undertake at his own risk.
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Characters,
«*«™««w««mibc:«ufted*o the story -the storv lO;tlu: .characters. ]
<2) The characters must be dearly distinguished one from
that it that
2. Novelty
An important requirement of a dramatic story is
be fresh and original.....Still it must not be forgotten tnai
an did story,, told in a new way, possesses all the charm of a new one. A certain Interest also attaches to well-known events in history that compensates for their lack of novelty.
I i
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
3. Variety and Contrast
Monotony is the bugbear of the dramatist. In order to escape it he must exercise all thc inventive power of which he is possessed to vary the character of the incidents as they follow one another. Pathos must be followed by humour wit by eloquence, "talky" passages by quick-succeeding scenes of incident, soliloquies by thc rapid give-and-take of dialogue. The entire act should be a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope, presenting new features at every turn.
Variety not only destroys monotony, but it secures the powerful effect of contrast. A bit of humour is twice as effective if it follows an instant of pathos or even of commonplace.
4. Suspense
Suspense is the nervous system of the drama. In some form or another, it must exist throughout the entire progress ofthc story. At various points ofthc play, generally at the close of each act, it may be partially relieved, but it must always be done in such a way as to give rise to new suspense, or to leave one or two particulars still unsettled, etc.
5. Surprise
Nevertheless, surprise is one of the most potent of stage
effects........Surprises are most valuable in light comedies,
which sometimes consist of little more than a succession of startling incidents. In more serious plays, too sudden surprises give the story an unpleasantly abrupt and "jerky" character* The surprise, in such cases, must be in a manner prepared for; the audience must be made to have a dim forehodlng of the impending disaster, while its exact nature is to he left a matter of surmise.
5. Climax
A regular increase of force and interest culminating in a strong situation is called a climax. A dramatic story should be lull of climaxes from beginning to end, l;very act should have several lesser ones scattered through It, and should invariably end with one of greater importance. Toward thc end of the play should occur the great climax In the technical sense of the word, i,e. the point at which the interest of die play reaches its highest stage.
Humour and Pathos
Except in the lighter sort of comedy thc two elements of humour and pathos are always introduced into the modem drama. No one any longer thinks of writing pure tragedy for thc stage, and, on the other hand, the most saleable comedies are those which have a few touches in them of genuine pathos.'
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And next, extracts fro — Growth
m
pages 109 to 116 of Chapter XVIII
2. Conflict and Plot
Every dramatic story is founded on the conception of a character striving to accomplish SOTlc purposc ,n vvhidl hc is thwarted by another character. This brings about a con-flki, or clash of Interest which becomes more serious and more complicated as the play proceeds, and forms thc in-iriguc or plot,
(conflicts of virtuous and thc wicked are to be found in all serious plays.) (In comedy, the clash or conflict usually comes about through misunderstandings - but these can also cause pathetic or tragic events.)
8. Episodes
However interesting an episode may be of itself, however humorous or pathetic, it should be ruthlessly cast aside unless it in some way helps on the principal current of the
storv
9T Series of Climaxes
If the story grows continually in interest, the introduction of various characters with their conflicting aims, will lead to a series of situations and climaxes, which themselves will be arranged in a climax."
At this point Hennequin introduces a rising saw-tooth diagram, with a sudden fall after thc grand climax, illustrating the dramatic progress of Bulwer's Lady of Lyons,
This is an elaboration of the kind of diagram that appeared in Guslav Freytag's Die Tcchnik da Dramas, of 1876.
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Hennequin also says that the Grmd climax should occur in the latter half of the play, and comments that multiple climaxes are now fashionable. He considers them irartisuc, even though the "gallery" likes them. But they will be in demand, so make the later one* of multiple climaxes stronger. Incidentally, Hennequin, and the writers he was discwing,
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including tironson Howard, dcMiile Senior, and Bclasco, were not talking about and writing melodrama, but what they considered good plap', which they all distinguished from the American melodrama of the lime. They considered that their work was realistic, and they all frequently included-an intentional moral message in it\
ves
Methods ofPlot Generation
Chapter XXHl of Hcnnequin's An ofVhywriting g\ a demonstration of how to create a play plot from a basic situation by logical steps. The example of a situation that he gives is "A young woman and an elderly woman in love with the same mam, then, by expanding it by introducing another main character, and adding complications by mak-inc two of the characters related, and thinking of situations leading to the revelation of the character's feelings, and so on,,he eventually constructs a plot he reveals to he that of Scribes Duel en amour.
Although Hcnnequin docs not say sot this technique for generating a plot is a generalization from the methods used by Bronson Howard, at least in one particular case, which the latter described in a lecture to the Harvard University Drama Club, published in- the Boston Herald of 27 March, 1876,
A later manual on constructing plays that became.popular with would-be scriptwriters was W.T. Price s Analysis of Play Construction 0^®$)- Price identified the same basic constituents of a correet'ly constructed 'splay as 'Hennequin and his other predecessors, but he suggested1 a different method for. creating the plot. This -involved! a series of rational and causal steps starting from the beginning of the plot, rather than working outwards from the basic central situation, as with Hennequin. Price's term for lihesituation at the beginning of the plot was the "formula", and it included a critical condition^ an excitant y and a result.
An example of a critica 1 • condition isj- "Anne Cavcndish, who loves and' is loved by Arthur Renwick, has ambition which has been inflamed by the artful-encouragement of George Sylvester. She must choose between love and ambition. What shall be the result of her choice?*' Here the excitant or disturbing factor is George Sylvester, and then the result of Anne Cavendish's choice gives rise to a new situation or formula., which is worked: out in the same wavt and so on.
I believe that a recent computer programme written to generate film plots uses this latter method.
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Dramatic Ideas on the Screen
; .. When there began to be extended. theorizing about m im construction from 1910 onwards, thefc ideas ^mmmm: Pff« Lakcn m largely unaltered, with
DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
the fairly inevitable simplification that the one reel fi]m was considered to be only capable of accommodating one climax, and also left no room lor sub-plots or contrast-ing episodes. However, at first there was a certain amount of confusion about the basic nature of film dramaturgy amongst theorists, because there was in general no dialogue in films made before 1909, Hence the notions invented to deal with this lack, some of them derived from pre-existing ideas about the art of theatrical mime, confused the matter. Other irrelevant ideas about using short story writing as a model for film script writing also surfaced at first, but these were already being questioned by 1910, and by 1913 it was generally recognized that short story writing technique had little to contribute to film script writing, This was because by 19I0 even the ordinary commercial short story writing of the day had come to rely more on colour1' and fine writing than dramatic construction. Some more detail on the influence of stage dramaturgy on film construction can be read in Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs' Theatre to Cinema (Oxford University Press, 1997).
In the American one reel film the requirement that the character or mood of succeeding incidents be varied was usually not met, tfhough it is actually possible for really skilled film-makers to do this with a certain amount of effort. Some of D.W. Griffith's Biograph films do contain one or two lighter incidents, verging on comedy, amongst the more dramatic scenes that make up the bulk of his films, and he and other people also made some comedies that involved suspenseful scenes amongst the more usual fooling.
Then once Rims became several reels long, and having their dialogue rendered in intertitles, it became fairly easy in principle for them to accommodate all the desirable dramatic features indicated by Hennequin, though this did not happen instantaneously. Early gropings to more fully satisfy the "Variety and Contrast" criterion include the unnecessary part of a scene at a party in The Avenging Conscience in which Mae Marsh docs her "silly flapper'' routine, and the suicide scene in Cecil B. DeiMIlles comedy What's-Nh-Name, both from 1914. On the other hand, another 1914 film adaptation of a successful stage play of the period, The Spoilers, docs not manage to use variation of mood to any great extent.
The advent of the long film brought more and better people Irom the American theatre into the movies, together with recently successful stage plays, so it was inevitable that all the standard features of play construction would be eventually accommodated in motion pictures. Actually, most good nineteenth century plays were just waiting for the long film. Close examination of stage works all the way from Boucicault's The Colleen Wn to Ibsen's The Wild Duck shows that their continuous scenes are actually broken up
&RAMAT1C CONSTRUCTION FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
into sub-scenes involving different groups of people, with the playwright having to use various forced pretexts to get some characters off stage, and others onto h3 for the next section of the scene and the further advancement of the plot. Hence it would be more natural for these sub-scenes to take place at other times and locations, as permitted on film, but not by the practicalities of the stage.
The full assumption of theatrical methods of dramatic construction by American motion pictures took place at the same time that the final features of continuity cinema were being generally polished and diffused, during the First World War. The perfection of standard film dramatic construction particularly involved people like Mary Pick-ford, who had starred in Belasco plays in New York, and who worked to incorporate features from such plays into her films when she became an independent producer. Sometimes she did this against the resistance of her collaborators, for instance Maurice Tourneur, who was very unhappy with the comedy scenes that Pickford insisted on having in Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). 1917 was really a crucial year for some of the new leaders of the American film industry,
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because, besides Pickford finally getting these things right from Rebecca of Sunnybrooh Farm onwards, Chaplin began to introduce pathetic scenes into his comedies, and Douglas Fairbanks moved beyond his stodgy early works like His Pie-tare in the Papers to better shaped constructions.
By the end of the war it was generally recognized that the model for the dramatic construction of ordinary com-mercial films should be theatrical, as can be seen in Howard T. DimickTs Modem Photoplay Writing of 1922, and other subsequent manuals on the subject. However, writing "how to do it1* books about film script-writing died out m the late 'twenties, because American film studios stopped buying film scripts, and turned to having them developed by their own employees. After this, the techniques I have described were passed on inside the Hollywood studios for many decades by word of mouth and by example, but were forgotten in the outside world. This has meant that it has recently become possible for someone like Robert McKee and other recent authors of script-writing manuals to become very successful selling advice that is little more than the nineteenth century Hennequin recipe.
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11. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
urino the years of the First World War there was not JLA 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 Histoira Generate du Cinhmo (Tome III, 'Le Cinema 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-wit-ness accounts of the American takeover of the market in Paris can be read in Richard Abel's French On cm a: The First
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
Wove 19IS-I929 (Princeton, I9S4). 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 prewar 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 sec 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 ihey 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 I", 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, ft 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 curing the years 1914-1919,
Lighting Equipment
As is welhknown, these vears saw the introduction ol spotlights for the lighting of studio interiors in America, but the details of the process are not simple. The lighting themselves were standard theatrical-type spotlights,
125
m m carbons producing the arc contained in an oblono box of black sheet steel, and the light from the source beirj concentrated into a beam by a large glass lens several inches * m in the        of the ea% By standards
they were rather inefficient, since onl^ 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 theatric cal purposes was Kliegl Brothers, anil they, and iater others, supplied them for film purposes as we!!.
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 Stain, where the principal scene is lit in low-key for suspense purposes. This Universal film was released in July 1914, well before Wyckoff and DcMille had done anything with arc spots. But it is very difficult to mak- out exactly which type of arc light is doing the lighting unless the instance is in a very low-key situation, so 1 may have missed something earlier amongst the films I have seen.
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 ofa split between films shot in die East Coast studios and those shot in California, in the years 1914-1916 films from the
A scene in the shon thriller At the Foot of the Stairs (Universal, 1914) lit only by ihebeam ofún ate light.
12b
A-studio interior shoi in Between Men (Reginald Barker, I9IS), with the actors hacklit by by the slightly diffused liginfrom the sun behind tliem, and tviib rhc general diffuse daylight from the from supplemented by an arc pood-light just to the left of the camera.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
East, though more completely lit by artificial light than the Califomian ones, stayed with either frontal liolit or side or three-quarters back light done with arc floodlights in the way chat had begun to develop before 1914, while the films from the West Coast had more of a tendency to use full backlight on interiors. Tliis backlighting of the actors was still sometimes done with sunlight in 1915, as in the illustration from Ihtwsen Men, .which was made in the Thomas Ince studios in that year. TFhis kind of backlighting was done by constructing the set so that the sun wwbehindthe 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.
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 ciclonc, as was the idea of using diffuse sunlight through the studio roof to give a weak backlight.
By  1917 backlighting with an arc spotlight from
}
An interior scene in Their One Love (TJianliouser, 1915) Jit by genera diffuse daylight, plus light from an arc spotlight of the theatrical type hitting the back of the head of the more distant
actress.
FILM STYLE A ND TECHNOLOG Y: 1914-1919
(Right) A Close Up from Daddy-Long-Legs (1919) lit by Charles Rosher with two backlight spots coming in from an aglc a little w each side of the head, plus key andfill lights of almost equal brightness to the left and tight of the camera from the front. There is no softening of the image by the use of a diffusion filter in front of the lens
(Below) A large arc spotlight of the typu based on the military searchlight introduced in 191S, and referred to as a 'Sunlight* arc. The beam isfocussed by a parabolic mirror behind the arc. The carbons between which the arc is struck ar just visible in the centre of the housing behind a protective screen stretched across the front opening.
or
er.
cr
overhead was appearing in more American features such as Forbidden Paths, and for the first time cameramen tried using nro slightly separated arc spotlights from high behind so that they hit the side of the head from glancing angles on eithe side, producing a bright rim round the whole of the upp side of the figure. This began to appear in a limited numbc of close shots in some Famous Players-Lasky films in 1917, for example Rebecca of Sunnybwok Farm and A Mormon Maid^ lit by Walter Stradlingand Charles Rosher respectively, and it seems the idea spread slowly from there. Waiter Stradling took it with him to the other Mary Picklord films he lit af-terwards, such as Stella Maris (191S), and Rosher also began to use the idea consistently. Hy that year a tingle backlight was being used in some, but not all, interior scenes in other quality American features; eHg. .-I Modern Musketeer (Allan Dwan, 19-1S) and The Gun Woman (Frank borzage, I91S). Walter Stradling had also begun to use arc spotlights lor key and fill lighting on the front of figures as early as 1915, in ,1/r. Gre.k 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 oj Rosie Taylor (1918;, which is also lit using spots for much of the key and 111! on the figures.
In 1918 another major technological development in lighting equipment occurred with the introduction of a new tvpe of arc spodight, 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
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1914-1919
An exterior scene in Daddy-Long-Legs lit by high sunlight Jrom the left back-with Jill lightfrom a big arc refiecioi Spotlight ant of shot at the rightJrom. Note also the soft-edged vignette round
the edge of the shot.
over a large area from a distance, although this beam was less precisely controllable than thai from the earlier type of spotlight. Over the next few years sucli 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 Baddy Long-Legs (1919), the cameraman Charles Roshcr 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 arc1 as a floodlight on at least one intc-rior scene in the film.
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 east softer-edged shadows instead of the bard-edged shadows that had been so characteristic of arc floodlighting.
^In interior scene in Daddy-Long-Legs lit solely by a 'Sunlight arc out of shot at
the right.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
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 Uie actor's face, the result was an approach to the sort of 'soft lighting' coming from a north-facino window that had long been considered attractive in portrait photog^ raphy. (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 ivas only about IS inches across, which is far smaller than the size of 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 191 6, is not clear, Fanchon the Cricket (1915) is the earliest film that 1 have noticed with die light from arc floodlights softened. Since arcs had been used for filming for over a decade in many studios, and since die 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 inllammaUon of the eyes resulting from their irritation by the fine dust in die studio atmosphere coming from the burnt carbons of the arcs, perhaps supplemented by die large amount of ultra-violet light given olfby the arc flame. (Arc lights were generically referred to as Klieg lights at this time, after die KUegl Bros, 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 djscussion in 1916-1917, and even if this was not the reason for putting glass diftusion screens on the front of arc lights, their enclosure in this way certainly hindered the arc dust from 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 1917-191 S films use arc floodlights both with and without diffusa of) in various scenes might suggest that die use of diffused arcs was a purely aesthetic decision, 35 a response to the dropping of the general frontal diffusc 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
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ff d^er ]',ms *$m *m ^enes lit by alternating current (AX.) arcs. The visible result is a periodic fluctuation of the light level several times a second due to the stroboscope effect between the frequency of the A.C. fluctuations and that of die opening and closing of the camera shutter. This 3S quite a different matter from the occasional flicker of un~ steady 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, very old 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 or D.C., and the second persisting through the twentieth century, 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 rciakes 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 [n the nineteen-twenties.
Throughout the years 1914-1919 the general large-area lighting of sets continued to be supplied by racks of Coopcr-Hcwiit mercury vapour tubes, and in *ome of the smaller companies by arrays of street-lighting type arcs hun^ 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 dirough the glass studfo 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 1913. This is best made clear with some examples. To speak of Californian film-making first, the interiors ol' Birth of a Nation (1915) were lit entirely by daylight controlled in one way or another, and a sketch of G.VV. Bitzers lighting procedures can be read in Karl frown's Adventures with DAY. Cnffith. 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
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
A scene in His Phantom Sweetheart (Ralph I nee, 1915) shut on location in a real theatre, and lit by a group of arc flood lights out left, The focus is set slightly forward so that the image of the actress in the background is a little soft.
solely with controlled daylight t$ given by the lighting of Raoul Walsh s Kegcnemtion (1915), for which Georges Be-no it created remarkably precisely controlled gradations and localizations of sunlight across some of the interior scenes, We 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 19.15. the more common approach, both on the East Coast and on the. West Coast, was to add some arc lighting lo 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.
r he n,v, shot in the series of alternating re^rse angles m the «** in Hi Phantom Sweetheart. In *j Medium W Up lit m o single an floodlight £ actress is still kepi slightly out of focus.
The reverse angle to the previous shot in Mis Phantom Sweetheart, In this case the actors in the hockround arc in
focus.
One of the most elegant demonstrations of this earlier (and about to be superseded) style is given by the lighting of Dai id Fiartun (Allan Dwan, 191S). Although the photography of this film has been recently credited to Harold Rossou, it seems probable to me that he was only assistant cameraman on this lilm, 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 I9IS, 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
A hw-key interior shot in His Phantom Sweetheart lit solely by a small arc light concealed in the table lamp.
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
A studio interior scene in The On-The-Squarc Girl (1917), lit by an arcfloodlight with a diffusing screen in from of it, so producing slightly soft-edged shadows.
short film His Phantom Sweetheart, which wras made by Ralph luce for ViUgraph. 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 Vi tag rap h some years before. What is new in this film is the scale and complexity of the. scenes. Híí Phantom Sweetheart also contains a climactic scene lit with genuinely low-key lighting done with arcs to contribute to a succession of moods sensuality, sus-
A studio interior shot in Silks and Satins (jt Searle Dawley, 1916) lit by three arc floodlights through the doorway at left. -As can be seen from the sharp edged-shadows, there are no djf J using screens in front oj the openings of the reflectors of the floodlights.
pense, and terror. The rather similar, and much better known example in Cecil ft. DeiYlilk-'s 77iL< Cheat (I91S) is no more thoroughgoing and extended in its use of low-key arc lighting.
By 1916 there were many films coming out of the East Coast studios dial had most of their studio interior scenes tit solely with arc floodlights One example is Stfh and Saiint (J, Searle Dawley), which had the lights disposed so as to give a stronger key light from oin: of the side-front directions, and weaker fill light Irom 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
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOG Y: 1914-19J9
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Left Single backlight with key andJill light. Centre Early use of close double backlights.   Right Double backlights spread apart.
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 unsuhtle 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 Qn-Thc-Squarc Girt. (Although the cameraman and director of this film are named on the titles as Morris E. Hair and1 Frederick J;. Ireland, Kevin Brownlow has suggested to me that these are pseudonyms for Arthur Miller and George Fitzmauricc, Given the high quality of the lighting and direction of this film, and that it comes from George Fit/mau rice's company Astra, and also that it was listed in a trade source at the lime as a George Fitamaurice 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 Hack To You (Cecil B, DeMille, 1918), which- was lit by Alvin Wyckoff and Charles Roshcr. In this film there was still1 some contribution from the oldTashioncdJgcneral overall light as well as the well-managed directional components Iromdiffusedarc 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 indecd. to make changes in thCipo.
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sit ions of the lights when shooting the closer shots which were to he 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, hut 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 fronton 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 hack 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 mat-tcr 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 cither 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 Gome (1917). In the former the lighting on the figure is rather flat, since the key and fill lights arc of almost
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Well-pfoccfigure lighting by jahan Ankerstjeme in Hsevneris Nat ()9]6) Side-back lighting from the left, and side lighting front the right, both produced by diffuse sources.
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 in Dangerous Flours.
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 Moris and The Whispering Chorus, photographed in 191 S by Walter Stradling and Alvin Wyckoff respectively. This use of double backlights could be combined with cither a single key light and no fill Írom 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 oí treating a 'profile two-shot' (two actors facing each other), hut this did not happen at first.
It is at present impossible to tell who were the principal forces behind the developments I have outlined above, in part owing to die lack of cameraman credits belore 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 ^option 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 Hood lights when a special lower key effect was wanted. Over the war years in .Scanclinavia 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 Sjostrom.
The most accomplished Danish cameraman during this period was Johan Ankerstjeme, and his work on Benjamin Christensen's Hacvnens Nat (1916) shows the way that a few European cameramen were also developing ihe kind of three-point lighting that has already been described in American films. Hut Ankerstjeme only did this on closer shots, where the light uppJkd from the three-quarters back position could come from an arc flood light. There was no introduction of backlighting from directly behind with spotlights in Europe, nor any use of spotlights at all for that mailer, until well after the end of the war. Ankerstjeme also did some notable low-key work: such things a± a hand-held lamp casting looming shadows in a flight down subterranean passageways in Verdens Undergo^ (WS), which was yet another of the speculative and apocalyptic epics like Civilisation which were produced during the early stages of World War I. Ihmaneulus (1916;, a German contribution tu thi.s genre, shows die retarded state of lighting in that country,
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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.
By 391S the Germans had fallen badly behind in lighting, as is obvious even in a Lubitsch film such as Die Avgcn der Mumie May 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 ofthat 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 jaeir/on 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, cither 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 localised light in one area tailing off into \he 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 MauriU Stiller^ Balluprim^ donnan (1915), An alternative form of this localized lighting with natural light which was very popular with the camera men at Svenska ßiografteatern was to allow direct sunlight to tall frontally from high above onto a central area of the
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
One of the many low-key scenes in Verdens Lindergang (August BLom, 1915). A simulation of of ightfrom a hand-held lamp coming in from an arc floodlight out of shot to the left.
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 sel. It also precludes the use of a lot of cutting around to dillcrent 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.
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The most obvious visual leature 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 leature 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 emigre French directors at the Fort Lee studios Pcrret, Capellani,and Chautard worked in similar, though less exalted, versions of this 'pictorial ist1 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 continues 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 Strolicim's Foolish IVivcs, and also in the lilms of Clarence Brown, Tourneurs former assistant.
The Italian Picture
One aspect of the decline of the Italian cinema during
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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 feadino characters posed in a beautiful landscape picture. This can be readily seen in the FJeanora Duse vehicle, Centre (I9]6j, but it touched even the best Italian Ulms ol 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 E. DeMille's Kindling, which was lit by A Kin Wyckoff solely with a lew strategically placed arc floodlights, and a night battle scene done the same way in a short Thanhouscr Company production, Their One love. G.W. Bitzens cruder solution to the same problem in liinb of a Nation was to use pv-rotechnic flares to linht 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 191S even an ordinary Western such as Henry King's Six Fmc 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 night1 with artificial light by applying the same overall blue tinting to the whole sequence. Some camera-
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A battle scene shot aat night, and lit wtey by arcfloodlights m Their One Love (Thanhouser, I^IS).
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men and directors show thc first signs of frying to improve on this method however, and there are a few very rare eases where distant night scenes have been photographed in the half-light of desk (Female ofthc Species, 1916), or where thc uppc/part ofthc scene has been darkened by putting a partial filter over it in front of the lens, as in Less Than thc Dust
(1916) . In such eases the cameramen avoided getting any appreciable amount of sky into the shot, but in general such an approach was neither possible nor striven for.
In Europe the idea o flighting night exteriors with arc lights was also just beginning to appear, as in Batiers Zhi/n za zhrsn (1916) and Sjostrom's Bcrg-Ejvind och bans Ihstru
(1917) , Elsewhere I have seen no sign of this technique before the 'twenties, but it must be emphasized that 1 am discussing location or 1 back-lotf exterior scenes, and not sets representing exteriors constructed inside a studio, such as those in Lubitsch's Die Puppc (193 9), or the subsequent Dai Cabinet des Dr. Caligori (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 G. DeMillc bc^an using the shadows ol objects outside the frame cast into the irame area as early as 1915. The well-known example here was the shadow of the prison bars falling on the husband in Thc Cheat, but the first instance of this in DeMi lie films was earlier in 1915 in Thc Girl of thc 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 thc idea also occur in Maria Rosa, where the villain casts his
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1914-J9Í9
shadow on the wall before he enters the scene, and it h>£| spread to other countries by 1916, e.g. P rota /a nov s ftta-vayo Danta and Abel Gance's Barhcroussc, where thc 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 I9|7ř e.g. The Whip by Maurice Tourneur, and Kidnapped. And DeMi lie's The Whispering Chorus of 1918 uses definite looming shadows cast on thc 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 thc earlier Italian examples of low placed lights that 1 have mentioned, and this is also the case in Sidney and Chester Franklin's Going Straight (i9l7)3 in which a low placed light shining up into a face in Close Lip 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.
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 Akcíey, was first pro duced in 1917, but since it was a few years before it had any significant use, \ will defer a description of it till thc next chapter.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: i 914-1919
The shadow qf the villain slides into frame before he does in Maria Rosa fCedl B. DeMilk. 1915).
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The shadow of a threatening hand slides over a sleeping woman'sface in Barbcrousse
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Angle Shots
In this period shots taken from really hi^h- 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, Ijj-noring distant shots from the ground towards a first floor window, or something similar, real low-anjde shots are
even rarer. By far the most striking instance in this class U a low^angle Close Up in Abel Gance's Rarbennissc. This is of the titular protagonist, at the point where he declares that he is 'the King of the Forest', and this must he intended to he expressive.
Camera Movements
During the years 1914-191 % just as in previous years, there was little change in ihe way the vast majority of shots were taken with fixed iraining, particularly in interior scenes. Verv rarely one iinds panning shots being used to
A Clvse Up shot from a very hw angle in Abel Gance's Barberousse (19lb). The character m ihe shot has jun boasted that he is The King ofthc Forest
follow actors across a set, as in some Reginald Barker films .uch as Typhoon (1914) and Buw.cn Men (1915), but there was some increase in the use of framing movements i.c, 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 jí possible to avoid the use of framing movements if the movements of the actors arc carefully controlled, but if the cameraman had the abib m xo 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 Haním (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 bcině shot from closer to the actors; e.g. jubih (Clarence Badger, 1919). As before, exterior action scenes were tlie 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 track i ng-to wards 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 thcJtalian film Cabina (Í914). Such tracking shots were referred^ to at the time as 'Cabina movements', for it seems thai no-one had taken much notice of the earlier tracking shots on quasi-static scenes in American and English films, except perhaps Giovanni Past rone, the director of Cabins At the time Past rone stated that his intention was to create a ^hřce^dimensionat^effectin 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 19|'5 and 1916 every bright young director had to have one or two 'Cabirte movements3 in one of his films, but they used them sli d i ffcren tly to Pas trone.
Topickjústa few examples of this,fash i on, from amongst well-known directors, I will mention David thrum (Allan Dwan, \9\S)t Diiya bólshogo garoda (Ycvgcnj Bauer, 1914), Evongelmandem LW (HolgCr Madsen, 1915); and The 1^1 bond (Chaplin, 1915), all of winch move in much closer to the actors ami rather faster than the originals in Cabiria and also have trajectories fairly straight in or out from the scene. And all of fee tracking shot, incorporate a certain amount of panning.^ well;whjeh those in Cabiria-ául not The example in Maaband is the most elegant application a track ou, from a close .hot of a painty reveals the people
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
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-Commond (William J. Bowman, 191S), 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 conv plcxity 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 Fioisc 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 .'I Girl and Her Trust (1912).
By 1917 the tracking shot craxe in America was declining as last 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 Stello Mans (Marshall Neilan, 191S), though there probably some more amongst the large number of lost films. The example in Stella 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 Ames 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 bard 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 SťrohcinVs Blind Husbandsy 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
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'Depth of field(often erroneously called depth of focus) is one oi the central factors controlling the appearance of the film image, and it is really necessary to £>et 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 technoloay. The four central
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EI LAI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
quantities whose variations arc strictly connected one with another are Depth of Field, Lens Aperture^ Focal Length of tens, 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-gloss 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 T-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 fl t fl A} 12, f2<8, 14, fS.6, f8, fl I, fl6, f22, f32, f45, f<54, though other numbers may appear on actual lenses, Each or these f-numbcrs is said to differ from the next by 'one stop', and each change of a slop 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 122 or R2, but in the early days it could be f45, and the largest or maximum aperture was usually between 12 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 halidcs 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 slower7, and so on.
Length of a Lens is the distance behind its 'optical centre3 of the plane in which an image of an infinitely distant object is formed. The 'angle of view1 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 VlCw. ^d 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 4 standard lens. The opinions of film cameramen on this
139
point have changed during this century, and as aheadv remarked, some cameramen before 1914 considered a ^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 Wnties. Later on, there was some move towards considering even shorter focal lengths as standard, ®\ shall detail later. There lias been another approach to this problem through experimental investigation into which camera lens focal length gives audiences the best impression ot correct perspective in projected images of real scenes, and this work suggests 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 die distance at which the focus a lens 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 on 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, hut 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 (I J reduction of lens aperture, (2) decrease of focal length of the lens, (5) increase in distance at which the lens focus is set (up to a certain distance called the hyperlocal distance).
As has already been indicated, the aperture cannot be freely chosen in any particular case, for il depends in Its turn on the light level on the scene to be photographed, and also on the sensitivity to light (the SipeedT) of die 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 or 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 jubifo (1919), there is quite clearly a visible reduction in die 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 ® mm, lens Although these example* presaged the trend of the few years, they were not typical in 1919, hut restricted to the work of a limited number of leading film-rnak-
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
An exterior scene in Clarence Badger's Jubilo (1919), back lit by the sunf but with some strong extra fUfrom ihefrom on the foregroundfigures. There is a fairly shallow depth of field heret and the man severalfeet behind the people in thefront is already a little oat of focus* This corresponds to a camera aperture of aboutf4. Note also the irregular soft dark border around theframe., done with layers of black net in ihe matte box infront of the
lens.
ers. This phenomenon may hove had'something do with the move towards shooting in totally blackcdrout 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 diffused1 arcs, it seems likely that this replacement was not complete, and hence the overall1 light level' dropped slightly. However the majority of the studios were probably still working at an aperture of about f£-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 (Nob, 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 die kind of lighting set-ups being used at Viugraph 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 look an exterior shot at f45 around.this time docs not mean that this was s tan da ^practice. It wasn't.
Lenses
There Mas no change in the variety of camera tenses triable during the years 19141919, but the first signs of
^useof long focal-lcngth lenses appeared iniclltcr.tainment Mms There are isolated shots in aero*-*       in 0ri/i2a-
*- (!9J6Hnd,ck battle on the pyramid in Th* ib„ GoJ
C317) .which are take,. «jth Ifanse* of focril length in
i
the region of 4 to 6 inches, both scenes clearly having been shot with multiple cameras. This kind of usage remained very rare for decadest 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 ofa long lens for shooting Close tips 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 orthc 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 Bitter originated irisingand the use of the iris vignette, it seems highly probable that the well-deserved prestige of D.W. Griffith and the success ol Birth of a Nation were responsible (or the popularisation 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 wiiihin 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 erection, and those few who did soon abandoned the ex-
HLM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
treme of the practice, but Griffith himself persisted with jt into the 'twenties. This may be because Billy ftitzer kept using a Pathe camera, which did not have a fading shutter, throughout tliis period, whereas other cameramen were switching to the 6cll & Howell as soon as they could afford
it.
The films made at the Incc studios contain relatively few iris-ins and -outs, and those few are confined to the beginning and end of sequences. At the Incc 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 I91S 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 tlie frame appears at the beginning of 1915 The Girl of the Golden West undBirthofa 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 docs 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 til] 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 "■as the single mask that pulled up from the bottom like a theatre curtain, or down Trom the top, or back from one side, and yet another was the diamond-shaped opening iris, as in Poor Little Pcppina 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 I91S the edges of ordinary circular irises were becoming very fuzzy in American films, sometimes to the point where it l* difficult to distinguish an iris-oul from a fade. This is a refltction of the move that was beginning towards photography at larger apertures, and hence reduced depth of field,
141
which put the iris mask in front of the lens further out of locus than it had been some years previously. The edge of the ins 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 gels half-way across the screen to reveal a mental image lie fore stopping in Old Wives For New, and there is an instance similar to that in The Angel Factory in TiWn 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 (I91S), where an iris-out is overlapped with an iris-inr] 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 Dos Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
(1920) is not as unprecedented as has been suggested.
'Soft Focus5 and Lens Diffusion
The earliest use ofa form of 'soft focus' of which 1 know occurs in Hh Phantom Siveetheon (19 IS), 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 tt occurs twice in successive shots; first as a mysteriously seductive woman is introduced in Medium Shot behind foreground actors who arc sharply in focus while she is slightly out of focus, and then in a Medium Close Up 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 Picklbrds Fan-ebon the Cricket, In which there is repeated series of Medium Close Ups of Mary Pickford in an exterior scene with her face wdl 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 Kails, No. 96 in the hazards of HelenT series of films, This film, which was made in 1916, opens with a close shot of the actress playing die heroine of the film in a glamorous gown introducing herself iri the working clodies of the films, The central area of the
142
FILM STYLE AND 7ECFf NO LOGY; 1914-1919
A Close Up in Fandion the Cru kei {191 5), tilth thcjocus sharp on [he frame of haves in the foreground, bin with the actress behind appreciably out of focus. She is bockUt by the sun, and there is strong reflector fill from the front as
frame covering her face i.s 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 1 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 focus7 in mother film made in 1916, hut which is now lost. What one docs find in thc next Tew years is the use of extremely out-of-focus circular vignette masks, which are so out of focus that the
blurred edge ol the mask extends its effect to the centre of thc frame, slightly reducing the definition of the image then:. Then in 19IS there was a completely new development in D.W. Griffith's Broken ftlossoms. In this film all the Close Lips of Lillian Gish arc heavily diffused by the use ol layers of line black cotton mesh placed in front of trjy 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
Elaborately shopped I'ignctte mask usedjor a shot in a children s battle scene in The
Little Patriot (1917).
i
fILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: I9I-1-I9I9
143
-'I bard-edged vignette mask of complicated shape enchstna three seta of'fox-trotting feet in l.uhiischt Die Austcrnprinzessin
(19IU
parts of the story, though whether these were done by Sar-tOV or Bitter is not known, Heavy lens diffusion was also used in a similar wav in France by Marcel L'llerhier in his IjJm Rose-France. This could well have been a case of direct influence, since that film was first shown at the verv end of 1919. Alter that date lens di Elusion otcasionallv appears jn a more limited way in the works ol the so-called 'French avant-garde", but not elsewhere in Lurope for a lew more years.
Masking of Other Kinds
Masts ol shapes other than circular also began to appear in American films during the years 1 914-1918: first such simple shapes as the 'CinemaScope-shaped narrow rectangle formed by a black band masking the Um and bottom ol the Ira me in Intolerance, then moving on to inure complicated shapes such as a mask with a cruciform cut-out in SicllaMam (19lSj. The Ctrl I fir We a Soul (Wrn. Bertram, 1917) also has shaped vignettes, while .1 Little Patriot (loathe, 1917J has elaborately shaped vignettes used on a scene ol a children's mock battle, and also a white vignette Lo concentrate attention on a detail. In 191« Maurice EKey in Britain took up the idea, and, alontj with a number of other new tricks, introduced it into his Kelson; The Story of ^gland's immortal \avai Hero. Thi^ has a couple of scenes framed in a heart-shaped mask, as does hi* subsequent The Rocks of Valprc (1919). The mm elegant variant* oc-air in some films Ernst Lubit>ch made in 1919 and later. In Die Austernprinzcssin a triple layer of horizontal rectangle with rounded ends enclose sets of dancing feet at the
frenzied peak of a foxtrot, and in Die Puppc a do/en gossiping mouths are each enclosed in individual small circular vignettes arranged in a matrix. Unlike most o\the vignettes used in American films, the vignettes used by Lubitsch were 'hard1 or sharp-edged, as \y£s neccssarv [or clarity in hi.s particular application, in France again, unusually shaped masks p]jy a large pari in Rose-France (1919), and later eon-tiuue to appear in a small way in subsequent films.
For the sake ol complcieness I should also mention another celebrated use ol hard masks in these years, and I his was the characterisiic arch shaped mask UM-d by Mjurice Tourneur in his lllrns Lo denote iantasv or hallucination. As Iiir as I can remember he used it consistently (<»r this pur pose, and not merely lor decoration* Certainly in Poor little Rich Girl the arch-.shaped mask is u>ed solefv on the snots ol the heroine's hallucination*.
Anamorphosis
1 he use ££^a^f^S| (distorted shape) images lirst appears in the^e years with Abel Gancc\ fa Folic du Doc-icur Tube. In this film tfie effect of a drug ddministered to a group ol people      sfcgg£$to*J by shooting the scene* reflected in A distorting mirror of the lair-ground type. Ah though this film still exists, It was not shown at the time of production, which Gancc claim* was 191 S. It would be nice to have ^me independent confirmation of ibis date. There may well have been other uses of anamorphosis dur m£ the war years, but in any lj.vc the next m I fo*^S of was in fdl the Clouds foil    (Victor Fleming, 1919). Here it was used lo depict the nightmare dkvis ol im%MJon in j comic manner. Jn fact, like K> many film cIIvcIn that Mwi
66
144
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 he done as Point of View shots, as in Sidney Drew's The Sictv of the Owe (1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the PQV of a drunken man. In Poor Little Rich Girl a rocking camera shot is intended to convev delirium, and bv 19IS the idea had got to Russia, in Baryshnyo i khuligany 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
Svmbolic 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 DAV. Griffiths The Avenging Conscience (1914), the title The birth of the evil thought' precedes a scries 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 uhimi giorni di Pompei, which J 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's Youth, someone else7s 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.
GbvanniPastrone's l[fuoco(\9\6) represents an advance to some extent, in that the symbolic effects, though admit, tedly fairly obvious, were not explained as the v occurred,
UJuot* was an entry in the already established 'vampire' genre, of wfcich the best-known example is Frank Powell's A Ml There Was (1915), but in fact these tales of aman en-need and destroyed by an evilly seductive woman had been
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
developing in European cinema for years before that. The central figures ofll fuoco are introduced as 'He - The Un* known Painter1 and 'She - The Famous Poetess7, 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 arc travelling landscape shots tak^n from a boat going down a river, and they arc 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 Yevgcni Bauer for Khanzhokov during the First World War, and include Grcvy, Sehastyc vechnoi naehi, and Posle smertij all from 1915. These to some extent live up to the promise of the 'decadent' aesthetic suggested by their titles; Daydreams y Happiness of Eternal Night, and After Deaths Sehastyc vechnoi nochi includes a visually very striking vision or a medusa-like monster superimposed on a nighttime snow scene, and Posle smcrti 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 Pikovayo dama and Saiona likuyushchi lacked the true Symbolist feel. In Italy, another country somewhat isolated filmic-ally by the war, the same kind of realization of thejjn dc siccle decadent symbolist aesthetic can be found, mostly in films associated with the diva phenomenon. 1 have already mentioned Ilfuoco, 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 Krauss1 11 gam nero. This last is one of the few films ol 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
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
Í45
most
A set iriih decor in the style of the
advanced Russian interior design of the pre-World War I period in Yevgeni ^aue/jYuri Nagorni (1916).
had made Symbolism thoroughly old-fashioned.
The first dim explicitly intended by its maker to be a visual analogue of poetry, Marcel L'Herbiers 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 ninctcen-twcntics, 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 bein^ given to visual co-ordination in films with contemporary subjects, the first efforts al 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 \fp much beyond what might have been the very latest ideas of refinement in actual interior decoration. Though the abstract designs round uSe intcnitlcs in this film are a little more advanced. The same concern for putting into a Rim the latest kind oPrnod-ernr elegance that a wealthy contemporary with the most advanced taste might hypothetical!)' use in his home can be ghmpsed in some of the sets in Benjamin Christensens Hacvnens Nat (1916) and Ernst Lubilscb's Schuhpalast Pinkus
In Fighting Odds (1913) 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 bein^ 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 closelv reproduce what was the most advanced work there in the interior design ol real houses, mostly that being done by Feclor Shekhtcl'. 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 Shekhtcl", 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 Fornin from the same period. This is perhaps not so surprising, a_s advanced stylized set designs had appeared in the Russian theatre before the war, and Bauer bad been a set designer in the theatre before he turned to film-making. Also, Ian Christie tells me that Bauer knew Sbekhtel' quite well. It is also worth mentioning that some oJ the exterior scenes of Bauer's films have a definite flavour of the paintings of Konstantin Sumov done in the early years of the century, with tbeir peculiarly Russian blend of Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Impressionism.
The film Thais (1916) made by the Italian Futurist Bra~
146
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
One of the many sets with "Toy Town" stylw Lion in Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppc (1919),
gagJia 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 lew scenes. The greater pari 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 wall s covered with sets of alternating black and white rectangles and triangles nesting inside each other, but, contrary to some suggestions, the geometrical regularity or these designs sots them apart from true Expressionist art.
Maurice Tourneur's The BlueJiird and Pruned, both made in 1938, 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 flUfc Dud wemstraight'back to nineteenth century Salon painting. In Prunella the styli/ation ol houses, trees, etc. in the decor into si mplifad'flai patterns was carried much further, witlvmuch more consistency. Prunella was also unusual m that these stylized sets were partof 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 ol such films. Both films were designed by Ben Carre.
Then in 1919 Ernst Lubitsch moved in the same direction with the decor of Die Puppe, though in this case the very definite 'Toy Town1 stylization of the sets was justified by the framing presentation oTthe narrative as representing the doings of dolls from a toy-box. Lubitsch's DicAusicmprin-zessin made earlier in I9I9P and likewise designed by Ernst Stem, also used slightly stylized sets, but this did not go much further than the enlargement and geometrical iz at ion of the kind of decorative features to be found on the walls of real houses, etc.. Incidentally, all this happened before Das Cábinei des Dr. Cafigari was made at the very end of 1919. (its premiere was on February 20, 1920.) The use of styh ized decor in Die Puppc may well have su^ested a similar approach in Caligari, though Ernst Stern s work had nothing to do with the characteristic forms of Expressionist paint-ing, The choice of a truly Expressionist style for the design of Caligari was presumably due to the impact of the stagings of Expressionist plays in the Berlin theatre that year. For instance, Tollers Die Wandlung, which was premiered on September 30, (919 had decors by Robert Ncppach in a genuine Expressionist style. A more extended discussion of these matters can be found in the articles "From Caligari to Who?" and "From German Stage to German Screen", in my book t\ faring into Pictures.
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
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
147
A gloss matte shot in Daddy-Long-Legs (1919) combining a real exterior scene in the bottom right corner of the frame u-hh a painting occupying the rest
oj the frame.
prior to the introduction of the Bell & Howell. Norman O. Dawn made the Inst glass shots in 1907 by painting additions to the scene being photographed which were roofs far 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 die image fucussed 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 sci;ne 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 £atc of a camera which is set up in Iront of an art board on an easel Light is shone through the hack of one frame of the test film to project an image of the
test film onto the white art hoard. Then the artist is free to slowly build up painted additions to the scene, checking all the while lor matching, and he finally blacks out the parts of the board where the filmed parts of the scene fall. Tin.' resulting painting is then filmed as a second exposure on the undeveloped negative alter a series ol lest exposures and developments have been made using the other undeveloped Lest sections. In this wav a correctly combined scene can he obtained on one negative filter it has been developed.
The successful application of this technique can he seen in Oi ilisation (1917), and the result of trying to make matte combinations in a camera with poor registration can be seen in Rirth of a Nation, in the burning o| Atlania' scene,
Tit I ing
During the war war* 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 title*. However, a> with other aspects of film form, tW were a few director* who clung to older practices to a greater or lesser extent, and here D.W, Griffith wa* one of ihe extreme cases, Me continued to use large numbers of narrative title* into the 'twenties when such a practice was quite obsolete in Europe, ** usual, these developments lagged some y%m behind America practice, with most director* using few dialogue title* in 1919.
it must not be understood from what I hjvejuM >a<d that oil the lines of dialogue which were visibly spoken by the actors came to he given in interna; what b ai taut is the
m
•
proportion of dialogue to narrative titles. All films con tin-ued to leave some visibly spoken lines of dialogue untitled, and as early as 1915 there were films such as David forum 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. (1 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. Prom 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 L-ubitsch, though he did not use it in all of his silent films. Mis earliest really distinctive use of untitled dialogue occurs near the beginning of Carmen {191S),
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 La sky films of that year, The Citl of the Golden West and Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo have illustrated titles, as docs Maurice Tourneur's Trilby, Then in 1916 quite a'large number of Amen can 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 oi border. The style of the illustrations and decorations was almost always that used in middlebrow book and magazine illustration of the .period, but the abstract backgrounds to the titles in The Female of tie Species (1916) were in the manner of the embryonic Art Deco style, which was the very latest thing at uhaI 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 $C0Op 0 Dc Grasse, 1916), the lines of dialogue at the climax of the film are supcrunposcddirectly over the image of the person Sp caking, die.n, rather'like the sub-titVmg used in modern films. However, in this case the lines of dialogue were superimposed across the top of the frame rathe, than-the bottom, Obviously this would create problems with the production of foreign versions of a silent
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
film, not to mention the extra difficulty of carrying out the superim posit ion in the camera at exactly the point at which the lines were spoken, so it is no surprise that there Mere no more examples of this technique.
A clever variation on the illustrated title idea which ob-viously had no future was the use of live action vignetted into decorative cut-outs around the title in the title cards in Twin Pawns (1919).
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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 191+, 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 Jens 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 Ycvgeni Bauer. It was just possible to do work in this style that still seems striking, as docs Alcksandra Rebikova in Yuri Nagomi, 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. Ily 1919 American acting style had developed to a point that left the acting in D.W. Griffiths films at the more emphatic end or the spectrum. What had earlier been outstanding invention of acting detail in the context of the general production oi 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 express,-]ons 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
f/LM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1914-1919
be the case in the next decade, when exaggeration in acting was a thing of the past. After J 919 dramatic acting became $o 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 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 arc a number of factors involved in the strong and apparent visual discontinuities between successive shots in Griffith's films, and the use of cross-cut ting between parallel actions Is only the most obvious of these. Cuts within the duration of a scene are still relatively infrequent in Ins films, and when they do occur they arc 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, su 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 iU 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 of forth of a Nation or intolerance and shou-ing 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 ol actors from a shot m one location to another in a neighbouring location is handled. At best this kind of transi-Uort nacl previously been dealt with by having the directions
149
of travel ol the actor m the two shot, correspond on the screen, though there were still some director, in 1914 who could not manage that much. But in a film such as The hank Burgas Fou (Jack Adolfi, 1914), one can see shot transi-
tions in which a cut is made from
an actor just leaving the
s
OS
rame, to a shot ofhim well inside the frame in an adjoining location, which have the positions and directions so well chosen thai 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 lilies, a the story is entirely supported by narrative titles. Anomalie 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 1 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 I nee s films, particularly The iKight 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 feel away on ihe other side of the room in the next shot, again with apparent continuity. This became important as more and more of the shols 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 shols. Ibis 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 angle* within a scene during the years 1914-1919, and in particular to the development ol reverse-angle eulting.
Reverse-Angle Cutting
It was only in 1915 that cutting to different angles within a scene became well-established as a technique for directing a scene into shou. As already described, this approach had appeared a few limes in earlier years, hut in general cuts to or from a closer shol 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 lew instance.
ISO
in which the disposition of objects within the filmed scene were such as to prevent the camera being moved absolutely mm Ibrward to take the closer shot, but the donations
were never so ^reat 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 thisgenerali^lion, and this is in connection with scenes taking place in a theatre. In such cases cuts with a change of direction of approximately ISO degrees between shots of the audience, and of the show they were looking at, were used even in Europe before 19-14,
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 Phant&m 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 Ynex, but none matched Ralph Ince's command. It must be emphasized again that this development has nothing to do with Thomas Incc, for the films he most closely supervised, such as Civilization (I9.| 6), 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-ha 11 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, wh ere as there are more than a dozen such cuts within the ten minute length of Ralph Ince's Hh Phantom Sweetheart.
WARNING Since Birth of a Nation is such a frequently seen film I must point out that to.the umnstructed glance there might appear to he more reverse-angles in it than I have stated-hut 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; U. from the 1 front'.
Nevertheless, the Griffith style of (ilnvmakina was still lollowed in its lull idiosyncrasy, with extensive u« of side by side spaces and a definite Trent' for the camera, in most sbpsuek comedy, and this was because of the success and influence of me Keystone company, which was already %
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
idly using this style before 1914. Directors of dramatic films such as James Kirk wood, Lloyd Ingraham, and W. Christy Cabannc, who had all previously worked fur Griffith, alsu followed his style fairly closely, though by 1916 Ingraham could sometimes manage to use the occasional reverse-ancle cut when the two shots concerned also formed a watch-er-POV pair. In fact the Griffith style, with only a slight weakening of his relentless frontality ol scene dissection, was the standard for films made by his Fine Arts section oi the Triangle company, and was followed by all who worked there. D.Wr Griffith's prestige ensured that many American film-makers elsewhere were very slow to adopt true re-verse-angle cutting during this period, and on into the years after the First World War.
By 1916 there arc a number of films in which there are around IS true re verse-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. Bondage, I91S) with 18% re verse-angles, and Juhilo (Clarence Badger, 1919) with 16%, and by that date most directors of quality films were making more use ol reverse-angle cutting than DAV. 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 re verse-angle cuts, mostly in association with Point of View cutting.
Cutting On Action
A major feature of 'continuity cinema1 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
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: I9I4-I919
191$ 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 stvlistic conditions, for around 1916 the first editino view-ers 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 die 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 Eil m in the gate was from behind in some sort 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 Hrjuht 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 hand3 most of the lime, 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 Jtal| in European films. It was also before 1914 that D.W> GrifThh had begun to bend the use of the Insert towards tr^y dramatically expressive ends, but he had not done this o|tcn, and it is really only with his The Avenging Conscience of
15/
19H that a new phase in the use of the Insert Shotstarts As «*H ** the symbolic inserts I have already mentioned The A^gConscie^m made extensive use'oHarge numbers °l Big Close Up shots of clutching hands and tapping feet as a means ol emphasizing those parts ol the bodv as indica^ tors 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 vear. 1914-1919.
Cecil B. DeMille was a leading figure in the further development of the use of the insert, and by !918 he had reached the point of including about 9 Inserts in every 100 shots in The Whispering Chorus. Me 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 En Old Wives Jar JW (19IS), (More on this topic can be read in Moving Into Pictures r)
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 Lip could be several times the si/.e of a real pistol when held at arms-length, and for instance in Her Code oj 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 pistol. Since the evolution ol the use of the insert had been vjuitc gradual in the United States there was no comment upon it there, but in France a number of young aesthetes lelt its lull lurce 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 DclJuc 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 Trench avant-garde1 of the early nine teen-twenties. (Detailed information on this subject can be found in French Film Theory and Criticism by Richard Abel (Princeton University Press, I9SS), When Louis Delluc and others of like mind came Lo 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-cutLing in its most extreme ibr/n in Intohame 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 manv other devices that were mo. e fully developed in Europe during the next decade, what could be called the Stmospheri/lnsert Shot' made its first appearance in American dims during the years before 1919, This kind of shot is one ol 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 Tourncur's The Pride of the Clan (1917), in which there is a scries 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, llaris The Narrow Trail, in w'liicJva 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 could1 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 crossed1 my attention is iiv T<hc Woman in 41, which includes a chain-or shots joined by fades discovering the heroine in tlie middle of typical New York scenes, as she discovers the city lor the first time. Maurice Elvey's Nelson - England's Immortal Naval Hero (=19 \$) has a sy mbol ic scqu en ce di ssol vi ng from, a picture of Kaiser Wilhclm II to a peacock, then to a battleship, which is probably more startling now than then, given our awareness of Eiscns tern's subsequent films.
The atmospheric Insert began its notable career in European art cinema in Marcel L-Hcrbier's fWfranee. Here amongst the intentionally 'poetic' uses of vignettes and 0ft ters and: literary ihtertitles, a shot of the empty path once trod by .the lovers is used to evoke the past.
j nc SUiash-Bacfc
The fashionable interests thefch-back continued into this period, and it could' now be entered with, very little preparation, as in Between Men (iReginaId Barker, 191S) In this Kim the hero reads a letter which refers to a past incidents his life we see the letter man Insert Shot then after a cutback to.lum.su.ting thinking, there is a dissolve which goe* straightinto.a representation of.the.past scenes referred to uvthe letter, without any explanatorv titles
occurring at
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
any point. During these years the usual way of entering and leaving aflash-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 19 IS 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 191+ where it docs 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 (Sclig, 19I+), 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 Piavc 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 wlsh-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 irjsing in other films, and even straight cuts in Bauer's Grc/y and Posle sment1 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 Qn-The-Sauare 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 1 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 arc insufficient, and also change too fast, to be considered as a language system.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
r;-V:.-V* •
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>yŕ
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r
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i
Í S3
The beginning of the flashback scene in The On-The^Squarc Girl done as a scries of shots inset into the middle of o letter recoiling the past events in question.
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..... -—-^—^--L.--x/       ■ ■■ . —■■■■ — ... ^
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 Tu net ion essential to the plot, as in Silks and Satins. During the war the use ol 11 ash backs occurred in films from all the major European film-making countries as well, from Italy (Tigrc reale) to Denmark (Evangeliemandens Liv) to Russia (Grezy and Posit imcrti), where it arrived in 1915. As the years moved on a sudden decline in the use of long Hash-back sequences set iri around 1917, but on the other band 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 Thelady 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 mtcrtitles, though after a while this stops, and the intertitles lhen 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 Hash back forrn, but with cut aways inside it back to events occurring >n the time frame in which she is doing her narrating. Actual)', 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.
ä
Cross-Cutting Between Parallel Actions
Alter 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 ol 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 lei t it necessary to make the initial transition to the first shot of the alternate strand of action with a fade, as in Benjamín Christensen's Haevnens Not (1916) and the Cincs company's f I sogno patriottko di Ci-ncssino* And in 191S the quite experienced Russian director Protazanov still found U 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 themH
Jn the United States some directors became so enraptured with the idea of cross-cutting that they sometime* 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 acceleraiion of the main action was accomplished then One example of this is contained in the Sclig conv t film, The Lost Messenger (1916). On the othtr hand, cro^s-cuttíng was used to get new effects of contrast, such
ei
pany
as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMilte's The Whisper ing Choru?, 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 Specks (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 stonesare 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 I he 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 arc not,) The influence of Intolerance produced a few other films that combined a number of similar stories having similar themes, such as Maurice Tourncur's Woman (19-18), but the box-office failure of hroicrartce ensured that these later films had simpler structures. The true line of descent from -Intolerance curves away from the mainstream through Abel Gancc's to Roue {192]:), and1 some of Eisensteins 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 notbe where the idea started. This film begins with an insert shot, and then the camera tracks back to
H —
-
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914^1919
reveal the whole scene. Other instances of this new idea can be seen in Dai id Fforum (Allan Dwan) and Ekas 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 cacti other, before where they are doing this is revealed. Although not common, once 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 which was now present 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 19IS there were more shots per hour in a Kay-Bee Triangle film such as The Hired Man (Victor Scheruinger) than in Griffith's Broken Blossoms, while jubiio (Clarence Badger, I 9 I 9) and Until They Get Me (Frank Bor/age, I9'17) are shot from much closer in throughout their length than contemporary films by die best-known names of the period. And Badger and Borzage used far more reverse-angle cuts than Cecil R. DeMille, while in his turn the latter used more middle distance shots than D.W. Griffith, who was tending to avoid this range of camera closeness by 191 S_
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, 1 shall now begin to provide this new approach.
PICTURES - PART 1
Since my work is basically concerned with establishing differences and similarities between Rims in the way ihey are put together, 1 have felt the need for a more precise method of analysis than the simple verbal descriptions that | hate used in writing the previous chapters. Up to the present, everyone has been satisfied with statements like u,..Fritz Lang, tike jean Renoir, puts the emphasis on Long Shots In his films.,,1', and "Muriel contains twice as many shots as the average Him" or even vaguer statements than these to describe a director's style. When concrete statements like the above are made in this area, they often turn out to be flatly wrong, as indeed are those f have just quoted, in fact Muriel contains a fairly average number of shots, and Renoir worked mostly with a camera distance of around Medium Shot, as did Lang once he went to Hollywood.
When I first started thinking about the problem of more accurate stylistic description back in the 'sixties, I took my inspiration from the use of statistical style analysis which had begun long before in literature and music, (For a survey of some of that work see The Computer and Music, edited by fl.B, Lincoln, Cornell, 1970, and Statistics and Style, edited by Delete! and Bailey, Elsevier, 1969.) However, I have recently discovered that I was not the first person with such Lhoughts about the style analysis of movies, Tor Herbert Birctt had already published some suggestions along these lines in Kinemotvgraphic I (1962). (For Birett s other publications see issue No.2 ol Diskats Film (Munich, 1933)), Indeed, it appi^ars that there were other researchers beforehim who put forward ideas about measuring cutting rates, not to mention diebricf investigation by the Reverend Dr. Stockton in 1912 which has already been referred to in Chapter 9. In Birett's studies he has, like all previous investigators, worked with shot lengths, and has not investigated all the other major stylistic variabl es with which I am also concerned.
One filmic variable about which conscious decisions have to be made when a film is being shot is Scale (or Closeness) of Shot, and even before 1919 distinctions were already being drawn by American film-makers between the categories "Bust" or Close Up, American Foreground, French foreground, Long Shot, and Distance Shot. Although there wa,s al ready a small amount of disagreement about precisely UThat shot scale corresponded to each of these descriptive lCrms, it is sufficient for the purposes of analysis to define carefully what one means by each category, and then stick
in
rones
to it, I will in fact use categories of Scale of Shot more like those used in the mnetcen-forties and later, as follows: Big Close Up (BCLI) shows head only, Close Up (CU) shows head and shoulders, Medium Close Up (MCU) includes body from the waist up, Medium Shot (MS) includes from just below the hip to above the head of upright actors, Medium Long Shot (MLS) shows the body from the knee upwards, Long Shot (IS) shows at least the full height of the body, and Very Long Shot (VLS) shows the actor small the frame. Jt must be appreciated that the closer categ of shot are understood to allow only a fairly small amount of space above the actor's head, so that the kind of siiuation where just the head and shoulders of a distant actor are sticking up into the- bottom of the frame with vast amounts of space above him would not be classed as a Close lip. All the analyses in this hook are done with the above categories, but after a few years [ sub-divided the category of Long Shot into Full Shot, which just shows the full height of I he-actor, and Long Shot showing the actor so distant that the frame height is two or three times the actor height, and still reserving Very Long Shot for those shots in which the actors are verv small in the frame. So although I have records for most of the hundreds of films J have analysed for Closeness of Shot which include the Full shot category, Jbr consistency I have included Full Shots in the Long Shot category.
Since there is very little camera movement in the films made in the periud we are dealing with at the moment, anil since the actors also tend to stay mostly at the same distance from the camera in them, it is not difficult to assign the shots to the appropriate category. However, if a shot does include extensive actor movement towards, or away Irom, the camera, it is alwavs possible to carry out an averaging process for actor closeness within the length of the shut to any desired degree of accuracy, if one takes enough lime and care over it. Also it should be noted that since we are considering films with 200 or more shots in them, there is a tendency for occasional errors in the assignments oi shots to their correct category to cancel out.
To carry out an analysis of a film in this way, it is
necessary to run it on
some sort of vie wine machine, so
that it can be stopped and run backwards while difficult decisions are made a* to the appropriate Scale of Sliol. The obvious choice nowadays is to work with a copy ol the film in a Non-Linear hditing programme on a computer.
:
ISO
STATISTICAL STYLE ANAUSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART I
The different Scales of Shot (or Closeness oJShoi) - Long Shot (LS), Full $hot(FS)t Medium Long Shot (MIS), Medium Shot (MS), Medium Close Up (MCU)f Close Up(Clii)t and Big Close Up (BCU). Very Long Shot (or Extreme Long Shot) (VLS) could not be included in the picture, h would shmv ihe actor small in the frame.
With practice it is possible to deal with most films in not much more than their actual running time. Although in the first place the total number of Close Ups, etc, in a film.are recorded, for the purpose of the comparison between one particular film and other films which will include different numbers of shots in total, it is preferable to multiply the number of shots in each category by SGG divided^by the total number of shots in the film, so that one lliemhas the number of each type of shot per 500 shots. This "standardization11 or "normalixation" not only enables one to easily compare one film with another, but also gives a direct measure of the relativeprobability of a director choosing any particular closeness of shot.  It might have been preferable to use a normalisation to number of shots of each class per 100 shots; he, percengtages, but it is-difiWlt for me to change everything in all j gfa wriltCn ,boijL ^ ^ ^ ^ |fi
years, in any case, you can get percentages if you want them by a simple division by five.
First Results
When we look at the histograms (bar charts) for the number of shots in each category of Scale of Shot for some American films released in 1914 and 1915, we can readily see a marked difference between them. In The Avenging Conscience and Birth of a Nation Long Shot is the most frequently used closeness of shot, While in The Spoilers, David Hdrum and The Golden Chance, Medium Long Shot is much the most common. In the first two of these latter films, nearly all the shots fall into the Medium Long Shot and Long Shot categories. This was no more than the application to feature length films of the standard closeness of camera in most American films made around 1913, as has already been described. The graphs for Traffic in Souls (1913) and Ivanhoe (191B) can be compared with that for D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience. The latter is fairly close to the Griffith film, though without .the BCUs from Griffiths symbolic Insert shots. But Traffic in Souls is distinctive for the very
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART I
IS7
Traffic in Souls (191 3)
IvanW (1913)
					345		
50*							
??0 ■							
1«-			■				
	I	0	4 -J				0
o -	:BCU	cu		MS	MLS	ts	VLS
MO ■JŮ0 I GO
Tirol in WqtTen (I9I4J
			
	150		
			-13
MS		LS	VLS
100 0
Si?
The Spoils (i 914)
£95
The Avenging Conscience (1914)
ms
KO
1W
&4
12
300 ■»
WO
31S
131
		£0
It		
		
KB
HO
IK)
14
jS 1
too 100 4
BCU    CU    MCU    MS     MLS     LS VLS
David Harum (19IS)
ISO
ecu   cu   mcu   ms   r,n_$   ls vls
Hie Golden Chance (19] S)
				
■		141		
o      o o				
scu   cu MÖÜ		IAS	LS	VLS
Birth of ii Naiion (19\ 5)				
■			172	
				
				
i* »				
1     i \				
ecu   cu   tocu   us   vt&   ls vls
The Cheat (1915)
1Í
100 i
200 ■
100
41
17
13
eCU    CU    MCU     MS     MLS LS
VLS
1«	16S
	
	
MS	MLS
3W
100
ITJ
13
32
£
ft	rrr-•	122
		
		
1
QCU    CU    MCU    MS    f.iLS     LS VLS
Havsgamar (1916)
320
íl Fuoco(l93 6)
ftarbcrouiwc (1916)
SM
1M
BCU    CU    MCU    IAS     P.1LS LS
	SCO -
	£00 ■
	100 ■
	>a -i j
	i-1           o r
LS	VLS
				
		150		
			110	
■				
3i 3i				35
-1        i -				
so
1W
ne     119
30 O
£2
BCU     CU    MCU    MS     MLS     LS VLS
BCU    CU    IfCU    MS    PrlS    LS VLS
Number of shots with the given Scale ofShot per 500 shots for the films named
heavy emphasis on MLS, which follows the style of the bulk American short films of 1913. The Cecil B. DcMille films, The Cheat and The Golden Chance, have something of the same emphasis on Medium Long Shot, but they are starting to increase the proportion of closer shots. They are also shot with the camera up near head height, as had become the practice in 1915, rather than at the earlier low position, which can still be seen in The Spoilers. The figures for The Cheat illustrate one of the minor problems with the practical ^plication of my ideas about statistical style analysis, since I had to use a 16 mm. print rather than a 35 mm. print, as I have been able to do for virtually all my other analyses. 16 m™. prints of silent films nearly always crop off part of the fame, and so make it appear that they were shot slightly ^scr in to the actors throughout than was really the case. Making allowance for this would aivc a distribution of the
numbers of shots for each closeness of shot much closer to that for The Golden Chance, You will notice that the other three DcM i lie films from some years later still have the same sort of general prolilo of the scale of shot distribution as The Golden Chance, with the same sort of slope up to Medium Long Shot, but a little more emphasis on the closer shots.
[t should be mentioned that 1 include in the category Big Close Up all shots in which the camera fs as close to whatever is being filmed as it would be to give a shot of the human head alone filling the full height of the frame. Thus for most silent films this category is entirely, ur almost entirely, made up of Insert shots of objects, except towards the very end of the 'twenties. I could separate out the two sorts of Big Close Up, since I have them recorded, bul I judge that this would produce an unwanted complication in my presentations here.
ISS
STATISTICAL STYLU ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - fr[RT I
Until Thev Get Me (1917J
The fřlttiit of Texas ■Ry.w (7)
5K>
113		S7			Si	1. '•
■						
						
						1
330
1»
J					
	i				i
- ■	*o				
					5
ecu   eu   wcu   ms   mls   ls vis
Tl>c Hired Man-(19IS)
BCU     CU    MCU    Í.<s    MLS     LS VLS
Gld Wives For New (1S8$)
l£3
67
m
j£_r
2»
					
-		na			
					
					
iff       g:- .	61				
	:-í				
1 ■				-	
BĚU     CU    MCU    MS     MLS     LS VLS
ECU     CU   .MCU    MS     MľS     LS VLS
Broken Blossom^ 1919}
Jubilo(l9t9)
srn
soo-
1
1PŮ
SO
SO
ago-
100 ■
1«
sa
I
BO m
—-
94
9»
SCO    CU    MCU    hlS    MLS     LS VLS
Tíóľat>leDsvid(l922)
■
aeu   eu  mgu  ms   mls   ls vls
Manslaughter (1922)
300
2«)
147
*C0 97
33
1
se
2r
J7
»>1
130-
SCU    CU    MCU    MS    ML$     ĽS VLS
KoůnigsmůrEí:(| 923}
2Ť7
1?4
44
13
33
tl
fa
300-1
:
IDA-
&CU    CU    MCU   -MS    MLS     LS VL&
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS    LS VLS
^hc Iron. Morse (1324)
■
it
10?
2D
£0
BCU     CU    MCU    MS     MLS lig
Thomas Graals basta Film (1917)
«0
lOfl
			tfiS			
						
11						
						a
BGU    CU    mcu    ms     mls    ls vls
True Heart Susie (1919)
300 i
100 ■
-					
	ei	102			
					
37					
_M_r ■					
ecu cu	MCU	ms	mls	ls	vis
Why Change Your Wife? (1920)
3«
200
1O0
ICS
40
Ú3
20
6Ů
5»
700 -
iM -
BCU    CU    MCU    Itó     fJLS     LS VLS
Dor verlorene Schuh (1923)
»1
bcu    cu    mcu    ms     mls     ls vls
The Marriage Circle (1924)
300
2t>0 ■
1W-
109
rza
21 m
77
VLS
BCU    CU    MCU    MS     MLS     LS VLS
■
Over the next few years after 1915, there was.of
course a merican
trend towards closer shooting, particularly in the A cinema, and'other examples li.hav^ sdectcd.from amongst
nSl-^ 8** Oik Just as do the
DoMdlentms. ^^^^0^ & ^(1917) h, closer shots deHn^y form the majority, but there were wn* other directors who ftft dow ,o follow the trend
Such directors as E,A. Martin, who directed The ikon oj Texas'Ryan^niekiy vanishedrrom sight. Havsgamarmdllfuoc* illustrate typical European scale of shot distributions of the time, but there were one or two more advanced European directors who were following the American trend more closely, as shown by MauriU Stiller'* Thomas Gravis basio Film and Abel Ganees Barberousse from L917 though the)'
7 d r
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART
IS9
Erciricnoicts Poiyomkin (1925)
The Gootfe Woman (1925)
HO
10J
		•			1K>	
						
	fs	ĚJ7		71		
32						
						I
ecu	CU	MCU	MS	MLS	LS	VUS
20a
im ■
Varied (1925)
WO
103
as
2a
60
7ř
27
Smouldering Fires (192S)
BCU     CU    MCU    *S$     MLS     LS VLS
Siclb Dallas (1925)
i	7C	7fi			5?	
Jl				EO		
,___						
SCOi
ItO
						
						
	Gl					
						
						33
						1
BCU	CU	MCU		MLS	LS	VLS
£00
100 ■
ECU    CU    MCU    m    í/LS    LS VLS
Sun Lip (1925)
110 IB
ST
103
70
500
29
J
The Eagle (1925)
ECU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS    LS VLS
Flesh and the Devil (1926)
						
			IS1			
				1E3		
				10i		
		?1				
37						
s						í
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
The Son nf Uie Sheik (1926)
£00
J
3M n
77
ai
J7
£CO
100
ei
68 O
I GO
63
us
«3
$0
7Í
BCU    CU    MCU    MS     MLS     LS VLS
lc Vertige(l926)
BCU     CU    MCU    MS    ia.s     LS VLS
Underworld (1927)
ECU     CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
11(1927)
200
100
37
ÍŮO
ItO
íl
]
ISO
17
74
60
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS    LS VLS
i
"t
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS     VLS J3CU    CU    r.^CU    I.«S    IAS    LS VLS
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots Tor the films named
never completely caught up. I have more distributions which support this statementp and more data on the comparison of European and American films can be read in Moving Into Pictures. Also, all my scale of shot data can be seen on the Cmcmetrics website — w\v w. cine metrics J v. Of course to prove my case, a really large sample of analyses of Scale of Shot for this period is needed. Meanwhile, I hope you pl accept my assertion, which is backed by a perception sharpened by carrying out a large number of analyses for later decades, that this is indeed so.
Notice as well that D.W. Griffith was a)so following the trend, though definitely not leading [t, as can be seen from his two 1919 films, True Heart Susie and broken Blossoms. Notice also the similarity of these two distributions, and ^particular the curious avoidance of Medium Long Shot,
I believe that this is a characteristic of many ol Grilfith's feature films, but in any case, this peculiar profile of the Scale of Shot distribution can be found in a number of other American films of the uineteen-twenties, as can be seen in the accompanying histograms for Sulfa Dallas (Henry King, 1925), Sun-Up (Edmund Goulding, 1925), The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925), and Th* Son of the Sheik (George ntzmaurice, 1926). Despite the persistence of dus single aspect of Griffiths style in the work of some directors, the other important idiosyncrasies of his scene dissection that I have previously mentioned wen.* nol copied by these directors. The above films  by GouMing, King, Brown, and Rumauricc all show much greater use of reverse angle cutting, better position and movement matching across , and far less Rising and vignetting within scenes than
cuts
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS Oř MOTION PICTURES - PAKT 1
My Rest Üiri (1937)
Casanova < 1927)
Moulin Rouge (I92S)
■
*3
it
X
>£7
97		107	Mt?								
				1»-		ai					
											
				i L ■   ■ -        0 j							
hp
						
ITS		913				
■					n	
S3			H			
						
						
bcu    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
Dock* üfN^v York (192S)
ecu   cu  Mcu  ms   mls   ls vls
The Ring (1928)
ICO
1				■		
		13?	It*			
						
■					b	■
						
■						
s					i. s	12
						■-   — -i
KM
TOO
3» i
M 63
Si
113
41
14»
bcu     cu    MCU    IAS     mls    ls vls
r-räukin Else (1929)
1u
4B
3d
8cu    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
BGU    Cü    M3U    ms    mls    LS VtS
104	97	
		
MS	MLS	LS
23
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots For the films named
"   JUL ■
there is in -Griffith's films of the nineteen-twenties.
As new directory came into the industry in thenincteen-twenties, they tended to push the move towards closer shooting even further, as is shown in the distributions illustrated for Docks of Neiv York (]. von Sternberg, 1928), and It {Clarence Badger, 1927), and some other established directors swung with them, as can be seen from Brown's Mi Eagle an d Flesh and the Devil. G n c • of t he ma i n aI tern at i ves for camera placement continued to be defined hy a profile with the strongest emphasis on MedmnvShot, and.examples of this arc shown here from the 1925 Clarence Brown films Smouldering Fitcs and Tfhc Goose Woman, as well! as Sun tip and Victor Fleming's Mamiap (1926). The European iilims illustrated show yet other ways of shooting, with the camera still, further back. The one exception to this last generalization that 1 have come across is LA. Duponfs Varied of 1925, which much impressed the American film industry, though only partly for this reason.
The other major point that begins to emerge from consideration of these Scale of Shot distributions is that films made ;hy the same director often .have profiles .that closely resemble each other, as is-the case for the DeMille Lang, and Sternberg films here. This observation receives much more support from the extensive results which I will present later for films of the sound -period'.
Average Shot Length.
In.fe previous cheers lhave already commented on
per reel of nhn, or in terms of the number in-one hour's -nnmgnme, Although other people have usedi these ideas
in a rough kind of way before me for making some kinds of limited comparisons between films, neither of these quantities is a very convenient or accurate measure of the general tendency for any particular film-maker to break a scene down into a smaller or larger number of shots, Instead I shall introduce the rather obvious concept of Average Shot Length (ASL), which is the length of a film divided by the number oi shots in it, and which can be expressed as an actual physical length of film, or as a time duration. Such a measure provides strict comparability between films of different length. Because of the variations in taking and projection speeds that existed for silent films, and which will be further.discussed in the next chapter, the use of feet of film as a measure of Average Shot Length (ASL) lor silent films does not give a true impression of relative cutting rates when comparing films made at widely different times and places, so I express all Average Shot Lengths in seconds. This decision introduces the complementary problem that the correct running speed for a silent film must be estimated before the ASL in seconds can be finally determined, bul thiscan always be accomplished within an accuracy of a-few percent with a variable speed .projector, and that is quite sufficient for most reasonable purposes.
So we find that in 1914, D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience :has an Average Shot Length of 7.7 seconds, and there were other American film-makers who were cutting just about as-fast, as the ASLs for The kalian (7.5 sec.) and A Florida Enchantment (&sec.) indicate. However, most directors were still using less shots in their films, as is suggested by the figures for The Spoilers (13.5 sec), The Wishing Amfl (lfl.3 sec), and The Three Musketeers (11.2 sec).
srmsncAi. style analysis of motion pictures - part 1
American 1911-17
161
25
10 5 0
2 2
■
2 3
IT
25
30
IS
10-
5 ■
li i t
g    American 1918-23
13
! 2 3  4  5  i  ?  &  9 10 fl 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 £2 23 24 25
■0 10
1   i 3 *  5  J 7 6 0 mil 12 13
-—1     '     '  .J--:-JL_Ji_ f , ■
1J TS 16 17 l& 19 50 El 22 33 31 Í5
European 1911-17
25 20 15 10
20
3 3
I 1
10 ■ 5'
European 19IS-23
IS
15 15
-1 3
I  2 i -l  5 &  ?  &      50 11 >2 13 14 15 16 17 1Ů 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
1  2 3 4  & 0 7 0 ^ 10 i I 12 13 1J 15 1C 17 IS 10 20 21 £2 £1 M 25
Number ofFilms with stated Average Shot Length for samples of American and Euopean Kims, as indicated
A wide range of values was still to be found in 1915, such as; The Cheat (DeMille) - 13. S seconds, Birth of a Nation (Griffith) - 7J seconds, The Coward (Barker) - II seconds, David ILarurn (Dwan) - 20 seconds, Madame Butterfly (Olcott) * 16 seconds, and Playing Dead (Sidney Drew) - 9 seconds.
But by I'9-lS, because of the rapid formal evolution that continued through the war years in the United States, we find that values for the Average Shot Length had decreased substantially, as the following figures show; The Hired Man (Schortzinger) - 5.5 seconds, The Gun Woman (Bor/age) - 4.7 secondsy A Modern Musketeer (Dwan) - 4 seconds, Stella Maris (Neilan) - 7,5 seconds, Old Wives for New (DeMille) * 3.2 seconds, and Till 1 Come Back To You (DeMille) - S seconds.
To reinforce the point 1 shall add a few figures for 1919, as follows; Broken Blossoms (Griffith) - 7.5 seconds, True Heart Susie (Griffith) - 6 seconds, When the Chads Boll By (Fleming) - 5 seconds, andfubih (Badger) - 5.5 seconds.
These figures give just one indication that stylistic development in the American cinema was just beginning to slow down and stabilize at the end of the war, and as well ^ that, if we note that the ASL for Cecil B. DeMille s Don'i Change Your Husband (1919) is 8,5 seconds, and then compare vvith the other values quoted for his films, we can also see the way that Average Shot Length comes to be characteristic for a director once his individual style is fiillv formed. I will nave .more to sav about this in later chapters.
in European cinema, I have found no films with an ASL shorter than II seconds before 1917, by which date a lew clever and perceptive directors had finally begun to u ntlersland the new American methods of fiI m construction. In Sweden, Victor Sjdstrom had all the devices of continuity cinema working properly in Tosen fta Stormyttarpw. (1913), with an ASL of 6 seconds. (His other films of this time, in which he acted as well as directed, unlike the one just mentioned, are slightly more retarded stylistically.) Maurhv. Stiller also went some of the way down the same path in Thomas Graals bdstti Film (ASL=9 sec), but this was not typical for the Nordic region, as figures for films made by Georg af Klerker and others show. (See Moving Into Pictures - pages 240 to 249). In Germany, Ernst Lubitsch seems to have been the first to get a good grip on American methods, as is indicated by the ASL for Wenn Vicr dasselbe tun (1917) of S.5 seconds, while his Die Puppe of 1919 has an ASL of 5.S. seconds, not to mention the fact thai he was already using a lot of reverse-angle shots by this dale. His Carmen of 19 IS has 14% of such cuts, and Die Puppe includes 19% reverse-angle cuts. However, he was not working as close in as some American directors, as the Scale of Shot histogram for his Madame Duborry (1919) shows.
These changes and differences in cutting rates-for a larger sample of feature films of the period can be* be summarized by using another set of graphs on the nexl page which *boW
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STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - FART \
the various numbers of film* with Average Shot Lengths which fall within each of the ranges of one second width from zero to 26' seconds for the periods 1912-1917 and I93S-1923. That is, there were 20 films with ASLs of 5.0 seconds or greater, but less than 6,0 seconds, Eh my sample of 6S American feature films from the 191 $-1923 period, and 17 films with ASLs of 6.0 second* and greater, but less dian 7.0 seconds, and so -on. The speed-up in cutting rate is reflected bv the fact that there arc no American films in the sample with ASLs longer than i'O seconds in the 1918-23 period, and hence the mean value of the Average Shot Length for this period is 6.5 seconds, whereas for the previous six year 1912-1917, the mean value or the ASL for American features was 9.6 seconds. On the other hand, for European features, the 1912-1917 mean value of the ASL was IS seconds, which only decreased to S.6 seconds for die next 6 year period. And this difference of 2 seconds in the mean ASL's .between America andTiurope remained into the late ^twenties as well, and was quite obvious to people in the American film industry at the time. Two seconds may not seem much on the page, but it is a lon^ time on the screen. Imagine all the shots in a film you know well having two seconds added to their duration, and you will gel the idea.
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Reverse-Angles
Another of the other major stylistic variables is the extent to which reverse-angle cutting is used- 1 define a reverse-angle cut as being a cut within a scene whiclichanges camera direction by more than 90 degrees in the horizontal plane, since this accords welf with film industry usage, net to mention the common meaning of the words "reverse" and
"angle". The proportion of reverse-angle cuts to the total number of shot transitions (including fades and dissolves) in the dim is the appropriate measure for comparative purposes. This percentage of reverse-angle cuts often distinguishes between films by different directors which are otherwise rather similar with respect to the major stylistic variables already defined; for instance Henry Kings films arc rather similar to those of D.W. Griffith with respect to their Scale of Shot distributions, and even their Average Shot Lengths^ but King used around 20% reverse-angle cuts, and Griffith hardly any.
During these early years, when American directors were only just discovering the usefulness of re verse-angle cutting, there was a tendency to make most of such cuts between a watcher and his Point of View, but this changed towards the end of the 'twenties, and in general in the sound-film period most reverse-angle cuts arc between two positions both of which are off the eye-line. It must also be remembered that in any period not all the cuts between a watcher and his POV arc reverse-angle cuts - sometimes the watcher is shot from the side or the back - and oT course no I all' reverse-angle cuts are between a watcher and bis POV. Nevertheless, the amount of cutting between a watcher and his Point of View (or vice-versa) is also a variable that can distinguish between the films of different directors, and there is something to be said for recording this quantity for that purpose, as I suggested when I first made proposals for the statistical style analysis of films in 1968.
in a later chapter I will take up the question of what constitutes reasonable and attainable accuracy in the statistical style analysis of films, and also introduce further extensions of ihe technique,
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13. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
fin the nineteen-twenties the general trend in the world ifilm industry was, with certain exceptions, one of ■expansion, and in the United States in particular, profit ratios continued to be very high. This was because American films penetrated into all markets, but foreign films were not widely shown in the United Slates, The great commercial success of American movies no doubt encouraged a certain conservatism in their forms, though finally they proved susceptible to stylistic developments that took place in Germany in the first half of this decade. The so-called French Avant-Garde cinema of the early 'twenties was as inventive as some of the German films, but the poor production values and poor technical finish of its films tended to keep them out of other markets. The few Russian films which were seen by a limited audience in America after 1925, though applauded, had very little visible effect on American film styles.
The German and French advanced cinemas of the early 'twenties in their turn owed quite a lot to American films of the previous decade, in fact more than is now realized. A thorough investigation of this matter, as of others, is hampered by the relatively small numbers of films surviving from the early nineteen-twenties when compared with later years, and also by the fact that those which are usually seen are rather unrepresentative of the general production of the time, whether it be in America, France, or Germany. This matters because in the early 'twenties there was stil! a far greater range of styles in use in any country than was to be the case from the late 'twenties onwards, when the range in competence amongst film-makers come to be greater than the stylistic range. It can hardly be said too wrongly that the Russian film industry between 1919 and 1925 was very small and feeble, and most of the films seen 'n Russia at that time were American or German. As far as can be told at the moment, the few Russian fictional films-produced before 1924 were made in a rather retarded style, ambling the American films made a decade before. The 'nfiWial Russian films were made after 1925. while the most influential German films were made before 1926. The wildly mistaken idea that the German cinema of
the W
bvihe
enties was distinguished from that of other countries
pracúce of shooting film exteriors entirely on studio iet$, rather than using actual locations, rests as usual on
the consideration of a couple of handfuls of famous Films most of which were made by one company, Ufa. In fact Ufa produced less than 10% of German films throughout the 'twenties; a period over which the total German production amounted to about 2000 films. The French production for the decade was less than half that, fluctuating around 70 films per year, while the total American production of fiction films of four reels or longer was nearly 7000 films.
These figures bring me back again to the problem of film availability when trying to make an accurate assessment of the main developments in film style during this period. My experience leads me to believe that with a sample of about I'OO films from each year, one docs not miss much in the way of general trends. A sample approaching that size has been available over the last decade for films made in the late 'twenties, but this has not been the case for the early part ol the nineteen-twenties, and St is quite possible that more discoveries about developments in those years are yet to be made.
Film Stock
There were few major developments in the types of motion picture negative and positive stocks available up to 1925; each manufacturer continued to produce a single standard orthochromatic negative stock, and a single positive print stock as before. Kowever, Eastman Kodak added a new 'Super-Speed Cine Film' to its range from about 1922. This was available lo special order, and had to be used almost immediately it was manufactured, as the effect of the special sensitizing treatment applied toil wore oJf quickly. Also, the Eastman panchromatic negative, which had previously only been available to special order, was made a standard stuck item from 1923, Kodak made efforts to encourage the use of this panchromatic negative by the industry, even financing a short feature, The Heodlas Horseman (1922), which was shot cntirelv with panchromatic negative lo demonstrate its capabilities, particularly in 'day for night' filming But because the price of panchromatic negative remained higher than that of the usual orihochromatic stock, no other films were entirely shot with it before i 926, There were, however, a feu- films in which some of the exteriors were shot on panchromaiic negative, starling with The Lost o) theMohkans ^.Maurice Tourneur, 1920). but this created problems o)
hi
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chants in ffie tones of the costumes between scenes si on the two different stocks, as described by James Wong Howe in Uollpvoad Cameramen. Since it was still standard practice to tint aJJ night scenes blue, there wasnogreat need lor a convincing 'day for nighť technique of photographing exteriors as we know it from later years.
The other major advantage of panchromatic negative in exterior photography is in die rendering of blue sky with scattered clouds, but the importance of this should not he exaggerated either. In the first place, it is not generally understood that orthochromatic negative will just distinguish between sky and' clouds if it is correctly exposed, since its emulsion has a small amount of yellow sensitivity, and this is particularly the case at sunset, or when there are heavy clouds all over the sky, and in the second place it had become customary to put clouds into the sky when necessary by glass matte painting or with a mattcd-in photograph, as can he seen in the desert shots in The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and elsewhere. Nevertheless, panchromatic stock was occasionally used to bring out cloud formations, but usually only on shot's in which human figures were distant or absent.
In 1920 Easiiinan Kodak made its ordinary camera negative stock available in an optional" alternative form with a resin coating on the.back of the cellulose nitrate base. This was called 'X-back1 stock, and its purpose was to prevent the build-up of charges of static electricity on the film as it ran through the camera, particularly in very cold weather. If these static charges formed, they could cause minute sparks to discharge onto the film surface as the film strip pulled off the feed roll. These sparks produced very fine black branching lines on the negative which thoroughly spoiled the look of the picture, andi these static marks were a cause of great concern to the early cameramen. Although X-back stock may have reduced, the incidence of static marks, it certainly did not eliminate them completely, for they can still occur on rare occasions with modern film stocks, \vhich also have a special backing on, the film. X-back stock was only used, on the East Coast in the depths of winter, and it also had the slight disadvantage that it was almost opaque to transmitted light, so the older type of focussing arrangement in cameras that depended' on viewing the image formed, on the nlmTrom its back side could not be lily used with it,
The Pr i zm a Pro c ess
Early attempts by William M Doren Kelly at creatina a successful two-colour process for colour cinematography were fairly closely based on the Kincmacolor additive process, but in 1919 a further mediation to the Pri.ma system produced a subtracts process that was used in a
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: I920-1926
number of short films over the next couple of years. In this form the Prizma process used the same kind of camera as the Kincmacolor process, taking alternate frames on black and white panchromatic Him through a rotating filter with red and green sectors, but after this stage the method was quite different. The red record frames and then the green record frames were separately printed onto two black and white positive 'films by using an optical printer that skipped alternate frames, and then these two films were separately dye-toned so that the black silver images in each were turned to red or green as the case might be. These two prints were then cemented back to back down their whole length to give a single print which could be projected in ordinary projectors at ordinary speed. Since the red and green records were taken successively in the same way as for Kincmacolor, there was some colour fringing round fast moving objects, but this was slightly reduced as the two records were projected simultaneously rather than successively. There was only one feature film made in the Prisma process, and this was The Glorious Adventure (1922), which was shot in England by James Stuart Blackton of the Vitagraph company. Surviving material suggests that the process was biased in the red direction compared to other later two-colour subtractive processes, and this meant the general effect was one of browns and reds in the image, with the greens underplayed. The Prizrna prints cost about six times as much per foot as ordinary black and white prints, and this may have been the reason the process was dropped after 1922.
Tec h n i co I or Ci ncm n t ogr a phy
Like tlie Kincmacolor process before it, the Technicolor system of colour cinematography was initially a two-colour additive process incapable of reproducing the full range of natural colours. But after Kalmus and Comstock's first unsuccessful trials in 1916 with this additive process, they developed a new two-colour subti active process with which The Tall ojthc Sea was made in 1922. A new camera was produced for this process which was quite different to the earlier model. This new camera used a different form of beam-splitting prism to produce the red and green images on the him, with a shorter path in glass for the rays between the back of the lens and the Rim gate. The new prism was made up of two separate prisms in the shape of equal right-angle triangles which were cemented together along their longer right-angled faces with a semi-reflecting filter layer between them. The light coming out of the back of the camera lens entered the prism through the hypotenuse side ot the first prism, and after passing across it was split into two beams by the semi-reflecting filter layer, A red beam was reflected back into the first prism inside which it was
-
PÍIJÍ STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920^1926
Lens
Semi-reflecting surface
—4f
Red filter
the beam-splitting prism arrangement used in Technicolor cameras during the 'twenties.
reflected once again by the front surface down through (he prism and out of its base onto the film to form the red image. Simultaneously the other beam of green light passed into the second prism and then across it to the back hypotenuse surface where it was reflected internally down through the base to form the green image on a frame of film adjoining that for the red image. The red and green images were inverted both laterally and vertically with respect to eath other on the negative, and the other difference from the earlier camera was that the corresponding red and green frames were adjacent on the film negative rather than separated by two other frames. The film movement was novel in the new Technicolor camera as well, being based on a modification of the Bell & Howell shuttle gate níťchanísm. Most unusually, the film was pulled up through the gate which was set below the oblique bottom of the double prism block, rather than moved downwards as in all other cameras. Exact registration of the image for every exposure was accomplished by the part of the shuttle-gate mechanism which lifted and dropped the film off and onto fixed.registration pins, but the intermittent advance of the "J*n was produced by a large sprocket wheel above the gate which rotated intermittently by means of a Maltese Cross fnovement, rather than by the claws of die standard lícil & Howell mechanism. Although the light path in the prism block was now only about two inches, it was still not possible to use wide-angle lenses on the new Technicolor camera.
AJter development the negative was printed in an optical pnnier that moved the film down two frames at a time, while only moving the positive forward one frame for each exposure. The result was a positive that had all the red image fames printed on it, 3nd then the process was repeated to extract the green record frames onto another strip of
m
positive film. These two red and green record positive 1 ,1S        dcVCV<l by » fecial process which hardened k!f °f Lbe * I-oportion to the amount of
^Iver produced in each area of the individual imac^ i e in proportion to the intensity of the red colour or'the green colour of the image, as the case might be. The result was a rehef image for each frame in which the remaining gelatine of the emulsion was thicker where the red or green colour had been brighten Then the red relief positive was treated with orange^rcd dye, and where it was thickest most dye was absorbed, and vice-versa. The green relief was similarly dyed with blue-green dye. This treatment of the red and green positives just described also produced the usual black silver photographic images in the coloured gelatine reliefs, and though in principle it was possible to remove this by dissolving it out, this seems not to have been done. The red and green positives were next cemented together back to back with the corresponding red and green images in alignment, and the resulting film could be run in ordinary projectors when the pressure on the gale was slackened off a little to allow the double thickness of film through.
Contemporary reports speak of the subdued colours obtained with this process, and prints reconstructed from a surviving print of The Black Piraie (1924) do indeed show a very limited range in both hue and intensity of colour. This may be due in part to the fading of the dyesv but as the him now exists the two primary colours appear to be a pafe salmon pink and a steel blue, and some of the time only one of these colours is present. In fact the process looks more like a one-and-a-half colour process than a two-colour process! Because the process also retained the black silver image, though in 3 weaker form than in ordinary black and while film! there is also some resemblance to the Pat he stencil-tinting process, which was still being worked in the 'twenties in Prance, A caution is necessary here about the reconstructed prints of Toff of the Sea recently produced in the United States, These, which were made from the original negative by a quite different process to that originally used, give the impression that the process produced far brighter colours and far higher definition than was actually the case. These prints also reveal that the exposure of many of the original shots in 1922 was substantially incorrect, which is not terribly surprising given that the effective speed of the system was very different to anything that the cameraman was used to, and that it was being shot without an cxposun: meter.
The filming operation in thi> Technicolor system still suffered from some of the drawbacks of the L-arlier Kinemacolor. Because of the division of the light from the lens into lwo beams, and the: interposition of filter* mm those two beams, not to mention the light losses in
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traversing all the length of glass in the prism system, the film effectively lest two stops or more in speed when compared with ordinary black and white photography. This meant using a very great deal of light in shooting studio interiors, and something approaching maximum aperture on exteriors. Also, because of the length of the paih through the prism system, which was móre than two inches, special lenses with large back focal distance had to be designed lor the cameras. But the real drawback to the process was that the original negative had to be passed twice through the optical printer lor every show print that was made, and this was a slow job compared to standard black and white
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1920-1926
printing in a continuous contact printer. This meant that there was little scope for lowering print costs as the process was expanded commercially. Another minor drawback ivas that the double-sided cemented prints wore out faster than ordinary black and white prints, and they were also liable to 'cupping', which meant that they became concave jn cross-section after a while, and hence could not be properly focussed in the projector.
Laboratory Procedures
No great changes took place in laboratory procedures in the early part ol the decade; negative continued to be batch
A scencjrom The Warners (John Stahl k -   Gi   a ^^^^^^^^^^ ^" "^^^^^^
wm mm «™„ ^ maUe w      JSSS TTrm 1mmm w Mm£r *    a *#
producing^. The lights in the bachound are another fS'flT ^ ^ ^ * ^ arrangement jot
floodlights can be partially seen. The one on the left m        hfl ^ ^ ^ and in ^ f°'W™*d °*
m opening. (Photograph courtesy ofKe,in SroJlo-} ^chedfrom its usual stand has a diffusing screen covering
pUJi STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
Night exterior icene ion The Virgin ofStamboul (Tod Browning, 1920) shot on the studio back I at, and lit 'nightfor night' with the mm big reflector arc spotlights.
developed in 200 or 400 foot lengths, and so mostly was positive, but there was a slow movement towards more machine (Le, continuous) development of positive as the years passed, starting in news reel production. SO to 90% ol prints were tinted, with the colours continuing much as before - blue for night, gold for day, orange for II a me light, red for conflagrations, magenta for romantic scenes, and sometimes green lor ghastly happenings. As before, the tinting was applied by running the film through dye baths after printing and developing the positive, and then the diilcrcnt coloured shots were spliced together to make the Ifnal print. However in the 'twenties there bujjan to be some use of print stock with a pre-tinted base which now became available from Eastman Kodak or imported from Pathc in France, loning was still very rarely used, except (or the occasional climactic scene in major productions, and these were usually emotional sunset scenes which were blue tuned and pink tinted, though other combinations were possible in other situations.
Lighting Equipment and Techni
Although most American studio filming was being done on totally blacked-out stages at the beginning of the decade, this was not the case in Europe, as can be seen in the many films in which it is obvious that on. the sets of large-scale interiors a good deal of the light is old-fashioned diffuse sunlight coming through the studio roof. FAV, Murnaus Carl)r films could be mentioned amongst manv others in Lnis connection, As the decade wore on it was inevitably the larger companies in Europe which first moved over to
filming entirely under artificial light.
The only major new piece of lighting equipment that came into general use during these years was the kind of arc spotlight En which the beam was focussed by a large parabolic mirror behind the arc, often referred to as a 'Sunlight arc'. They were widely used in the early 'twenties in Hollywood, almost entirely for the lighting of exterior sets and scenes, but it was only around IS22 that a large company such as UFA came to use them in Europe,
The principal use for these reflector arc spotlights was to light large sets 'night for night', i.e. to bring the light on a night-time exterior scene actually shot at night up to photographic level. This approach was already well developed at the major studios in 1920, as can be seen in The Virgin of Siomboul made at Universal, in which these large spotlights are used singly from various places outside the frame to litjht selected areas of the streets just as it is done to this day. In the next couple of years one can see the same technique being used in better-known tjlms such as Foolish iVives (1922 J and The Hunchback tf Notre-Dtwe (1923). In this application the reflector spotlights were used with their focus adjusted so as to give a spread or 'Hood' beam, but in a related u>age, the lighting of night-time trench warfare scenes, the arc spotlights were used with a tighter >po< beam just skimming the ground from side back to give a really low-key effect. The prototypical instance here seems to have been The Four lloncmen of iht Apocaljpx H92I), lit by John Seitz. He retained the same :>ort of lighting for the closer shots in the night trench scenes in tin* film, just adding a very little weak fill light from the front, <o that in
lóS
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1920-1926
Night exterior scene of trench warfare in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921) lit wjjijfa reflector arc spotlights from left and
right back.
I
í
i
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
Studio interior scene phoigraphed by Henry Cronjagerfor Tol'able David (Henry King, 1921) with single backlightfront an arc spotlight, and excessively fat lighting from arcs to the
font.
all respects these scenes look exactly like such scenes have looked ever since in movies.
Studio Lighting
The standard equipment for studio lighting continued to be Cooper-Hewitts, arc floodlights of one kind or another, and the older theatrical type of arc spotlights, but a few studios did not use Cooper-Hewitts, replacing them with extra hanks of arc floodlights. The Cooper-Hewitts were used as they had been before, suspended from above the set or on fib or stands to provide general overall background
light on scenes jit to a middle- or high-key level, but they did not define the real modelling of the figures. Some cameramen also used a small pair of Cooper-Hewitt tubes rather than a diffused arc floodlight to give fi I blight on closer shots. It was now universal practice in America to put diffusing screens over the front of arc floodlights when using them for figure lighting, and often these diffuses were heavy enough in their effect to produce a considerable softening of the shadows they cast.
As the years went on from 1920 to 1926 the rather varied approaches that still existed in American lighting practice:
i
converged towards uniiormity. One ol the general features which emerged in this transformation was the greater use uf what might be called lour-point lighting. í have already described how the use ol two backlights had firs t appeared just before 1919, spreading from the lighting of close shots to thi; lighting of Long Shots as well in a small number of films, and this technique, in combination with use of two more lights as key and fill from the front, spread to more and more cameramen as the years passed. 13 y 1925 some cameramen wxtc using this arrangement fairly relentlessly on interiors, bui others alternated it  with  other arrangements as
appropriate, including the earlier three-point lighting using one backlight plus key and fill. Yet other* stuck more or less exclusively to the earlier closu double backlights with key and fill from the front, Exactlv which of these methods was used, and more importantly, what thu usual angles of the lights were with respect In the camera lens axis represented a stylistic distinction between cameramen, Tor instance, in the middle 'twenties John Arnold habitually used a single backlight, not too strong, and coming in at only a very small angle tu the line between the lens one I the actor, while the key and fill lights from the front were fairly well
A Medium Shot in The Thief of Bagdad (1924) lit by Ernest Palmer with two backlights. The right one is fairly fine to the head, while the left one is coming in from >A back at about 45* to the head. There is oho a key light fotn the from to the right of the camera, There mayt or may not, be some weak fill light from the front.
i
John Seity. used a variation on his usual style to light this scene 8 The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse (1921). The key "$bt h straight out to the side « the right, and there is a high flight from kft S}de back. Fill li$hifom thefront must he from flights on each of the women.
'Sir
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
A studio scene in Daddy-Long-Legs (Marshall Neilan, 1919j Ik with single reflector arc spotlight out right, and nothing else.
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separated. And so on. Another new and fairly general trend was the placing of the key-light a hit above the actor's eye-level, whereas previously it had usually been at or below eve-level.
As an example of one of the major lighting styles from the previous decade that was relegated to cheaper films and comedies as the years passed, J will quote Henry Cronjager's work on Tol'ablc David (1921). In this film the backlighting on interiors is done with a single spot directly behind and above the actors, and both the key- and fill-lights are almost equal in intensity, and applied to the actors too
frontally, so that there is a flatness, a lack of modelling, over the parts of the face facing the camera, For this date this was not had lighting, just not particularly distinguished. In Triable David what photographic distinction there is lies elsewhere, in the composition and camera placement on exteriors.
A very individual approach to lighting in the early 'twenties that was later lost in the tide of the general trend is to be found in the work of Charles Kosher. In 1919 he explicitly formulated the idea of creating very sharp images with very simple lighting applied from carefully chosen
A Close Up in The Pour Horsemen of the Apocalypse which has been photographed with John Seitz's usual 'core' lighting oj this period, with two source straight out to each side. Exceptionally Jar thisflmt it also has heavy lens diffusion.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY. 1920-1926
location exterior Medium Close Up in He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjostrom, 1924) lit with arclighis right and left of the camera providing key and fill of almost equal intensity, and the sun providing the backlight.
171
directions. This style can be seen most clearly in the more distant shots in Daddy-Long-Legs, but he was stijl working in much the same way in fiosita (1923), After that date he gradually succumbed to the general movement that was afready underway in the opposite direction; towards larger apertures and heavy lens diffusion. However the struggle between these two opposed styles ol photo it rap hy in Rosher's work meant that he had some difficulty in adjusting to the use of lens diffusion, as the less-than-pcrfect control oi the gradation between differing amounts of dillusion on successive shots in My Best Girl (3927) shows.
Still another idiosyncratic approach to lighting that was much less at odds with the general trend was that of John Sciiz, working for the director Rex Ingram. The basic technique used by Seitz in lighting The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) was what was known as 'core lighting' in still photography. This involves using two equally bright key-Jights placed to either side of, and very slightly behind, the ">re being lit. This kind of li^hti ng leaves a dark vertical band of shadow down the centre of the figure - the 'core1. This kind ol lighting set-up is nowadays included under the more general expression 'double cross back lighting i For uie more distant interior shots in The Four Horsemen oj the '\pocalypse, Sciu used groups of lights out of shot on cither ^e, rather than single lights, though the effect was the same. He also had a little weak fill-light on the figures from the h-cm, particularly on closer shots, but this was not strong enough to wipe out the dark core. Two years later, when he ttmeto light Scaramouche for Rex Ingram, Seitz was starting 10 use a more varied approach, but some of the time he turned to a modified form of his ordinal ' core' technique.
Instead of having the two side lights at head height as he had placed them before, he moved them up and a tittle further backwards, so that they were now almost two backlights, and thus close to the way other cameramen were starling to use backlights, Jiul what little fill-fight Seflz used was far weaker than the frontal fight used by other cameramen, so there was still a dark 'core' down the centre of hi* figures. SeiU also adopted very heavy lens dillusion for the Close Lips in Scaramouche, whereas he had mostly used the older soft circular vignette mask in The Four Horsemen, Though he did try lens diffusion at one or two emotional moments in The Four Horsemen. *
in Europe these new American lighting techniques were picked up rather slowly in the nineteen-twenties, so that although there are some shots in European llfms with a single backlight from the beginning of the decade, this only happened sometimes when the actors were right in the middle of the set and it was easy to gel a back spot onto them. After a few years the use of double backlighting likewise makes the occasional appearance in the occasional European film, but it never became as common as it was in American film*.
Cameras
The Akelev camera, designed with the special problems of wildlife filming in mind by a cameraman of that name, was first produced in 1919, ll was v^ry different in appearance to ail other cameras, since its body was in the form of a squat cylinder of height 7 incte and a diameter of 15 inches standing on one curved edge. This drum could be rotated about a pivot supporting it from M$ Me at
172
the centre to give the tilting movement, hy pushing on a panning arid tilting tiller fixed to the back. The panning pivot was also an integral part of the camera, and the casing which included both pivots also included flywheels that were driven by gears from the movements applied' to the camera body by the panning and tilting tiller. The flywheel system smoothed out any unevenness in the panning and tilting pressures applied by the cameraman, as this kind of uneven ness was particularly harmful when trvino to follow unrehearsed action with a long lens. Tlie basic camera weighed 22 lb.
■
A view of the other side of the Akeley camera, in which can be seen the way the camera body is supported from the pillar contain-ing the flywheels producing the '^roscopic smoothing of the movement when panning and tilting. The camerman actually controls the pans and tilts with the handle on tap, and just in front of the handle is the knob that remotely control* the kus focus,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
The Akeley camera with the adjustable vienfiner eyepiece angled upwards. The viewing lens is on the left of the taking lens on the removable lens boardfxed to the front of the camera body. (Camerafrom
Kevin Brown low colection)
On the front of the camera a pair of identical lenses were mounted side by side, one being the taking lens, and the other the view-finding lens, and they were coupled together so that focussing the image through the viewfinding lens simultaneously focusscd the taking lens. These paired lenses were supplied in a range of focal lengths on standard qui exchangeable mounts, and the image seen in the view finder was erect rather than inverted as with most previous cameras. The vtewfinder tube, which ran up the side of the camera, was jointed in the middle so that the eye-piece could be set at a convenient height for any position of the camera. The
PUM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
f]|,n was loaded into 200 foot magazines which included the drive sprockets Tor film transport, and these pre-threaded magazines were then inserted into the camera body. This arrangement simplified loading in the heat or the action, for all that was necessary was to open the camera door, take out the used'magazine, and then slip in the new one, sliding the pre-formed bop of film coming out of it under the usual kind or claw in the film gate. The whole camera, including pan and tilt mechanism, weighed 41 labs., and it entirely suited not only wild-life cameramen, but also second unit cameramen in ordinary commercial film-making who were shooting unrehearsed and unrepeatable action in war films and the like. Many Akeley cameras were used for this purpose up until the early sound period, though they did not entirely monopolize this application.
The most distinguished user of the Akeley camera was Robert Flaherty, and all his silent films from Nanook of the <vWr/i (1922) onwards were shot with one. Me did not make a great deal of visible use of its unique properties in Nanook, for there ore only a couple or long-lens shots in that film, and also only a couple of shots with the smooth simultaneous pan and tilt movements that were possible with the Akeley camera, but not with ordinary geared beads. But in Moana (1926) there are a number of extensive sinuous camera movements involving simultaneous panning and tilting, As far as 1 know, no-one else made such use of the special properties of the Akeley, though one can occasionally see action followed with a long lens in Westerns such as Tumbkivccds (1925), and this was presumably shot with an Akeley camera, (n 1926 the Akeley pan and tilt head with iis smoothing flywheel (or ^gyroscopic') mechanism was marketed separately without the actual camera body, so that it could be used for the same purpose with other cameras.
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The Mitchell Camera
The basic design of the Mitchell camera was due to John E. Leonard, and not to the man whose name it bears, In some respects it was a logical progression from the Bell & Howell, which remained the major production camera tfi America for the rest of the silent period. Rather than moving tlie whole camera sideways on the tripod head to put the viewing lens in the position normally occupied by the taking lens for focussing, as was done with the Ml & Howell, only that part of the body behind the front plate, ^'liich carried the lenses on a turret, was slid over for this purpose. This obviated all the moving of the matte box backwards and forwards over the lens that was necessary to get a Bell &-Howell across and back when focussing, and as *p as that, in the viewing position the Mitchell through-^-lens viewfinding system showed the whole frame area C ar!>= Avh'ch the Bell & Howell did not. When it was
173
first made available in 1921  the MiirMI ™^ i-v      ,       « ' inc Mitchell camera did not
i ^ the renter pins it was later provided with in 19?S but the basic design was pretty much as it remained in later versus The body, machined from cast aluminium, was shghtly |arger and heavier than that of the Bell & Howell and hke that camera it had a variable shutter which could be closed while the camera was running, so permitting perfect fades and dissolves to be made at anv lens aperture It also had detachable 400 foot magazines, and a lens turret with places for four lenses. Immediately in front or the film aperture adjustable mattes were built into the front plate behind the lens turret, and these could be screwed across the frame from either side, so blanking ofTpart of the frame horizontally or vertically. This made split-field trick effects very easy to carry out. The claw movement was actuated by two cams working simultaneously to provide the combined in-outand up-down movement required, in a very general kind of way like the working of the old Pathe mechanism, though the disposition of the actual earn system was quite different. A third cam system clamped down the back pressure plate on the film while it was stationary in the gate during the actual exposure. Although this idea may have been suggested by the Bell & Howell mechanism, the way that it worked meant that the Mitchell in its first version could not achieve an image registration equal to that of the Bell & Howell.
Other Cameras
The Studio model of the Pathe camera was still extensively used in Europe in the early 'twenties, and even in America some impoverished or conservative cameramen continued to use it. In total numbers the Debrie Parvo was the most used camera in the world, if we take all kinds of film-making into account, but it was only in Russia after 1924 that it was regularly used as a studio camera on feature films. At the beginning of the decade a new model of the Parvo became available that had an automatic dissolve facility, and this made a fade mechanically over a fixed number of frames. A Debrie Parvo cost Si500 in America, while a Pathe Studio model cost $552. A Bell & Howell camera now cost S3S00, and a Mitch elf camera even more.
In 1921 Debrie also introduced a new high speed camera of quite different design to the Parvo, in general configuration th is new camera looked like a larger and cruder version of the much later 35 mm. Arriflex camera, with the film fed in line through ihe gate from an internal 200 foot magazine which had the feed and take-up compartments lined up slantwise above the film movement and gate. The vicwfindin£ arrangements were extremely simpk with none of the subtle mechanisms that were used in the American cameras- In its initial form the High Speed Debne
174
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was hand-cranked with a top speed of about 200 frames per second. The great slowing down of motion that could be produced with this camera was immediately applied in The l\opm Fool, which enclosed a long demonstration of Will Roaers' lariat twirling in extreme slow motion within a brief and crude story. Subsequent to this date the occasional Tory slow motion shot turned up on rave occasions in comedy films such as Fee! My Pulse (La Cava, 1928), just as less marked slow motion had already been used in comedies before 1920.
For the sake of completeness another camera that has had a long life, though almost entirely in the documentary field, should he mentioned here. This was the English Newman-Sinclair camera which.was first put on sale in 1922. It was clockwork driven, with two springs which when fully wound wouId lake through a fii11 200 fo o t magazinc without rewinding them, and it had a very individual clapper gate' registration system. In this system the register pins were fixed as in the Bell & Lowell, but the film was lifted off them, moved forward one frame, and then dropped onto them for the next exposure by a quite different mechanism. The entire camera was inside a simple sheet aluminium box, and the single lens was simply mounted on the front. Through-the-lens viewing was possible by sliding a 45 degree prism in behind the film in the gate from the side. The film was pre-loaded into a 200 foot magazine which included the sprocket drive, and this in its turn was placed inside the camera body in the same way as in the A'keley camera described above. The advantage of the spring drive system was that it left the cameraman torn bands free while filming, so that he could simultaneously change the focus and pan; or take other combinations of action, which was not the case with the usual hand-cranked cameras.
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The Mobile Camera
At the very beginning of theninetecm-twenties the first phase of camera mobility in I9IS and 1916 seemed to he almost forgotten, From time to time one can see a small framing movement used' in some films, particularly in America, but in general shot after shot stays quite fixed. In American and German films the only kind of tracking movement to be found: and that only extremely rarely, is the parallel: tracking shot, in which -the camera.aecompanics actors walking along at a.fixcd distance from it, iButm-*923 there was a new explosion-ofcamer-a mobility in France and Germany, and this time the effects were much more far-reaching, in France there were a number or films made in 1923 by the most advanced film-makers which included one or two tracking shots moving with respectloa quasi-static scene, and amongst these I will mention Au secour, (Abel Gance), VAuheroe rouge <J,.an lutein) and Vir>ondation<Lw\,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLQGY: I920-}926
Deliuc), but at the moment it seems that the really influential line of development comes from the German cinema, and Lupu Pick's Syhesier. In this film there were many tracking shots moving through the atmospheric scenes, the umweh, surrounding the main action, and a special dolly was built to carry a set ol three cameras to take these shots as it moved through the set, which showed a city sStreet, and also through other locations. Sylvester was intended to be the second pari of a trilogy of films that started with Schcrhen (Lupu Pick, 1921), but as it turned out, the third part of the trilogy, Oct letue Mann (1924), was not directed by Pick but by Murnau. Nevertheless, this latter film carried on the use of tracking shots, many of which are parallel tracking shots, but a few of which are done on more or less static scenes. And it was Dcr kmc Mann that really caught the attention of other film makers, and led to a very widespread interest in using the mobile camera a^ain.
jjSj!
In America this new fashion for camera movement took a year to really get going, but there are a few films such as von Stroheim's The Merry Widow made in 1925 which use one or two tracking shots with panning movements in which the camera moves with respect to a quasi-static scene. Although the examples in 1926 become more numerous, those films which do use tracking shots still make do with only a handful, and they are still a very small minority amongst the total production. The same kind of observation could be made about the French and German cinema in 192S and 1926.
Taking and Projection Speeds
The question Of taking and projection speeds in the 'twenties is rather complex, but nevertheless a number of generalizations can safely be made by relying on discussions of the subject which took place at the time, in combination with making trials at different projection speeds of a number of films of the period. As far as making trial projections is concerned, it is not sufficient to project just part of the film, as the taking speed sometimes varies throughout the length of a silent film, and in the second place it is only possible to tell whether thcpeople in the film arc moving at just exactly the natural speed with certain kinds of human movement. The best kind of movement for showing whether the speed is natural is steady walking over a fair distance within the shot, and also steady running, Ordinary interior scenes, in winch the actors move from one position to another with only a few steps, and make no fast movements of any kind, are not very good for this purpose.
In American films it is evident that on the average the taking speed had already increased beyond 16 frames per second before 1919, in fact to something like IS frames per second, In a-report on the subject in The Transactions of the
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
Soeiciy 4Motion Picture Engineers the situation was described as one in which projectionists had increased projection speed, and as a consequence cameramen had increased their lakingspeed. From this point onwards the excuse given bv
proj
■—r w ■
jectionists for this increase in projection speed was that the increased speed reduced flicker, which is certainly true, but it has always been considered that the real motive was to get more complete programmes into a day s screening, and hence sell more tickets. This seems a very plausible explanation to me. In any case, in 1923 a survey of the viewing theatres in the studios showed that they we re-projecting rushes and finished prints at speeds between IS and 20 frames per second, and this tallies fairly well with the projection speeds at which films from around that year show correct speed of movement for the actors in them. Tn 192+ it was decided to attempt to standardize projection speed at SO feet per minute (approximately 21 frames per second), presumably on the basis that this was the speed used in most cinemas, and this again squares well with the visible characteristics of surviving films. Despite the concrete evidence to the contrary, the American Society of Cinematographers claimed in 1925 that its members were still cranking at 16 frames per second! Apparently cameramen reserved all their attention lor the scene being filmed, and never looked at the tachometer (speed indicator) with which all the major makes of camera were now fitted. The attempt to standardize projection speed did not succeed, and it continued to increase, so that when a survey
was made of first-run cinemas in 1926 with a view to fixing
p
the sound film speed, it was found that the projection speed had become 2+ frames per second on the average. Flowever in this year it is clear from the prints of films themselves lhat the taking speed was a couple of frames per second less than this - about 2i to 22 frames per second in fact.
In Europe there was also an increase in taking speeds through the 'twenties, which was inevitable given that American films were widely shown everywhere, but European taking speeds lagged behind those used for American films of the same date. French films only reached taking speeds of around 21 frames per second in 1929, but German films were closer behind the American speed urease, say about 20 frames per second in 1926. As might be expected, Russian films incre ased very little in speed during the 'twenties, not getting above IS frames per second before 1925.
This whole story is further complicated by the fact that not only did individual cameramen's cranking speeds |wef with respect to the averages I have been describing, MS in some films whole sections were cranked at different sP^ds, presumably as a result of being shot by different camcramcnf A very interesting case in point is Elk Cinders
17S
(1526), of which the first half is .hot at around 1$ frames
per second, and the second half at around 22 frames per
second. Further than this, since this particular film is about
■Irn-making, it includes a scene showing a film being shot
by two cameramen side by side, ,s was\ti|| the practice and t|ve m &mrmm arc vjs.b|v ^ ^ _
diluent speeds. A European example that can be quoted is Hosferatu (1922), in which some scenes are shot at 18 frames per second and some at 20 frames per second. In Xosfiatu there is also of course the scene of the phantom carriage which is very undercooked for expressive purposes, but this aesthetic use of different camera speeds within a film is yet another matter superimposed on the quite independent general effects I have been describing so far.
The moral of this story is that silent films can only be properly shown with a projector with continuously variable speed, and since they were habitually shown when they were new at a slightly higher speed than their taking speed, it can be considered legitimate to do this today, but only to o slight extent. Showing films from before 1920 at sound speed should be out, Tor instance.
Expressive Variations in Taking Speed
The example of undcrcranking, and hence of accelerated motion on the screen, which has just been mentioned in Nosjeratu might be conjectured to have been intended to convey the feeling or idea of supernatural velocity, but it certainly does not achieve this now, and it is questionable if it ever did so. Film technique had already advanced to the point, at any rate in America, where it was realized that the most audience-effective way to lead into such un naturalistic distortions was through the use of re verse-angles and Point of View shots, but if one has seen Murnau's other films from the beginning of the 'twenties it will be realized that even in German terms his control of the medium was imperfect. By 3924 this was no longer the case, and he himself repudiated his carlv films, though as far as Nosferotu is concerned, the instance under discussion is the only major blemish on iL
The common uses of undercranking continued to be in comedies, and also to produce accelerated motion in races against time in dramas, where something approaching double speed was used for this purpose in some fiJms right up to the end of ihe silent period. On the olh^r hand, ovcrcranking to produce a slight slowing of movement was less common, but it was sometimes used in love scenes, and also 10 make some actions such as mounting a horse more graceful. An example of a rather rare type of related use of overcranking to provide a Jyrical feeling is given by some ol the shots which show the eponymous heroine of The Merry Wido« (\91S) waltzing in the big bail scene at the centre of the movie.
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1 76
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
An objective low angle shot from Vanina odcr die Galgenhochzeit (Arthur von
Gerlach, 1922).
Angle Shots
m the ' twenties the use of high- and low-angle shots continued to be rare in American films, hut in the German and French cinema there was a move from using them as distant PGV shots, which was the only way they had been consistently used before, to shooting them without such motivation, and from closer in as well. Staoes in this development can be traced from the use of a few objective low-angle shots in Vanina (Arthur von Gerlach, 1922) and Bic Straw (Karl Grune, 1923), to the shooting of the whole of the Ivan the Terrible episode in Das IVaehsfigiirenkabi
uncíí
■
An abjective low angle shot from VAffiehe (Jean Epstein, 192S),
(Paul Leni, 1924) with the camera near floor level and fairly close in to the actors. From this point onwards the technique was a standard option in German practice, but it was not used with great frequency. There was some tendency to associate low-angle shots with the creation of an imposing impression in the figures so treated, despite the fact that they were never presented as the Point of View of a character in the film. A parallel development of extreme angle shots was taking place in the French cinema, though here there was more emphasis on high-angle shots taken from close in, rather than on low^angle shots. Examples of such non-PGV
PUM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
A tilted low angle shot with looming shadows cast on the wall and ceiling inOiQ Strasse (Karl Grune, 1923).
177
angle shots taken from close in can be seen in TAuherge tc-uflc (Jean Epstein, 1923) and la Souriante Madame Rtudei (Germaine Dulac, 1923), and a general shot of a scene taken straight down from directly overhead in L'Merbier's Vinlu/mtiine (1924), Despite the admiration of many American film-makers for Dec letzte Mann (192+) and Varietc (1925), both of which continue the use in German films of a small scattering of extreme angle shots, there was considerable and vocal resistance to this usage in America afkT those films appeared there, and the only examples of low angle shots taken from ground level and fairly close to the actors that I have come across before 1926 are in David Smith's Captain Blood (1925). It was not till the very end of the 'twenties that rather more low-angles shot from close in make their appearance in American films, By then the German example had been reinforced hy some Russian fibs which had amplified the use of extreme angles.
1 he first Russian film in which this happened was Sergei Einstein's Staehka (1924), and this presumably owed its low-angles to the large number of German films imported into Russia in J923 and 1924. However Eisenstein and other later Russian film-makers pushed the use of low- and high-angles to much greater extremes, particularly in using ftem on Close Ups, and their smooth integration into a moderately conventional narrative in Bronenosets Potyornkin
092S> hat! the greatest impact in other countries,
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D*tch Tilts
The use of shots taken with the camera body tilted e^vays to the horizontal made their first appearance in Ti Period. Such an arrangement of the camera means of
course that ail true verticals and horizontals within the scene are tilted that same amount with respect to die edges ol the frame. This kind of shot eventually came to be tailed a 'Dutch tilt' after it arrived in American cinema some time later. So far the earJiust uxamples I have seen are in French films from 192? and 1926, Foil ě ccirotieniiA le Vcrtige, made by Julien Duvivier and Marcel L'Herbicr respectively, but there may be others that I have missed. In both cases they are probably intended to be expressive of the leelings of characters in the lilms. In Poil decarotte the Dutch tilt is one shot in a montage sequence depicLing the atmosphere o i a fairground, and in It Veaiac it is used to suggest the vertigo of the title from which the protagonist suffers at one point.
Lenses
Much wider angle fen ses than had been available before became available fairly early in the nineteen-twenties. These had focal lengths in the region of 25 to 30 mm., hut f have so far not been able to discover the precise technical details. A new generation of standard lenses also appeared in the 'twenties, and here the leading manufacturer wis undoubtedly the British firm of Taylor, lay lor, and HoUjji. They introduced an l"2 len*of 50 mm. (2 inches) focal length in 1920. Bausch and Lomb produced a standard lens with a maximum aperture uf 12.7 in 1922, and Zeiss produced new Tachars of maximum aperture JO and 12.3 in [92 fe though the latter seem* to have been the one preferred by film cameramen. The longer k-nse> of focal lengths 7> and I0Ú mm. now extensively used for shooting Close U,» continued to be of MnalJer maximum aperture, about 13.5. As already mentioned, the smallest maximum aperiurc oi a wt oi
I7S
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920^1926
Selective sofr focus in VHerbiers Eldorado (1921), wkh a special diffusing filter in front of the Jens that only softens the image of the centralfigure.
lenses being used by a cameraman lends to have a regulating effect on the aperture choscrn for -ill the photography in the studio scenes, once the move has been made to shooting at the lowest possible light levels. This move towards shooting at maximum lens aperture was now well underway, before the general use of panchromatic lilm.
Lens Diffusion
It was only in 1923 that lens diffusion started to become really fashionable in the United States, and this was remarked on at the time. Although there had been a few films using lens diffusion in the years following hroken fttossanUi amongst which can be mentioned (nay, has to be mentioned), Sex (1920), most cameramen had rather surprisingly been content to stay with the soft iris mask already described when they wanted to add 'beauty1 to the image, During this initial period in the development of lens diffusion it was usually carried out by putting sheets of coarse gauze in front of the lens, close enough to be out of focus, and sometimes this was supplemented by using a special lens constructed to give poor definition even when it was nominally in focus. Vaseline-smeared glass plates and specially made glass diffusing filters were yet to come.
In 1923 tens diffusion was only applied to Close lips, and not to more distant shots, and this produced an abrupt transition from the sharp image of the general scene into which the diffused Close Up was cut. At the time this must have been seen as unsatisfactory, for by the next year some cameramen were starting to use intermediate amounts of diffusion (i.e, smaller numbers of sheets of gauze) on the shuts immediately on either side of the Close Ups which
had been shot with heavy diffusion. By 1925 this modified approach was becoming more common, though far from universal, and an alternative solution, that of using heavy diffusion on all the shots, whether near or far, had also appeared, as in Zander the Great photographed by George Barnes, This latter alternative never became common.
In France, Marcel L'Herbier moved on from his use of simple lens diffusion in Rose-France to invent a new variety in Eldorado (1921). in this film the heroine is first seen in Long Shot sitting in the middle of a row of performers in the cabaret of the title, and though everyone else in the shot is in sharp focus, her face is blurred by a spot of localized diffusion covering it alone, in the next shot from another angle that includes her, the spot of diffusion remains over her face, but as she starts to perform it disappears, or rather she moves from behind it, and it only returns when she has finished performing. From subsequent developments in the narrative it would seem that this device was meant to indicate her mental abstraction from her surroundings, but like other such devices used by advanced French filmmakers of the 'twenties, its appearances in this film are far from consistent, so we cannot be certain of this. This use ol lens diffusion in a selected area of the frame was used in some of Jean Epsteins films up to I'Affiche (1925), but after that it seems to have been dropped in favour of the conventional use of lens diHuston over the whole frame arca+ Despite these examples from the 'avant-garde', the use of lens diffusion was in general taken up more slowly in Europe after 1924 than it was in America,
Another rare variation in the use of soft focus1 occurs in René Clair's le Mystcre du Moulin Rouge (1924), in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-.J9?6
A scene staged in depth in Scara-mouche (Rex Ingram, I923)t and Ik by John Seitz in the modi-fed core style he used in thisfilm. There is no true 'deepfocus1 in this scene, as theforeground actors are about 20feet from the camera, and thefocus softens beyond thefurthest small doorway in the background. All this is consistent with use of large aperture photography in the region offl.K -j4 and che use of a 40 mm. lens.
179
.^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
Hi!
lfj     ..Tři  m   • ■ • -     *r-- . *
rr
||v
5  11 .3^
winch it was used exclusively to denote night-time in scenes actually shot under full daylight. This curious usage crops up elsewhere on rare occasions, and so accounts lor the heavy diffusion applied in the 'night' scenes of Carl Dreycrs 1^^(1932).
Lens diffusion works best when the lens is set at maximum aperture, which by 1925 was at least f3.5, and the increasing use of lens diffusion in American lilms no douk helped to encourage the further reduction in the depth of field, which is quite visible in many films made in 1925 and 1926.
MM it Love (Edmund Coulding,
0. background is softened by a W WW W behind the actress.
-SET, ■
Depth of Field
As in other dimensions of the medium, there was a considerable range of variation in the handling of depth of lield in American films made in the earlier part of the 'twenties. Because previous commentators have only considered a handful of films from this period, not going much beyond the famous comics, von Stroheim, and Griffith, they have concluded that there was no reduction in the depth of field from that usual before 1914; i.e. a depth of field corresponding to a lens aperture of f5.6 on interiors. As I have already noted, this was indeed true lor some
Another angle on the other participant in the same scene in Love, in which there is no screen behind him, únd the true
depth of field in this situation is repeated.
ISO
films in 1920. hut in many others the trend towards filming at increased aperture which had just begun before that date continued to cain Eround. Scaramouch?, which has already been discussed, is a case En point. Tlie interiors in this film arc shot at apertures in the region of f2,S to f4, and even a few of the exteriors are shot in this way loo. The staging in depth that is used in some scenes in this film does not conflict with this, as the foreground figures and objects are not placed closer than 20 feet from the lens, wtlh the focus extending from them to about 60 feet back, and this is quite possible with a 40 mm. lens set at f2.S.
The increasing use of lens diffusion may have encouraged the trend towards larger aperture filming in another way, as it is simpler to fix the lighting level lor all the shots at the level used for the Close Hps shot at maximum aperture with gauzing, rather than reduce the lighting level specially for them alone. Another factor in this development was the use of Iouct focal length lenses - anything up to 6 inches - for shooting Close Ups, which threw the background well oul of focus, even when no diffusion was used. Ibis introduced another source of visual discrepancy between the diffused Close Ups and the distant shots of the scene, unless the aperture was increased on them to throw thi:ir backgrounds a bit out oi locus as well. One rather bizarre response to this last part of the problem was to leave the aperture and depth of field alone on the Long Shots, but lo soften the sharpness of the background by placing a giant gauze screen behind the actors, and right across the full field of the picture. Examples of th is are known Irom \922 to 192V, but they do not seem to be very common.
it
A very minor trend in filming Close Ups in interior scenes was to put a completely black background in behind the actor just for these shots. The most glaring; examples of this are in DAY. Griffith's films such as America (1924)1 where it accentuates even more the discontinuous features of his film construction, but occasional examples can be Ibund in the work of other film-makers in the 'twenties. In the previous period, Griffith had also originated the occasional use of'choker1 Close Ups, which show only the Iront of the face, leaving the neck at least partly out of shot, and these came to be used by other American film-makers on rare occasions in the 'twenties, By the late 'twenties it was possible for an American and other film-makers to go even closer at a peak moment, into a shot showing only the eyes, as in %e Blood Ship (1927).
Erich von StroheWs obsessive pursuit of realism in his films led bin, against the tide in photographic matters, and accidentally produced greater depth of field in many of the images in hi. films. Stroheim wished to have his cameramen shoot .scenes inside rooms, with at the same time a view of
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920^926
the action in the streets outside visible through doors and windows. This requires that Lhe light levels inside the room sets be almost as high as that of the direct sunlight outside, and this in its turn meant that an aperture of about fS or I11 had to be used for correct exposure. With the usual 40 mm or 50 mm. lens as used on teoUsft Wives (1922), this does not give 'deep locus' in the modern sense, which means sharp focus all the way from Close Up to Long Shot, and in anv case von Stroiieim did not exploit all the depth of field he did have available in this film. But in the photography of (iwJ (1925), where similar considerations applied, mam shots were taken with a truly wide-angle lens ol about 10 ruin, focal length inside small rooms, and this did give tin- depth ol field associated with true 'deep focus1. Hut here again the stagings were not particularly arranged to take advantage of this, and only occasionally do the actors accidentally pass through positions that show this great depth of field. Von Stroheim's later films were lit more conventionally, as were those he made before 1920.
There was another peculiarity in the lighting of the two von Stroheim films 1 have just mentioned, and this was that the interiors were shot in room sets (or actual rooms) which had real ceilings in place, though these ceilings uotl- not visible within the shots. This meant thai backlighting from above and behind could not be used, and the sets hat! lo be lit with arc floodlights on floor stands. This gives manv of the scenes a quite distinctive look, particularly- when tjie reflections of the lights can be seen in the varnished wood uf doors and furniture, which was something that was avoided in ordinary films,
In America, von Stroheim was alone in this accidental achievement of 'deep focus', but in Germany a similar situation arose in Varkte (1925), in the filming of location scents in the lhe at re manager's office. There was a slighth greater tendency to use wide-angle lenses on studio sets in Germany than in lhe United States, and this is quite visible as early as 192 3 in Die Strasse and Das \\ach figure nkahneii. In these cases there was no increased Mfti level to match exteriors as in the Stroheim films and Variety as they were shot entirely in the studio, and so were later Lit7A films such as Am Rande der Weil (Karl Grune, 1927) which alio has scenes shot with wide-angle lenses. The case of Der Schau. (G.W. Pabst, 1923) is yet again different, in this film it is obvious that a conscious effort w as made to obtain and use greater depth of field, and it is also clear that all the setups had been predesigned before the film was shot; Le, the camera positions were not freely chosen by the director during shooting. A number of the sets in Der Schat/. have heavy low ceilings visible in shot, and this was also the case for some UFA films of the same kind.
pUMSTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: (920-1926
One oj the many differently shaped (J-jp&É mosh in Die RcrgkaUe (Ernst
Lubitsch, 1921).
Vignetting
The use of sofL-edged vignette masks, particularly on closer shots, continued into the earlv twenties, but this praclice was still not completely general, lhe !orm of the mask was still often that oi a circular iris diaphragm in front of the lens, well out of focus so that its edge was complete! v blurred and indistinct. On Close Lips it continued to serve in ionic films as an alternative to the use of eniuzc diffusion ever the whole frame, but now those cameramen using it in this way led into its use bv putting a wider circular vignette, which just entered the corners of the frame, on the
adjoining shots, The use of the hard-cd^ed circular vignette had pretty well entirely vanished in America, where a new kind ol soft mask now made its appearance, and quickly came bi In- quite widely used, This was a sort of black semi-transparent edging that projected just a little wav into the frame lo which it made a faint small irregular border of rectangular shape. This kind of mask is so unobtrusive that one hardly notices its presence, and it was produced bv layers of coarse black gauze with rectangular holes cul in their centres posit toned in Iront ol the lens in a matte box. This matte box was now <i standard accessory fixed
Imgularly shaped soft-edged and ^-transparent mask covering m of theframe m Miimaus Fitist (1926).
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-!926
White bordered vignette mashing used in I VHerhiers Eldorado (1921).
in v
front of the camera tans, and it usuatly incorporated the igncttingiris diaphragm into itself at the lens end.
In Germany Lubitsch continued and elaborated his experiments with unusually-shaped hard-edged decorative masks in Sunwrun (1920) and Die Rcrgkaizc (1921). The la tier film is packed with masks in all sorts of complex and symmetrical shapes such as a double ogive, and these shapes have been carefully chosen to harmonise with the decorative srylfcations of the sets. However, after this film Luhitsch completely abandoned this approach, and nothing like it has been seen since,
A quite different kind of complex but irregular masking was developed a few years later in Murnau's films, but this involved the use of black semi-transparent gauze masks rather than the solidly opaque masks Lubitsch used. These semi-transparent irregularly shaped masks first appear in Dcr lerzic Aftinn (1924-), and for a good deal of the film they do not reach much farther into the frame than the American type edging masks which may have been their model. However on some of the shots the)1 do cover a fair amount of the frame area, and only leave an irregular central opening in which the actors do their stuff. These masks are not very noticeable, particularly on poor prints of this film, because they integrate with the other dark areas inside the frame, and in particular with the smudgy dark patches painted onto the walls of the sets, which were a characteristic feature of the design of many German films in the 'twenties. In Der ftk* MQTm the central area of the frame in the closer shots is usually illuminated with a spotlight which casts a soft-edged patch of light, and Ctia again ,bUds with the very soft edge of the mask!
Kowcver in the moving camera shots in Dcr htzce Mann the masks can lie clearly seen, as the moving backgrounds show through them. There are still cjuite a number of shots in this film which do not have the masks 1 have described, but in TartU[j'(]926.) nearly every shot has them. It may be because these masks show up on moving camera shots, and also when actors walk behind them when they walk out of shot, that M urn an almost entirely abandoned camera movement in Tartufy and also arranged his scene dissection so that the actors did not walk out of the edge of the frame at all. Tft? result is that the actors are literally trapped inside the clear central area of the frame, and personally I find the effect extremely oppressive.
For whatever reason, Muvnau relaxed this total use of the broad-edged soft black mask in his next film, fotm (1926). The masks in this Him, which are not used on every shot, though of the same soft-edged black semi-transparent kind, are much more varied in shape, and many of them have at least one side open. On the other hand, there arc a few of the masks in Faust that encroach much further into the frame area than ever before, leaving only a small part of the frame clear for the action. The example illustrated from the duel scene would be a high-key shot lit brightly all over by direct sunlight but for the mask, which effectively turns it into a low-key shot, and helps give the impression that the whole scene was taking place at night. After this final well-balanced use of this technique rvlurnau dropped it, and it has never been seen again since.
in France, the use of simpler regular decorative shapes in mattes or masks with fairly hard edges after the earlier American manner was continued into the early "twenties by
WJt STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
L'Hcrbicr in VMomme du large (1920) and Eldorado (1921). In tde former film there does not seem to have been much reason for the particular shapes chosen, but in Eldorado a shape such jS that illustrated - an oblong white mask-could be related to an implied comparison between the decadent character <hown within ilt and the similarly framed Aubrey Beardsley drawing he has on his wall. This use of decoratively-shapcd masks disappeared in France too in later years.
Special Forms of Shot Transitions
In the early 'twenties the use of the dissolve continued to be rather limited. The dissolve continued to be the principal vvay of getting into and out of flashbacks, but flashback construction became much less popular. The dissolve also continued to be used for smoothing out a suspected mismatch in the transition to (and from) a closer shot of an actor, but the necessity for this was now rare in American films, and less frequent too in European films. The dissolve now also began to be used to string together the first montage sequences, and in some of these it docs happen to correspond to a time lapse between the shots joined by it, as in the brief excerpts from a series of variety acts in Varicie (1925). In other montage sequences made earlier and later, the dissolves joining the shots do not always correspond to time lapses, but I would still suggest that the later use of the dissolve as denoting a time-lapse arose by generalization from those montage sequences in which it does, since it is only at the very end of the 'twenties that the dissolve between ordinary scenes begins to denote a time lapse with >orne certainty.
S *
1S3
In these years a time lapse between ordinary scenes was still mostly indicated with a title card or a fade-out and fadc^n, but the iris-out and iris-in still appear sometimes ^d even occasionally an overlapping iris-out and iris-im As might be expected, even more elaborate combinations appeared in some of the films of the French avant-garde, utilising various forms of moving masks in front of the lens! The opening^slit iris was overlapped with fades and ordinary irises to make some of the transitions in L'Herbicr's 1'Homme du large (1920), and devices of equal visual complexity were also used in his Eldorado (1921). However most of the shot transitions in these films were more conventional, as was the case for the work of other film-makers using such utkete. There seems to be no specific reason for which particular form of shot transition was used at which particular point in these French avant-^ardc films.
Wipes
Eldorado also includes a number of true wipes; i.e. transitions in which a straight tine moves across tfu: frame removing one shot as it goes, and leaving another shot revealed behind its line of travel. In Eldorado the control of the moving boundary between the two shots was very imperfect, and the effect was very roughly done when compared with the wipes from later times with which we are familiar. The same imperfections can be seen in the wipes in Eisen.stc'tiVs Staehka (1924), in which the disappearing and appearing shots arc separated by a broad black bar which changes in width as the wipe progresses. These faults arose from the difficulty in making the transition directly In the
Anainorphk effect in ihetvim |*w c/XVainquc-
hillc (Jacques Feyder, 1922).
IM
camera, n$
had to be done before the introduction of special duplicating film* a couple of years later. To make a wipe in the camera a mask has to be slid across in front of the lens from one side to the other at the end of the first shot, and then the Him has to he wound back past the beginning dl the wipe before starting the second shoL At the start of the second shot the mask has to be slid sideways from the other side at exactly the same speed, and siarting from exactly the same frame to open up the second shot. Now although this procedure resembles that for making a dissolve in the camera, as ivas always done at that lime too, it happens thai small errors in the speeds and starling points of the fades that make up a dissolve are not visible at all in the finished effect, in the way that they very definite ly are in wipes. It was possible to make a perfect wipe at this date by taking enough time and trouble, and also being prepared to go hack and try again if it did not come out properly the first lime, as a perfect wipe in Victor Sjostrom's lie Who Gets Slapped (1924) shows, but most Hollywood film-makers apparently did not think it was worthwhile. Another original way of making an expanding circle wipe, in which the second scene appears inside a circle which enlarges to fill the frame, appears in Das hiaus am Meer (1923). This was achieved by punching out a series of circles of increasing size in successive frames with punches of increasing diameter at the end of one scene on the negative, and repeating the operation at the beginning of the next scene, but in this case keeping the circular punch-outs, and cutting off the remnants of the frames. These punch-outs were then cemented into the holes of the same size in the frames al the end of first scene, and then sticking the next shot from the first full frame onwards after the circle has reached full frame diameter. It works in a rough kjnd of way.
■
Anamorphosis
In the early 'twenties distorted images (i.e. anamorphic in the original and literal sense of having the wrong shape5) had quite a run of popularity in European films with artistic pretensions, where they were used to suggest subjective states in a character in the film concerned. Having said that, it must be admitted that there is a certain ambiguity of intention in one of the earliest examples in Von Morgens m Miucrnachi (1920). In this film the six-day bicycle race that the protagonist watches at one point in his adventures is shot with a lens that stretches the image out sideways. It is not clear whether this is intended as a subjective effect representing the way the protagonist sees the race or whether it represents the feelings of the cvclists takinp part, or whether it is simply an attempt to maich the vi,ual stvbzauon or the rest of the film, in which all the decor and costume are painted with distorted black and white
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
patterns in an extension of the Caligari manncrL I incline to the last view myself, but there is no way of deciding iJe question on the internal evidence in thc film itself.
When anamorphosis became popular with the French avant-garde in the next year or two, there was the usu,i] tendency for it to be inconsistently applied as an expressive effect when it was used more than once in a film, as is the case in la Sourionte Madame Bettdet (Germaine Dulac, 1922), In this film the neurotic depression and anxieties of the woman of the title are established by conventional nutans, and then this impression of her state is reinforced by a horizontal stretching of the image in a number of shots, some of which are from her POV, and others objective Close Ups of her. To accentuate thc el feet in some of these shots the squeeze ratio of the anamorphosis is varied slightly during the course of thc shot, so that the image expands and contracts a little in one direction, Germaine Dulac used this effect again in la Coquille ct Ic Clergyman in 1928, Even a director like Jacques Feyder who was closer to thc mainstream tried out anamorphosis in 1923 in Crainquehilk, in this case usinsj a diagonal stretching of the image strictly in POV shots to indicate the old mans boredom and confusion when in thc dock in court. After this date it again becomes extremely rare in conventional films.
In all thc cases I have described, it seems probable that thc anamorphic effect was created by putting a simple cylindrical lens in front of an ordinary camera lens, with the cylindrical axis of this supplementary lens in the appropriate direction for thc distortion required. As well as producing thc required distortion, this procedure also severely degraded the definition of the image. However, it is also easy to get a simple anamorphic effect with a cylindrical mirror reflecting the scene back into thc lens, and this alternative tcrnative may have been used in these films.
German Expressionist Cinema
Prom an art historical point of view, which is the only way to approach the matter with a useful and productive degree of accuracy, Expressionism was an artistic movement that began in Germany before the First World War, reached its peak around the end of that war, went into sharp decline in 1922, and had fairly well vanished by I924+ It was in fact one of the most sharply defined artistic movements that there has ever been, and its products in the various arts all have quite definite characteristics. Expressionist paintings, which were always figurative, used distorted, irregular, and jagged shapes in unnatural, vivid colours to depict their subjects. Expressionist literature used brief,
telegraphic
fragments of sentences, and Expressionist drama added to that literary style simple, elementary, and violent plots with anonymous protagonists, and also a special form of acting.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY. 1920-1926
is usually thc way in general artistic developments, Expressionist painting appeared first, several years before die First World War, followed by Expressionist literature just before thc war started, and then finally Expressionist plays were written during thc war, and staged from 19)7 onwards. In 1919 these Expressionist plays were just startine to ue stagL^ 8* settings derived from the style of Expressionist painting before Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari was made, and Expressionist cinema entered the scene. What was really singular about this event was that never before or since has an advanced artistic movement entered tlie commercial cinema so quickly. Another peculiarity of Ctligari that has confused the issue is that it contains a supernormal element in its story, which has led some people to describe every German film that contains supernatural elements as Expressionist. In fact Expressionist art was completely free of supernatural elements, whereas there had long been a tradition of the fantastic in German art and also in thc German cinema. Most of the German films involving the supernatural and the fantastic were the work of Paul Wegener and Henri k Gale en, working together or .separately from Der Student von Frag (1913) and Der Golem (1914) onwards. Hans janowitzs story for Caligari was one of the limited number of outside contributions to this cinema tradition, and the Caligari story owes absolutely nothing to Expressionist drama and literature, though it does contain a component derived from the international genre of 'master criminal* movies. For more detailed discussion of this question, sec Moving Into Pictures,
The iilms which had strong connections with Expressionist art in one way or another were Das Cabinet da Or. Caligari (Robert Wienc, 1920), Genuine (R. Wiene, 1920), Von Motgens bis Mit ternach t (K a rl - H ei n v. M art i n, 1920), %u(Hans Kobe, 1921), Kaskolnikov (R. Wiene, 1923), anclDtt Wachsfigurcnkabineti (Paul Leni, 1924). Even within this small group of genuinely Expressionist films one can set a weakening of the style by 1923, so that in Haskolndior die costumes, furnishings, and even a few of the sets are realistic, and in Das Wacbsfigurcnkahinett only the l]ack the Hipper* episode is substantially Expressionist. If 1 include these, perhaps I should also include Metropolis (1926), as that has a plot heavily indebted to the first half of Gcorg Kaisers &m trilogy of Expressionist plays, and some Expressionist acting as well, not to mention mass stagings derived from ttavvork of the theatrical producer Georg Jessner. All the fi^isjx films I have named have their visual design strongly taetl on Expressionist art, they ail contain Expressionist
bis Mittcrnachr is a filming ol another ^nuine Expressionist play by Georg Kaiser. But apart from "one of these fil ms has anv of the other characteristics
that
0 Expressionist drama and literature. One might ask if
<fa -re films that were heavily indebted to Expres.onist 38 Wlthm,t «7 ^pressionist visual elements
and the answer must be that there were indeed a few films which had a simple plot with un-named principal character, and a small number more which had somewhat Expressionist acting from one oľ thc principals, but I don't see that that makes them Expressionist any more than one raisin turns a suet dumpling into a Christmas pudding.
Expressionist Acting
There was an explicit theory of Expressionist acting, according to which broad and slow gestures gave the audience time to think about the emotions being felt by the characters in thc play, and also amplified those emotions as they were communicated. This conception was probably erroneous at the time, and is certainly so today. Owing to thc elementary nature of Expressionist pfots, the emotions that the characters are likely to he feeling are only too simple and obvious, and can even be guessed in advance of the moment. At first glance Expressionist acting in films seems no more than bad old-style melodramatic acting done very slowly, but there were a small group of top actors such as Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss and a few others, all of whom had appeared in Expressionist plays at the end of the war, who could come up with an original twist in their characterizations. Amongst the major themes on which variations were played were the use of hands clawed this way and that, and shoulders pushed in various directions. Incidentally, since there was still a tendency at the beginning of the 'twenties for most European film
acting to be rather broad and slow, it can be a tittle difficult p
to tell where Expressionist acting leaves off, and ordinary film acting begins. However by 1926 the last vtstiges of Expressionist acting were diluted enough to be ignored in a general survey,
Expressivist Features
The small group of genuinely Expressionist films had little influence on later films, for it was mostly the other famous German films of the early 'twenties which used the looming shadows and extreme camera angles which arc-usually thought of as 'Expressionist'. For instance, Die Strove (1923) and Schaiten, which respectively feature extreme angles and looming shadows, both have perfectly corner tional sets, and the acting in the first of these films Is quite normal for the place and lime it was made As I have already made clear, extreme angles had already appeared in Danish and American films before 1920, and they continued to appear in films which had no connections with the genuinely Expressionist films. For this rea>on f prefer to use the .,rm 'expressivisť for the non^naluralistic distortions M
ISt?
HU! STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
A combination shot madewith fixed mattes in Der müde Tod (Fritz Lang, 1921). Unas* ally for this period, the combination has been made by double printing using camera negative to make the intermediate positive, and then the combined internegative, rather than by mi no double exposure in the camera.
existed in film before and after German Expressionism. This usage also leach to greater precision In analysts, so it is naturally to be favoured for art historical purposes rather than the catch-all vagueness of 'expressionism', which encourages laziness, ignorance, and journalistic imprecision in dealing with the cinema of the nineteen-twenties and later. In previous chapters I have described many kinds of expressive effects such as low-key lighting, superimpositions, montage sequences, etc. occurring in American, French, and Danish and Russian films from before 1920, and these continued to occur in films from other countries into the early twenties before any influence from Caligari, or indeed from other Expressionist art could have occurred. An obvious American example now known to many people is Charles Cnblyns The Dark Mirror of 1920, which has a delirious narrative of confused identities played out mostly at night in dark rooms and Greets.
Optical Printing
in the 'twenties there was a revival of the use of optical printing, and this may have been connected in some way with the introduction of reduction printing for the making of copies of existing 35 mm. films in the new amateur substandard gauges of 16 mm. and 9.5mm., when these were introduced in 1923, A number of optical printers had to be made specially Tor this purpose, and it was suggested at the time that they could be used for enlarging or reducing pam of the image from one 35 mm. film to another 35 mm. film. In any case, specialized optical printing (or projection printing, as n was still called) services were provided by independent operators from about 1924, The
leading figures in this field at the time were Irving Knerhul and Max Fleischer, and they had ol course built their own optical printers, presumably in the way it continued to be done, by adapting Bell & Howell cameras to serve as both projector and also the specialized taking camera, with a lens system in between, and the whole lot mounted on a lathe bed with screw controls lor traversing the main component units in any direction separately.
Not much use seems to have been made of these facilities until the late 'twenties, which is not surprising, since optical priming inevitably involves the making of an intermediate positive film from the original negative or negatives, and then a new combined negative with the final optical effect on it. This produced, as mentioned before, a noticeable deterioration in ima^c quality, since ordinarv positive and negative Him had to he used for these stages. A good example of the result of this deterioration in image quality resulting from the use of ordinary negative as an intermediate duplicating stock can be seen in a trick shot in Der niiide Tod (Frit/ Lang, 1921), though this was probably not done on an optical printer. In the scene in which the magician produces a miniature army for the Chinese Emperor, the high-angle shot showing the tiny figures of the army in the foreground with the Imperial court in the background was made by combining two separate negatives of the two groups, with the area the miniature army occupies blanked out on one negative by a fixed matte or mask, and vice versa on the other. The 'positive' stock that these two negatives were printed onto to make a combined positive was actually ordinary camera negative, which was used yet again to make a new negative from which the final distribution prints were
MM STYLE AP TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
Atrovdhtig matte shot in Cecil II Delias Manslaughter (1922). A datit mm line (ttiinus) can just be jmu/i oat behind the white veil blowing out from the woman's hat,
made, As a result this particular shot can be seen to be much grainier and also less contrasty than the surrounding shots if a good 35 mm. print of this iilm is inspected, and this uijulfl have been even more obvious on the original prints shown at the time.
The earliest optical enlargement of part of the Ira me 1 fir 'blow-up', that 1 have seen occurs in Womonhandlcd (Gregory La Cava, 1925), where a letter important to the plut, which is not very visible in the Long Shot in which the scent is conducted, is revealed more clearly by enlarging part íjI the Irames containing it to full frame size, and then cutting this new footage back into the existing shot, because oE the enlargement of the original negative, as well as the effects of the use of unsatisfactory duplicating Hocks already mentioned, the image quality of this insert is very poor indeed. Even afl_er the introduction ol special intermediate print stocks with improved qualities in 1926, such a use of optical printing remained very rare, since for ordinary studio scenes it was almost always quicker and dieaper to re stage the scene and shoot a Close Up insert « tta unclear detail, possibly with a stand-in for the actor auoWk As far as using optical printing lor reversing action and producing 'freeze frames' is concerned, the important »Imsums to have been HoIIj-wood (James Cruzc, 1923), but J much better^known example where the effects of these technique are central to the plot is René Clairs Poos qu! Jn ('924). These devices, though continuing to appear mLtrmitiently in light er films, were never used in serious Warnas till after World War II, when Frank Capra took up Ufe idea for fantasy purposes in % a Wonderful Life (1946), ,n 1 *ay rather similar to Paris oui dvrt.
Travelling Mattes
The first true travelling matte process also dales from the beginning ol the nineleen-twenties. f have already described methods lor combining into one shot scenes of action which take place within separate areas ol the Irame, but there had been no way of combining a moving actor with a shot of a moving background scene immediately behind him that had been taken separately, in principle the Williams process wras supposed to change this situation. As described bv its originator much laterh die process consisted of shooting the foreground action mi a stage in Iron! ol a white backing which uas briglitty illuminated, and then from the negative of this scene a positive print vsas nude of such htyh contrast (hat the moving figure became a black silhouette surrounded by clear film. This positive travelling matte' was then put in a printer .sandwiched between the negative of the background scene which had been separately diot, and the print stock on which the final combine'] image was to appear, and the printing exposure- was «Ä <>n the final positive, which was not developed at this >t;ige, there was no exposure recorded in the silhouette area, hut around tbal there w& the latent image of the background scene, which could contain movement of its own. Then a second pass was made through the primer with the original negative of the foreground moving Jigure, and provided the fjrtt frames of each film had been correctly aliped, the
Lld exactIv fill the
mage printed of the moving figure woul.I ex mot v spaces in the frame when the combined
empty spaces developed
posit i\
H^vevc-r, then: arc « number „I gwnl r«s«i» I 'M
lhal this ve* not hem' the. Wiltúmi proce
si vshjs tarne
d vrtJt
- -I
-
in the majority of cases. It has been said by people actually working in the 'twenties that what was actually done by the operators of the Williams process was to rotoscope (project frame by frame) the negative of the foreground action onto a series of large sheets of paper on which counter-silhouettes were painted by hand around the changing outlines of the moving figures on cverv frame, and then to rcfiJm these hand-painted mattes frame by frame onto positive film stock which was syYen high contrast development. Prom this point on the printing process continued as first described: Clearly the process was very slow and expensive in this form, and so h was rarely used, and then only on larger budget films. The earliest example of the Williams process that I have been able to find is in Cecil B. DcMilles Afonsldv$H0 (1922), where it was used to put a moving background behind a close shot of the heroine driving her car, in this case the quality of the combination is fairly good, although there is a thin black line just visible round the foreground action, (A 'minus' in the jargon of the trade.) In another early example that I have been able to examine closely in a good 35 mm, print, the shot of clowns surrounding a giant spinni ng globe in He Who Geu Slapped (1924), the irregularities in the hand-painted mattes are clearly visible, though they cannot be made out in the usual poor 16 mm. prints.
It seems that after this there were some attempts to work the Williams process in the original form described, for instance in The fire Brigade (1925) and The For rent (1926), but the result was that the photographically produced mattes were not dense enough to hold back the part of the background image where the figures were to be-placed, and as a result the background 'prints through' the figures in these films. A further drawback to the Williams process in both forms before the introduction of intermediate d upl ica li ng stocks was that u nless the d ou ble pr int i ng process was carried out separately for every print made of the film, there was marked deterioration or the image quality, of the kind I have previously mentioned in connection with Bcr mode Tod.
Film Splicers
Despite the introduction of the Bell & Flowell1 semir automatic splicer for joining both positive and; negative film (particularly the former), there was no standardization of the width of splices used, though much narrower splices, dowivto ]/32nd. of an.inch, were now usual. The Bell & Howell splicer, whichis stilling used for the same purpose today, was a free-standing machine on. a pedestal, with the film cutyng and clamping actions operated by foot pressure on pedals, though the scrapingof the film and the spreading ol dK- cement still had to h, done by hand, Nevertheless it was * considerable improvement ove, the simpler type of
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
splicing clamp, which continued to be used for editing the work copy (cutting copy") of the film.
Editing Equipment
In 1924 an improved version of the first editing viewers of several years before was produced under the name of the Moviola, This was essentially the same as the earlier machines, but the mechanism was now driven by a small variable-speed electric motor controlled by a foot pedal and the illumination was now provided by a built-in light bulb. The previous machine had no shutter, but the Moviola was provided with a shutter behind the film gate which swung into place and started revolving when the speed of film transport exceeded several frames per second, The machine was now usually mounted on the top of its own small table rather than standing free on the editing bench or elsewhere. It was in fact just the same as the basic picture he ad on the Hollywood Moviola of today. (Since the original Moviola has given the generic name to all other subsequent types of film viewing machines, it and its sound version will henceforward be referred to as the Molly wood Moviola, as is done in the industry when the distinction has to be made,) It soon became the practice to have a Moviola handy on the set in Hollywood when difficult points had to be decided about matching a shot which was about to be taken to existing shots.
Matters of Continuity
Although most of the standard methods of securing smooth continuity of action through the cuts between shots, and also for giving a correct sense of direction in the movements and placements of actors were well understood in the United States at the beginning of the 'twenties, this was not generally the case in Europe. In particular, when it came to the matter of eye-line matching in reversc-angle cutting between shots, the chances were that the average European director would get this 'wrong' nearly half of the time, since he was not aware of the existence of any convention in the matter. This can be illustrated in Fritz Lang s DermuuV 7W(192I), for instance, in the introductory scenes in the inn. Other examples can easi ly be lound up to 1926 and beyond, in French and Russian films as well as German-films, e.g, la Glace a troisfaees (Jean Epstein, 1926) and 0hhmok Imperii (F.Ermler, 1929). Naturally this minor failing in craftsmanship (and the fact that nearly all those concerned stopped doing it later on when they found out about it shows that it was a matter of craftsmanship) was most common in the works of the avant-garde or 'art cinema1. But whatever the films concerned, if their proper context is taken into consideration there is no way that any profound meaning can be read into failures of eye-line matching, as
\f STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1920-1926
FILi
come have tried to do in recent years. Even in American (Tims there are plenty of lapses in the correctness of eye-line matching in the 'twenties, and that includes the films of directors like Frank Bor/age who were some or the first to use reverse-angle cutting extensively. (For example The GWt(l92SJ, and Seventh Heaven (1927)). My feeling is that although the rule against crossing the eye-line may perhaps have been formulated by the beginning of the decade, there was no general attempt to observe and enforce it before the last years of the 'twenties.
Scene Dissection
The basic Griffith style of scene dissection, with cuts in to a closer shot made from the frontal direction> without any substantial angle change, continued to be practised by many film-makers into the early nineteen-twenties, both in America, and particularly in Europe. In the United States people who made dramas tended to be more subtle than Griffith about the way they did this, which was by arranging the actors in a group in the wide shot in such a way iliat their faces were anoled at about 4S to the lens axis. Thus, when there followed a series of cuts to close shots of individuals taken straight from the established 'front', I here was created the illusion of them facing each other in a reverse-angle arrangement.
Another feature: of Griffith's style in the use of Close Hps was also copied by other film-makers in the 'twenties, particularly in Europe. This was bis practice of having the actors look straight into the lens in such shots. Other American film-makers only did this very rarely, and then at a few peak moments in the drama, but it was much more common In films from continental Europe.
Reverse-Angle Cutting
In America in the early 'twenties more and more directors came to use a substantial proportion of reverse-angle cuts when they were breaking scenes down into shots. Even at the beginning of the 4twenties a point had been reached where 20 to 25 percent of the shot transitions in many American films were from a shot to its reverse-angle. This was particularly true for those who began directing in the late "teens when the usage was already starting to be consolidated. But on the other hand many older directors *ich as Cecil B, DeMille were not particularly inclined to use reverse-angle shots. In between these two extremes there were directors who restricted their use of reverse-^nglc cutting to just a few main climaxes in ihcir films. (Slapstick comedy is excluded from this consideration, as Vei in its more elevated reaches reverse-angle cutting continued to be relatively rare right through to the end of l^silent period.) [n Germany most directors used reverse-
189
-gle cutting relatively little, or in some cases not at all | and only Ernst Lubitsch had truly mastered American methods of scene dissection. Even famous names such as Murnau were working in a retarded style at the beginning of the twenties; shooting from far back with slow cutting and without reverse-angles. The position was somewhat the same m France, and because of these features - sometimes relened to disparagingly as the 'Old Country style3 - European films, with the exception of those of Ernst Lubitsch, were unsaleable in the United States until 192S.
The Eye-Line Match
As the extensive use of reverse-angle cutting consolidated in the United Slates, film-makers must have gradually become aware of a new problem of directional continuity. It was not consciously formulated before 1919, but it must have been increasingly considered within the next several years in the United States. The point is this. When a great many shots within a scene come to be made from manv different angles and closenesses to the actors, should the camera be put anywhere, or should some positions be preferred?
A little thought shows that a better sense of the relative positions of the actors and the set under these conditions is preserved if the camera is kept roughly in a position to the 'front' side of the actors, even though its direction varies through nearly 180 degrees lor different shots. (Please note that this is quite different to the Griffith practice in which the camera was kept in the 'front' and only one lens direction was used.) One can nowadays visualise this approach (in a very rough way) as being like covering the scene in one continuous shot while quickly panning the camera from actor to actor and also making fast zooms in and out as appropriate, and then removing the z.oorn ami pan parts ol the footage in the editing, to leave the scene broken down into the remaining fixed shots cut together. The whole can then be st;en as rather like what a spectator before the actual scene would see, standing to one side of it, and casting his glance from this point to that point within it* For various reasons which it is not appropriate io go into here, rather more license in camera (or spectator) position is desirable, and of course this license was already being used before I9J9. But to prevent what the film-makers themselves experienced as disorientation, a simple rule came to be devisod that covers not only this problem, but also a related one having to do with the positions of objects on the screen in successive shots. This rule was that the camera should be kept on the same side of the line joining two actors who are interacting when its position is changed between successive shots of them. This notional line later came to be called the 'eye-line' or sometimes just 'the line', and die rule involved is now referred to as an Vye-line match1, or 'not crossing
190
the eye-line \ When more than two people are involved in a scene, the line keeps changing according to which of them arc interacting atanypointin the scene, and ihis means that it ^.possible, without breaking the rule, to make a complete circuit of camera positions around a group: over a sufficiently large number of cuts, though this is hardly ever done.
Much has been made of this rule recently by would-be film theorists; but in fact it seems that infractions of it arc of no great importance to audiences, since they arc certainly not noticed by even habitual, but non-professional, film viewers, and it can even be difficult for an expert to be certain whether the rule has been rigidly observed in a film on the basis of a single screening. For instance, although I thi n k there are no eye-I ine crossings amongst the substantial number of re verse-angle cuts ih jubila^ a film from 1919, I would not stake my life on it without seeing the film again, preferably on an editing machine. As final empirical evidence on people's failure to notice eye-1 ine mis-matches, inote that many trials with groups of students in a school for film-makers have shown that most of them, even when alerted- do not notice eye-line crossings in Hollywood sound films,
My main reason for doubling thai the eye-line rule had been formulated! in the 1914-19 period is thai nearly all the films made in these years that include an appreciable number of reverse-angle cuts have at least some of them 'crossing the eyeline\ It is not surprising that a certain number of reverse-angle cuts should! be correct even before the rule was consciously expressed, since the usual physical arrangements of set and actors in the shooting of interior scenes tends to make unintended observance of the rule probable, but not certain. On the other hand, those many directors who still only used're verse-angle cutting in one or two climaxes of their films certainly had not realized the principle, for many of their eye-line matches are 'wrong'.
■
in Pawns The Virgin of Stamboul TheFour Horsemen of the Tollable Oavid The OldSwmimin Hole Foolish Wives A Woman ofParU Srri ou Ideri n g F ires Ben-Hur
Forbidden Paradise The Merry Widow . Stella Dallas
Apocalypse
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
There are various other subsidiary facts supporting the idea that t he r u I e a b o ut not c rossi ng t he eye -1 i n e was n o t ge nera 1 ly taught fn Hollywood till the late 'twenties, but 1 will just mention one of them. This is that Maurice Elvey, one of the important British directors of the previous period, came to Hollywood and made five films there in 1924 and 1925. Before he came, his films were nearly totally innocent of reverse angles, but after he resumed directing in England in 1926, his films included a fair proportion of them. But ihe eye lines for these cuts were very frequently wrong. They had taught him about reverse angles in Hollywood, but that leaching did not include not crossing the cycling
Flashbacks and Cross-cutting
As already remarked, there had been a reaction against the use of the long multi-shot flashback sequence, and this form.of film construction, continued tobe quite rare through the 'twenties. On the other hand, cross-cutting between parallel actions continued to be used when appropriate, without pushing the idea to quite the DAV. Griffith extreme. I can't resist mentioning a particular example of cross-cutting for expressive purposes that continues the tradition established in the previous period, This is in Louis Mcrcanton's I'Appcf dusana (1920), where a love scene inside a room at night is cross-cut with, a fireworks display that is taking place not too far away outside.
Cutting Rates in Silent Films of the 'Twenties
To give an impression of the sorts of cutting rates la be observed' in particular silent films of the nineteen-twenties I will quote a fairly random collection of Average Shot Lengths selected from the figures I have obtained from more than 300 films of the period. These values correspond to projection speeds estimated to give natural movement to the characters in the films.
Leonee Perret Tod Browning Rex 'Ingram Henry King J1, de Grass e E. von Stroheim
- -
€. Chaplin Clarence Brown FredNiblo E. Lubitsch E. von Stroheim Henry King
5
■
1920	6.5 sec.
1920	4,5 sec.
1921	7.0 sec.
1921	6.0 sec.
1921	6.0 sec.
1922	6.0 sec.
1923	5.5 sec.
1'924	7.0 sec.
1924	4.0 sec.
1924	5.5 sec.
1925	5.0 sec.
1925	5,5 sec.
pilAt STYL& AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
The Phantom of the Opera The Magician Don Juan
The Winning of Barbara Worth Skinner's Dress Suit Mantrap
Son of the Sheik
The Unknown
f he Dress Parade
The Cradle Snatchers
White Shadows in the South Seas
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
the Crowd
A Girl in Every Port
Sumurun
Von Morgens bis Mitternacht
Scherben
Schloss Vogel öd
Die Bergkatze
Van i na
Danton
Dr. Mabusc der Spieler
Eine versunkene Welt
Das alle Gesetz
Die Strasse
Der letzte Mann
Örlacs Hände
Variete
Die Brüder Schellenberg TartüfT
Der Geiger von Florenz
Dk Villa im Tiergarten
Die Unehelichen
Die letzte Droschke von Berlin
Metropolis
Die Hose
Adieu Masco tte
L'Homme du large
Eldorado
l'Atlantide
h Wiame Wame ßeudet
191
Rupert Julian	192S	5.5 sec.
Rex Ingram	V926	7.5 sec.
Alan Crosland	1926	B.5 sec.
Henry King	1926	5,0 sec.
W. Seitcr	1926	S.Oscc.
V. Fleming	1926	4.5 sec.
G. Fitzmaurice	1926	4.5 sec.
Tod Browning	1927	S.S sec.
Donald Crisp	1927	5,5 sec.
Howard Hawks	1927	4,5 sec.
WS. Van Dyke	1928	6.0 sec.
H. Brenon	1928	6,5 sec.
K.Vidor	1928	5.0 see.
Howard Hawks	1928	5,0 see.
E. Lubitsch	1920	6.0 sec.
K-H. Martin	1920	12.0 sec.
Lupu Pick	1921	16.0 sec.
F. W Murnau	1921	9.5 sec.
E, Lubitsch	1921	6.5 sec.
hi von Gerbch	1921	11.0 sec.
D. Buchowcty.ki	1921	6,5 sec.
Fritz Lang	1922	7.5 sec.
A, Korda	1922	7.0 sec,
E.A. DuponL	1923	6.0 sec.
Karl Grune	1923	13.0 sec.
F,Wr Murnau	1924	10,0 syc.
R. Wicnc	1924	11.0 sec.
E.A. Duponr	1925	6.0 sec.
Karl Grune	1925	7,0 sec.
F, W. Murnau	1926	6.5 sec.
P. Czinner	1926	10,0 sec.
Franz Osten	1926	6.0 sec.
G. Lamprechfc	1926	7.0 sec.
Carl Bocse	1926	6.0 sec\
Fritz Lang	1926	7.0 sec. ■
H, Behrendt	1927	5,0 sec,
mi	1929	6.0 see.
M. L'Herbicr	1520	7.0 sec.
M.L'Herbier	1921	5.0 sec,
J, Fcyder	1921	8.0 sec.
G. Dubc	1922	5.0 sec.
192
■
Visages-cV-Eniants
Grihiche
Poil de Carotte
la Glace a trois Faces
les DeuTíTiiTiides
les Nouveaux Mcssieurs
Neobytchainye prikhoutennaía iViístera Vesta v straně bolchevikov A cl i ta
Dom na ťrubnoi Novyi Vaviíon
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY; 1920-1926
As can be seenvthe slowest cutting in the American films listed for the period 1920-1925 is an ASL of 75 seconds, whereas there are 8 German films with slower cutting, and in fact with A-SL*s of up to IS seconds. It is also noteworthy that the slowest cutting in American films is in the works of the leading American pictoriaiist' of the period, Rex Ingram, with ASL's of 7 seconds for The Four kforsemen of the Apocalypse^ Searamouchct and Mare Nostrum, and 7.5 seconds for The Magician. Clarence Brown also had tendencies in the same.direction. The slower cutting in European films still tended to be reinforced,by the slow pace of their narratives and acting, but even if narrative and acting had: been faster,
«J0 35 i
25 20 IS 10
5
0
American Silent 1918-23
Mean ASL = 6.5 sec.
19 lfl
■
_1-1-• ■
12 3 4  5 0 7  Q- & 10 VI' 12 IE IE 15 10 17 16 2i 22 23
ACQS HO 25 20 15 ■
s J
0
American Silent 1924-29
Mean ASL ~ S.S sec
i&
ru..
-i i
1  Z 3 4 & a 7 ů g tO U 12 I a 14 i5
' _1___J
16 J7 IB-19 30.2V22.S3 £4-2S
J. Feyder J. Feyder J, Duvivjer jean Epstein René Clair J. Feyder
L, Kuleshov Y. Protazanov Boris Bar net Kozintscv & Trauberg
■I 925 1925 1925
1927
1928
1929
1924
1927
1928
1929
5.S sec. 5.5 sec. 5.0 sec, 5,5 sec, 6,0 sec. 6.0 sec.
6.0 sec, 4.0 sec. 4,0 sec. S.O sec.
silent films such as Scherben which have many shots longer than 30 seconds would still not seem fast.
A rather more conclusive demonstration of these points is given by comparing the Average Shot Length distributions for much larger samples of American and European silent films for the six year periods 3918-1923 and 1924-1929. As you can see, for samples of about 70 films from 19-18-1923, there arc no American films with ASLs longer than 10 seconds, whereas there are about twenty European ones, and the modal values of the ASLs in the two cases are respectively 6 seconds and S seconds. When we move on to the ASL distributions for 1924-1929, which are
■40 1
ao
25 20 15 1Ü ■
Sr
European Silent 1918-23
Mean ASL = 8.5 sec.
is is
J 3
£    ■    1    2    1    1 t
1  2 3  4 S 6  7  & S 10 f 1 12 13 14 16 IB 17 16 f E> £0 21 22 23 24 25
J0n 35 3D 25 20 IS 10
5 -i
0
17
European Silent 1924-29
Mean ASL = 6.5 sec
Í3
0 0 0 o qqqqqqooo _t_i_»—>.....—.....
1  2 3 4  5 6  7 8  0 10 1.1 12 13 14 IS 1C 17 If 19 20 21 S 23 & 25
Number ol sanlplcs of AmeFÍCan and Euopean fc as indicated
flttf STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
based on well over 100 films in both cases, die American
sample show* °nlv a ver}' sma^ 5Peetlir,g up, while for the European distribution the modal (most popular) value has decreased to 6 seconds from the 7 seconds of the previous period■ The mean values of the two distributions are now 5.8 seconds and 6.5 seconds respectively, and the European cutting rates are still almost 1 second slower on the average, so although the gap was reduced over the previous period of 1918-1923, the Europeans had not caught up in this respect, And later on we Will find that they never have.
These results reflect a conscious attempt in the latter part of the nineteen-twenties by European film-makers to follow the earlier developments in American film style. This process was referred to as 'Americanization' from 1925 in the German cinema, and something similar was apparently going on in French and British cinema from around' this date. This 'Americanization' also included closer camera placement and some changes in photography as well, not to mention the elimination of the last traces of Expressionist acting in Germany. In America itself, a more detailed examination of cutting rates year by year shows that the mean ASL for silent films was pretty steady at close to 6 seconds from 1920 to 1928. The suggestion is that in this respect, as in others, the basic American style of film construction had standardized by 1920,
The shapes of the distributions of the numbers of films with a given ASL are in general assy metrical, like most of those just illustrated, but you can see that the distribution for American silent films of the 1924-1929 period is very nearly symmetrical, and bears a strong resemblance to the Normal (or Gaussian) distribution. This distribution is one that describes many natural phenomena, such as the heights of people in a population, or the distribution of errors in measuring a length accurately. Analogy with the second case just mentioned suggests that the approximation to the Normal distribution for American films of the late twenties may be due to filmmakers unconsciously aiming at a standard cutting rate, and failing to hit it due to a variety of disturbing factors. The ASL's of American lilms in the 'ate 'thirties are again approximately Normally distributed, but elsewhere this is not so,
The Atmospheric Insert
Prior to the nineteen-twenties there had been no real edition of using a general shot of a scene which did not contain any of the characters in the story to give a feeling °f mood or atmosphere to the narrative at an appropriate P°>nt. Isolated instances of this had occurred, but it is °nly in France and Germany after 1920 that the use of the llUmed atmospheric shot became a definite principle of ^ruction. In Marcel L'Herbier's i'Hommc du large (1920)
r
193
t'-e are a small number of shots of scudding clouds and tumultuous seas cut uno scenes at points at which they could be taken to indicate the feelings of the principal characters, even though those characters are not present at the place where the Insert Shot was taken. As wiih most of the expressive uses of Insert Shots in the cinema the audience's understanding or this device depended on conventions or cliches established far earlier in the other arts, and particularly in nineteenth-century literature,
A more developed example of the use of atmospheric inserts is provided by die shots of the docks of Marseilles which arc cut more or less at random into the narrative of ficvrc (Louis Delluc, 1921), which otherwise takes place entirely inside a bar frequented by sailors. In this case these atmospheric inserts are not specifically expressive, since they do not appear to relate to the specific emotions which might be felt by any of the characters at the point where they are cut in, but rather they provide a kind or generalized 'port' atmosphere.
(Delluc explicitly proposed the idea of illustrating psychological states with shots of objects, etc. in one of his theoretical articles in Cmca (9 December 1-9-21 p. 14), and indeed similar ideas had been advanced by other French writers earlier than this, including the future film-maker Marcel LJ Her bier in his Hermes ct le silence of I91ST)
In parallel with these developments in France, but perhaps unconnected, a similar use of atmospheric inserts began to appear in German films from 3 921 onwards; in Scherben with shots of the railway line and the outside of the house, in Vanina with cuts back to an empty ballroom when the action has moved elsewhere, in I)r> Mabusc tier Spieler with the empty stock exchange likewise, some shots of the eponymous street in Die Strasse (1923), and then after that Sykcsicr, Descriptions of the extensive tracking shots in this film which showed the u/mivft, or world surrounding the action, but not connected with it, can be found in Lotto Eisner's The Haunted Screen, but onfy a few fragments of them are left in the surviving print of this film.
Made almost simultaneously with Sylvester at the end of 1923, Louis Delluc's last film, tlnondation, also used tracking shots showing the village market and river which eventually Hoods as background atmosphere, in much the same nay as Sylvester, though in the case of I'inondation these scenes eventually come to have a connection with the action of the plot. It may be that this use of atmospheric ticking shots in both films had a common inspiration, but if so it I* still obscure. The use of shots independent of the narrative to create atmosphere (or Sttounung, as the German filmmakers put it at the time), never went beyond the extreme reached in Syhester in mainstream cinema, but m tbt Art Cinema or.avant-gardc of the late 'unties the mode was
i-9-1
HLM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1926
Multiple súperi impositions in the montage sequence showing the attractions of the big city in Die Strasse (Karl G rune, 1923).
pushed much further. In a sense the 4cross-scction of a city1 films from Berlin - die Symphonic dcr Grosstadt {1927) onwards arc nothing hut Stimnumg,
The Documentary Montage Secpicnce
A development closely related to all this, and which is indeed not completely distinguishable from it, was the appearance ol what could he called the 'documentary montage sequence3. This was a series of fairly connected shots showing the actual events and unstaged action going on in some, particular place that the characters in the film happen to be in, without it making any great emotional or expressive contribution to the narrative. The first example here was the Holy Week procession included in Eldorado (1921), and this was followed by the series of shots of the street market that begins Oainquchilic. (Jacques Feyder, 1923), and then by the shots of popular Sunday recreation on the outskirts of Paris near the beginning of VAfjiche (Jean Epstein, 1925), and so on. The last mentioned instance also has expressive connotations, and is one of those cases that escape any simple classification, and so have to be described in detail to indicate their true nature. Both Feyder and Epstein continued to use documentary sequences in their films throughout the 'twenties, and in many of these such as la Glace a troisfoccs (Epstein, 1926), the effect is startlingiy like similar usages that appeared in the 'Nouvelle Vague" iihns of the ninctcen-sixties.
The 'Classical* Montage Sequence
The early evolution of the 'classical' montage sequence, which is a sequence of short shots joined by dissolves or other
optical effects that are so close together that one transition starts shortly alter the one before ends, is another topic that is still not completely elucidated. I have already menLiuiK-t! examples of atmospheric montage sequences in French films before 1923, but in these the shots arc ol appreciable length, with the transitions between them, be they cuts, dissolves> or fades, are well separated Irom one another, and the same can be said for the first German example I have seen. In 1922 iVlurnau s Phantom contains what seems to be the first attempt at what later became the standard method ol suggesting a subjective feeling ol dizziness, or vertigo, or loss of consciousness in a character in a film hi this I ihn there were a series of moderately !onu shots joined by dissolves, each shot rotating about the central point ol the screen. (The rotation of these shots was achieved in various ways; partly by building special small sets which were actually rotated in front of the camera, and partly by putting a special rotating prism in front of the lens to produce the effect in a purely optical manner.)
Die Strosse (Karl Grune, 192 3) contains one of the very first lully realized montage sequences in the classical form, in which the dissolves.lake place absolutely continuously, so that there is always a changing sequence of super imposed images present on the screen. In this film the scries ol images are intended to represent the alluring attractions and excitements of the Big City street as seen by a timid bank clerk who is looking out of his window at it. In some parts this sequence is further complicated by splitting the frame into multiple images side by side. A similarly-used montage sequence in Murnau's Sunrise is also very similar in form and content, though more precise in execution, and far more
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-i926
tlcgant visually. Also in 1923, Robert WEenc's Rasbvlnikov has a fairly fully developed example of a montage sequence in the what was to be the classical style.
The German film most admired in II oily wood, VoTicie (1925)> dso M9 its manLll^e sequence, which is a series of shots showing short details of the acts on the bill of the variety program, and this is again used to convey at mo sphere. In these few years development had been rapid, and by 1926 even ordinary German films had to have a montage sequence, as in Die Villa int Tiergancn, where the montage sequence suggesting a loss of consciousness has attained its canonical form. A scries of dissolving images is surrounded by i nebulous swirling vortex matted in towards the outer cd^e of the frame.
Again there had been a parallel development of the classical montage sequence in France, though in this case I have a strong feeling that the German example had priority. Instances can be mentioned in Cocur fidclc (Jean Epstein, 1923), and later films. But even in 1926 in America there \verc only a limited number ol directors just starting to use full montage sequences in lilms such as What Price Glory? (Raeul Walsh), So This is Paris (Ernst Lubitsch), and Mantrap (Victor Fleming). The last ol these is an early example of i montage sequence indicating a spatial transition, being made up oi a series of panning and tracking shots ol scenery which dissolve one into the next smoothly along a passage from the wilderness to the city.
The Things Take Over
The atmospheric Insert Shot is only one variety of the Sonera! class of Insert Shots, which is made up ol shots of objects and also shots of the body apart from the lace. The use ul the general class of Inserts shows a marked increase in the films of all countries throughout the decade, so tliat by 1925 we find that both Varicte and Smouldering Fires [Clarence Brown J include about +5 inserts of alt kinds; i.e. about 10% of their shots arc Inserts. Although this tendency had its roots in American practice before 1920, >t then developed quite independently through the early
twenties in both Europe and America. The highest form of the use of the Insert was when the object shown alone In the close shot could be made to perform a double function ■n the narrative, though the occasions when a director could manage this were very rare, An example of this is given by Tod Browning's Outside the Law (1921). In this OWi the protagonist strays into criminal it v, and while he is rtx'ingirom the police he befriends a little boy for whom he imptoviscs a kite. Later his criminal predicament suggests cv«i worse crimes to him, and now the sticks of the child's
Sfa which has been lost and dangles broken from above the ^irulow outside, cast a crucifix dike shadow on the floor of
195
thccnn.naFs ^ding pl^/Hus naturally recalls him to th, paths ol righteousness. Both the kite in its ordinal form ^d also its shadow, ft rtpC[lLcdl, ^ m gtf
Ups at various points throughout these scenes. This mav Wm corny, but it is gjg j trick t[> ^ Jjj^ [fe ^
into a him in an unforced way, which is what Tod Brownm* certainty does.
Already in 1924 the real avant-garde had produced a film compose almost entirely of Inserts $ Ballet mccaruytc by Fernand Lcger and Dudley Murphy), and in the later twenties the use ol a large proportion of Inserts became the norm in the new international Art Cinema in films such as Dmitri Kirsanoffs Rrumes d'amomnc (192S), not tu mention the advanced Russian cinema of Eisenstein and others. When some critics around 1930 were writing about the 'art of the silent cinema1 and lamenting its loss; it was basically the extensive use ol Inserts and montage sequenus that they were talking about. 1 find it difficult to be sorrowful about the matter, since it seems to me that by 1929 these usages were becoming an established style which was starting to be used unimaginatively and unthinkingly by lessor talents. Sometimes even the hctter directors used these and other devices to hammer borne dramatic points that were already quite obvious, as in Clarence Crown's Flesh and the Devil (I92fi), not to mention large numbers of lesser known European films with artistic prelcnsimis.
The Hard Cut
Under the influence oi Intolerance, which reached France towards the end of the war, Abel Gance marie hit* lirst experiments with fast cutting in the battle scenes ol J'accuse (3919). Whereas in Griffith's films the hardest cuts (i.e. those creating the greatest physical discontinuity between shots) are mostly between parallel actions, and have been created largely in the pursuit of heightened suspense in Gance s stvle this was changed to a linear progression through very disparate shots, without a true parallel line ol action. There were already signs of a development like this in American cinema, where I have come across a humorous short film from 1920, The Perils oj Paul, which depicts a wild drive in a car by Intercutting shots of the car and POV shots From inside it with big ln>crls of the speedometer and of e, foot on an accelerator. This is the kind of thing that uas developed further by Gance in la Roue (1922), in the scene of the train proceeding towards a crash. Many of th, shots intercut with general shoes of the moving train are ol rftik parts of it such as pressure gauge,, etc, and this produces a different eficct to that in Griffithfilms, where there is nearly alwavs some movement in the shots. As .veil § that, the cutting in some part, of h Roue is even la«cr than anything in Griffith % films, with some of the >hots only one
196
frame in length. Although Gance did not completely carry through his original intention of creating simple regular metrical patterns with the lengths of shots, an clement of mechanical rhythm, oblivious to what is represented in successive shots, remains in the film. This is most marked in the final climactic sequence which intercuts shots of the peasants' round-dance with shots of the dying engineer. The sequences in la Roue that I have mentioned represent a definite move in the direction of cutting together static, and at the same lime very disparate, shots that later became important in Eisen stein's films, and also in fully avant-garde fi Ims I i kc !c B a}let mccaniquc.
The Interaction of Form and Dramatic Content
By the beginning of the 'twenties, the construction of American features through the filmic variables like Scale of Shot, cutting rate, angles chosen, and so on, had been largely brought into line with the standard form of dramatic construction which was now fully taken over from the theatre into the cinema, in particular, the alternation of different types of scene in the way described in Chapter 10 was accompanied' in films 'by variations in the local Gutting rate according to the type of scene concerned, This can be illustrated by the example of John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924)- a film which is fairly easily available for study in Britain and the United States in a 16 mnv, print produced by Killiam Shows, This print does have some short sections in which scenes of very fast action are 'stretched' by step-printing so that they do not appear ridiculously fast at sound speed, but these are sufficiently few and sufficiency short not to upset my demonstration. It is also important to realize that the Average Shot Lengths are here calculated for n projection speed: of 20 frames .per second, which is close to the speed at which the film was shot, and not for the sou ml projection speed of ?4 frames per second, However, there is^now also a DVD-version of The iron Horse available, and; this has been transferred'from film to disc at about 20 frames per second throughout, and so the movement is at natu ra I sp eed througliou t.
The overall A<SL for The Iron Horse is-about-6.5- seconds, and the local ASL's for particular scenes fluctuate about this rate, according to their nature. The general pattern of these variations, which is fairly standard for ordinary American films from the First World War onwards, is that action scenes arecut faster than the norm, antfsad^r comic scenes slower than normal! In ,the case of The Iron Horse the tot few scenes, which are basically concerned with introducing the characters, do not depart very far from■ the overall norm, but after the young protagonist's father has been killed by Indians, the two scenes in which he Juries and mourns him slow down considerably, to an ASl of IS
FILM STYLE AND TECFINOLOGY: 1920-1926
seconds. Then a scene in the corridors of Congress, which mostly contains exposition of the situation 20 years later in the story, returns to something like the norm, with an ASL of S.5 seconds. This is followed by a scene which trades in the suspense as to whether Lincoln will sign the bill opening up the West, and this has a smaller than average ASL of S seconds. The next scene is neutral in mood, showing general "documentary1 views of the building of the transcontinental railroad out JVom the West Coast, and this proceeds at a pace slightly slower than the norm, with an ASL of 9 seconds. This is succeeded by another such scene, but since this includes more intense action and a dramatic mishap, it is cut much faster, with an ASL of S seconds. Next is action on the Eastern end of the railroad which is again somewhat similar overall to the previous scene, though longer, and starting slowly, then building up to the faster climax of an Indian attack in the middle before slowing down again. The ASL of this scene overall is 5.9 seconds. Yet another scene at the eastern end of the railroad building follows, but this time it starts slowly, with a comic section in the middle, ■followed by faster action at the end. Overall the ASL equals S J seconds. The next section is pure action, representing a buffalo hunt, which is cut even faster, with an ASL of 4.6 seconds. This is followed by a short factual and non-dramatic scene of winter track laying which is made up of a couple of long takes, both about 24 seconds long. After a time lapse, another long action scene follows, with an ASL of 4 seconds, followed by another sad burial scene, which is slow cut, like the earlier one, at 12.5 seconds. After a long sequence of scenes to do with the building of the Eastern end of the railroad, which have an overall ASL of S.6 seconds, there
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follows a long pair of basically comic scenes in the portable saloon which follows the construction gangs. These scenes have a slower cutting rate than average, as is usual with comedy scenes, with an ASL of S.3 seconds. There follows a seduction scene, which slows down even further, to 11.2 seconds, and so it goes on.
As hinted in the above simplified summary, by the early 'twenties American films bad also adopted the variation of type of dramatic action-within scenes, as well as from scen£ to scene. Even within a continuous scene, dramatic sections are often followed by comic sections, which are followed by action sections, and then pathetic sections, and the cutting rate varies in the same standardized ways to go with these ditfercnt sections within the scene, and so indeed do other formal features like Scale of Shot. More detailed illustration of this point tends to be tedious in a book, but further examples of these standard constructional procedures are illustrated in the final chapter dealing with the films of Max Ophuls, and also in the article "The Numbers Speak" % Moving into Pictures,
U. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
■
ecause of the overlap between the production of the first sound films and the last silent films in the United States during the years 1926-1929, and also because only nilcnt films were made in Europe during these years, my consideration of the period is rather difficult to organize. There has always been an unfortunate tendency not to make inv distinction between the nature of silent films from the eark -twenties and those from the late 'twenties, and on the other hand to fail to notice the close formal similarities between the last silent films and sound films from the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, and I can only advise close attention to the points which bear on this, as 1 have been unable to think of a better way to cover these developments than to continue the pattern of the previous chapters.
To recapitulate the well-known outline of the industry's transition to sound cinema production in the United States: aily a handful of sound films were made in I927T in 1928 a minor part of the production was sound films, hut in 1929 lhe majority ol the films produced by the major studios ivere part-talkies at least. By April of 1929 about 2500 sound projectors had been installed in American cinemas, mainly in the first-run theatres in the larger cities. By the end of 1929 all the major studios had stopped making silent films, though, they did convert many of their talkies to silent films by replacing the sound-track with intcrtitles for the benefi t o f uncon verted cinemas.
In Europe on the other hand no sound films were made till the end of 1929, so fil m-makers there were Iree to develop certam stylistic features of the last silent films to an extreme that was impossible in the United States. This was particularly the case in France. In that country the development of stylistic extremes in an lArt Cinema' was also encouraged by the fact that there were no large, highly organized production companies in the latter part of the decade, and each film was a separate enterprise for fee concerned. If it failed, they could just walk away, and get the money for the next one from someone else, because that was w*hat was done anyway. This approach was only passible to alimited extent in Germany, and hardly at all in America. In Russia centralized artistic control was imposed from I92S, but before that the production situation was sufficiently confused for those determined enough to make pretty much how they likcrL After 1929 only the mm following of the party line in matters of content could
give Dovshenko, D/.iga Vertov, and others some freedom in formal matters for a Few
more years.
Film Stock '
The new contestants in the film stock market were the E.L Dupontde Nemours company in the United States, and Cevacrt in Belgium, both of which began making motion picture negative and positive during this period, but without making any great impression, since their products were not as good as those of Eastman Kodak,
In 1926 the reduction of the price of Eastman Kodak's panchromatic negative stock to that of their standard orthochromatic negative precipitated the swing lo the general use of panchromatic negative over the next few years. Almost instantaneous conversion in the studios should have been possible in principle, but no doubt the usual conservatism of most cameramen helped to prevent this. It was claimed at the time by cameramen that the new panchromatic negative was more contrasty than orthochro ma tic negative, but this claim is almost impossible to substantiate now, given the extreme difficulty there is in seeing a reasonable number of original prints of films shot on both stocks. It is certainly not obWous on duplicate prints of such early all-panchromatic films as The Son of the Sheik (3 926), but on the other hand it may hove something to do with the rather unusual look of the figure lighting in The Winning of Barbara iVorth (1926), another early entry on pan^ chromatic film. In this film it can be seen that the skin tones are reproduced as a mid-grey rather than the light grey, yet even so the highlights on the protruding cheek bones, etc. are completely burnt out to an undifferentiated while. This is indeed an extremely contrast.)1 effect, but it could have been achieved by special development or the like. This particular look to the photography of faces bad been used to some extent over die previous several years in still photography, but it had never been a dominant style there, and I have never seen it used in another film. In any case, bv the lime thai the majority of films were being shot on panchromatic slockin 1928, Kodak had replaced theorigmal panchromatic emulsion with a new one which wa.scertamly Lt more conlrasty than ordinary orthodromic stock, even though it was still approximately the same speed as bolb the original orlhochromatic and panchromatic stocky A2fa, Cevaert, and Pari* also made similar panchromatic
!9S
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
Medium Long Shoe in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926} shot on panchromaticjilm with the distinctive contrasty effect of dork shin tone and burnt- out highlights on the face of the seated cha^ acter. Note also the heavy lens diffusion
often used in the period.
films stocks available in parallel with Eastman Kodak.
Eastman also introduced a Super speed Megative in 1926, as did Agfa in Germany and Pathc in France, and these would seem to have been about twice as fast as ordinary negative: i.e, about 40 ISO in present-day terms. These fast stocks were in general little used for feature film-making, except to get the occasion a Marge-scale night exterior but the fast Apfa stock was essential 'for obtaining some of the interiors shot with available light in Berlin - die Symphonie dcr Grosstadt (W. Ruttman,l927), The graininess of some of these shots suggests that special forced development was given to the negative as well- Also in 1926 the firm of Dupont de Nemours star ted' marketing its own film stocks in the united States, though without dislodging Eastman Kodak from its position of dominance.
The other major development in film stocks in the late 'twenties was the introduction of the first duplicating positive and duplicating negative stocks by Eastman Kodak in !926. By making a print of an original negative on. duplicating positive stock, and then printing this onto duplicating negative stock, it was now possible for the first time to create a duplicate negative that had almost as good definition and as low contrast as the original negative, and so capable ofhemguscd in its place either to make duplicate prints, or optical effects in the printer without much loss of quality. These duplicating stocks were undoubtedly created in response to the demand for a more convenient way of producing a second- negative for foreign distribution than using two cameras side by side, and also for a more efficient way of making the increasingly popular optical effect, such as delves, etc. Despite the availability of these duplicating
stocks, it would be a mistake to think that everyone in Hollywood stopped making their dissolves in the camera; as usual the change took a few years, but the possibility of making dissolves between any pair of shots at the editing Stage, using the optical printer, was immediately useful for putting together the newly popular montage sequences. By 1928 aifilm such as Lonesome (Paul Fcjos) could include a vast number of dissolves, almost turning it into a single feature-length montage sequence, thanks to these intermediate film stocks and optical printing. In Europe such facilities seem not to have been available till the end of the decade, and certainly the 'Art Films1 that also made great use of dissolves between shots had to have them made in the camera as before, e+gt Menilmontam (1926), Un ChienAndabu I, etc. etc.
Technicolor Dye Imbibition Printing
In 1928 Technicolor finally introduced the unique method of printing that continued for the rest of the life Of their process. The initial stage of printing continued to be the same, with two hardened gelatine relief positives being produced for the red and green images, but now these were not used to make up the final print, but instead a single pair of them were used as matrices to absorb dye, and then deposit it on the final print somewhat in the manner of lithographic printing. To be precise, the gelatine relief absorbed more dye in the thicker parts of each frame corresponding to the areas where the colour to be printed was brightest in the original scene, but instead of leaving the dye there as before, it was transferred to a blank gelatine emulsionon another strip of 35 mm. film pressed against it.
01
fU STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
■
The crucial'dye transfer or imbibition operation was carried out on a very large machine that essentially consisted of a thin endless stainless steel belt running between two large pulley wheels about SO metres apart. This belt was 35 mm. wtcle and had small stainless steel pins set down each edge ,jm.dimensions and positions exactly corresponding to the .perforations in 35 mm. positive film. The blank print stock was settled onto the pins at the beginning of the top length of the belt after it had passed over the first pulley, then the dye-soaked matrix (gelatine relief) was pressed down onto the pins on top of the blank film, and it stayed there a5 it and the film passed down the whole length of the belt through a series of drying chambers. As the films reached the other end of the belt they were stripped off it, and the relief matrix was led back as a continuous loop to receive a new charge of dye and endlessly repeat the process.
At this stage in the history of Technicolor the blank film Avas actually coated with emulsion on both sides, and alter one of the two colours had been printed onto one side in thii manner described, it was further dried, and then passed on to another identical dye transfer machine, and the other colour was printed onto the other side in the same way. The printing matrix was the length of one whole reel of film, and after SO to 100 prints had been made, the two matrices were removed from the transfer machines, and those matrices corresponding to the next reel to be printed were put on, and the process repeated. If a larger number olprints.than this were needed, new gelatine relief matrices had to be made again by optical printing from the original negatives, as the printing process wore out the perforations, aid the further use of the original matrices would lose the perfect registration, of the two colours an the print,
The two primary dye colours now used were cyan (blue-green) and an orange-red, and these two colours permitted fairly good reproduction of the skin tones of people of most races, and also good blacks and whites- But yellows in the original scene were reproduced as pink, and pure Wues and pure greens were both reproduced as not very different shades of blue-green. Pure reds were reproduced a* the orange-red primary. A special fast emulsion had to be used on the camera negative for the Technicolor process, ind as a result the image was very grainy when compared ttirli that for black and white film, and the definition was much poorer. It should also be noted that the cyan dye was ™uh more inclined to fade with time than the red primary cH'e, so that many surviving prints are reduced to orange-red fuzy_y images, with the blue-green colours nearly (or entirely) lost.
One of the first demonstrations of the capabilities of the ^Technicolor printing process was Victor Scherlingers ft*toiu (1923), and this"fiJm was also unusual in that the
199
-ctiou of the film dealing with the youthful education of the American indian of the title in an Eastern college was iUm black and white, so creating the first strong example tft the use of expressive contrast between sections of a film through the use of both colour and black and white film.
The Use of Colour Film With Black and White Film
The series of films that have intermittently followed Redskin over the decades In using the contrast between colour and black and white film to distinguish between sections set in different worlds' shows the way that expressive conventions (or codes) fail to solidify even in the case of one of the simplest formal distinctions. In Redskin the colour/no colour distinction is presumably intended to suggest that the wild country of the Indian reservation is superior or preferable to the equally real world of civilization, whereas in The Wizard of Ot (1939) a fantasy world is shown in colour, and the real world, which is explicitly stated in the film to be superior, is in monochrome. The next film to use this distinction, The Secret Garden of 19+2, reverts to something like the Redskin usage - the secret garden, which is quite real, is in colour, but then one comes to A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which the real world is in colour, and the fantasy world is in black and white- Later films continue to show this failure to establish anv fixed convention of mean-ing with respect to this distinction, and eventually we reach films where the occurrence of black and white and colour sections is totally arbitrary with respect to their narratives, but not with respect to their production circumstances. For example Un Homme et unafemme (1966) and If (196S).
Tinting
It was not po.snible to tint sound films in the way silent films were still being tinted in 1927, because the tinting dyes covered the sound track area as well as the picture area, and so the transmission of light through the sound track changed from section to section as the tinting dyes changed, Special tinting dyes that did not interfere with sound reproduction in this way were developed after a few years, but the tinting of films never became standard practice again, though there were isolated examples of tinting in the "thiriies. The increasing number of films using colour processes of
one sort or another no doubt helped to make tinting less
-
attractive as well.
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Film Laboratory Procedures
By 19'S the continuous development of positive JiJm in machines, rather than the old style of batch development, had been in use in some Hollywood studio, for a year or two Then in that year Universal Studios instituted machine devdopmont of camera negative as «11. and the other major
-v
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200
studios Jol lowed silit quickly. This change was encouraged by the necessity for very precisely controlled and reproducible conditions of development for sound track negative, which implied machine development, and so the same might as well be done for picture negative. The use of machine development in its turn.meant that exposure conditions for film had to be standardized for the whole production of the studio, although this did not lead to the use of exposure meters as might have been expected, Photoelectric light Wei meters already existed for illumination engineering, as did pur pose-buill photographic exposure meters of die comparison type, but Hollywood cameramen were so experienced, and lighting was so standardized, that their determinations of exposure were already sufficiently precise to satisfy even the requirements of machine development. On the rare occasions when cameramen might be in some doubt as to the correct exposure, Eihcy could stí 11 expose a test section and have it developed almost immediately.
Lighting Equipment
With the swing to the use of panchromatic negative from 1926 onwards came the swing to using incandescent tungsten lighting, and in the first place this happened before sound films needed incandescent lights ('inkies') for silence. Although tungsten filament lights had been available from before World War I, the large wattage lights necessary for film lighting were only properly developed ih the nineteen-twenties. Incandescent lighis were used on the silent films The First Auto and The Rose of Monterey at Warners and First National in 1927, Although in general incandescent (tungsten) lights give less light when used in the same lighting unit as that in winch an arc light has been used, they have the advantage that they do not require the occasional trimming by band that arcs do, and they are far less likely to go out in the middle of a shot, This means that less manpower is needed to tend them, and hence greater efficiency. At the time, scientists employed by Eastman Kodak and the incandescent light manufacturers made much of the idea that the greater sensitivity to red: light of panchromatic emulsion matched the greater amount of red lightfrom tungsten sources, but this was notstrictly speaking effective, as there is already a fair proportion of red light in the arc flame. In fact panchromatic film, is slightly faster with arc light of the same intensity than with tungsten light, and at least half the light on the sets at the time was coming from arc lights. However cameramenmay have believed thit propaganda, which had been put out in technical journals for years:before 1926. And it is true that, incandescent lamps are more efficient for panchromatic film than the mercury vapour lamp, (Cooper-Hewitts) that were still hem*, used to provide the genial background light on the sets
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
In any case, panchromatic film came in together with the partial use of incandescent lights, with some arcs being retained at first. Then almost immediately, as the production of sound films began, the remaining arcs had to be abandoned as well, as they emitted a hum that was picked up by the microphones. In the first stage of the transition, the Cooper-Hewitt banks were replaced by closely packed rows of incandescent floodlights having large tungsten filament globes in hemispherical metal reflectors. These were used in exactly the same way as the Cooper* Hewitts - either suspended at an angle above the set, or on floor stands, In the second stage of the transition, that necessitated by sound filming, the previous arc floodlights and spotlights were replaced by incandescent Hood lights put into the same housings, There was however some tendency to replace the old trough-shaped reflectors carrying arcs, which had been used for flood lighting from floor stands, with new hemispherical reflectors containing incandescent globes, and to use these for figure lighting. Because the incandescent globes were in general less powerful than the are units used in the same housings, there was also a tendency to use the reflector type of spotlight in the open drum housing rather than the enclosed theatrical type of spotlight with lens when doing figure lighting. However, both types of spotlight continued to exist side by side. From 1926 onwards, 10 Kilowatt, 5 Kilowatt, and 2 Kilowatt incandescent globes were used in the various types of lighting unit,
As far as interior shooting was concerned, the change over to tungsten lighting made no appreciable difference to the style oi film lighting; a silent film such as Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926), which was shot on orthochromatic negative with the older type of lighting, looks much the same in- this respect as an early 'thirties Warner Brothers film, According to information supplied to Kevin Brown low by its cameraman, Byron Ha skin, Don Juan was shot at 13,5 with a Bell & Howell camera, mostly hand-cranked, though with some extended takes shot under motor power. A range oi lenses from 25 mm. to 100 mm. were used, though as far as I can see the 2S mm. was used rarely and inconspicuously. The lighting units used for figure lighting, which were described by Haskin as standard, were arc floodlights ('broads') for key-lighting, small two-tube Cooper-Hewitts for fill-light, and arc spotlights for backlighting. Arc spotlights were also used for general- set lighting along with the large Cooper-Hewitt racks. Production photographs for other films made atthisdate andearlier confirm that this was indeed standard lighting before the advent of panchromatic film.
By 1927 there are some signs of further reduction in depth of field in the photography of A merican silent films. For instance, most of the interior shots in My best Girl
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: J926-1929
20}
Close Up in an exterior location icene in Mantrap (1926) completely lit by artificial light. Spotlights provide both the key and fill lightfrom the left and right of the camera, and also the two backlights.
(Sam Taylor, 1927), which was photographed by Charles Roshcr, have hardly any depth of field at all. To be more precise, even in Medium Shot the depth of field is about 1 to 1 feet, which corresponds to an aperture of between [2 and f2.S. The photography of the exteriors of this film show an almost equal reduction in depth of field, and such a reduction in depth of field on exteriors can also be seen in some other silent films of the period, such as Winners of the Wilderness (W.S. Van Dyke, 1927). With the general switch to panchromatic film, and then the further transition to sound filming a couple of years later, the light level on the sels of all films dropped to the level that was already being used in some films such as My Best Girl, and apertures of about f2.S became standard. Although this increase In the aperture by one stop in the photography of films in general rcduced their already reduced depth of field still' further, ihcre were also other factors affecting this variable, as I will describe below.
The general trend in film lighting during the late twenties was the way the methods introduced in the early 'twenties by the most advanced cameramen spread downwards to the lesser cameramen. In other words, it was a period of standardization of the basic lighting style in Hollywood films.
■or Lighting
From the middle of then meteen-twenties onwards there $u a major new development in the lighting of exteriors. -*P involved the use of large incandescent reflector-type spotlights for figure lighting; not only for the key-light, but *ta for the backlight and/or fill-light. In some eases the
direct sunlight was even shielded off the actors with a large shade, so that the total result uras an approximation lo the way figures were being lit in studio interiors. Examples of" this approach from 1926 include Rose of the Golden We it and Ahnirap. Although in succeeding years this was to become the usual way of lighting figures on exteriors, at ihis stage most exterior scenes continued to be lit with direct sunlight plus sunlight bounced off reflectors, as had been done before. The use ol spotlighting for exterior scenes required mobile elcciric generators to he taken out on location, which had sometimes been done even in the early "twenties, but the trouble and expense of this ivas now regarded 3S worthwhile. In Europe no such subtleties developed in exterior lighting during the late 'twenties, so though it was now quite common there to use backlighting from the sun on the figures, plus reflecior fill on their front, it was still possible for a quality film such as Die Liebe dcr Jeanne Ney (CAV, Pabst, 1927) to have its exreriors lit solely with frontal sunlight,
Cameras
The Bell & Hoivcll Eyemo and the De Vry camera were the principal loially new cameras introduced in this period and both became available in 1926. They were small cameras that took 100 foot rolls of ?5 mm, film on dayhght loading spools and they were really intended lor amateur use Both were driven by clockwork mechanics powered hv hand-wound spring motors. The Bell & Howell Eye**, 4ich was the superior design, weighed 7 fbs., cost S600, and initially had a mount for a single lens on y Tay or-Kubson lenses from 40 mm, upwards were liable for this
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202
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
The NC model of the Mitchell camera, with a 400foot magazine. The body is racked over on the base-plate into the taking position. The rectangular ihrough-thc-lens viewflndcr, which (ran be seen on the camera door, is not operative in iliis position. The standard supplementary viewfinder which would have been attached to it has been removed.
camera,
jv and from 1929 it was supplied with a lens turret holding three lenses, it had no means of framing the image through the lens, so a<supplementary finder attached to the side of thc camera had to be used Tor this, However critical focussing could-be accomplished in the same way as with the large Bell & Howell Studio camera, by rotating the taking lens to the other side of the turret, where tihe central part of the image only couldbc examined: with an eyepiece behind a ground glass screen, tinlike the larger camera, the Eycmo did not have registration pins in the film transport system, but only a simple reciprocating double claw pull-down.
Thc Dc Vry camera had rather similar specifications, though, without any critical foeussing system, and it was Slightly heavier at B;5 lbs. Both cameras eould be hand-held quite easily, though neither was the ideal shape for this. The Eycmo was immediately put to work to.get the occasional unobtrusive hand-held: shot, as in The Passionate Quest M Stuart Blaokton, 1926)., polity Street (Sidney Franklin, 1927), and^ir^o/A-in^(Cecils. DeMille, 1927). Thereafter the Eyemo was similarly usedlon the rare isolated occasion in leature RJms opto the cnd.of World War 2 and both the Byemo and the De Vry were ^extensively used as combat eameras to get documentary footage in that conflict
The major studio cameras.continued to'be.the |arge B^ll * Howell andhfe Mitchell, and'in 1927,he latter waf.fitted J™*-** ouble renter,pins and curved extension to the bottom of the gat, that it had to the end of its life Tie
The film movement used with no real change in Mitchell camerasfrom 1921\ through the NC and BNC models, and into Ponovision cameras. The film path is outlined in white, and vanishes down into the gate at the left of thc picture. The claw mechanism is at the bottom left corner, with the register pin system immediately abore it, going horizontally
into the middle of thc gate.
change in the angle of action of the clow system so that it now worked within the new curved extension to the bottom of the gate was necessary to make space for the new register pins that were to fix the film accurately into place during exposure. With this modification the Mitchell could nou1 offer the facility of completely accurate registration that had previously been restricted to the Bell St Howell amongst studio cameras.
In Europe in 1927 the through-thekms viewfinding system of the Dcbrie was altered so that instead of viewing the image on the film through its back, the whole gait-holding the film was displaced by turning a handle to slide a ground glass screen into its place. Amongst other advantage this meant that the single frame of film that happened to be stopped in the gate was not fogged by critical checking of the image, and also that opaque coated-back negative could be used in the camera.
The first American svnehronized sound films were shot using Bell & Howells and Mitchells indiscriminately m sound-proof booths with glass fronts, but when sound- proof coverings (s blimps') began to be applied directly round uV camera body itself from 1929, only the Mitchell camera could be used, as its rack.over through-the-lens viewfin<lin£ system was far easier to use under these conditions, and also because its mechanism ran more quietly than that ol die Bell & Howell, The particular measures that were taken to reduce the running noise of the Mitchell camera included
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
die replacement of ball bearings by sleeve bearings, and also the replacement of some of the steel gears in the drive mechanism by fibre gears, The Bell & Howell was not modified in this way, so from 1930 it became obsolete as a standard production camera.
Camera Supports
The new increase in camera mobility that occurred in the latter half of the nine teen-twenties called forth changes in camera supports to facilitate it. Apart from the tendency to use more tracking shots, there was also a return to thc greater use of the small pans and tilts to keep actors well-placed in the frame as they moved about, of the kind that had first developed at the beginning of World War 1 in lhe United States. Thc small geared head which was still universally used was just able to cope with simple combined tracking and panning at moderate speeds when following moving actors, particularly when the panning gear was disengaged, but anything beyrond that required the use of the new friction heads. Such makes as the "True Ball', which appeared in 1926, were similar to modern friction heads, with the camera movement about vertical and horizontal pivots controlled by hand pressure on a pan bar or tiller attached to the camera support plate, with the speed of these movements being regulated by adjustable friction in the pivots. When the first blimped cameras bet;an to be used in 3929 they were always mounted on larger and heavier versions of these friction heads, which had in addition internal springs to partially counterbalance the greater weight of the bl imped camera when it was lilted forward or back. These large spring-loaded friction heads continued in use up till the end of the ninetecn-thirtics.
The improvised camera doJIys of earlier years continued lobe adequate as far as tracking movements were concerned, though they were supplemented on occasion hy such things as fork lift trucks with the camera tripod mounted on a platform on the forks. This improvised device made possi bit limited camera rises and falls combined with a tracking movement of the kind that can be seen in Harold Lloyd's Per Heaven's Sake (1926). (Harold Lloyd was the only one of the great film clowns whose films showed an interest in thc latest stylistic developments of their day, not only in camera movement, but also in other things such as lighting.) An even more remarkable and elegant use of camera movement occurs in his The Kid Mother of 1927, in which thc camera rises straight up for about 20 feet to keep Harold in frame as climbs a pine tree, finally giving an over-the-shouldershot of his distant view of the object of his affections. Although presumably achieved with some improvised arrangement, *his equivalent to a crane shot indicates the kind of interests tW led lo the construction of the first true camera crane in
203
1929. The stylistic interests of Harold Lloyd fitted well with Ins comedy, which was mostly set far more definitely in the real world than that of the other Him clowns.
Camera Cranes
As is well known, the first real camera crane was built under the direction of Paul Fejos lor the Universal Studios production of Broadway in 1929. It had a camera platform big enough to accommodate two cameras on tripods suspended below the end of a 2S foot arm, and this counterweighed arm pivoted on a column mounted on a large wheeled chassis which could be moved under the power of electric motors. This crane wis used extensively and very noticeably on Hroadway to carry out long takes that traversed the mam-levels of the vast night club set during die musical numbers, but not for thc dialogue scenes.
Camera Movement in General
Although it was not uncommon to find 10 or more tracking shots, not to mention large amounts of panning, during the length of some of the last American silent films such as The i\ed Dance (Raou! Walsh, 1923), in Europe I his trend went a little further, particularly m France. In pari this was because there were none oJthe constraints of early sound filming there until 1930, and in part because stylistic developments have always been pushed to greater lengths in the 'Art Cinema* section of film production. So one gets some films like Marcel J.Tlerbier's VAr^em (1928) in which most of the shots involve camera movement ol one kind or another, often of a very conspicuous nature. It seems likely to me that the obviou>ness of a lot of the camera movement in this film and others such as Jean Renoir's Tire ou jlanc (192S) "as due to lack of technical skill. This deduction follows from the fact that as TArgentgoes along the camera movement, though remaining just as ex tensive, becomes less conspicuous because it is fitted in better with the movements of the characters, presumably as a result of the practice irux the director and operators acquired in the earlier part of the film. There have been a number of examples beiore and since or European film makers learning their craft in front of the paying public. Something of the same lack of complete control can sometimes be seen in American films using a lot of camera movement at this date, but it dovs not go so far, When extensive camera movement is used close in to the actors, with panning and tilting a* well as tracldng, such films now look quite modern in appearance. Examples thai spring to mind in 1929 silent films include Jacques Fevder , The Kiss and Wifhcm Dieter's ludwig der tweite - Komg der Bayern
a
Although trading shcti «kh sync. *>ur,d ^'Fjr in number of American film, made in 1** *
204
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
besides tfrWutfjone could name The Saturday Night Kid and The Virginia*, not to mention the well-pub licked instance of Applavv, still it must be realized that these are all instances of parallel tracking shots, in which the camera moves on a straight path with the actors, and without any large panning movement This is because in nearly all of these instances the camera and operator were inside a glass-fronted camera boodi on wheels, and the dimensions of the window to this sound-proof booth (or 'bungalow' or 'ice-box') prevented very large panning or tilting movements. However there nrcsome films made in T92S and 1929 that do show free panning and tilting on tracking shots: films such as The Singing Fool (192S), Hearts in Dixie (1929), and Chinatown Nobis (1929), But in these cases the shots in question were taken with an unsyiichronized camera, and the sound laid under the shots in the editing.
Of course there were also a number of sound films made in 1923 and 1929 that were shot from fixed camera positions, though not without pans and tilts to keep the actors in frame, but then this was the case for quite a large proportion of American silent films in the late 'twenties also, The noticeable difference was that in the sound films the shots went on far longer while a lot of lines were spoken by static actors. The all talking, all singing, all dancing'revue films that were made in 1929 and 1930 were a special case which were indeed filmed almost entirely in Long Shot with a totally fixed camera. But if one makes a rough addition of all the cases, one finds that in fact there was remarkably little discontinuity in the use of camera movement across the transition to sound in Hollywood; what discontinuity there was mostly existed in other dimensions of the medium. The use of the mobile camera in their early sound films by such second and third rank talents as Eddie Sutherland (The Saturday Night Kid) and Paul Sioane {Hearts in &ixic) attests to the vigour with which a burgeoning fashion could be pursued in the face of technical obstacles.
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Lenses
Lenses of focal length even shorter than 25 mm. were tentatively tried out inthelate twenties in various countries, though they all had rather poor optical performance. In Trance a 14 mm. lens called a Whyscope was used by Abel Ganee on Napoleon to cover a very wide angle indeed in a tight corner, but it suffered from severe distortion and very poor definition round, the edges. The next year it was used ma rather more rational way by LHcrbic,' in VAraent
suggest a subjective effect of shock in a Close Lip In America Clarence Brown also used a very wide-an^ lens
" *J 20 mm" 1 1»« m - - * -milar way in^a scene showmg a young man in an alcoholic stupor in A Woman 0f
as a Full Shot.
This latter film also includes an interesting use of a 25 mm lens to get a semi-'deep focus' effect. A pair of handcuffs are held up in the foreground by a detective at Close Up distance, and sharp focus is carried from them back to die man who is about to be arrested standing in Medium Long Shot in the background. This amount of depth of field umier these circumstances is quite compatible with the shot being filmed at an aperture of about f2,S.
Another film which makes even more extensive use of wide-angle lens filming than any of those so far mentioned is Gremillons Gardicns de phare (1929), where something like a 25 mm. lens is used extensively on both exteriors and interiors. On the interiors many of these shots arc also high or low angles, and taken together with the large amount of white in the sets this makes the film look rather tita something made twenty years later.
The first experimental models of what was to be called the 'zoom' lens appeared in this period. These had a number of shortcomings, in particular that their maximum aperture was only about fll, which made them difficult to use for studio work, or even for exterior shooting under poor light. As well as that, their focus had to be adjusted at the same time as the focal length was changed with the 'zoom' control. Although these experimental Mum lenses were not taken up for general film-making, there are a number of American films from 1926 onwards which contain one or two zoom shots, nearly all made at Paramount studios, such as The Grand Duchess and the Waiter. The exception is After Midnight (1926) made at MGM> but since the director, Monta Bell, had Paramount connections, the same lens may have been used. Most of these examples don't do anything special with the zoom effect, but in /( (Clarence Badger, 1927), there is a striking '/.oom out from a sign on the top ol a department store, followed by a tilt down and zoom in on the front entrance.
Lens Diffusion
By 1926 the use of lens diffusion had become so common that Kodak was selling ready-made sets of diffusion filters producing various amounts of diffusion. However some cameramen were not satisfied with such simple means, and started using a glass plate smeared with vaseline in front of the lens. In the example illustrated from love (1926), which was photographed by William Daniels, the streaky softening of the image round the edrjc was created (1 think), by leaving a clear area in the centre of the frame and stroking the vaseline outwards radially towards the edge^ This is a relatively restrained example from the period; other cameramen went much further. Charles Rusher had a special lens - the Kosher Kino Portrait - designed ffc him, which produced a rather similar effect of progressive
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
205
A romantic scenejrom Love (1926), photographed mih kos diffusion becoming progressively heavier outwordsfrom the centre of the image, h is done with layers of gauze, and possibly also with a vaseline smeared glass plate in front of
the lens.
softening of the image towards the edges, and can he seen used in Tempest (1928), On the whole however, by 1929 there were signs that the extremes of lens diffusion were being abandoned in both sound and silent films. This was connected with the increasing use of camera movement, which also caused the last traces of vignetting to be dropped. As well as that, there was a school of thought in the studios around 1929 and 1930 which considered that lens diffusion should be dropped entirely in sound lilms, as the 'realism1 added by synchronous sound filming supposedly demanded that everything in the image be sharply visible, just as it
■
was all now sharply audible. This idea had only a limited and passing influence.
Vignette Masks
As more and more panning and tracking shots came to be used in the last silent films, and more panning and framing movements in sound films, the use of soit black semi-transparent vignette masks round the edges of the frame rapidly vanished. This was because, as I have already mentioned in connection with Murnau's use of masking, the way that moving objects showed through the masks drew
Very heavy lens diffvmn, plus very soft lighting from a single source is created by George Barnes for Our Dancing Daughters {hhrry Beaumont, 1928)
206
m
attention to their presence. However there were still § ■nnmber of films being shot «itli a mostly static camera, and in these one still finds some use of soft circular vignette masts just eoming into the corners of the frame, as in The
-rVX--.<i . i-v.i .
■
T he Dun n t ng Pro cess
it seems probable that the Dunning .process Avas the
■first really successful travelling matte process in which the masking effect was generated purely photographically, in contrast to the Williams process where the patcntcóprocess did not work properly in its photographic form. Although the Dunning process was only fully described and patented in I92S, there were reports of a two-negative travelling matte process in which the foreground action was shot in front of a blue backing being operated in 1926,and this may well have been an early form of the Dunning process. My uncertainty about this point really results from the obsessive secrecy about the technical side of all sorts of special processes, including colour, that existed in those days,
in any case, in the Dunning process as described, the background scene ůhat had' to be combined into one shot with die foreground action was shot first in the ordinary way, and then from the resulting negative a special positive print called the 'Dunning ^latc1 had to be produced. The exact details of the preparation of this positive were never revealed\ but it was described as consisting of rcd; positive images of the background scene made by dyc^toning an ordinary positive, which simultaneously contained negative images of the same scene in black and white, The actors whose actions were to be combined with the background scene then performed: in front of a blue backing sheet illuminated with white light, while being filmed with a camera loaded with a double layer of film passing through it. This double layer of film was .made up of the Dunning pláte in front of the unexposed panchromatic negative on which the final combined image was to be produced, the two films forming a sandwich or 'bipack'. The stated effect of doing all tins was that the blue light from the backing sheet printed' a negative image of the background! from the red positive, which-was opaque to the blue light in the appropriate places, but no image from the background was produced where the actors blocked the blue light -from the lens. On the other hand the actors, being illuminated with wrute light (which^ontains component of red light) would reflect, this red. light from their costumes and faces, and it would pass through the red image sections of the Dunniufi plate, without being affected lby them. In the area of the
the background scene would be produced bv the blue liuht component of the white tight reflected from the actors
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
This very weak image must have been balanced out by die effect of the black and white negative image component of the Dunning plate, though on the face of itp it would seem to have been more logical to have illuminated the actors with red light separately from the white light illumination of the back £ rou h d.
Whatever the process used to produce them, travelling matte shots made in the late 'twenties continued to show either black lines round the actors ('minuses'), as in My Jjt-W Cirl} or some print-through of the background scene.
Microphones
In the first days of sound, complex scenes were recorded with multiple microphones scattered about the set in fixed positions, most of them being suspended over the actors by a network of ropes, but with some also hidden behind props, as colourful anecdote has it. The electrical signals from these microphones were mixed and passed to the disc or film recorder. Nearly all the microphones used for film sound recording for the first several years were of the capacitor ('condenser') type, and worked on the same principles as modern capacitor microphones. However they were far larger, and had to have an amplifier unit weighing several pounds right next to the diaphragm unit winch actually responded to the sound waves and produced the initial electrical signal. Also they were all omni-dircctionah, that is, they responded equally to sounds coming from every direction. For this reason they had to be as close to the actors as possible, to reduce the level of any small background sounds relative to the actor's voices, but even so, incidental sounds such as bacon frying and feet crunching on gravel came through rather louder than was usual several years later, when such noises were either post-synchronized as sound effects, or entirely eliminated in the way the scene was staacd.
Tfiie first generation of microphones had a frequency response from 50 Hertz to 7 kiloHertz (50 to
Wmern Electric Type 47A condenser microphone from 1927. The pre^mphfa and power supply aíC ^ the cylinder above the diaphragm unit at the botwm.
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
7000 cycles per second), but although this was a restricted ninoc by more recent standards, it was about as much as could pass through later links in the sound reproducing chain and be put out into the cinema auditorium. The microphone response also had a hump around + to 5 kilo Her u, and the extra emphasis this gave to frequencies in this range niay have had an adverse effect on certain kinds of voices, and thus helped to end some actors' careers.
It seems that experiments were very quickly made in moving microphones about above the actors to keep them close when the actors moved, at first by manipulating the sets of ropes suspending them, and then in 1929 with the first crude improvised microphone booms.
Sound Film Systems
Restricting my attention as usual to the technology that ms commercially applied to actual films, and ignoring all the experimental attempts which can be studied elsewhere, I can say that the position as regards sound systems being used in the American studios in May 192S, when sound films started to be produced in appreciable numbers, was ihatM.G.M., Paramount, United Artists, Warner Brothers, and Universal had adopted the Western Electric system, RXQ. had adopted the R,C.A. Photophonc system, and Fox the Movietone system. All these systems offered the alternative in the cinemas of projection from a sound-on-film track or from discs* and ail were compatible in the two modes. Other than this, the Movietone system was essentially similar to the Western Electric system except for die light valve used in the sound recording camera, ami the only difference these two had from the R.C.A. Photophone system was in the nature of the sound track on the film itself.
Sound on Disc Recording
initially in i927 in The }azz Singer, Lights of New York ct a|, recording and reproduction of film sound was done solely from discs. The electrical signals coming from the microphones on the set were recorded onto wax discs in the same way as for the making of gramophone records at that period, but although the discs for film recording ran at ^revolutions per minute, they Merc 16 inches in diameter 3nd the grooves were cut from Lbe centre outwards, and so 1% ran for 10 minutes on their single side. The disc cutting machines were locked in synchronism with the cameras since both were driven by synchronous motors powered DJf die same alternating current source. Up to 192S it was customary to shoot a scene, or part of a scene, with several ^nieras running simultaneously for its whole length, which was made as long as was reasonably possible. The usual ^nangement was to have the cameras arranged in an arc
207
around one side of the scene, with two or them covering >t m Long Shot Trom different directions, and two or throe
Tk ^g WSC* CCVC™3 <* Principal actors Ml Medium Shot or Close Up. A number of identical discs of the sound were cut simultaneously so that one could be preserved for making the master from which to press the shellac discs for distribution with the finished film, and the ethers could be used for immediate playback to check the sound quality and the actors' vocal performances.
The use of multiple camera booths in 192S, 1929, and also to some extent in 1930 forced the use of longer focal length lenses than had been usual before to get some of the shots. For instance, in the years mentioned, a Medium Shot would quite probably be taken with a 7S mm. lens rather than the usual SO mm, lens, and consequently the depth of field was even further reduced, becoming so shallow that everything but the actor was conspicuously out of focus. With the appearance of blimped cameras it was once more possible to get the camera, fitted with any lens, closer to the actors again, and so this extreme shallowness or depth of lield disappeared.
Sotincl-On-Film Recording
The only essential difference between sound-oivfiJm recording and disc recording was the replacement of the disc culling machine by a sound recording camera, In the sound camera the sound track was recorded photographically down a length of negative of the usual dimensions, just inside the sprocket holes on one side, in the position it was to occupy on the J mat prim. The emulsion coated onto sound film negative was of a special fine grain high contrast type, and it was given special high contrast development. The sound recording camera was similar in layout to the ordinary American studio cameras used for filming the picture, with a detachable 1000 foot magazine on top.anrl the film driven through toothed sprockets just like those in the Mitchell and Bell & Howell cameras. But instead of being pulled through a IIIm gate by an intermittent claw mechanism, the sound negative was guided by a set of rollers to wrap around the circumference of a smooth drum, which was attached by a shaft through a high quality hearing to a small flywheel driven freely by the friction of the film round the drum. This last device was absolutely essential to the satisfactory fimctioningof the >oumi camera, as the mertia of die freely running flywheel in its turn smoothed out the irregularities in the motion of the film, wliich were due to the engagement and disengagement of the sprocket drive teeth with the sprocket holes in the film % times per second This U® transport smoothing mechanism to patented bv the German Tri-ergon company, and all other creators of sound sterns had to buy a license from them to
■
20$
1
design a satisfactory sound camera.
ft was at a point on this smoothing drum that a thin traverse slit of light as wide as the sound track was focusscd'to produce the image on the sound track as the film moved past it. This beam of light came from a light source called the light valve' or 'galvanometer', and it was varied or modulated in different ways depending on the system being used, in the R.C.A. Photophonc system the width of the beam was varied1 by the varying electrical signal, and so produced the black sound-track band of oscillating width characteristic of the R.C.A. system, In the other two systems the width of the beam of light through the slit was constant, and its brightness was varied, so giving rise to the full width pattern of transverse stripes made up of varying ^rey tones that can still be seen in modern Western Electric recordings. After the sound track negative was exposed and developed^ a positive print was made of it for editing purposes.
-
Sound Editing
At first the editing of so und-'films was a matter of selecting the required parts of several simultaneous takes from each of the cameras that had been running for the whole length of the scene, and1 then relocating them in sequence to make up the edited picture track. This final edited picture track had to be exactly the same length as the individual camera takes, because that was how long the single sound recording corresponding to them was unalterably, as sections could not be cut out of the disc recording. The tool developed to keep the multiple picture tracks in synchronism during the editing process was the synchronizer, and this is still used in its original form, but for the different .purpose of negative cutting (U.S. 'conforming1?). It is nowadays referred to as a mute or silent synchroniser, to distinguish it from the modified form with added sound heads now used for sound tfaok editing. The original synchronizer was just a scries Of large sprocket wheels, each exactly one foot £16 frames) in circumference, rigidly attached1 one behind the other on a common axle. The synchronous picture tracks were fed from a series of spools on a. winding arm at one end of the editing bench, over the appropriate sprocket wheel while held against it by rollers, and then to a series of take-up spools, one for each picture track, on another winding arm at the other end of the editing bench. By cutting out and transferring equal- length sections from one picture track to another before the Tdm passed through.the svnehronizer it was possible .tohuild up the desired scries' of shots on the front track, just as is,now dbne when editing multiple soundtracks. Since in those days two frames were lost from du, film every time a section was cut out and- rejoined consumable care was needed to avoid a mistake that would
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1920-1929
lose synchronism.
Although in principle this method gave the flexibility to make as many cuts as desired from one camera angle to another within a scene shot with multiple cameras, in practice the difficulties mentioned were a strong disincentive to the use of fast cutting in the first sound films, in fact it can he observed that the mean Average Shot Length for American films roughly doubled with the coming of sound, as can be seen by checking the figures for this variable I have quoted elsewhere. The change can also be sharply observed w i thin any of the early sound films that have large sections shot 'wild' (i.e. without sound) and then post-sychronized. For instance in The Singing Fool (I92S), the sections shot wild have an Average Shot Length of less than 4 seconds, as was quite common for the last American silent films, but the sections shot with full synchronous sound have an A.S.L. of 10 seconds. This latter figure is again quite typical for early sound films, though many are a lot slower than that.
The method' of editing synchronous sound films thai I have outlined above began to change in 1929, in part because some of the more accomplished directors began to shoot sound with a single camera, running it for only the length of the shot that they knew they required in the final film - they were 'cutting in the camera*. Then they simply assembled these individual shots in the correct order together with their equal lengths of sound track to give the finished separate picture and sound tracks. Something like this process produced such films as von Sternberg's Thunderbolt (Í929), but this was only possible when the studio concerned had decided to abandon the issue of their films with sound-on-disc recording. This began to happen in 1929, though Warner Brothers continued to make their films available in an alternative sound-on-disc version for a couple more years,
'Post- Sy ncli ron iy.ati o n
The addition of music and effects (i.e. noises) to a film shot silent had been practised Trom the very beginning ol the sound cinema with the sound track added to Don Juan (1926), although in that case the synchronization was not very exact. By I92S it was quite common to add music and effects to sections of a sound film that had been shot silent, and this was done, as it still is, by projecting the section of the film in question, and recording the musicians an^ effects-makers performing to match the action in the Him on a recorder synchronized with the projector. The mixing of sounds from different recorded sources into a combined new recording was tried out from almost the beginning of sound1 movies, hi 1927 disc recordings of sound effects and music were mixed and re-recorded onto disc for the last reel of in Old San Francisco, and after that there were sometime
pitit STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
i.
more elaborate mixes of this kind used for sections of sound films, However, this was a quite tricky process, and was avoided as much as possible.
Synchronization to Playback
lu |929 the inverse process was used in the filming of Uie musical Sunny. In this case the musicians and performers recorded a disc or sound track of the musical numbers first, ond then mimed the appropriate lip movements etc. to die sounds played back from the sound track, while they tvere fdmcd with cameras locked in synchronism with the playback machine. However not all musicals were made in this way after this first appearance of the 'sync, to playback1 technique; for a year or so many continued to be made with die musical items shot live and recorded directly in synchronism.
Some Things That Were Done With Sound
For the first couple of years of sound cinema quite a number of Hollywood directors made experiments with the novel formal effects that the new dimension made possible. These were such things as the way the title and credits for Thz Terror (Roy del Ruth, 1928) were spoken by the shadow of a masked man, and the way a final 'Well folks, that's all there is.' was spoken directly to the audience in Caught in the h$ (Howard Brethcrton, 1928). The Bellamy Trial ([Monta Bell, 1929) starts with a documentary sequence, and then goes straight into the narrative without any credits, and so on. Other examples of such devices are described in Alexander Walker's The Shattered Si lent s (Elm Tree Boob, 3979), but the most interesting Him oi the period from this point of view was Cecil B, De Mílie's Dynamite (1929), which seems almost to be searching lor a whole new form for the medium. It contains scenes which arc carried through with dialogue from off-screen, a semi-improvised ícúnc, and another in which three lavcrs of diverse sound ire continuously superimposed. This last happens in a scene of a wedding taking place in the condemned cell of a prison, with the dialog ue of the wedding service combined with a sentimental song sung by a prisoner in another cell, toú the sounds of the construction of the scaffold outside. Unfortunately, such directorial exuberance quickly died om in the next decade.
Cinema Projection
For the sound-on-disc method of sound film projection ^c ^edifications required to the existing models of projectors were fairly simple. The direct current electric nwor driving them had to be replaced by an alternating current synchronous motor running on mains electricity, *nd a special disc turntable had to be added to the back
209
of them driven by a shaft and gearing from the film trans^ port medians Once the needle of the gramophone had been placed on an index mark in the run-in groove of the dtsc, and the film had been threaded with a special mark on the leader placed exactly in the gate of the projector the projector could then be started safe in the knowledge that synchronism would be rigidly maintained through , the length of the reel, provided theJilm did not break. A film break was unlikely with a print in good condition, but if one should happen there was no way to regain synchronism for the rest of the reel, once the film had been re-threaded in the projector and restarted from the point of the break. Another minor disadvantage of disc sound was the surface noise   inherently  associated   with  reproduction from shellac discs. Sound on-film suffered from none of these disadvantages, and as a further bonus it made possible the return to the projection of 2000 foot reels, as had been standard with silent films for the whole decade,
The modification to projector design for sound-on-film reproduction was also fairly simple. It involved an extension to the liJm path beneath the projector gate and before the final drive sprocket, along which path it passed around a
drum roller attached to a free flvwheel similar to that
■i
already described in the sound camera. In the projector another thin transverse beam of light was locussed onto a point on this smoothing drum that was exactly twenty and a half frames ahead of the frame in the film gate. This beam of light passed through the sound track in varying amounts depending on the varying density (or varying clear area) of the sound track, and fell on a photoelectric cell on the other side where it excited a current that varied conespondingly. This current was amplified in the usual way and drove the loudspeakers beside the cinema screen. Ways were shortly discovered to make the cinema screen transparent to sound while still reflecting the light oi the picture, and then the loudspeakers were placed behind the screen. The same 'sound head' on the projector served equally well lor both the variable area sound track system and the variable density ones. Also sound-on-disc and sound-on^iim could easily he combined in one dual-purpose projector
Scene Dissection
The general trends in scene dissection in silent films of the late Wntw* have already been indicated in the previous chapter. To recapitulate, these were that in the American cinema there was only a small increase ffl the speed of cutting through the decade, though there was fiirlv eertainlv a slight tendency by many directors to shoo, even' closer in as the decade wore on. The Scale ol Shot distributions illumed in Chapter J 2, together with olWs , J^e not illustrated, support this subjective impression.
210
^visc,. there was some increase in the use of reverse-angle cutting in American films through the 'twenties, with an overall increase of a few percent in the amount used from the first half of the decade into the second. 1 think this was not so much a matter of individual directors increasing their
use of reverse-angle cutting slightly, as of many directors like Llbvd In^raham Or Herbert Blache who stayed with the older Griffith style being removed from their chairs. These generalisations only apply to silent films, Tor at first
Fool's Gold	1920
New York idea, The	1920
Why Change Your Wife?	1920
A fla i rs of An a to 1 e, The	1921
ToJ'able David ■	1921
Without Limit	1921
Girlin theTaxi^hc Hungry 1-1 ear ts	1922
	3922
;LureofGold,fhc	1922
Mar ri age Orel c, Tíh c	1924
Iron Horse,The	1924
i Lady Windermere's Fan	1925
Smouldering Fires	T925
Goose Woman,The	IÜ92S
Stella Dallas	1925
Sun-Up ■-► ■       - ■ '•• - '■" Mantrap	1925
	1926
Son of the Sheik, The	1926
Winning of Barbara Worth.The	49-26
Blood Ship/The	1927
My Best Girl -	1927
Toilers .The	1928
Spinnen, Die (Part 2)	1920
iH'aus anv Meer, das Zur Chronik von Gricshuus	1923 1925
Variete Venus im. Frack	1925 ■ 1927
Angst Samson und Delila	■1'92S
Unbekahnui Morgen, das	' y ~ L. 1923
Won derml: Story, The Hat, The PleasureGaKlen^Hie Third Round,Tlie	1923 1925 1925
F/i/V STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-19^
there was a sharp reduction in the amount of reverse-angle cutting in the early sound films. Here are some figures for the use of re verse-angles in silent films of the 'twenties drawn from a collection that includes another couple or hundred. Incidentally, all the indications are that there are no strongly preferred values for the amount of reverse-angle cutting used in an)' period, unlike the case for Average Shot Lengths, where the distributions arc always strongh peaked.
Trimble, Larry Blache, Herbert DeMille, Cecil 8. DeMille, Cecil 3. King, Henry Baker, George D, Ingraham, Lloyd Hopper, E. Mason Hart, Nea) Lubitsch, Ernst Ford,John Lubitsch, Ernst Brown, Clarence 'Brown, Clarence King, Flenry Gouiding, Edmund Fleming, Victor Fitzmauricc, George King, Henry Seilz, George B. Taylor, Sam Barker, Reginald Lang, Frits: Kaufman, Fritz Gcrlach, Arthur von Dupontr£,A. Land, Robert Steinhoff, Flans Korda, Alexander Korda, Alexander Cutts, Graham Cutts, Graham Hitchcock, Alfred Morgan, Sidney
10% 7% 19%
23% 24% 12%
9% 19% 18% 28%
8% 23% 24% 2S% 17%
9% 22% 15% 17% 15%
7% 9% 1% 14% 19% 14% 16% 11% IS% 15% 25% 14% 5%
JI01ŠTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
Lodger, The i0ov>rnhill Moulin Rouge Ring,The
farmer's Wife, The
Champagne Manxman, The Alley Cat Arlesienne, V Coeur fidele Kocnigsmark Violettes imperials Inondation, 1* Belle Nivernaise, la Pierrot/Pierette Nene
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Miracle des loups, le Pech eur ď Islande Jim Ea Houlette Vertige, le Michel Strogoff Casanova
Verdun, visions dř his to ire Maid one
nhillon de Paris, le
211
1927
1927
1928 192S
1925 1923
1928
1929
1922
1923
1923 1924-
1924 1924 1924 1924 1924
1924
1926 1926
1926
1927 1923
1925
1928
in European cinema during these years, the conscious process ol 'Americanization' led to changes in the treatment ofthc stylistic variables which was mentioned in the previous chapter, There the way cutting rates increased in European Ijlms in the latter part of the 'twenties was demonstrated, ant I the selection of figures below for the use of reverse angle cutting in European films in the "twenties gives an iiuJication how this stylistic variable changed. In particular, )ou,can see how Alfred Hitchcock became very enthusiastic about the device after a couple of years, though his colleague Graham Cutts picked it up first, in fact, Hitchcock had sets <# four walls, rather than the usual three, built for The fo'mfVi Wijct and it was this that made possible the very high percentage of reverse angle cuts in that fi 1 m.
Acting
There were no conspicuous developments in the acting in "lencan silent films during the nineteen-twenties, since a ^Vfeof only slightly stylized naturalism consistent with the g^eral approach of American cinema had been arrived at
Hitchcock, Alfred
Hitchcock, Alfred Dupont, E.A.
Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Steinhoff, Hans Antoinc, Andre Epstein, Jean Pcrret, Leo nee Roussell, Herri DeDuc, Louis Epstein, Jean Feuillade, Louis Baro ncel I i, Jacques de Bernard, Raymond Baroncelli, Jacques de Lion, Roger L'Herbier, Marcel Tourjantiky, Victor Volkoff, Alexandre Poirier, Leon Gremillon, Jean Duvivier, Julien
13% 25% 27% 24% 42% 30% 31% 10%
7% J+% 12%
10%
3%
18% 16% 12% 15% 12% 19% 28% 15% 21% 8% 17%
19«
in the previous decade. After a little uncertainty from some directors and actors during 1923 and 1929, when there was a some excessive elocution, the style of sound film acting auickly settled into the same approach, In France, and particularly in Germany, the conscious 'Americanization' in other dimensions of the medium was accompanied by a move towards greater naturahVn in acting in the latter part of the decade. In this, as inother things, UiL-re was a tendency for the better directors to get there first. However there, were occasional oulcroppings of the earlier melodramatic style, even in the works of such major directors as Fritz Lang and Abel Gance fir* Napolkn). The latter ease may be due to a certain megalomaniac isolation from current events, as indeed may the former, assisted by the fact that Lang had made no films on realistic contemporary objects, through the 'twenties, Also in Germany those leading actors schooled in Expressionist stage acting may have been a little more difTknlt to shift from the individualistic elaborations of pose and gesture they had developed, Nevcrthefe the isolated cases ofbroad acting mat occurred in German him.
:
of tbc late Wňties are always quite well integrated with me nature of the films ingestion, which could not be said of the acting hr Abel Gancc's films.
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:
Russian Film Acting
U vm only in Russian films that there were any really new developments in acting during the ninetecn-twentics. Unlike other features of the new Soviet cinema after 1924, this did not owe very much directly to film developments in the West, but rather stemmed from slightly earlier developments in advanced Soviet stage work. More detail on this point is available elsewhere, so I will just briefly mention Meyerhoid's theories of 'Biomechanics' in acting, and the dramatic work of the theatre director Foreggcr- These lead in their turn to the stage work of the PEKS group (.Kozintsev, Trauberg, Yutkevitch, et. a I.), and the pre-film-ma king studies of the Kuleshov group, Sergei Eisenstein in his stage work also had connections with Mcycrhold, the FEKS group, and Foregger. Besides having a derivation from popular spectacles and showrs, and also from more theoretical conceptions, the novel acting styles evolved by aEl these Russian groups also owed something to American slapstick comedy of the higher and lower kinds.
The influence from American slapstick comedy shows in some of the films, particularly in the case of the Kuleshov group, which included' the future directors Boris Bar net, Sergei Komárov, and Y\L Pudovkin. In the first film directed by Kuleshov with this group, Ncobyiehninye Prihhoutcnnaia Mhicrt Vesta V Swnc Baichcyikov (192+), the group's acting style can be seen in as extreme a form as it ever reached, The most thorough exponent of the new style was Kuleshov's
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
partner, the actress Olga Khoklova, and she invented the most bizarre poses to express character and psychoIogiti| states, The novelties of the style lay more in the poses than in the movements joining them, and in subsequent films by Kuleshov this acting style was rapidly diluted in the performances of the actors other than Khoklova. A trace of Khoklova's style also appears in Galina Grauvhenkos performance in Komarov's Kukh s Miflionami (192S).
Despite the word -eccentrism' heading their program the acting in the films of the FEKS group was not as idiosyncratic as that in Kuleshovs films, and by the time they made Shinel {Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1926) and S,[',/} (Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1927), any special acting style was largely confined to the performances of their leading actor, Sergei Gerasstrnov, Actually Gcrassimov's work in these films looks rather similar to the sort of thing done by some of the best German Expressionist actors in earlier German films, just as the visual aspect of these FEKS films strongly resembles earlier German films,
The influence of Meyerhoid's 'Biomechanics' combined with that of the circus and similar popular comedy can occasionally be seen in Eisenstein's silent films in the acrobatic poses struck on ladders and similar constructions from Stachka (192+) onwards. A particularly striking moment in this vein is the grotesque scries of positions that the mechanic delivering the new tractor in Star aye i Novop (1929) gets into all over It when it breaks down. (For a bit more on this subject see "Acting in the Movies - and Elsewhere" in my Moving into Pictures,)
By the end of the "twenties Soviet acting had begun to develop a few special cliches of its own, the most tiresome of
Gúlina Graukhovo in ú Khokhva-style pose in Kukla s Millionami (Sergei Komárov, 192S)
flyj STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926-1929
which'is the proletarian glare from under the eyebrows with head slightly lowered - and of course directed at the class enemy. It can be studied at great length in Pudovkin's films from*' O^) omvart]s' not to mention others. This trick la&ted into the sound period, but the other styles did not, with the sole isolated exception of the acting in Kuleshov s
Another major innovation in acting in Russian films during this period was the use of non-actors - ordinary people untrained in acting - in prominent roles in some of lhe better known films, not to mention in crowd scenes. r\nil in one or two cases, such as Eisenstein's Staroye i Novoy^ van in the leading role. When one also notes that such non-actors performed without make-up, and in their ordinary clothes, It is not surprising that there was some tendency in the West in this period to think of the films concerned as documentaries rather than fiction films. Even despite the move towards greater naturalism in some German films from 1925 onwards, nothing so extreme in this respect had been produced in Western Europe at this date.
The limitations of n on-actors fitted in well with the tendency of Eisenstein's style towards the use of relatively static images, and in any case he had evolved a theory of +typagc' which required the use of actors whose basic appearance crystallize*} the essence of the characters they were playing, and their roles in the drama, This theory was really only an extension of the a veil-established Hollywood practice of type-casting, and in this it resembled other Soviet theories about other aspects of the cinema. Nevertheless the fact that it was an extension in theory and practice had significant results in a few films. The majority of Russian films of thi? period did not use non-actors, and for obvious reasons die .practice did not survive the introduction ol sound.
The Kuleshov Effect
Kuleshov formulated the idea in the early 'twenties that different feelings would be attributed to an actor according to the nature of whatever object he was shown looking at, by means of a cut from an expressionless Close Up of his face to a Point of View shot of the object in question. It has been questioned whether this idea was ever put to the test by Kuleshov and his associates, but be that as it may, the source of the idea was his close analysis or the new American films that became available m Russia during the First World War, m *s nc hecame involved in film-making. As previously ^ted, most of these films had developed the use of a large proportion or POV shots, to an extent that was unknown in uropeat the time. There were no American theories about the use of this device, as it had evolved gradually without conscious thought over the previous decade. Much the same COuld ht $aid or another of Kuleshov s Ideas, which had to
213
mm the possibility orcreating an apparently continuous
bt T   ^ *ynthCHC b> ^ together a series
f shots taken at different times and places and joining hem with action continuity. This latter idea was even remarkable, since it had been used in praetice even in European films since near the beginning of the century, but ere as with the "Kuleshov cMe^ properi m m ^ fc had been explicitly formulated led to novel extensions in filmmaking practice, but not by Kuleshov or his group. For the curious thing is that Kuleshov's own films make absolutely no use of the 'Kuleshov effect/ that goes any way heyond standard practice in Western films. However, it may well be that his ideas influenced Sergei Eisenstein in his practical Investigations of the novel effects that might be obtained by the juxtaposition of wildly disparate shots, and subsequently hii theories about this practice. Incidentally, there is now evidence that the hypothetical 'Kuleshov effect' docs not exist. The details of a experiment on this point by Stephen Prince and Robert E. Hcnsley can be read in Cinema journal (Vol. 31, No. 2, Winter 1992). This does not surprise me very much, since 1 have long believed that the emotional effect that movies have on audiences depends in the first place on the nature of what is represented in the individual shots, and that the limited range of purely filmic devices, such as POV shots, only act as intensifies of this shot content to a limited extent,
About Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein's first film, Stechka (1924), lacks most of the distinctive features that his style was to develop over the next few years, but it does contain a number of tie vices adopted from the earlier advanced cinema of the West, such as expressive super impositions and elaborate irises and wipes, which were to be dropped Irom his later films, I he extensive use of high and low-angles is already present, as is the emphasis on mass movement, but Eisenstein's special way of putting shots together is not yet really apparent. If one looks closely, one can see scattered throughout the film individual instances of the kind of discontinuity between shots that he was later to exploit extensively, but in this film they only occur In the way that Inserts of detail that are not closely connected with the surrounding shots are cut into an otherwise normally constructed scent, One example of this is the repeated Insert or thrown tools hitting the floor, which is cut into the scene or the workmen leaving the factory at the beginning ur the strike, without there being any shot 0r the workmen actually throwing the tools. In StaMa fkft is also a fair amount of lack of continuity from scene Ly scene which lias had to be bridged by awkwardly placed explanatory titles, but this must be due to inexperience, haste, and lack of sources.
214
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■
In his next film, Irpi^* Jfy^* (*92S)> Etost<?in developed much lurcher the repetition of shots within a sequence to produce visual rhythms, hut this is sufficiently well-known to excuse me discussing it. I will just remark that what Eisenstein was doing from this point onwards seems to he a conscious development from the ejects ol discontinuity and resulting contrasts between shots that had tentatively appeared in Staetifa reinforced by the examples of highly discontinuous cutting he had observed in D.W. Griffith's films and Abel G a nee's la /W His theories about his particular approach to film construction which were written down in 1929 can be read;in English in film Form (Hareourt, Brace and Company, 1949). In 1929 Eisenstein called his basic concept thc 'montage of conflicts*, and this related to various kinds of strong contrasts between the features of two adjoining shots on either side of a cut, and also to strong visual contrasts within a single shot, in the case of the "conflict7 between shots, even when this was not directly related to thc purely visual qualities of the two shots, as was the case for his category of 'intellectual conflict1 between shots, thc result was still to produce a strong visual contrast between them most of the time.
With Eisenstehvs next film, Qktyabr (1923), thc full exploitation of the 4montage of conflicts' produced a film that was almost entirely moved forwards by the way a series of nearly static but highly disparate shots succeeded one another. The. success of this technique depended1 to a considerable extent on the use of a very short Average Shot Length, down to 3 seconds in the case of Gkiyabr. Though tihis was shorter than that of the fastest cut American films, which did not go,below 3.5 seconds, the norrotivc'pace in this and other Soviet films of the late 'twenties was much slower than that in American films. Of course in American films most of the cuts were continuity cuts rather than Eisensteink strong 'discontinuity' cuts. The effect was heightened'in his ifilms by the use of sections where the cutting speeded up to give strings of shots each-only several frames long, but this was-terbalanccd \i\ other sections where all the shots were very Jong. Since in these latter sections,the shots also itend to be static, some people find the effect rather wearing. In the films he made through into the nineteen-HUrtics eisenstein. stayed with this style, ignoring the contemporary fashion lor the moving camera thai had developed in,the West.
The use of sections-of very fast cutting became a fashion in,the Russian, cinema of the end' of die Wntics, but most of the other novice directors who took it unapplied ■it without Einstein's talent, and it adds nothing whatever to their films, as can be seen in Jlya Trauberg's Mirfcol ^.(1930), ^ the-other hand, there were director, such as Fyodor Otsep and Yakov Protazanov working in Russia in the late "twenties who ignored all this, and made
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1926^1929
perfectly conventional movies, though their work lacked the final polish of Western films in most dimensions of the medium.
In fact the major factor necessary to the success of Eisensteine use of almost static shots was the graphic quality of EisentcJn's individual images. These had the same kind of characteristic outline shapes that he produced in hi5 drawings, both those made for film purposes, and those made independently of this. That Eisensteins silent films work in the way 1 have indicated isconcltisively demonstrated by thc reconstructed version of Bezhin Lug (1935) produced in 1967 by Sergei Vutkevitch. Alter Eisenstcm's death all that existed of this film, which had been banned on completion, were short clips several frames long from every shot of it, and these were extended as still frames by step-printing, and then edited together in script order with a music track. I judge the result to be very nearly as effective as Eisensteins original films.
Modern Art and [mage Composition
The ferment in advanced art in the nine teen-twenties had very little visible effect on the static composition of film images, apart from the truly avant-garde cinema made by established artists like Fernand Leger and Man Ray. The handful of German Expressionist films in which the shots were completely pre-designed by the art director have already been mentioned, but apart from this there is little else that is not a matter of set design, as in the Martian scenes of Protazanov's AelUa (1924). The main exception to this generalisation again involves thc Russian films of the late "twenties. Apart from those of Eisenstein, even films by secondary figures like Boris Barnct occasionally contain an image produced purely by camera placement, rather than by pre-designing, which would not have been created but for the influence of the visual art of the early ninetecn-twenties in Russia. An obvious example of this is the still that is always used to illustrate Abram Rooms Prividenyie, Kotoroye jVc Vozerctshchayetsya (The Ghost That Never Reiums* 1930). Such direct influence of advanced painting on lilm composition was not to reappear till the nineteen-six lies.
There is however another individual case of the influence of advanced art on image composition in mainstream films of the 'twenties, and this is in thc films of Fritz Lang. As early as 1919 one can occasionally sec in Langs films the use ol strongly marked crossing diagonal lines in the composition that derive from the geometrical abstract painting that had begun to appear at the end of the war. Major figures in this development in abstract art included Lazlo Moholy^Nag); and'in fact when Moholy-Nagy turned to the photography ol real scenesabout 1924 he used thc same sort or compositions that Lang was sometimes already using in his films.
IS. WIM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
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■
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■
■
There were no major changes in the industrial organization of American film production during the nineteen-thirties. The sharp fall in public attendance at the cinemas during 1932 and 1933 produced severe financial problems for the major companies, and although they all recovered as the decade wore on, this experience may have contributed to the marked decline in innovation in stylistic details after the first few years of the 'thirties. Within the Him companies the already existing trend towards a closer control of the details of the fiim-making process through a hierarchical structure oľ production supervisors or producers steadily continued. I will have a little more to say about that later. The general situation in the other major Western film-producing countries was similar during the "thirties, hut not in quite such a marked way. American films continued to dominate foreign markets, either in specially made foreign language versions for the first couple of years, or later in subtitled and dubbed form until the very end of the decade, when they were excluded from some countries by political action,
film Stock and Processing
At the beginning oľ the nineteen-thirties the most commonly used negative stock continued to be the Eastman Kodak panchromatic negative of the type introduced in 1328, but similar negative materials were available from Agfa, Dupont, and Pafché. Al! these were slow emulsions that were still used as though they had a speed of around ?0 ISO in present-day terms. The Russian film industry Estill using or t (achromatic negative in 1930, but a year °r two later they finally began to use panchromatic film, The faster Agfa negative which was already available, and the new Eastman Supersensitive Negative which became available in 1931, were not in general use in Hollywood except for filming the odd largish-scale night exterior, but Jacques Feyder's Daybreak (1931) was one film that **.s entirely shot on Supersensitive negative. As one might e*pect, the images in this film have slightly less contrast and NuVr more grainincss than those in films shot on standard ^gativc, and this point must have been what prevented thc gr^ttr use of Supersensitive stock. Eastman Supersensitive negative was the first camera stock to have an anti-halation ^k'ng applied to the cellulose nitrate base on the opposite 5,ilc from thc emulsion. This opaque grey backing prevented
extra-bright beams of light being reflected back into the emulsion after they had passed through it once, which would produce a halo of scattered light around very bright parts of the image, such as street lamps in a night exterior. The anti-halation backing on Eastman Supersensitive was dissolved off during the developing process so that it did not interfere with the printing process, and eventually, over the next several years, all camera negative came to be manufactured with anti-halation backing. In the early 'thirties photography on interiors continued to be at maximum aperture, which was between 11 and f2.S, depending on thc make of lenses in use.
New improved duplicating negative and positive stocks were made available by Kodak in 1930 and 1933 respectively, and these were directly connected with the developments in that will be discussed below. The duplicating negative and positive stocks were improved yet again in 1936, but 1 have seen definite signs that the French and German industries did not benefit from these or similar improvements. Throughout the "thirties the dissolves, etc., in French and German films look much more grainy and contrasty than those in Hollywood films, so presumably they were made using inferior local duplicating stocks. The same applies to the negatives used to shoot background scenes for back projection or travelling mattes in European films, which are noticeably grainy and of poorer definition than American examples, in 1933 Eastman Kodak had introduced a special Eastman Background Negative in the United States for these purposes, in response to thc rise of background projection, but apparently European film-makers had to go on using ordinary negative to shoot the film used for background projection. (Rim shots used for background projection are called background plates). Eastman Background Negative had very fine grain, and this made it possible to obrain <hots whose grammes would not be evident on the new Mill background projection (B.P,) screens. This was a case where the demand very definitely produced the technical development, but in fact the causal chain can be traced hack even further to the exigencies of ^ recording at this
lime
In 193* Agli-Ansco introduced their U ASA Superpan native to the African nwket^nd th* Kodf riposted with S«p«r X fail* of approxima.ely 40 ASA These new «oeb had better definition tbu. **
276
predecessors, but thedecisive innovations occurred in 193S, when Eastman Kodak introduced Plus X and Super XX with speeds equivalent to SO ASA and \6Q ASA respectively, and A^fa introduced Supreme and liltrapan (64 ASA and 120 ASA). Of these negative materials, Plus X immediately proved the most popular, for it gave definition comparable to the earlier slow stock for the first time, and in Tact the vast majoritv of Hollywood films were shot with it for many vears afterwards. Bui in most cases in the late 'thirties the extra two stops of speed that Plus X gave were not used to stop down by that amount from the usual maximum lens aperture, and so secure increased depth of field. On Che contrary, the major effect of the switch to Plus X was that light levels on the sets were reduced: in 1937 typical values were 250 to 400 foot-candles for black and white film, and S00 to 1000 foot-candles for Tech it i color, while in 1940 typical values were 75 to 150 foot-candles for black and white and ISO to 4G0 foot-can dies for Technicolor. These lower light levels reduced the heat on the set, and made working conditions more comfortable, particularly for the actors.
But at some of the major studios not all of the speed advantage of the new stocks was absorbed in this way. A common approach was to slightly over-expose them rather than use them with the light level intended by the maker for a given aperture. This over-exposure was then compensated for by giving the negative slightly reduced development, and this finally resulted in a Clatter {less contrasty) print, so that there were more middle greys in the image, and fewer true blacks and whites. M.G.M. and R,K.O, were the studios which went furthest in this direction, and all in all this
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
practice was responsible for the distinctively pearly grey look of many late 'thirties films when compared with those of the early 'thirties.
But there was one studio which used part of the extra speed in quite a different way. At Twentieth Century-Fox the extra speed of Plus X was partly used to film at slightly reduced aperture. About the end of 193S a rigid pa|jCy was instituted there to film everything at B.5 on interior sets. The reason for this policy is so far unknown to me but its result was that from that date onwards Twentieth Century-Fox films have a slightly greater depth of field, and also a slightly greater image sharpness than those from other studios, at any rate until the latter began to change their photographic practices several years later. A minor unfortunate side effect of this use of reduced aperture wa^ that it made it difficult to integrate background projection invisibly into □ studio scene, as the BtP. screen tended to be sharply in focus in the more distant shots, whereas this had not been the case previously with the larger lens aperture. This can be seen in Frontier Marshall (1939), and other films.
The major long-range effect of this studio rule at Twentieth Century-Fox may have been through Grc^g Toland's experiences when he went there to photograph The Grapes of Wrath at the end of 1939. More will be said on this matter in the next chapter, but briefly I note that in one or two shots in this film there Is a noticeably large depth of field, though advantage is not really taken of this in staging the action. In the shots concerned, the depth of field corresponds to the use of a moderately wide-angle lens of about 2S mm. focal length shooting at the standard Fox
"1
A wide-angle lens shot token h}' Gregg Tolandon a studio set in
The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), m which ihe depth offield extends from just in front of theforeground figure to more
than si.uyfiet anay
m STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
:
217
A set uith solid ceiling representing a roadside lunchroom in The Grapes of Wrath, which has been lit solely from the front by two lights on floor
stands.
studio aperture of f3.5, but they are the kind of shots in which a wide-angle lens would have been used by any cameraman to photograph a large studio set filling most of the sound stage. I can only think that the unsought for result rmisL have taken Gregg Toland's fancy, for before this there was no sign of extra depth of field in his work, and after it he alone went on to strive for even greater depth in Cititcn Kane. Other cameramen who had similar experiences at Twentieth Century-Fox clearly did not think further about llie matter, just as those who had inadvertently produced the same results Tor the same reasons in the odd shot in the 'twenties had not. incidentally, The Grapes of Wrath has a scene in a roadside lunch-room which is shot on a set with a low and visible ceiling, and this set is lit solely by floodlights on floor stands, though there is no noticeable use of a wide-angle !enst
In the late 'th irtics manufacturers finally began to give speed ratings to their film stocks using the Weston system, for by this date the use of exposure meters was becoming f|UHe common when shooting exteriors, though not when sWting interiors in black and white. The Technicolor Corporation insisted on foot-candle meters being used to determine the light levels when exposing Technicolor both ™ exteriors and in studio interiors, and the increasing familiarity of leading cameramen with Technicolor filming, 15 fellas the difficulty of coping with the new and changing rangeo( black and white stocks helped to promote the use of ^posure meters of one kind or another.
(fhe   Weston   photoelectric   refiected-Iight meter
,ati l*cn available from the beginning of the 'thirties, as K I & &
U        General  Electric incident-light foot^candle
our
meter, and also the Bell & Howell spot photometer. This last instrument measured the absolute brightness of a small area of the scene by comparison with a standard source, and was very similar to the still-available S.E.I, photometer.)
Two-Colour Technicolor and Other Two-Co I
Systems
In the early 'thirties tht;re was a large increase in the number of films that were shot wholly or in part with the two-colour Technicolor process. This continued to be carried out in the form established in I92S using a special Technicolor camera with a be am -splitting prism producing the red and green images simultaneously on two frames oI a single strip of panchromatic negative. The gelatine relief matrices were made as before, and the dye transfer or imbibition process also carried out as earlier, but around 1930 a change was made to printing on blank film with the emulsion on one ride only, rather than the film with emulsion on both sides that had been used before. There seems to have been a fair amount of improvement In the system over this period, mostly as regards definition -Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) has quite sharp images when compared to say King of jazz and other early Technicolor films. Grainineis and contrast were also somewhat reduced, though still remaining higher than with black and white film. (Of course when considering prints of the early •thirties it is important to take into account their history of being copied; original prints are more or less unobtainable.) The speed of the negative stock used in shooting Technicolor was now efiectivelv half that of ordinary black and white negatwe, taking into account the light losses in the beam^jihtting
21S
■
PH the km r" 1» Technicolor camera. The slow Him speed called for about twice as much light as ordinarily used for black and white (liming, and then this requirement was doubled again, because the fastest lens available for the Technicolor camera had a maximum aperture of f3.2.
AJt   the   other   two-colour   processes employed commercially in the early 'thirties: Multicolor, Magnacolor, Harriseolor/ etc, etc,  were  in  fact  essentially the Prizmacolor process of the late 'twenties, whatever they were named. This process continued to be carried out by exposing hipack negative in an ordinary camera (MitchcJI or Bell & Howell) modified to take the double thickness of film in the gate, and with a double magazine formed by mounting a second magazine on top of the existing one+ The two films fed emulsion to emulsion through the gate, the front film being orthochromatic to-record the blue-green component of the image, and the back one being panchromatic with a red-orange filter layer on its surface so that it recorded only the red-orange component of the image. Printing
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
was done from the two negatives in succession onto the two sides of 'duplitizcd' print stock specially made for this purpose by Kodak and Dupont. This special stock had an emulsion layer on both sides of the cellulose nitrate base with one emulsion containing a yellow dye to prevent the second image printing through to it, this yellow dye beij^ dissolved out later, When the duplitized print stock had been developed in the usual way, the silver images in diL> two emulsions were separately toned by floating the film on the surface of two toning baths, one containing an iron salt to give a blue green tone, and the other uranium salts for an orange-red tone.
Although this process used ordinary cameras with the full range of lenses, it'had its own peculiar drawbacks. The main one of these was that it was impossible to get the twe images on cither side of the film perfectly in focus at the same time on projection, and the film was also liable to the 'cupping' and wear experienced with the Technicolor film on double-sided stock.
C     I      | 25 M
Fig. 3. ','
audi
Fig. 4.
TOP
Fig. 5.
*—1__-iWJ*
ueo   jiw     f-fo ^joo nwt   emeu flrp^-y/
Fic. S3.—Technicolor, E.P. 38^239.
Cit) The Technic fhri!e.mip..£amtro.. lU^ht\ TU ..    -     , , * ■ * A'
rh* h™m mm       .    V ,    / .JKight) The patent application drawinq shoivina the construction oj
between the diagonal ip(it sufface, ~G> UlJialles [hc
green filter on the back surface of the prom block, and 'MC indicates a mi-
*■ ■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
T Ji rce> Colou r Tech n ic olo r
In 1934 the new Technicolor three-colour process was ^ for the first time in live-action filming to make the <hort film lo Cucaracha, and the following year saAv the first feature-film in three-colour Technicolor, Becky Sharp. The diree-colour system was made possible by the introduction of die new special Technicolor three-strip camera, which had a 45 degree split-cube prism behind the lens to produce wo Images, one of the green part of the spectrum on a panchromatic film directly behind the prism block, and another deviated by 90 degrees onto a bipack of two films u'ith their emulsions in contact in another gate, to record the blue image and the red image respectively. In this second gate carrying the bipack, the light passed through the transparent base of the first film before forming an jma^e in the blue-sensitive emulsion and then through a nd filter layer coated onto its surface before forming the red image in the panchromatic emulsion on the second film facing the first. The definition in this image was the least good, since the light had passed through so many layers of material to get there, and this accounts for a tendency to blurriness in the green of foliage shown in filmed scenes. The green colour was principally formed by the cyan (bluc-green) dye in the final print, and this was controlled by the inverse densities in the red negative record.
The Technicolor camera was to a certain extent modelled on the Mitchell camera, and was not alt that much larger, except that the magazine was three times as wide to accommodate the three rolls of negative side by side. The bipack of two negatives face to face that went through tht gale at 90 degrees to the lens axis was formed and separated by rollers on either side of the gate, and the pulldown mechanism in both gates was the Mitchell type, with (lie same registration pin system, etc. Unlike the Mitchell tJracm there was no rack-over arrangement for rapid through-the-lens viewing of the image, and focussing was usually done by using the scale on the lens, though there was a kind of through-the-lens system involving moving one of the film gates to one side. The larger reliance on the supplementary viewfinder this caused may have produced a tendency towards less precisely composed images in Technicolor when compared with the best black and white - P^lngraphy oj" the 'thirties and 'forties. It took at least "W minutes to change magazines and re thread the film ffih the Technicolor camera, whereas this could be done 111 uJKta- a minute with the Mitchell camera, so it was the ^al practice 10 have a second Technicolor camera on thc m rady threaded so that there would be no halt in production. Such was not the ordinarv practice in black and *Wte filming.
^cause of the prism block between the back element
219
of the lens and the film gates, ordinary lenses could not be -d in the reclmicolor camera, and so a special « had to lx designed and made by Taylor-Mobson Ltd. The widest angle lens of this set was a 35 mm. f2 lens, and the focal lengths went upwards through a SO mm. fi.7 lens to one oi 40 mm. focal length. In other words there were no wide-angl, or very long focal length lenses for Technicolor lilming. However at the end of the 'thirties a true wide-angle lens of about 2S mm. focal length was made for the Technicolor camera, and it can he seen used in a Tew shots in Gone With 77* Wind (1939), These shots are readilv recognizable because as well as the usual steep perspective due 10 the wide-angle reproduction, there is a lot of barrel distortion and some reduced dclmiiion in the image. The people concerned must have been well aware of this, and so this lens was only used when a very broad scene had to be encompassed from a limited camera distance.
The Technicolor lens apertures were not calibrated in f-stops, but in a series of special numbers that were related to fixed levels of key-light that had always to he measured on the set with a photo-electric loot-candle macr. In fact, photography in the studio seems to have be^n carried out at, or near, maximum aperture. In the initial period of the three-colour system the key-light level was set ai 800-10O0 loot-candles, but in 1939 a new negative \tock was introduced and used on Com- With The Wind, and this was 2 to 4 times Taster than the previous slock, and was considered to have a Speed equal to Super X black and white negative, i.e. 40 ASA. The key light level was now around fool-candles. There was a change in the colour sensitivity oi the new negative stocks now used, and the colour filters cemented to back of the beam splitting prism block in the Technicolor camera were no longer necessary, and were removed.
From  the beginning,  the response of the whole Technicolor three colour system was arranged to give correct colour balance under sunlight; or in the studio under arc lights fitted with 'light straw' coloured filters. Flood-lights were used rather more for Technicolor Jilming than they were in this period for black and white filming, which made for Hatter li|tog M the whole-, but this lilted in wdl with the usual desire of the producer* and of Technicolor to show & much colour as possible in each image. Nevertheless, compared to laier years there weft a fair number of films made uptoihe beginnings the 'forties such as The Gatdtn of Allah (Richard BolHiiw**. 1936,. A Star is fan fWilliam WcHann, 1937), and The /Wn ,;f frank Ja^ (Frit/ Lang, 1940), in which ;i .trong-mimlcd sector, or cameraman with a good visu,f kiix, managed to use quite a lot of heavy chiaroscuro, including the use ol for. Jund Mres In black silhouette. Even tat With
220
MWshov* tendencies in this direction, though in that case the production designer, William Cameron Menkes, was certainlv responsible. Also striking was the very 'modem simplicity of the lighting of The Trait of the lonesome Pine (1936), done by VV\ Howard Greene, but apparently this approach was not very popular at the time.
Printing of three-colour Technicolor was a straight forward extension of the imbibition- process already used for-two colour Technicolor; each of the three negatives was used to produce a gelatine relief positive matrix, and these matrices applied the three dyes, which were now Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta, to the blank in succession on three nin-bcli machines. But now the blank stock carried a weak fourth "key1 image of black silver created in it beforehand photographically by printing from one of the three separate camera negatives, and the purpose of this was to get good solid blacks in the appropriate places. The green negative was usually used reproduce the key image, but there were exceptions to this, and in particular for Reefy Sharp the blue record negative was used. The purpose of this key silver ima^e in the printing blank was to add extra black to the densest areas of the positive image,
Despite tins departure from the theoretically optimum procedures of colour reproduction, the Tech n i col or process was.capable of remarkably accurate reproduction of colours on natural exterior scenes by 1936, and this is the true test of a colour process. Initially the system was extremely contrasty, roughly comparable in- this respect to present-day 'broadcast quality colour video > with the unfilled shadows solid black, and very bright areas such- as white clouds tending to 'burn out' (i.e. become undifferentiated transparent ajeas without detail on the positive print). However with the advent of the new camera negatives in . 1939 this contrastsness was somewhat reduced. As far as fa ith f u Ihcss of col ou r r c prod ucti on is eonce r ned, i l mu st b e noted, that for a couple of years from about 1937 to <\9%% or igin al Tech n icolbr ;pri nis were apparen tl y made - with- a hi as in the direction of orange, and such prints db riot provide atruc iileavOf ithc fidelity that the system, was capable of at that time. -
WARNING: A number rif early Technicolor films such ^s Beefy Shotp and,1 Star htiorn werelater reissued in two-colour Ginceolor prints, and: these have veryHitric relation at alt: to the colour,, (iefinition, and contrast of the original prijvtSi
vftASHiffP WARNING: l,v <fe last couple of decades *f*f^ a number of oldTedhnieolor films made either from the original earner natives. or from an,orig,nal positive prim using modern colour stocks and tbe colours of these.fe,not correspond exactly .,„ t|10Se of
m mm   w% mé fa% °w i».gw
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
For instance, in the modern Becky Sharp prints the rc<ls and yellows are more intense, and the blacks arc not so black The image definition of this class of modern reprints is often beucr than that of the original prints.)
Returning to the original Technicolor three-strip process, the printing of the relief positive matrices wa.s carried out in an optical printer as before, and this printer had a facility for making fades and dissolves directly and automatically, without going through an inter positive and inter negative as was necessary in black and white. It seems that this printer also could make a restricted range of simply wipes in the same way, but these were not used as often as they were in black and white films of this period.
Because the light level on a background projection screen has to match the light level of the scene being filmed in front of it, the high light levels ret]uired for Technicolor before 1939 prevented the use of big B.P. screens, with the upper limit being about ten feet. After 1939 the probjem was minimized by the faster stock then available, and also by the development of a triple background projector at Paramount. This had the images from three projectors perfectly superimposed on the B.P, screen to give three times the usual screen brightness, The restrictions on background projection before 1939 may have contributed to the large amount of location shooting in the Technicolor films of the late 'thirties when compared with black and white films of the period, and also when compared with the Technicolor films of the "forties.
Although the basic Technicolor camera, which weighed 77 lb., was.not much bigger and heavier than a (Mitchell NC, the blimp for the Technicolor camera was a lot bigger and heavier than the usual blimps for Mitchell cameras, with its basic dimensions being about 2 feet by 3 feet by 3 fcet, H might be speculated that this bulk and weight militated against using the large number of camera set-ups thai were required by directors working at the short end of tw Hollywood Average Shot Length range, but the sample of films available is not large enough to confirm this. Certainly Wellman's A Star is Born (1937) has an ASL of 9.S seconds compared with his habitual 5 to 6 seconds, and Henry Hathaway, who also worked in that range on his black and white films, went to slightly slower cutting on The Trail of the Lonesome Pine with an ASL of 7 seconds. It is doubtful if there was any such effect on directors working near the mean Average Shot Length for the period, for John Ford's Brums Along the Mohawkr has an ASL of 9.5 seconds, which is close to his usual; figure of around 9 seconds.
■
Gasparcolour
Gasparcolour was purely a three colour printing process involving the variable destruction of dye colours in two
f]blV STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
emulsion layers on one side of the print stock, and In a third pulsion layer on the other. It could only be used for printing animate as there was no satisfactory three-colour
camera Included in the system. On the surviving evidence [I was capable of producing quite saturated colours, but I have some doubts about the colour fidelity of the system which are impossible to confirm, since animated films give no reference point in their entirely artificial colouring. The present-day Cibachrome process for making reversal colour paper prints in still photography is descended from the Gasparcolour process.
Dufay Colour
Dufay Colour was the only successful three-colour adiliiive process that there has ever been in the cinema, hut it only had a limited commercial application to one feature film and a number of short subjects made after 1938, mostly in England. In its initial form in 1934 it wasa reversal process, in which a panchromatic emulsion was exposed through a filter layer made-up of patches of red, green, and blue dye arrangediin ^reseau (agrid or regular mosaic) with spacing of 20 elements to the millimetre. After reversal development in the normal way for black and white emulsion, the film became a positive which could be projected. Although the 16 mm. form of this version of Dufay Colour had some success in the European amateur market, the 35 mmr form was only used for two short sequences in Radio Parade of1935 {Arthur Woods, 1934). At this stage of the development ol Ihe process the results left a lot to be desired when Compared with Technicolor. All colours lacked saturation, and the blues and yellows were not strongly present or accurate. The reds had the dull red-orange quality that was usual with the older two-colour processes, and indeed the look ol the image could be described as a two-and-a-half colour process. As well as this, the outline of the rcseau was visible on the screen to most of the audience. In white areascf the scene a kind of 'boiling' effect was also visible owing to the presence of the minute discrete patches of red, g^en, and blue moving about in position from frame to fcune. After further development, particularly of the optics Ql the printing process to partially suppress the image of the T<xau, a negative-positive version of the process was made liable in 193Sh It was at this point that the commercial ™ema use of Dufay Colour really began, but the process dkl&ot survive the war. From the existing material it seems |U the negative-positive Dufay Colour process still had inferior definition and reduced saturation of hues when spared to Technicolor. Like all additive processes it produced a lower level of brightness in the screen image
n lhLV subtract!ve colour processes, but the impor-Unc* of this should not be exaggerated, since the screen
brightness was still perfectly satisfactory un mm. arc projection.
221
cry under good 3i
Agfacolor and Kodachrome
These two subtracts reversal colour processes, both using mtegral tripack film with three emulsion layer, were only initially available in 16 mm.; Kodachrome from 1935 and Agfacolor from i936, and so they had no application to commercial film-making. However in 1959 Agfa produced a negative-positive material in IS mm. film, and this was used for feature film production in the nine teen-forties.
Coloured Films
There was a slight revival of tinting and toning during the later 'thirties under the pressure of the increasing number of Technicolor Rims being produced. In Hollvwood this was mostly a matter of using a simple restrained sepia tone applied throughout the entire length of a black and white print, but in France, Max Ophuls made distinctive use of blue tinting to accentuate the romance of a moonlight scene in IVerther (193S), and also used pink and blue tinting to distinguish amongst the various levels of flashbacks in la Tcndre ennutnie (1936).
Lighting
By the beginning of 1930 electrical circuit to silence the bum of arc lights had been devised and produced, hut in most studios in that year tht-ir use was extremely limited, and most of the lighting J or sync, sound shots was done, as in previous years, with tungsten light sources. However l;ox had returned to the principal use of arc sources, and the slightly sharper shadows and modelling to be observed in their Rims from that year, when compared with those from other studios, was the result.
In E93I all studios had returned to the free use of arcs when convenient, but 30% of the lights used continued to be various types of tungsten light. This was no doubt to realize the worth of the investment already made in these incandescent lighting units, but also in part because cameramen appreciated the unique qualities of lighting that could be obtained with some of these units. In particular the Ville light1, winch had a large tungsten bulb of I kifoWatt in a hemispherical metal reflector with a fluted surface, gawfi J much softer light than any arc flood Ugh L In general the light from tungsten-source lighting unto was slightly softer than the equivalent unit with an arc source, and when used lor |W lighting they produced attractive soft-edged shadow, on the face. We cameramen took more advantage of the* possibilities than others, but Victor Mimer cu ,tand as an example of those who most V^^f^ lioht. in such fflmi as Ladies Ma* (1931) and The
li«VSE£.*Sl K . ■
tung.
sten
722
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE TIUKJ^
A Med him shot from The Man 1 Killed (1932) lit by Victor Miiner with a large hemisphere tungsten foodlight on a floor stand high lefuThc light has a diffusing filter on it, and the result is the very soft shadows you see on the walls. There is also a spotlight from high right behind the actors
backlighting them.
Man I Kilted (1932), where the key lighting was done with the hemispherical reflector tungsten floodlights on floor standi even in Long Shot, the cast shadows on the walls, as wel I as the modelling shadows on the faces, are as soft as can be achieved, short of using the type of 'soft light' unit which only became available in recent decades.
To sum up, the basic types of lighting units used in this period% to a greater or lesser extent, were first of all floodlight^ either with tungsten bulbs of about 1 kW. in hemispherical reflectors of various types, or alternatively with' arc or tungsten sources in trough-shaped matl-surfaccd reflectors ('broads' and 'scoops1); all of which provided a -fairly even flat coverage over an angle of about 90 degrees. Alternatively there were spotlights with either arc or tungsten bulb sources, and these could be cither the searchlight type with a large parabolic mirror and open front, or the theatrical type where the source was totally enclosed! and' the light concentration and focussing was achieved by a spherical lens of several inches diameter at the front. Both types could be To cussed to give a beam, spread over a range from several degrees to about 40 degrees.
Stylistic Peculiarities in Lighting
In general it is difficult to recognise individual styles Jn film lighting; much less todeseribcthem accurately in those particular cases where they do exist. To take a concrete example, I can see little obvious connection between the strong chiaroscuroappearance of the lighting in The Murders in the hue Morgue and the rather pedestrian mid-kev look 0r Back Street, both photographed by Karl rreund for Universal in 1932. However, when Freuntt work is juxtaposed with thai of William Daniels on Caruilk (1937), a difference is
recognizable. The point where Freund took over the lighting of this film from Daniels is fairly obvious, because Freund used far less lens diffusion in his photography, perhaps none at all on most of the shots, and also because on the average he used slightly simpler lighting set-ups, with less lights used to light the same sort of scene. Although the use of less lights and less diffusion is a general European characteristic, this distinction is not absolute, as can be seen if we look at another film on which two different cameramen worked. The point at which Rudolph Mote took over the lighting ol Come and Get It (Hawks/ Wyler, 1936) from Gregg Toland Es also quite obvious, for in the last several minutes of the film1 after the party scene, it can be clearly observed that in the closer shots the modelling shadows on the figures are much better handled, with a softness of edge that Toland could never achieve, And the Hump can Mate used slightly more lens diffusion than the American Toland, and he used it more subtly, But despite being able to recognize the difference in some cases between the work of two cameramen when presented with their lighting side by side, I would never claim to be able to guess the name or the cameraman who had lit a film l did not know, if I was shown it blind'. And I don t believe anyone else can, though J can't prove this assertion.
James Wong Howe was perhaps the cameraman "ho tried the most individual things in the early 'thirties. For instance, on Transatlantic (William K. Howard, 1931) he did much of the. photography with a 25 mm. lens, specifically to secure increased depth of field. But the result was M from being 'deep focus* in the modern, post-O^n K&f*i sense, which means sharpness of focus from Big Close Up to Long Shot, since the ran^e achieved by Wong Howe ^ only from 5 feet to 30 feet, which is from Medium Shot io
mi STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
Long Snot with a 25 mm. lens. These figures mean that the crture used was approximately 14, and the light levels to ^curc ^his were little more than twice those usual at this tjine The strange thing about the photography of this film j$ that having secured this increased depth of field, Wong Howe direw away most of the effect of it, by using heavy kns diffusion on nearly all the shots. Incidentally, it should be noted that the 'Waterhousc stops' that cameramen from this period often mention using are really irrelevant [a themselves to deep-field photography; the fact that the design of wide-angle lenses at this period necessitated the uSC of a series of multiply-perforated slides, rather than the usual built-in iris diaphragm to change the aperture, made no difference to the image or the depth of field obtainable tfilh a particular focal length at a particular aperture.
Wong Howe has said that he was nick-named 'Low-key' Howe at this period, and although the reason for this is not particularly evident in Transatlantic ^ there are some subsequent films where it is justified. In After Tomorrow (1932), many of the daytime room interiors are lit in a way that approximates the effect of filming in a real room lit only b) the light through the windows, without supplementary light. The result is that the room goes very dark away from ihe windows, and many framings in these scenes are truly losi'-key. In everybody else's lighting of such scenes in the 'thirties far more fill lighting would be used on such sets, and the result would be at most 'mid-key' lighting. In The IW/ and the Glory (1933), again directed by William K. hWard, Wong Howe extended this approach slightly in the scenes in the tycoons office, where he managed to duplicate even more exactly the fall of diffuse North light from large ™lows to one side of a room. There is no backlight or light from any other angle, as there would have been iWiny
223
other cameraman had lit this scene in the standard wav, and effect is very dose to reality Ignoring a few instances involvmg close shots of people in other films, this is the onlv ■nstance I have noted before recent years of anything that could reasonably be called 'North lighting on a studio set.
■■ WOuld Wcar ft* Wong Howe' was not further encouraged in such individual efforts, as he did not do anything very unconventional again till the 'fifties; indeed the later 'thirties were a period of con fomiism in all respects in films made everywhere. Directors who had a taste for experiment like William K. Howard were not encouraged either.
Lighting in the Late Thirties
The really important development in lighting practice in the latter part of the 'thirties was the introduction of a new range ol spotlights with Frcsnel lenses, which came into use in the United Stales within a couple of years from 1934. For the first time it was possible to have large diameter lenses (up to 3 feet) close in front of a powerful light source, either arc or tungsten, as well as having a parabolic mirror behind the source. In this way the efficiency of the light and its controllability were vastly increased, and this type of lighting unit has remained standard from that lime to the present. The range of units available extended all the way from those with 500 watt tungsten light sources up to the biggest arc spotlights, and all had a beam spread that could be varied from 3 to 4S decrees, The beam from these Frcsnel-lens spots had a soft edge spreading over an angle of a few degrees through which the light intensity fell off very rapidly from almost maximum intensity to almost not lung. With these new lights there was now a trend Lo do more of the main and key lighting with spotlights than before in Molly wood
onaJilt-hght from iht Uont. On the tight, zugen '»
V mmm * mm m mm *8      hul raucfc JI
224
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
A location scene in Quai des brumes (1938) shot on a slightly overcosr day with heavy lens diffusion. The lighting j5 produced by weak sunlightfrom behind, and theface of thefilm star on the righi ft lit by the beam from a small spotlight
movies, and though tbere was no sharp break with previous lighting practice, some Hollywood cameramen such as Tony Gaudio dignified the use of the new Fresnel spots with the name 'precision lighting'. (Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineer^ VoL 29, no. 2, p. 157).
But the new Fresnel spots were slow to arrive in Europe, and there, even in the late * thirties, the main lighting of shots continued to be done much more with Hood lights. Since there was a tendency for European sets to be smaller, this was not such a drawback as it might appear, and in fact the greater use of floodlights often (but not always) made the.lighting of European sets slightly more naturalistic in the
strict sense of the term. Apart from the lack of these new Fresnel spots, there scorn to have been few, or perhaps none at all, of the very large arc spotlights ('brutes') of the older kind available in Europe, and this shows up in the lighting of location exteriors. In films such as Quai des brumes (1938), one can sec that the fill light on the figures is being applied from a small spot fairly close to them, and hence covering a rather small area, rather than the large area that would he evenly covered by a very large arc spotlight in the case of such scenes filmed in the United States,
Aside from these technological considerations, there arc other occasional peculiarities of the lighting of German and
A shot oj a conversation in La Habanera (1937), in which the simple lighting from behind and from the right side leaves ihe face of the participant in the centre in the
shadow-
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
2S
Villainy in Quai des brumes photo-graphed in a high key on a jffógfe.
coloured set.
French 111ms in the nineteen-thirtics. In German films there was a tendency, which did not exist at all in American films, to \el the relative simplicity of the lighting sometimes put dk' lace of a character into shadow s even though he or she bad significant lines of dialogue to speak. This can happen in an ordinary conversational scene without any expressive connotations being intended, as in the one illustrated from La Habanera (Dctlef Sierck, 1937). It must not be thought thai this is a standard feature of German lighting, for there are many dims in which the effect docs not occur at all: it fs just a small tendency. Likewise the contrary Jualure that can he found in some French films of the late 'thirties,
Some French d ramas that have definite sinister, twisted, or downbeat cfements in them are nevertheless lit in a fairly high key more or less throughout, as far as the interiors are concerned. Quai da; Brumes again provides an example, hut the eliect can be found in other lesser films .such as Macao - L'enfcr de jeu (Jean Dclannoy, 1939). In part this high-key effect seems to be a result of a certain tendency to favour very light-co ton red sets, but it is certainly abetted by the lighting, Faced by such a set in anything but a comedy or a musical, an American cameraman would surely throw a few more shadows on it than Eugcn Schiifltan does.
But ail in all, any distinctive look that some French and
A scene in La Habanera in which, in a way tpiite common in German fltos
of rhe late 'thirties, the general dark effect fs produced by the dark tones of
ihe set and cost umes, as much as bj
ihc lighting.
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226
■
German films of me period have is due far more to set and costume design than to features of their photography and scene dissection. Throughout the later ninetecn-thirt.es just as in Hollywood, European photography contmued to be *% or near, maximum, aperture, and the faster Him slocks were not used to achieve smaller apertures and hence greater depth of field. For the last time, there is no 'deep focus' in Jean Rcnoirs fijlti^ just extensive use of staging in depth, sometimes beyond the limits of sharp focus. And occasionally he uses a surreptitious locus-pull to sharpen the background slight!)' when the main interest in the shot moves there, and1 vice-versa.
With the beginning of three-colour Technicolor in 3 934, there was a need for more powerful floodlights, and Mole-Richardson introduced a new 'broad' or, as they named it, a Side Arc type 29. This had a rather better arc feed mechanism, and passed more current, but it was still basically the same as previous models. There was also a new Scoop of similar design, for hanging overhead. The most successful model was introduced in 1939, and known as the Duarc, Still containing a pair of arcs within the one housing, the arc feed mechanism was vastly improved, so that it could run for hours without needing to he trimmed or restarted by baud. The reflecting surface inside was chromium plated, and there was a built in diffusing filter over the front opening, made of pebbled1 and sand-blasted py.rex glass. This unit became a standard film light for decades, used whenever a really powerful floodlight was wanted, either on floor stands, or hung at an anfde overhead.
a m era s
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In 1930 Warners were the only studio still using tjhe 'icebox' type of sound-proof booth containing both camera andi operator for sound1 Riming, but in 1931 they joined all the other studios in using Mitch el ľ N C cameras in ih and h n ad e blimps of their Own various designs. So although Warners had1 fitted some of their booths with wheels, as had' other studios during 1929, there was stilrduring 1930a limitation on the use of panning simultaneously with tracking at Warners, a 1 ítn i tat í o n that no Ibngcr held: e | s e where.
(Cameras inside sound-proof booths were limited by tlie sifce of the -booth window to pans of about 30 degrees on cither side of the forward direction, whereas both blimpeď ^ndunblimped cameras cambepoihted-in any direct ion while the dolly they are mounted on is being tracked along.)
The first Miich el I U N C cameras were produced in 1934 but at first none of the studios except the minor Goldwyn company bought them, lFfc BNC was developed from the Mu.heli NC by adding a closely fitting soundproof cover integral to the existing WpWe and front plate over which
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
This shell allowed just enough space for this 2 inch sklewiys movement of the body and magazine, and no more. Tta rotating lens turret on the front plate of the NC was eliminated, and replaced by a fixed mount for a single lens. Otherwise there was no essential change in the basic design of the camera, but the dimensions and weight (135 lb.) were appreciably less than those ol an NC camera in a blimp. Although not totally silent, the sound level fr orn the camera was not detectable at normal microphone distances. Gregg Toland used the Goldwyn BNCs for years with no visile effect on the style of his camerawork, while everyone else continued to use Mitchell NC cameras in hand-built blimps, though towards the end of the 'thirties automatic parallax correction was applied to the supplementary viewfindcrs mounted on the outside of the blimps. The studios resisted buying the h"NC model because it was only several years since they had paid out for the NC model, and the BNC offered no great improvement, while being quite expensive. In fact when Warners finally led the way towards general re-equipment with Mitchell BNCs in the Hollywood studios by buying 10 or them in 193S, the price was S 10,000 each.
In 193S another silent camera was designed for Twentieth Century-Fox, and in 1939 several were produced for the exclusive use of that studio, but lurther production was prevented by the demands made by World War 2 on ih<i precision-engineering firms concerned. This Fox camera was an entirely new design. It had no extra sound-proof casing, just some sound-absorbing material on the inside of the main casing, and also smoothly running mechanical parts. Its cylindrical body could he rotated 60 degrees about its longitudinal axis to bring a ground-glass screen into l lie film position behind the taking lens for accurate focussing and framing. The ma^axine was of the usual belt-driven American style, with two separate 1000 foot circular film ■compartments mounted on top of the camera, and the whole machine weighed SS lbs.
Both the Fox camera ant) the Mitchell BNC were slightly easier to got into extreme positions and slightly easier to use in general, but this really had no significance as far as studio filming was concerned. What was important was that in sync, sound filming lenses of wider angle than 2 5 mm. could now be used, which was not the case with blimps cameras.
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European Cameras
Through the ninetcen-thirties and 'forties there was only one significant sound camera of European origin. This was made by Debrie in France, and was closely based on their much earlier Parvo design. All that was done was w enlarge the dimensions of the body in all directions, so thai the coaxial marine chambers let into either side ol ihc
FiLM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
hotly-would now take IGGO foot rolls of Film in the circular iisettes, rather than only 400 foot rolls. The viewfincling arrangements were the same as those in the last silent m0itels of the Debrie, with the film gate displaced to put a ground class screen in its place, this being viewed through an cvepicee in the back of the camera. The camera was easily silenced by putting a simple rectangular box round jls rectangular body, and the lens was also enclosed behind a glass cover at the front of the camera. The dimensions of the whole blimped camera were about 20 inches wide by KJ inches high, by 25 inches long, which were smaller than ihose of a blimp cd Mitchell NC, but the Debrie still lacked pilot-pin registration, as is quite obvious in the special effects of a number of European films. The Debrie sound camera was used all over continental Europe, including Russia, either as built in France, or as built in licensed or unlicensed copies in the other countries.
British Cameras and Technology
In Britain the cameras and technology used were mostly American, and the penetration of equipment from the Continent was small, mostly limited to a small number of Debrie sound cameras, until well after World War 1. For this reason I will have little more to say about British 111m technology until some indigenous innovations began to appear there in the nineteen-fifties.
Camera Supports and Camera Movement
Most ol the major studios had acquired large camera cranes in imitation of Universal, and small cranes with a rise and fall of several feet appeared at Paramount in 1933, and at other studios shortly after. The tradition established \>v broadway, and followed throughout the 'thirties, was that large craning movements were confined to musical numbers of one kind or another, and not used in ordinary dramatic Wtcs, Occasionally a director would use a crane movement 0ft a spectacular scene in a non-musical context, as in The Scarlet Empress (1934) or The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). or sometimes to follow actors up and down staircases, but even this was quite rare.
Ordinary tracking shots were done with small stecrable follies developed from the improvised dollies carrying J hlimpcd camera on a heavy duty tripod common at the htgmning of the sound period. These new dollies were on ^general pattern of a low-slung platform about 3 feet wide and 5 rcet ]0ng vvitn w|1C(iJs having solid rubber tyres, and ^ilh the rear pair of wheels steerablc. The supporL column
the camera was now an integral part of the construction o! ihe dolly, and could be raised and lowered a few feet ^hamcally, but not during the course of the shot. The Pan and tilt heads used under the hlimpcd cameras were
227
mostly of the heavy spring-loaded friction type controlled wf 3 b*r> JUSt '** the still eating Mitchell and Mnten models. However in 1930 Mole-Richardson had produced a large cradle geared head verv like the present-day type of geared head, though without the the gear change on present-day heads that makes high speed pans and tilts easier. Per some reason this type of geared head was little used till the end of the decade.
With this equipment, the way was open to a complete continuation of the extensive use of the mobile camera that had characterised the work of many directors ai the end of the previous decade. Although obvious names like Fabst and Milestone spring to mind, this fashion was very widespread, and was eagerly joined by newcomers like George Cukor and John Cromwell, as the latter commented in interview at the National Film Theatre in 1974. However, many abandoned the extremes of this fashion after a few years with the rise of faster cutting, as I shall describe later
The prototype of a small, extremely manoeuvcrabie dolly was used on Milestone's The from Page in 1911, and this dolly was put into series production in 1932 as the Bell & Mowell 'Rotambutator'. U had a camera mounting writh built-in geared head that could rise and fall beside a central supporting column, and this column was fixed in turn to a circular base about 4 feet in diameter. There were three small wheels around the circumference ol the base, two at the front having fixed direction, and one at the back that was steerable. This arrangement permitted very light turns to be executed, and the Rotanibulator's manoeuvcrabiHty (but not its stability) approached that of present day crab dollies. The effect of its use can be seen in the Press Room scenes of The Front Itye*
The Hollywood extreme uf the 'lung take with mobile camera style of the early "thirties can be represented by John StaJil's Bach Street (1932), which with an Averse Shot Length of 19 seconds URviubly Includes quite n number ol lakes which are minutes long. (Remember that the approximately Lognormal distribution oJ shot lengths under these circumstances enables one to know roughly how many shots there will be of'givi-n length once the ASL is known.)
None of the doJHa or cranes thai became available in th is period permitted lens heights much below 3 feet, and setting up ultra-low camera angles continued to require special time-consuming measures. Nevertheless .such extreme low angles continue to make their appearance in a Tew 1.1ms sod, as Hdt (Archie Mayo. »930, and other, I he
inspiration presumabl) coming from various European Idms
Jh aS Bronco M * ar"Vt<l in
i-feht at the end of the 'ewentius. Unmotivated hlghangle is were rather more frequent, though still not commoo in no-.- musical films. A good place to study the use oi these
22$
and other exprcssivist device, ft one Hollywood extreme of tUc expre^ivist-imuwlrsi- spectrum is Ife A* (Roland West, 1931).
Whip or Zip Pans
A whip (or zip) pan is one which is so fast that the image become* an abstract blur of horizontal streaks of black, white, and grey- Whip pans first began to appear in very isolated instances after 1926, perhaps accidentally once the fashion for extensive camera movement had started. They were taken over as an intentional structural device to join the items in newsreels together a fter 1930, From there they made their way back into fictional films, where they had a brief vogue around 1932. Examples occur in Mamoulians Song of Songs, and most interestingly in William K. Howard's The Trial of Viricnnc Ware, in which all the scenes arc joined together ivith whip pans rather than dissolves.
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Dutch Tilts
Dutch tilts {or 'off-angles*) are shots in which the camera is set up with the sides of the frame skew to the vertical, and; they had first appeared in German, and then in Russian films in the previous decade. They were mostly to be found in montage sequences in mainstream movies, and this continued to be the case in the 'thirties. However in this decade they sometimes escaped from inside montage sequences in the strict sense, and could on very rare occasions be found in scenes of a disturbing nature, or those involving violent action. A few of these rare instances canoe seen in The Painted ■■Veil (iR. Boleslawski, 1934), The Adventures qj Robin Hood (Cui'tiz and Keighley, 1938), and some of Robert Florcy's films made at the end of the decade. Dutch tilts were not much more common in European film a, but in 1937 two Trench films show them: being used at much greater length than anywhere else. Raymond Uernard+s Mar [he Richard - an service de h France has all the more treacherous of the espionage scenes shot with dutch tilts, and Duvivier's Un Corner debut contains a'tang scene done entirely with the camera set skew to the vertical, while at the same time the camera is panned extensively about tiiat vertical axis. Although the scene in question involves a drug-addicted abortionist, none of these tilted shots are FOV shous, they are all objective shots.
Lenses
During the 'thirties lenses with focal lengths from 2* mm. upwards continued to be available, and the usual maximum aperture Ibv standard lenses was around | 3 with one very popular set being the Taylor-Hobson series wth maximum aperture of around a Lenses from Zeiss and Astro with maximum apertures of HQ.SS and K> 9S
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
respectively became available in 1933, but these would certainly have had visibly inferior performance, and it is highly unlikely that they were used for anything but ncwsreď work.
Once into the 'thirties, sets were being designed on the assumption that the Long Shots would be taken with a 40 mm. lens, and this focal length is close to that which more recent research has shown gives the impression of correct perspective when a natural scene is reproduced by projection. For closer shots a SO mm. lens was once more the usual choice, and of course for true Close tips something tike 75 mm. or 100 mm..
In 1932 the Taylor-Hobson 'Varo1 variable local length lens became available, and since this was an improvement over earlier experimental zoom lenses in that only tilt focal length control had to be adjusted while zooming, it had occasional limited use for a few years. The focal length of this lens could be continuously varied between 40 mm. and 120 mm+, and it had a maximum aperture of fS.6. Apart from the rather small maximum aperture, which stilt precluded its use under the standard studio interiér lighting set-ups of the time, the other drawback to ihis lens was that the focus was fixed at the hyper focal distance, and closer objects had to be focussed by putting supplementary lenses in front of the front element. So focus-pulling in the middle of a shot was impossible. More than that, when the aperture setting was altered, the Eens casing, which was a large and heavy oblong metal box about a half the size of the body of a Mitchell camera, had to be opened and the cam system controlling the internal moving elements changed. Shortly a iter the introduction of the Taylor-Hobson zoom lens another similar lens with a zoom range from 40 to 160 mm., but a maximum aperture of only rS1 was announced by Ourhota in the United Slates, but this did not make much impression. Zoom shots made with the Varo lens can be sten in the street scene opening of Love Mc Tonight (Mamoulian, 1932), and aUo in the stag-hunting scene. It was also used in a number of other films at this time on exterior scenes, but alter that these lenses seem to have passed into the care of the special effects departments of the studios, where they were occasionally used to get shots in montage sequences. One such example is in Private Worlds {LaCava, 1935), I táté heard that there was a zoom lens produced in Germany in the middle 'thirties, though I have been unable to gel details, of it. It may have been the Astro Trans locator, which was a supplementary zoom attachment put in Iront ol an ordinary SO mm, lens. There are certainly a few iíoúm shou in German documentaries of the late 'thirties, though I have seen none in fiction films from that country. There are al^ a number of zoom shots in the Italian film Scipiooe Tafrietino (1937), but again I do not know the details.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
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new lenses of any significance were introduced in ike second half oi the decade, but attempts were made to g^i greater effective depth of field by Hal iMohr through the use of a swinging lens mount in the films The Green Pastures ,iiuf RuUets or Ballots in 1936, The arrangement consisted of an urdinary lens set in a special mount that enabled it to be pivoted around a vertical axis di rough its optical centre, The idea was that the zone of sharp focus in front of the krs would be inclined to the camera axis when the lens was inclined to the forward direction, and objects on one side of the frame would be in focus forward of the previous clohest position of sharp focus, while objects on the other
side ol the frame would come into focus at a greater distance than previously. This kind of staggered depth oT flekl is not greatly in evidence in The Green Pusiums, hut it was effeeiiv<* in a number of places in Bullets or Ballots. One of these is illustrated on ihe next page, together with a simflar scene shot with an ordinary lens. The first shut also shows the drawback to the technique. The telephone at the right of the. frame is in focus, as are the actors far in the background at the left, but the actcr in the foreground centre using the phone is out ol locus, because in the centra of the frame the region of sharp focus has to be behind him, in I he middle distance.
ii
\
\ Zont- 'jf \ sharp
\ foeus
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V
i Ordinary leni
-0
230
This problem would not have arisen if the alternativy method of getting different regions of focus on the two sides of the frame had been used. This involves the use of a" splH-Hckl dioptre - a supplementary lens cut down the centre ~ which is placed in front of an ordinary camera lens covering the part of the field where the focus has to be brought forward. So to deal with this particular case the split lens would cover the actor and the telephone, hut not the background action, and all would be sharp. So the use ofthc swinging lens mount was a pointlcssly elaborate technique for securing a result which could otherwise be obtained more simply, and in fact nothing more was heard of it after these two films. The real significance of this attempt is that it shows an interest in a kind of approximation to 'deep focus', prior to Gregg Toland inventing the real thing in the Tonics.
Wide Film Processes
In 1929 there arose a sudden interest in the use of film wider than the standard 35 mm. at sonic ofthc major studios. This may have been a development from ideas of producing larger images on the screen in the previous few years, which had included the Hrst demonstration of Flcnri Chretien's anamorphic process^ and also some American use of wide angle lenses on cinema projectors to produce a bigger screen image from ordinary films. Jn any case, in 1929 Lorenzo del Riccio devised1 a process using 56 mm. film which he called Magnifilm. The only feature shot with this was We're in the No No \y for Pa rampu nr. Fox die v el oped; a pro cc ss ca 11 e d Fox Grandeur using film 70 mm. wide, which was used to film Happy Dap in 1929 and Be Big Trail in 1930. The special cameras for this process, like all the others, were based on the MitchelP mechanism, Other entries were George K. Spoor and: p. John Bcrggren's Natural Vision, a 63 mm. process which was used o\\ Danger lights (1930) lor RKO, anda Warner Bros. 65 míní system used for Kismet (I930J) and rtai:fli!i.(l93,l). The'Fox Grandeur 7ÍJ mm,process was also used on MGM's Billy \hcKiŮ{\ 93G), but in, this case the 35 mm. prints for ordinary distribution were obtained by optical printing from the centre of the wide ima^e.
Finally, when, the whole idea was in the process ofibeing abandoned, the Spoor and'Bcrggren Natural Vision 63 mm. system was used1 by 'Roland West for The Bat: Whispers in 1931. Allof these systems had.image aspect ratios oiaround 1:2; i.e. the image was about twice as wide as it was high, and despite the-fact that alow of them, had iilm widths the same as present-day wide film with its 65 mm, negative and 70 mm. positive, none were exactly compatible with !t. 11ns was because the frame and sprocket hole .positions w.re difierent, not to mention the size and placin, of the sound track. All of the films mentioned, except Wly the Kid
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
were shot simultaneously with ordinary 35 mm. cameras standing beside the wide film cameras, and these 35 mm versions were the ones generally shown when the fil^s were originally released. Only a few showcase theatres were equipped for wide film projection at the time, and the whole idea was not a success at all.
Recently, prints of some of these films have been unearthed, and modem 'Scope or 70 mm, copies have been made from them by optical printing from the originals, ffe wide film version of The Bat Whispers adds nothing to diversion shot on ordinary 35 mm., because the sides of its image are fuzzed out with layers of increasingly heavy black gauging put in front ofthc sides of the frame when the film was originally shot. There seems to be a loss of focus of the picture out towards the sides as well, so that the onlv effective part of the image is restricted to an aspect ratio similar to that of the ordinary Academy aperture, and all the significant action takes place in this area. FJowcver, in the case of The Rig Trail, it seems to me that the wide film Afersion is superior to the ordinary 35 mm, version. This b not because the compositions arc specially well adapted to the wide film ratio most ofthc time, though the final shootout round a giant fallen tree is striking from this point of view, but because the outer edges ofthc wide frame include extra background action in many scenes, and this adds considerably to the liveliness ofthc production.
Background Projection
From 1930 the earlier travelling-matte systems - the Williams and Dunning processes — used for combining live-act ion foreground scenes with moving backgrounds were largely abandoned, and replaced with background projection, In background projection a previously filmed background scene is projected in the studio onto a large translucent screen from behind, while the actors are filmed in from of it to give the combined ima^c directly on the film in the camera. The very first background projection screens were made of ground glass, and they were limited in height to several feet. They were also i nclincd to show a 'hot-spot': that is, the part of the image near their centre photographed brighter than the parts round the edges. Attempts to use other materials to make lar^e screens had other drawbacks, as can be seen in The Dawn Patrol (1930). Here very large screens, presumably made of some thin white cloth, were used in the final scenes showing the bombing of the German iactory. The image of the distant parts of the bombed factory hack-projected onto the screen are partially obscured -with an all-over wash of white, either from the screen material itself, or from flare in the optical system of the projector. The result is a glaringly unconvincing mis-match between the background and the actors on the parts of the set built
in
piiMSTYiEAND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
front of the screen. Earlier in the film, close shots of pilots i„ aeroplanes made in front of smaller background projec-non screens are more satisfactory because the effect is less i j aildi also because one expects aerial naze to wash out die background in the real situation being mimicked in
ttiesc shots.
Itecause of these Haws, background projection was limited to showing things like the passing street through tlie back windows of cars, where small screen size does aotmotter, until the introduction of a new cellulose screen material and redesign of the optics of background projectors in 1932 made satisfactory projection possible on screens a5 big as 17 feet by 23 feet. Flowever these improvements did not reach continental Europe for a decade or more, so background projection continued to be rarely used there, and' when it was, the defects of small screen size and dim edges are very evident.
The n e w p os sibi 1 it i es of ba ckgr o u nd p roje ct io n i n A mer ica after 1932 ca n be stud íed with ad va ntage ín King Kong (1933), in which all the combinations oi animated models with live action were achieved by background projection, often with Lk new large screens, though it would appear that the new fine-grain background negative was not available when the film was shot, It must he emphasized however that in this film some of the combinations of action in different parts i»f the frame were achieved with the older fixed-matte procedures, Also in one or two shots the silhouettes of birds Hying past are made by simple supcrimposition, and in two or three very brief shots the Dunning process was used where its defects would not be too conspicuous,
Travelling Mattes
There were other rare occasions when the Williams and Dunning processes had to be used, and one or two instances of this should he mentioned for anyone wishing to make a comparison. One case is when tiny human figures had to be combined widi giant human figures within one shot, as in Tod "rolling's The Devil Doll (1936), Here one can see the thin writ line (the "minus") surrounding the foreground figures uWh olten results from imperfect travelling matte systems, in George Steven's Suing Time of the same year, one can see 'print through' - the appearance of the background uWgh the foreground figure, which is the other common hull - in the 'Bojanglcs3 sequence.
fa Europe travelling matte shots were often used in prelerence to the local alternative of inferior background Rejection, but both processes tended to suffer irom another ^opean deficiency, the lack of cameras with pin registration ft>r shooting the background plates.The result was that Euro^ process shots almost invariably had jiggling backgrounds, betimes quite badly. In Russia background projection
231
*m to have been completely unavailable, so combination shots were done solely with very inferior travelling matte systems. The background print^through in the process shots in \ctyolye rehyat* (Grigori Alexandres- 1934) and U Saw* stnyevo morya {Boris Barnet, 1936) is so bad mat the shots in question are liulc more than simple superpositions.
Background Projection and Location Filming
As a result of the unavailability of good background projection during the early thirties, many films continued to include sync, sound location dialogue sequences, some of them quite lengthy, whereas after W3 such scenes are very rare, Naturally the point about shooting what purport to he exterior dialogue scenes in front of a B.P. screen is that it gives total control over the environment - lighting, and weather, and background noise, and hence more efficient production. The reduction in background noise was particularly important given the kind of microphones available in the 'thirties.
Optical Printing
As mentioned previously, duplicating negative and positive film with fine grain and low contrast En ess became available al die beginning of die 'Uiirties, and this permitted combinations of shots to be made and copied with little deterioration in quality, which had not been the case before. Series-built optical printers were made and sold by such firms as DePue from 1930, and these the studios set up their own optical printing departments. Immediately such effects as front titles printed over live action started to appear, followed by the frequent use of die wipe as a shot transition from 1932,The first wipes ui this new wave of fashion were straightdine replacement wipes with hard edi^es, but other shapes were tried, and the edge oi the wipe line rapidly became slightly blurred. In the late 'thirties the edges of wipes became even softer, and they <li!l continued to be used mostly to indicate a short time lap™, particularly in sequences of Vast moving action. There was a definite tendency lor wipes to be more common in Warner Brother* films than in dioseirom other studios The ready availability or optical printers also encouraged the proliferation of montage sequences with a faster How of shots than had been usual at the end of ihc twenties, so that the u>uaf montage s^u^ m now a continuous lluw of changing >uperimp<*mon>, rather than a series of very short shots joined by dS**** In Europe optical pruuer, came into u^ in 1W-IHS, but the montage sequent never became as widely u*d as m m United States, possibly because- the studios tended to contract out their film processing, and did not mamta* their own op<ical dlects departments and hence the use ol montage sequent was reJatively more e.pen^c.
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Busby Berkeley and Brain Function
Before Busby Berkeley began producing* is characteristic kaleidoscopic patterns with female bodies arranged to make im^es with several-fold rotational symmetry about tlie centre of the screen, similar overhead shots had already appeared a lew times in such film revues and musicals as The Holl^ood        (1929). But these isolated precursors have little impact when compared with Berkeley's vastly elaborated patterns in such films as Footlighr Parade (1933), in which large numbers of dancers produce wave-like pulsations moving to and from the centre of the pattern by co-ordinated movements of parts of their bodies. Nowadays there is an obvious connection with the design of some ol the abstract avant-garde films produced on the West Coast in the 'sixties like James Whitney's Lapis, which likewise works with patterns streaming and pulsing radially Irom the centre of the screen, but the connection is not just one of surface appearance. Behind the powerful, indeed physiological, visual effect of both sorts of films lies one of the so-far limited instances when the effectiveness of kinetic-visual stimulation in film can be related with some degree of certainty to the organization of nerve-cells in the brain.
The  connection  runs   through   the experimental investigation of the patterns in hallucinatory illusions observed under certain drugs, and also mother abnormal brain conditions such as migraine headaches. 'It is found that die re are a very limited number of basic forms of these patterns in such illusions, and the two that concern us here are those illusions that appear like proceeding down a tunnel whose surface may be regularly patterned, and those that seem like a streaming of light radially away from a central point. Taking into account other results from neurophysiology dealing with the direct stimulation of the visual cortex, it appears that the patterns observed are the result of particular fixed: patterns of connection of the nerve cells hr the part of the brain handling visual: information. (The details of this can be read in Hallucinations: Bcharivr, Experience, and Theory, edited by Siegel and West, John Wiley, 1975). The implication of the above observations Is that because of these particular patterns of neural organisation, tlie brain shows particular sensitivity when presented, with these visual patterns in actuality, as happens in, the films under discussion and also, in, other films including shots tracking down tunnels taken with a wide-angle Icon, when the same kind of weak physiological erreet-can. be experienced. It seems possible that some other elements of film thai work in this direct way m terms of neurophysiology will eventually :|>e uncov-ere<L, hut V expect that most recurring stylistic forms will turn out to be culturally conditioned:
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
Frame Size and Projector Apertures
In 1930 sound films were being photographed at j|| studios using what can be called for convenience the "early sound aperture'. This was created from the full sileni aperture (0.735 inclvby G\9S0 inch) by mask! n^ off the sound track area. This left an almost square frame area of aspect ratio 1:1.15, which corresponded to a projector aperture nf a p prox i m ately 0.6 S 7 i nch by 0. S 2 S i nch. F i 1 m s ph otog raph^d with this aperture have only a thin line between the frames and il the images have also been composed with respect to this aperture, it is quite likely that the heads ol the actors will be cut off if the film is projected with the later standard Academy aperture. However this -early sound aperture1 i5 quite close to the present CinemaScope projector aperture, so the CinemaScope mask can be used in the gate of a projector to show early sound films, if no specially cut mask is available.
In 1930 it was proposed that the sound film aperture should be 0,620 in, by 0.S3S in., and in fact the Fo.\ studios were already composing for this aperture, but most of the others were not. As cinema projectionists were already starting to mask off the picture to something like these dimensions the other studios came around to the same practice, and in 1932 the 'Academy aperture1 of 0.631 in. by 0.368 in. for cameras, and 0,600 in. by O.S25 in. for projectors, was proposed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In fact most films made in 1931 can he satisfactorily projected with the 'Academy aperture', which has an Aspect Ratio of 1:1.33, but the only satisfactory way of deciding which projector mask to use when showing sound films made up to 1931 is to examine a section ofuV film to see where the heads of the actors come to, or even to make a trial projection. Of course this question is irrelevant if a 16 mm. copy is under consideration.
Technical Standards and the Film industry Organizations
The way in which the sound aperture established by the Fox company was later adopted as the industry standard is absolutely typical of the creation of technical standards in the film industry, and for that matter in other highly technical industries in this century. The almost invariable sequence of events is that one company choses a standard for Us own use, and then, either because the company concerned was first in the field, or because it establishes economic superiority, or because the standard is obviously a sensible and practical one, the other companies adopt it as well; Only after this has happened is the standard ratified by an industry body, such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scv ences in the case of the film industry.
to
£1
mm style AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTiES
& brief consideration of the history of the major technical standards for motion pictures is all that is necessary justify this assertion. The 35 mm. width of tlie film and jlentframe size was due to tlie Edison company, the first to (ake satisfactory motion pictures and sell them. The initial <tandard of 16 frames per second lor taking and projection, iinil the two turns per second of the crank handle, were established by the Lumlere company because the first was more economic of film stock, and the second was associated with a more practical camera, which was eventually licensed lorsalc by Pathe.The pitch and dimensions of tlie perforations (n 3S mm, film negative followed die standard set by the Bell S: Howell perforating machine, wliich was much superior to competing machines, and the pitch and dimensions of positive perforations was set by Eastman Kodak, by far the largest manufacture of film stock. The failure of the industry bodies such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers to standardise projection speeds as they increased throughout the early twenties has already been described, and there were a number of similar later failures in their attempts to establish a technical standard before one had been adopted in practice,
Following this, the sound speed of 24 frames per second was established for practical reasons by Warner BrosT, die first company to succeed commercially with sound movies, and then adopted by everyone else, and next there was the business of the sound aperture that I have just described, Important later standards include the CinemaScope frame, squeeze ratio, and special perforations, again introduced by Twentieth Century-Fox, and dien adopted by die rest of the film companies, and so it has gone on.
The only really important function of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers was as a forum for the tlisie m i il ati o n a n< Id iscus s to n o f h igh ly tec bn i ca I i n for m a li o n, particularly from the 'thirties onwards. However, even in this area the activities of the film Industry organizations were often irrelevant. For instance, the technician s branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, together with the American Society of Cinematographers arranged a series of'Mazda tests* at the beginning of 192 S, which were intended to demonstrate bow to use tungsten lighting to film cameramen. But this was after many film cameramen had already found out how to use tungsten JigriLing and panchromatic stock lor themselves, and were already in the process of disseminating this knowledge 10 their immediate associates. Altogether, technical developments would have followed the same course that *cy ^tually did, though perhaps very slightly slower, if he Society of Motion Picture Engineers, the Academy of 'Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the American Society of Cinematographers had not existed. This generalization
233
about the mechanisms of technical change is confirmed by developments more recently in odier highly technical industries in the electronics sector.
Sound Recording
1930 saw the final triumph of sound-on-fiim recording,
and sound^on-disc was phased out. The microphones used for recording continued to be the capacitor type (or Wlenser1 type as they were then called), and two principal models competed for favour. Both had quite a smooth response up to 2000 Hertz, then there was a rise to a resonance peak at 3000 Hem, and after that the response fell away to zero by about 7000 Heru. One model was made by Western Electric, and this had a small diaphragm unit swivelling below a tubular amplifier unit which was about 3 inches in diameter and one foot tall, while In the other model from BCA the amplifier and diaphragm unit were enclosed in one large spherical container several inches in diameter, Both modeIs were suspe 11ded fro m m icrophone booms, essent ia 11y similar to present studio booms, which could be extended while in use, and the boom included a 'favouring device at its end to change the direction the microphone diaphragm was pointing. The column supporting the swinging boom could be mounted on a tripod stand or a small pneumatic-wheeled carriage similar to present unitst MolerPlichardson introduced a series-manufactured boom in 1930.
If Several microphones were being used to record sound for a 5hot, their signals were mixed directly bdore being recorded photographically onto the sound negative in the sound camera. A wax disc recording continued to be made simultaneously ibr instant playback to check the actors' vocal performances, but in the middle 'thirties an acetate disc came to be used instead. The mixing of a set of film sound tracks subsequent to their initial recording to give a final combined re-recording was avoided il al all possible during the first years of the decade, as the extra recording stage "onto sound film produced a just perceptible loss in quality. This meant that, although the post-synchroiiizing of voices to a film scene which had been shot silent could be carried out from 1929, il was mostly not used in the early 'thirties, and location scenes involving dialogue were always shot with direct sound. The point being made here is that it is mostly luo difficult to get both-the voices and the efieU*
in the right place in one pass when post-synchroniiring, and if they are recorded separately you are right back with the
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re-recording losses mentioned previously.
For location recording 'wind-gags1 were already in to prevent wind noise in the microphones, and in some situations ukra-directiona] microphones were created by nut, ing ordinarv .nicrophones a. .he fecus of large parabok Hi L'lecof op to6 feet in dian.ete, In thfcwav ia.rly
234
sorxl recordings could he made iWlh the microphone 15 feet or more from the actors: Since all the microphones in use were omni-directional (that is, they responded to sounds equals whatever direction they came from); background noise pick-up could be a serious problem with location recording and this was one of the pressures encouraging the change to the shooting of exterior dialogue scenes in the studio, as soon as good background projection made this possible.
Dynamic (or 'moving coil') microphones, and also ribbon microphones, had been available from 1931, but they were little used for film purposes, as their performance had serious shortcomings in one way or another. But in 1938 Western Electric produced a new moving-coil microphone, the model 630A, which was small'aiid light in weight (14 oz.), and with a fairly flat response up to 10 k1:Ja. Similar microphones became available from other companies, and they star tedLto displace condenser microphones immediately in Hollywood' Although the response of the Western Elcctr i c 630A (colloquial ly ca lied the 1 baI Ian d^bi scu it') was substantially omnt-directional; it was commonly used with the sound: direction at glancing incidence to the diaphragm, and at 90 degrees to its main axis, as the treble response was slightly higher in this position. Western Electric also introduced an improved smaller eon denser microphone in 193S, and this.had1 a very flat response up to about 9kMis., so dynamic microphones did net take over completely despite their size and'weight advantages.
Around this time there were improvements in the design of ribbon, microphones, particularly the RCA models, but despite their broad flat frequency response they were not particularly suitable for ifilrn recording under most conditions, because of their high sensitivity to mechanical vibrations, such as lihosc .produced by boom-swinging and favouring Nevertheless they were sometimes used on film sets when such movements eould;bc avoided1, as they were only type of microphones with sharply directional *up. Andj the better ribbon 'microphones made their contribution abetter music recording in the late nineteen-thirties
. ■
■
imj>rovejnehts in Sound Recording Systems
In 1930 there had' 'been thice operational American systems of sound^n^ilm recording: the RCA variable area system, and:the Western Electric and Movietone variable density systems. In lEurqpe there was only one really satisfactory system, which was the Vobis variable density system similar -to the Western, Electric, The Western Electric system used a Iigl^välve (variable aperture slit) the signal, and: modulating the amount of hght falhng on the soundtrack area ^expose it, and the
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE TlIjRTm
RCA system used a galvanometer (an oscillating niirror system) likewise controlled by the signal in its deflection so changing the width of the illuminated slit exposing ih? sound-track area. The Movietone system used a fixed lighi-sljt and a variable intensity light (the 'Aeolight') which was modulated in brightness by the signal. During the early 'thirties the Aeolight system was not able to match the technical improvements made in the other systems, and it went out of use.
Throughout the 'thirties there were more or less continuous improvements in the two surviving types of sound-on-film recording system through attention to various aspects of their functioning, such as exposure and development control of the sound track negative, amplifier circuit improvements, mechanical refinements of the sound cameras and printers, and so on. But the really audible advance Jn the quality of recording began in \ 931, and it was largely due to techniques for the suppression of noise in the sotmd track which were introduced almost simultaneously in the RCA and Western Electric systems. By 1933 it was possible to mix a separately recorded music track with the synchronous dialogue track recording after the editing staye without noticeable loss of sound quality from the ex Ira sound film recording stage, and from thts point on 'background music' ('underscore') came to be used more and more extensively, (Up to 1932 there was, roughly speaking, either dialogue or music on the sound track, but hardly ever both together, unless they had been recorded simultaneously.)
'However, right from the beginning of the decade it was clear to the smartest technical people concerned that the RGA system was superior in principle, and by 1935 this was certainly the case in practice as well. A pa it from what can be seen from careful reading of the technical discussions in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, the inferiority of the Western electric process is indicated by examination of original prints of the period. For instance, on the track of The Front Page (1931), the Western Electric track shows a 'biooped' sound cut corresponding to virtually every picture cut in the film, indicating that the original sound negative has been cut, assembled, and printed from directly, rather than being re-recorded to get a join dree track, as was the case for prints with RCA sound from this period. This necessity lor avoiding making fli second generation recording if possible continued to be indicated in tliis way for Western Electric sound prints for some years, although die sound track Joins are no longer as frequent, Even at the end of the decade, it was considered necessary to change from the Western Electric track usual on a Scl/nick film print to an RCA track for the last red of hebecen (19+0), to produce clear reproduction of a loud combination of music, sound effects, and voices.
;fflt\i STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
|n |934 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Tri-Eftfon company's claims for the exclusive patent on the sound smoothing drum at the sound head of recorders and reproducers, and the feeling in the business was that Lhi? would lead to more investment, and hence technical development by the American companies.
Reading the technical reports, the brilliance of the research work at the RCA laboratories at Schenectady is ciuite striking, and amongst many other things they produced a way of adapting RCA recorders to make superior variable density (Western Electric) type sound tracks. RCA a [jo set the standard for recording sound on 16 mm. film with the design of a superior projector for this gauge. This is ycl another example of companies rather than the industry hodies setting the technical standards.
Despite the evident superiority or the RCA system after 193 S, mos t of the stu d ios we re rel uc t a n t to ado pt it for i^cl case prints, though they all licensed it for possible internal use inline earlier stages of production. The reasons given were tliat prints with RCA soundtracks were more susceptible to.deterioration through wear, and that they did not sound so good on inferior theatre sound systems. The first reason had dubious validity, and the second was probably the true onc, (Old people may remember how the best new records often sounded unpleasant on old equipment during the 'hi-IV revolution of the 'fifties.) The important point here is probably that absolute quality in sound did not matter thai i¥iuch to film producers in those days, or they would have shown more interest in getting exhibitors to improve their theatre sound systems.
■flit major improvement in sound recording in the late 'ihirtits was the introduction of 'push-pull' double sound tracks in both systems in 1935. Thi.s technique, which required a limited modification to the photocell system in sound reproducers to get the full benefit from it, was mostly used in the studio recording and mixing and re-recording stages, which could now go through more than one generation of sound track, and so almost any manipulation ff the sound track that was desired could be accomplished. The only place that this made a real impression was in music ^cording, such as the use of the Western Electric version «1 push-pull tracks on M.G.M.'s The Creoi Zieojeld (193S), Multiple-channel music recording and re-recording were used'on the score for One Hundred Men and a Girl
(1933), and
°tWsubsequent films where music quality was important.
European Sounds
As was now becoming usual in film technology, Western European developments in film sound re cording followed one to two years behind those in the United States, and Eastern Europe was one or two years behind that. Sometimes, by
233
means o the intricacies of patent procedures, local equivalents of the major American sound systems found a place and soon the RCA and Western Electric systems were licensed m Europe as well, for those who were prepared to pay for the best, The major difficulties with making synchronised sound films were the necessity For sound-proofed studios and silent cameras, Because these were not always available « the beginning of the sound period in Europe, many films were completely post-synchronised, and this sometimes led to interesting formal features. The inevitable tendency in these cases was to reduce the amount of dialogue as much as possible, and to use background music (underscore) alone to cover as much as possible of the action. So such films tended to be more like silent films, and one aspect of this was that they tended to have large numbers of Insert shots in them, Just as late 'twenties silent films usually did. And these ln^ serts were very frequently used in the metaphorical way so common in late silent films. A readily accessible example of this is Hitchcock's Btad'0$ but other excellent examples, with even less dialogue, can still be found in Eastern Europe in the early 'thirties, such as Machaiy*s Ze avbviy no nedch (1931) and Evf^(l933). In Soviet films of the early 'thirties, which were inevitably totally post-synchronized as well, the quality nf the matching of sound to image was very poor, and a lot of the time the makers did not even bother to try to dub sounds for all the prominent visible sources, as in Protazanov's Tcmmi (1931). The actual quality of Russian sound recording was also poor, and can be exemplified by Mehandr Ncrskii (1938), which was recorded using a Russian imitation of the RCA system. Here the noise reduction bands on the sound track actually cut into the peaks ol the modulation in many places, which inevitably causes terrible distortion in the sound.
: ■
Editing
The basic tool for sound editing had already been introduced at the beginning ol' sound film-making, and this was the multiple synchronizer that has already been described. Originally its purpose had been to keep the several simultaneous picture tracks obtained from multiple-camera filming in synchronism with each other during editing, and hence finally with the sound track dfsc, but by J930 both multiple camera filming and sound-oil-disc were being abandoned. The synchronizer was then used just to manipulate the series of p^s of picture track and sound, ifilrn track, and to keep them in synchronism dunng editing. This simple procedure gave no way of hearing the „,rds on the soundtrack, and so was not much hep m editing scenes broken down into a large number ol shot. But in 1930 the sound Moviola became ^ ^m
1931 the Average Shoi Lengths in Molly wood films started
236
to drop. The sound Moviola was a simple adaptation of the silent Moviola, with an intermittently turning .sprocket drive polling the soundtrack Him under a photoelectr.c sound head identical to that in a sound projector, the whole unit being mounted beside the standard Moviola picture head, ancUlriven from it in synchronism by a rigid shaft drive. Basically the machine was the same as the present-day Hollywood' Moviola, except that the picture was viewed through a magnifying lens, and not back-projected onto a tiny screen- The soundtrack could be moved slowly by hand under the sound headvand the exact position of any part Ol
a sound identified.
The other development that facilitated the fast cutting (in both senses) of sync, sound shots occurred in 1932, with the introduction of 'rubber numbering' or fcode numbering' for sound and picture tracks. 'Rubber numbers' are numbers stamped in ink down the outer edge of the picture and soundtrack for each shot, and they increase serially for each fool of die film thai passes. The numbers coincide on the soundtrack and picture track at the points wheTC die corresponding image and its sound lie. After rubber numbering has been carried1 out it is possible to shuffle about sections of picture and soundtrack longer than one foot inihe editing process with perfect freedom, secure in the knowledge that synchronism can be regained when necessary by using the numbers,
Asa resu 11 of the freed om provídedby t hese de vel opments T the Average Shot Length in the films of this,period started to decrease in a way that can be exemplified by the work of William- Wellnian, for The Puhik Enemy (1931) has an ASL of 9 seconds, while Wild Hoys of the Road (1933) has an ASL of 6.5 seconds, and Well man stayed remarkably close to the latter figure for the rest of his career. Particular advantage of the possibility ol"speeding up the cutting rate was taken at the Warner Bros, studio, and this effect can also be seen in MichaefcCurtrAfilms..But the pressurewasnotabsolute, as can be seen fronuhe work of Mcrvyn Lc Roy, who stayed with a slower speed:, in Tugboat Annie (1933) and later 'films, of about 9 seconds, combined with, some use of camera movement. (It is obviously difficult, though not impossible, to use camera movement in a. large number of shots when the ASL gets down around 6 seconds,) The other extreme ©faulting speed, which was much more common in 1930 ian 1933, can be represented-by John StaM's Only Yesterday 1953), which has an ASL of 14 seconds;
U was only in tlie middle of the nineteen-thirties that the technological developments in editing which I have described hadiheiriulHeffeet. Por a sample of 261 American sound films made during the years J92S to 1933 inclusive the mean Average Shot Lengthy 10.0 seconds, while for a lairlyrandom selection.of 336 American ninis made in the
tl
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
years 1934-1939 the mean of their ASLs has decreased to S.6 seconds. This change is demonstated graphically by the accompanying histograms for the distributions of AvCragc Shot Lengths in the two cases. Although this is still not quite a large enough number of results to make a really accurate year by year estimate of the changes in the mean figure, it appears that a minimum was achieved around 1937. This means that although there was a wide spread ih the characteristic Average Shot Length used from director to director, most directors were taking some advantage of the ease of making a larger number of cuts within a scene in the middle 'thirties. But by 1939 a new tendency Lowardsa move in the opposite direction was just beginning to appear-a tendency towards the use of long takes that only became fully developed in the 'forties.
To give some examples, George Cukor moved from ASLs such as 17 seconds for Dinner at Eight (1933) to an ASL of 10.6 seconds in 1935 for Sykia Scarktti and then hack to Jong takes for Holiday (193S) with an ASL of 14seconds and The Women (1939) with an ASL of t3 seconds, and similarly for subsequent films. Obviously this sort of movement with the trend was common (e.g. Wyler, Hawks) or the trend would not exist, but there were also a certain number of directors who stayed with what they were doing at thy fast-cutting end of the spectrum. For example, Curtiz had already arrived at an ASL of around 7 seconds in the early 'thirties, and he continued right through the later 'thirties and early 'forties in the same way, with such films as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) with an ASL of 7.5 sec. and Dodge Cky (1939) with an ASL of 6 sec.
On the other hand, it was possible for just one or two directors to go against the tide without affecting the general trend, as John StahJ quite remarkably did. From an ASL of 13 seconds in Imitation oj Life in 1934 he went on to use even longer takes in Magnificent Obsession (1935), which lias many shots minutes long, and an ASL of 25 seconds. Even more distinctively, Stahl staged most of these long lakes in 'profile two-shot', and he did not use much staging in depth, as European directors who used long takes tended to do, to a greater or lesser extent. Though none of these other film-makers went to such lengths as StahJ did. However by 1939 Stahl had retreated from this extreme position, with l-Kjhcn Tomorrow Comes having an ASL of 14 seconds, and by the 'forties he was working near the norm for those years.
It might be thought that the Average Shot Lengths are related to the genre of the films concerned, and are not specific to the directors, but this is only true to an extremely limited extent. The most important case so far discovered after checking more than 2,500 films is that of the musical, where if one includes the musical numbers in the count there is a definite tendency for a director to use
I
1
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIKTIES
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American Sound 192S-33
Mean ASL =? 3 0.0 sec.
21
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European Sound 1928-33
Mean ASL =10.1 sec
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77
Mean ASL ± S.6 see.
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French 1934-39
Mean ASL - 12.6 sec.
100
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British 1934-39
Mean ASL — S.S sec.
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Number of Films with stated Average Shot Length for samples of American and Ruopca.n Films, as indicated
longer takes than he would otherwise. This conclusion is of course dependent on the assumption that the way the musical numbers were shot was controlled by the named director^ which was probably not always the case. And it is quite possible to make musicals which are fast cut throughout, as has been demonstrated in the last two decades. Another rare instance of the ^enre of the film dominating the way it was shot is given by the Tartan films. Here the necessity of faking all the animal stuff ensured that the ASL was always close to 4 seconds from the 'thirties through to die "fifties, regardless of who directed the films. Regular larzan directors such as Richard Thorpe never used such fast cutting in their later non-Tarzan films.
Another possibility that might occur to the reader is that the practices of individual film editors, and indeed of studio editing departments, might have some influence on the Average Shot Length of particular films. In the 'thirties
it was claimed by technicians that the cutting was fast at Warner Brothers, and siow at M.C.M., and on the basis of the figures collected so far there seems to he some truth in this, though for the later 'thirties only. However, if we remember that the Tarzan films just mentioned were made at M,G,M., and also note that although there were no contract directors who went in for long lakes at Warner Brothers, there were sometimes visitors such as Howard Hawks ant I William Wyler who made films tending in that direction, then we can see that ihe distinction was not absolute, but once more merely a tendency. Howard Hawi$ Oiling Aero of 1936 made at Warners has an ASL of 12 seconds, and Wvler's The letter (1939) has an ASL of IS seconds, despite their being edited by regular Warners editors, William Holmes and George Amy respectively. These editorv did not impose on these two films the kind of cutting rates they used in their regular work for Michael Curtiz ajid 0*1*1*
23$
Ir, fact at this period. Curtis fiW «^ «n ASL of 6 to 7 seconds consist^ and Mer-vyn Le ffiayls an ASL ol 9 seconds, even, though they were not all cut by the same editors, and indeed some Warners editor* worked on Rims by both directors. Of the other Warners directory Enright and .Keighley worked with ASLs orS to ^seconds, and Mayo and Goulding with 9 to 10 seconds. This last value was as hiab as Warner contract directors went in the 'thirties, but wlien the long take trend really got .under way later in the next decade some of the Warner Brothers directors both new and old moved.with it to sonic extent
On the other hand one finds consistency of Average Shot Length from comedies to dramas to action subjects in the work of directors such as Hawks and Wylcr and others, wherever they happened to be working.
European Sec tic Dissection
The adoption of American methods of scene dissection that had taken place in the European cinema in the late "twenties was preserved after the transition to sound, but there were still some general difference in this respect between the films from the two areas. Again, this can be readily seen from the accompanying histogram showing the di st ri bu dons ol numbers; of sound films with different ASLs made in Europe in general from J92S to 1933 inclusive, and comparing them with that for American filnas of the same periods It is important to point out that the sample includes a certain number of films in which most of the scenes were shot wild, and then post-synchronized, usually in an approximate sort of way. In these cases the director* usually took advantage of this to .use si lent-style fast cutting odideal, and: it is these films whiclv are ■represented by figures down, to 2 seconds in the bottom end of the range. These were films Me Dearth (23 sec.) and: Nicmandsland v+-5secT)-
Thefc-wisnaspceding up of the eutting;nite inihe Jaiiter pari pf the decide on. the continent cif Europe unlike the ease in America, as caivhesecnhycqmparing the illustrated' rfistributions. llihc mean ASL Tor the 193+-J9 period: for films made "on, the epiitinent of Europe 0..c. excluding British films), is iLOiJ-seconds Tor a 172 film, sample, and. in particular, for 64 French films made in this period there areoniy 4 with A$Ls0f6ind 7 seconds. The mean, value for this coHcclioiKorFreneh'films was 12:6.seconds. T3hc French fondness Tor long wlteS.waS.aolual]y lnerea5ingft,om th(,.fir^ few years ofsound. TheCerman nation was fair-ly similar TPN* emphasis,on.fast cutting,™ 5(LV due to the activity df Lute Trenclier. The ASLs in his. films were insistently very       49. SjS SCGOnd|ii Smikrf .i[uations
FILM STYLE ANf) TECHNOLOGY IN THE TimTiUs
On the other hand, the British sample gives a mean value for the Average Shot Length over the 1933 to 1939 period of
seconds, which is very close to the value for American films of the same period.
On the Continent revei se-angle cutting was now used fairly freely, hut the amounts used were several percem below typical American values> with most commonly something around 20-25% of the shot transitions beiru reverse-angle cuts.
E
The Shock Cut
The shock cut3, which is a cut to a different scene accompanied by a sharp discontinuity in the accompanying sound — say from near silence to loud music — seems to have been invented by Alfred Hitchcock, In his Blackmail of 1929 there is a scene in wdiich the guilty murderess h surprised by noticing the slumped body of a dead-beat in a doorway. A woman's scream on the soundtrack then instantly accompanies a cut to the body of her muruVr victim elsewhere, and the next shot reveals that the scream !has been emitted by another woman discovering the body Hitchcock worked a variant on this transition in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), in which the shock cut was from a woman about to scream on discovering a body, to a shot of a steam train accompanied by a loud whistle on the soundtrack at the cut. In both these cases the cuts can be understood as lining cuts to .parallel action, with the second scene taking place at the same time as the first, but in the * forties, following on from the example of Cifizen Kane (19+1), there are also a few examples of shock cuts that arc also jump cuts, in which =thc itransition is to a scene taking place not only elsewhere, but also much 'later. Although extremely rare, and always restricted: to one example per film, shock cuts arc more likely to be found in British films than anywhere else in the years prior to the nineteen-fifties, I have never seen one in an American film of the '.thirties.
Tlic Life and Times of the Jump Cut - Part h
The origin of the jump cut as an intentional special form of transition used in sound films is obscure. It is quite possible that it worked its way out of early musicals, where it was less conspicuous because supported by a continuous music track, into ordinary dramatic films. For instance, in Hallelujah (1929), as the hero makes his way home from prison, he is shown in a series of shots singing and playing a song on the banjo while sitting on top of a train, and then on the back of a wagon, and then walking, with musie continuity across a scries of jump cuts that move hitn Irora one mode of transportation to the next. This is the weakest or softest form of the jump cut, in which the transitions not only from one place and time to a different and later
1
WLMSmEAm TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
and'time, but there is also continuity on the sound uack The most noticeable or hardest form or the jump cut, in which there is a transition with a straight cut to a later Lime in the same location, was unknown in this period. In tlic case ol "jump cuts in ordinary non-musical scenes, which arc only found in European films in the 'thirties and the 'forties, the transition was always prepared and softened wiili: dialogue in the scene being left. For example, in la (wcestjini made by Robert Siodmak in 1934, a scene ends with one actor saying to other actors gathered around him something along the lines of: 'There's a piano in the shop round the corner, let's have a look at it tomorrow.', and ihcn there is a cut to a shot of the same group looking at llic piano in the shop the next day. Other directors besides Siodmak who were inclined to use the jump cut incltided Matf Ophuls in his mid-thirties films such as Komcdie om Geld (1935), Alessandro 131 a sett I in Vecchia guard ia (1935) and ho time di faro (1941), and many German directors such as Karl Ritter in Capriccio (1938) etc. As with shock cuts, the standard quota of jump cuts was one or two per film, and no more.
Communist Cul-Ups
The fashion in Russian films made at the end of the 'twenties for including sections of very fast cutting indeed at climaxes, with shots a few frames long being cyclically repeated, lasted into the beginning of the ninetcen-thirties, and into some of the early Russian sound films. This device can be seen in Pudovkin's Dexenir (1933), for instance, where it is also combined with the kind of disjunctive use of sound recommended by Pudovkin and Eiscnstein in their theoretical writings of some years before. This was something Eiseristein himself never tried, and after this film nobody else did in dramatic films either. Dramrr also shows that Pudovkin had no idea about how to ^et someone out ol a shot on one side of a room into a shot on the other side when shooting sound, and like his other sound films confirms that he had always been a small talent doing his honest best to compete with the big talents of the Russian cinema,
The Dialogue Cutting Point
At the beginning of the 'thirties editors were starting to frilimhe.importance of what might be called the 'dialogue ^f'ng point1 for making soft (i.e. smooth, unnoticeable) ^ts Hen cutting from one speaker to another in a scene, h general the least noticeable cut from a speaker in one -hot, to his listener who is about to reply in the nc*t shot, ^itlbc made while the last syllable of the last word from the ft™ speaker is still being spoken. Actually, rno*t editors cut f the very end of the last syllable, which is almost equally acceptable, but virtually none cut in the middle of the pause
239
between the two speeches, or just at the beginning of the ^pty. OF course deviations from this point can be made for reasons of emphasis and expression in general, most notably by cutting to a listener's reaction in the middle of a speech but even there you will find that the cut in the picture usually falls on the last syllable ofasentence. Curiously enough this principle has never been written down in books on editing technique, so presumably it is passed on to apprentice assistants at the editor1* knee, but in any case it should be immediately obvious to any would-be editor from watching a couple of films.
Some uncertainty about this point is still visible in some films from the first years of the decade, for instance Frank Capras Platinum Monde (193!), but by 1933 the principle seems to have been fairly well established in the editing of American films. The only later instances of bad dialogue cutting that 1 have particularly noticed are in the dialogue scenes o! Asia ire-Rogers musicals made by Mark Sand rich atR.K.CL.
Narrative Construction
The early 'thirties was a period when some of the brightest spirits were still very active in trying out new devices for narrative construction in the mainstream sound cinema, and most of the instances are well known. Nevertheless lor completeness sake \ should mention such features that depend on the use ol a soundtrack as the internal monologue in Hitchcock's Murder (1930), die visual illustrations supplied to speeches which continue on the sound track only in Fritz Lang's M (1931 J, and the subjective camera sequence opening MamouMan's />, jehyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). The narration of The Power and the Gory (William K, Howard, f933j through a scries oi' flashbacks in non-chronological order is also fairly well-known now, though the most daring feature for a dramatic film in The Power and the Glory is the flashback in which the narrator's voice quotes the remembered dialogue used -in that occasion, and his words are made to coincide with the lip movements of the figures in the past apparently speaking them. The cinema audience is once more directly addressed by the principal character at the end of the Him Lucky % (Alan Crosland, 19*0), but then the camera pulls back to reveal that what had seemed an ordinary film up to that point was in fad taking place on a theatre stage in front Lf an audience. There are also a number of asides to the audience in Lubitsch's The Smihng Idc^O™)^ fcjj j/t* ftn# (mil though we must remember that such liberie- -th the conventions have always een tak.n h comedies, and now this liberty was extended to musical The Czechoslovak cinema pushed slightly away rum the ZZwilh Vladislav Vaneura's M \'^ ^ ®
- -.
í/unfini mane (1933). The former is notable for its narrative construction in terms of scenes written as autonomous blocks* without the standard causal lead from events at the end of one scene to those at the beginning of the next scene. Thus the relevance of most scenes only becomes apparent later in the film. This method could'he seen as an anticipation of Jean-Luc Godards methods in the nineteen-sixtics. This feature is less important in Na sluneei stranc, which puts more emphasis on apparently non-functional camera movement and extreme high angles on scenes. It seems that this film also hada good deal of theorising behind the costuming and performances of the actors, but the effectiveness of this for the unprepared spectator is doubtful.
The later nineteen-thirties were thc cinemas most restricted and restrictive period, and although as already indicated the characteristics of films continued to occupy a large range in most of the major formal dimensions of the medium, there was very little indeed :going on at the innovative extremes. Even documentary films, which had to a certain extent taken the place of the now non-existent
■ .
i «
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mm ifti #1 TECHNOLOGY IN THE THIRTIES
avant-garde, were rather timid in the main, and one cannot point to much more in them than the rhythmic sound-and-poetry tracks of Cavalcanti s Coal Eace (1935) and its successors, and the pecu liar!ties of Dziga Vcrtov's Tri puni o Lcnirtye (1934), In feature films Dovshenko's Acrograii (193S), with its interjected choral songs illustrated on the picture track springs to mind, but otherwise one is left with vcrv little else except the innovative games played with the medium in some of Sacha Guitry's films such as Roman d'un tncheiiT (1936)-
Overall one can characterize the trend in the early 'thirties in mainstream cinema as an attempt to return to the main features of the last silent films, 1928 vintage, as soon as thc various technological constraints on putting a film together were relieved. Having reached this point about 1937, new technological developments began to have some effect on film photography, and at thc end of thc decade a new trend towards longer takes was just starting to emerge independently of any technological pressures, a trend that was to flourish in the nineteen-forties,
16. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES
PART 2
e
f;f we want to establish the existence of an individual sty I !in the work of a director, it is necessary to compare not only a sufficient number of his films with each other, but alsOj and this has always been forgotten until I pointed it out, to compare his films with films of similar genre made by other directors in the same period. This Utter procedure is necessary so as to avoid describing as characteristic of a film-makers work those features which are in fact shared with thc work of other film-makers. For every period an even more absolute norm is needed as well, to give a standard of comparison that reflects the general technical and other pressures acting on the work of all film-makers at thai time and place, And ideally that, requires thc analysis of a large number of films, both good and bad, chosen completely at random, Choosing one or two films to try to establish thc stylistic norm for a period is close to useless. In parenthesis, I might add that this comparative approach should be applied to the discussion of the singularities of conUnt in a director's work, as well as those of form, If
over-
this were done it would eliminate a lot of the wild interpretation of films that still continues to be produced.
The nine and a half thousand values of Average Shot Length that 1 have so far collected go some way towards meeting these requirements, but though my collection contains a certain number of rather poor films, the many truly bad films that have been made are under-represented. About half as many films have been checked for percentages of reverse-angles, but so far I have not collected much more than two hundred and fifty Scale of Shot distributions. Nevertheless, I think that even that number allows manv interesting and important conclusions to be drawn with a fair degree of certainty.
If you examine the further collection of Scale ol Shot distributions for a number of sound films that are printed here, you can see that some groups of them have a strong family resemblance - they are more like each other than they are like any of the other films. This applies particularly to the films made by Jean Renoir - h Chieune (1931), foudu
Underworld (1927)
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statistical stylu analysis of motion pictures - pakt2
saw dcs m (1932), 1™ Unc Pdnic Jt' ™mmnC
(1936}, and U Regit dujcu (1939), and also to the many Ophuls films dealt with in the appendix. The group of von Sternberg (Tims whose Scale of Shot distributions are illustrated in Chapter 12 and also here, and which span the transition to sound arc even more alike with respect to this stylistic dimension, and give an indication of the degree of stylistic continuity there can be across the change from silent cinema to sound,
However, there does tend to be a change in Scale of Shot distribution for most directors between the early sound period, say up to 19327 and the later part of the 'thirties, as the technical pressures against close shooting are removed The way that the work of directors can change over their working life, with their output breaking down into periods in which they shoot films in slightly different ways, Is illustrated by a groups of FriU Lang and Alfred Hitchcock films. In the case of Lang, there is a clear transition from li 15
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jAmTlCAl style analysis of motion pictures - part 2
243
European films, ^ *sfe e™Ph*sis going increasingly Up lo Long Shot, and his American films, which move over to much more emphasis on closer shots, and in particular the middle range of shot closeness. For Hitchcock1 films, there is also a move towards closer shooting when he went to Hollywood, hut it is much less marked, as his English films of the thirties were already moving towards closer shooting, When such changes happen more or less simultaneously in the style of a number of directors, they give rise to the large
scale stylistic trend, which this book is mostly concerned with discovering and analysing. One such trend hinted at by the Scale of Shot distributions for k (Clarence Badger, 1927), Flesh Qnd the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926), and a number of other silent films not illustrated. In these films the bulk of the shots are from Medium Shot or closer, with the strongest emphasis on the Close Up, and an increasing number of American directors were coming to shoot their films in this way at the end of the 'twenties.
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STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - pARl
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fflmmAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 2
245
■Blackmail < 1929)
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Another of the interesting points that emerges is the persistence of the weakened form of the early Medium Shot style, particularly in a number of European films. This was about as close in as European lilm-makcrs shot films; anything like the insistent close filming of OjHuman BonJogc (John Cromwell, 1934), The Down Patrol (Edmund Goulding, 1933} and Back Street (Robert Stevenson, 1941) was unknown on the Continent. Another curiosity is the persistence of tht D.W. Griffith type of Scale of Shot distribution in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1938).
One of the simple ways of demonstrating sylistic differences between film directors is illustrated in the bar chart to the right. The grey shaded portions across the upper part of the columns representing each scale of shot sbiv the variation in these quantities across the films Josef von- Sternberg made in the 'thirties. These are Morocco, Otihonored. Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, An American Ttapdy, The Scarlet Empress, The Devil is a Woman, and Sergeant the Scale of Shot graphs for the Sternberg filmsnot illustrated on page 2+1 can be seen in Moving into Pictures, 45 can that for Paul Conner's Catherine the Great (1934), vduchlwill use for comparison. This is on eactly the same object as Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, and was made *nost simultaneously to it. The Scale of Shot distribution for Catherine rhe Great is represented by the small squares
with a cross on theirs and it is immediately obvious that they nearly all fall well outside the range occupied by die Scales of Shot for the Sternberg films, So in this respect it is stylistically very different to the Sternberg films. Other ways-of making more accurate comparisons between groups of films in this respect can be read in Chapter 24 of this book.
The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed that a few films by different directors also have a close resemblance to each other with respect to Scale of Shot, but in tk'se infrequent cases one always finds that the films are fairly sharply distinguished by other stylistic parameters. For
150
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246
statistical style analysis of motion pictures - Parj
2
■
	Pan	Tilt	Pan with Tilt Track	Track with Pan Crane
Thomas Graals bästa Film	-1	0		0 o
Thc Hircd Man	i	f	it i	0 0
£rolikon	0	0	0 0	1 0
Hällelujah	3	0	1 3 ■	3 0
■ The Public Enemv .. : J	36	3	3 36	is o
Kameradschaft	i	25	T2 76	51 o
le Million		4	2 2	0 2
]a Chienne	45	9	3 44	n o
ßoudti sauve des eaux	30	%	0 7	7 0
Ton]	4S	s	8 23	25 0
Pardc de Campagne	S8	12	Ö 23	21 0
Sylvia Scarlett	22	4	0 IS	11 0
His Gir-1 Fridav	82	G	0 20	9 0
TheiiigSleep	77	3	1 36	64 0
The Front Page	Oi	0	6 39	6S 0
instance, the Scale of Shot distributions for The Public Enemy (William Wellinan, 1931), and1 k Million (Rene Clair, 193U) are very similar indeed, but we find that thc former uses vastly more camera movement when we look at the tabulations of camera movement above. ■
Camera Movement
The fashion for the use df extensive camera movement that arose in the late 'twenties and continued across into the sound1 period suggests the possibility of making stylistic distinctions in terms of the number of shots with different earner amovemcnts, si nee n ot al li d ire eto r s s ubscr i b edequ ally to this fashion. So the number-of shots with,panning, tilting, and tracking movements per 500 shots Were found for a number of films, taking the movements as they occurred both separately and in their combined Forms as well. A category containing shots involving the use of a camera crane was also used. It should be noted that where small pans and tilts were made merely:to keep the actors nicely framed, which was an automatic actionby camera operators from the end of the 'twenties onwards, then the shots were classed as static, as were those in' which the camera was fixed relative to the actors While the background behind them moved: e.g. an actor filmed: in a car. Incidentally, real camera.movements are only made when authorised by the director, and further than that they are nearly always called for by him rather than anybody else, so 1 hope that one day we wittsee the end to the practice of film reviewers
referring to such and such a cameraman's '..fluid and intricate camera movements,,' hi any case, once a director has decided on a tracking shot, thc execution of it is usually supervised by the camera operator rather than the lighting cameraman (Le. Director of Photography), at any rate in England and America.
Camera movements do not seem, on the evidence available solar, to be so characteristic of a director's work as Scale of Shot, but there is still a fair amount of resemblance between Renoir's films in this respect; however the large number of tracking shots in la Chicnne must be noted, and the small number (for Renoir) in flouJu. This is undoubtedly intentional, and must relate to Renoir's statement with regard to the style of his films that he did different things in each of them; a statement that is somewhat surprising at. first sight.
hits Ghi Friday has been included in the analyses because chance presented the opportunity of comparing it with The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931), and so checking an assertion made by Andrew Sams about the two films. He wrote on page $9 of The Primal Screen (Simon and Schuster, 1973) about Mis Girl Friday: '...Hawksian Fluidity of camera movement and. invisibility of editing was actuaJly faster than Lewis Milestone's classical montage in The Front Page. Now, The From Page when analysed has a far greater number of.tracks of both kinds than the Hawks film; objectively i* has far greater fluidity of camera movement. The Average Shot Length of both movies is the same, but the Milestone
sT0!st<ical style analysis of motion pictures - part 2
and th
247
:
film achieves lihis by having a larger number of very short
shotSi aM1 also a ^FSer nuTTlt,cr of VCI7 ,orig shots, and this is certainly a very idiosyncratic feature, and hence m 'classical' as 1 shall show below. As far as Scale of Shot distributions are concerned, the difference between the two films, though real, is not very large, and in any case it Is by no means clear what "classical1 might mean in this context- The cutting in The From Page is standard continuity cutting, just as it is in Mis Girl Friday, but I do admit that there is a further idiosyncrasy in Milestone's film, which it shares with others he made around this date, and that is ihc inclusion of strings of fast cut Close Ups at two or three points in the film. However these only make up a minor part of the total length. His Girl Friday is not free of patches of fast cutting either, and the sequence of violent action after the escape of Earl Williams is shot and edited in a very similar way in both films.
Actually the effect of greater speed in His Girl Friday is largely due to the fact that the actors in that film move around a great deal, and indulge in a lot of 'business' as ihcy deliver their lines, and also because they speak them faster. In other words, the speed was already in the scene filmed, and not in the way it was put on film, Andrew Sarris can sometimes be a perceptive commentator on the visual style of films, as can be seen from his comment that Well man's \^images tend to recede from the foreground to the background,./, which is illustrated by the Scale ol Shot distribution here for The Public Enemy, but the indulgence of his prejudices and his reliance on screenings alone can lead him to make serious mistakes, despite his worthy attempts to use a comparative method,
1 find that even after a lot of experience with the methods of analysis 1 am using here, I am still often unable to anticipate exactly how the statistical results will come out after one viewing of a film, and 1 am still being surprised by the large scale trends that emerge. I also find that further incidental benefits are gained from my approach to film style analysis, in the way that all sorts of detailed points about him construction emerge while I am actually analysing a film on a viewing machine. To give just one example, when comparing Boudu and le Million, which are both pretty much static camera films, I became aware that without sound le Million is a rather boring film to watch, but the other two are not. The statistical results partly indicate why this is
it is because Renoir and Vidor get the camera closer to lnt actors. But the points that only become apparent on the ^ach are that in cross-cutting between parallel actions, Renoir cuts while the actors are still moving, rather than between points of repose, and also that in & Million there are * number of unnecessary cuts: sbois that could have been continued from the chosen camera position are cut short,
e scene continued with only a small change in camera position, such a change being too small to add L dynamic impulse to the film. '
Patterns in Shot Lengths
In my search for variables that might characterize different films back in the seventies, I initially looked at the shot lengths in a number of films. I had expected that the numbers of shots of different lengths in a film would gwe a distribution that would differ markedly in shape from one film to thc next, in much the same kind of way that the Scale of Shot distributions differ. After obtaining more than twenty of these shot length distributions, for both sound and silent films, I was surprised to discover that films with roughly the same Average Shot Length have roughly the same shot length distributions, no matter who made them, and further than that, the distributions all had the same general kind of shape, as you can see illustrated on the next page for The Adventures of Robin Hood and Unt Femrne Mariec. For thc further investigation of the nature of these shot length distributions [ was fortunate to have the advice and help of Laurence Baxter and Valerie Isham, and VVai Ling Chan made a numerical study of some of these distributions under thc supervision of Dr. Isham. A couple of decades later, I re-analysed this work, and as a result oi 3ll this, I have drawn the following conclusions.
For those films having Average Shot Lengths up to about 20seconds or a little beyond, (which Includes the vast bulk of ordinary commercial movies), the distribution of numbers of shots with different lengths conforms at least approximately, and very well for films with a short ASL, to a standard statistical distribution, thc Lognormal distribution. This distribution is found to apply to many varied phenomena, one example of which is the numbers of insurance claims for different amounts of money as a result of damage to motor cars in accidents. But more interestingly, it has also been found to apply in literary statistics, and amongst other things, the numbers of sentences of various given lengths in a stretch of prose conforms to the Lognorroal distribution. Theoretically, the Lognormal distribution results when the quantity under consideration, in our case shot length, is determined as a result of thc probabi I files associated with a large number of factors being multiplied together, fn films, what is presumably concerned in determining the length of a shot is the simultaneous interaction of such factors in the scene being filmed as; how the actor moves in me shot with respect to the closeness of the camera, what lines he speab and how the other actors read, and so on. I hough there i< no way of being certain about this at the moment. Pc, those much rarer films with a very high Average Shot J enPth of around 20 seconds or more, ihc shape oi the
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - m&£
250 i
The Adventures of Robin Hood (l 93S)
200 -
150 -
100 ■
50 -
"Actual Values Theoretical Values
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 b 9 101 > 1213'14 1$ 1617 18.192021 22232425 26272S293031 3233343536373B39-10414243444546474849S0
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Actual Values Theoretical Values
Number of shots With lengths (fa. 16 mm. feet)
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STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES . PART 2
249
asstrEbution of shot lengths frequently does not fit any statistical distribution very well.The standard form of the Lognormal distribution is described by the equation for its probability density function f(x), which, for any shot of a particular length .* is given by:
MP
Cfexp{
- [log (x/m)] 2d2
tvhereCT is the shape factor, and m is the median value of lhe distribution,
j(x) multiplied: by the number of shots in the film is plotted on the graph above as a continuous line using the values of the median (the scale parameter) and the shape factor, which is the standard deviation of the logarithm of the shot lengths, both obtained from the actual values of the shot Ibngtlis for this film. You can see that it corresponds verv closely to the actual values. There is a standard method of giving a value to the accuracy of fit between two sets of quantities; in this case the observed and theoretical values forthe shot lengths, the latter assuming that the distribution is lognorrnal. It is called the correlation coefficient, and is best used: with its value squared, written R^, for comparison purposes. If the correspondence was perfect, its value would be I, but in this case it is 0.956, which is still very good as these things go.
For about 80% of sound feature films, the shape factor Pis in the range 0.8 and lp though in theory it could be anything in the range from zero to infinity. The practical resiilt of all this is that, given the Average Shot Length of a film, one can tell roughly how many shots there will be of any given length in it. For instance, if the ASL of a film is 6 seconds, 90 % of its shots will be shorter than 12 seconds, and it is unlikely that any of them will be longer than 30 seconds. On the other hand, if the ASL of a film is 21 seconds, only about 40 % of its shots will be shorter than 12 seconds, and 12 % of its shots will be longer than 30 seconds. And so on.
if we look at the actual lengths of shots as they appear in succession in any particular film, it can be seen that there '5 a tendency for shorter shots to be grouped together in continuous strings that roughly correspond to scenes and sequences in the film, and the same is true to some extent for the longer shots. To put it another way, there is a fairly h'gh probability that a short shot will be followed by another SW shot, and a moderately high probability that a long shot will be followed by another long shot. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this, since it just corresponds to the fairly obvious observation that scenes that are meant to1be exciting in one way or another tend to be cut up into a lot of shots, and neutral or romantic scenes are not. There
,! ^ ™< ^ ^he tendency 0 one shot to be followed by another of roughly the samc m m
* called the autocorrelation coefficient of lag L When this » ^mputed it confirms what is visible to the eye, which » that there are a few films which do not conform to the general pattern I have just described of the way the lengths of shots follow one another in most films. In some of Jean-Luc Godard's films the lengths of successive shots are truly distributed at random (within the constraints of the Lognormal distribution), and there is no such expressive organization of their length in relation to the narrative.
To conclude for the moment the discussion of patterns in shot length, I will add that in all films one occasionally sees pairs Or triplets of successive shots that have roughly the same length, but in sound films at least there are no signs of any really tight metrical patterns.
The Question of Accuracy
The accuracy with which the various parameters I have introduced characterize the work of particular film-makers can be estimated from the results that I have presented themselves, and it is clear that as far as Average Shot Length and Scale of Shot distributions are concerned, differences in quantities have to be well above 10% to be significant for style considerations, and those differences which are below 10% arc not* Percentages of reverse-angle cuts and amount of camera movement show wider variations. This means that in the quotation of Average Shot Length, for instance, it is quite sufficient to give it to the nearest second for values over 10 seconds, and to the nearest tenth of a second below that. However, for ASLs below 2 seconds, it is necessary to quote it to 2 decimal places to make accurate comparisons
between films.
A related point concerns the estimation of these quantities by sampling sections of a film rather than taking its whole length. In the case of a 16 mm. print of k Million, for instance, the first 1000 feet gives an ASLof 5.19 feet, the next 1000 feet an ASLof 5.47 feet, and the remaining 396 feet an ASL of 5.26 feet, all of which stands against an ASL for the whole film of S.3I feet. Here the deviation of the Average Shot Length from the .parts, each about 27 minutes long, to the whole is only a few percent, and this typical of many films, in my experience. However this is no longer the case when we are dealing with shorter sections or film, say of the order of 10 minutes. The reason that a thirty minute sample gives an fairly adequate characterization oi films as a whole is that once the construction of mainstream narrative films became standardized in the mneteen-twent.es as I have described in Chapter 13, it became the rule that there wou|d be several dramatic climaxes spaced down the length 0f the film, and the treatment of these in term, ol cutting
STA
and camera placement was also standardised in a general sort of way.
In my work so far, the Scale of Shot distributions are taken for the whole length of the films under consideration, but initially most of the figures for Average Shot Length and percentages of reverse-angle cuts were taken, from sections of the films in question that were at least 30 minutes in length, and also contained at least ^00 shots. If this criterion
TISTfCAi STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTUMS - PAftr 2
is.not satisfied in both its parts, there is a danger of the error of estimation of the ASL rising above 10 %, around which point the value quoted loses its usefulness for comparative purposes. In fact, I found this out tlie hard way, when in the early stages of my investigations around 1974, I tried taking shorter sections to estimate the overall ASL for the film
In any case, more than 9,000 of the figures for ASLs ft my present database have been taken from complete films
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17. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
■
Vurihg World War 2 the numbers of films made in all the ^'majorfilm-producing countries fell sharply. However, despite this, cinema admissions and box-office takings rose by a good dealin the United States, and something of the same sort of effect occurred in the other combatant countries. This trend1 continued for a couple of years after the end of the war, but then in 1948 cinema revenues began to fall in the United States, At this date there was still a rather small number of T.VT sets in the U.S., and so it has been suggested that this increasingly rapid fall in box-office returns, which continued'into the nineteen-fifties, was due to an increasing movement of the population into the suburbs and a turn to other leisure activities with their increasing affluence. Be that as it may, the rise of television probably made some contribution to the reduction of movie income, but it was only during the next decade that the production companies teat any positive steps to combat it.
After the end of the war there began to be an increasing tendency to deal with down-beat subject matter in all the major film-making countries, though story construction in such films largely followed traditional lines. An associated trend was an increase [n the amount of location filmingj mainly ol exteriors, but sometimes even interiors. The innovatory films in America include The House an 92nd. Str&t. (1946) and The Naked Qt\\ and this trend emerged be fore the more famous films from the Italian 'ncG-rcalist1 movement had reached the U.S. In fact, if we except Roberto Rossellinis Paisa (19+6), the style of the Italian neo-rcalist' films was quite continuous with that of Italian films produced both before and during the war, particularly with respect to scripting, dialogue, acting, and the amount of location filming used. {Like all the less wealthy countries, lhe Italians had always been inclined to use rather more nation filming of exteriors than the Americans*) The real, though limited, difference was that the settings and costuming of a number of Italian films at this time were "inchscruffier than those of other countries, and in a few °fthcm the narrative tone was more unrelicvedly grim. In Germany there were also a number of films made dealing w'th the aftermath of the war - the 'trurnmcrjiline, but the ^ccution of these was polished in the conventional way, the subject matter,
Film Stock and Processing
The only new black and white negative stocks that appeared during the Tonics were Oupont Superior II and 111, which had speeds under tungsten light of 100 ASA and 200 ASA respectively. At the introduction of these stocks in 1940 the ASA system of speed rating still did not exist, but it was finally proposed in 1941, and became generally accepted over the next lew years. The wide range of film stocks available from this period onwards made the use of exposure meters mandator) on interiors and exteriors, and in 1941 a new instrument joined the small range of meters already available, This was the Norwood exposure meter, which was basically an incident light meter, and the ancestor of the present Spectra and Sekonic meters. Unlike the other incident light meters in use at that time, which simply measured the absolute intensity (in foot-candles:) of the light arrixdng on the scene from one direction, the Norwood meter took a weighted average of the light from all directions, and included a calculating device to give a direct reading of the appropriate exposure, in the 'forties cameramen also continued to use reflected light meters ol the already existing Weston type.
The only significant development in film processing was the use of 'laiensification', a process which was alleged to have had a vogue with the major studios for some years, starting in 1947. This process involved fogging the negative with an all over uniform exposure to while light before the film was used in the camera to shoot scenes, This resulted In some increase in the effective speed of the film and a flatter (Iess contrast*) image. However, such an effect is not particularly obvious in films of the late 'forties as against those made earlier, so il may be chat the extent of the use of this process has been exaggerated.
Technicolor
During the ninctecn-forties there were no major changes in the three-strip Technicolor process, hut in I MJ iS mm Kodachrome «# *>r the first limeas » MMj materia) to produce a master film from which print* could be made bv the Technicolor process. The Kodachrom* reveal film could be exposed in any standard 35 mm. and alter its development in the usual wag at the
camera,
2S2
"
Eastman Kodak plant, Technicolor then made three black and white negatives corresponding to the three negatives produced by the Technicolor camera, by printing from Rodachrome reversal master with red, green, and blue light in succession- From this point onwards the Technicolor process proceeded exactly as it did normally. Advantage was first taken ofthc convenience of using this Technicolor monopack film7 in the filming of sequences in Dive Bomber
(1941) , Captain of the Cbuds (1941), and The Forest Rangers
(1942) . All the exteriors of Lassie Come Home (1943) were shot on 35 mm. Kodakchrome. Thunderhcad, Son of Flicka, also made in 1944, was the first complete feature to be shot with monopack and printed by the Technicolor process f 1944) k.prom this date onwards there continued to be a few Technicolor films made each year using this same monopack process, until Eastmancblor arrived at the beginning of the 'fifties.
The image quality of Technicolor films shot on 35 mm. Kodachrome was substantially inferior to those shot in the standard way with the Technicolor three-strip camera; the definition and colour reproduction were noticeably poor, and the contrast very high, so that shadow areas were rendered^as a solid, heavy, featureless black with a blue tinge. This was in fact the typical response of the Kodachrome emulsion of that period; somewhat accentuated by the extra stages of the Technicolor reproduction process.
The lighting of standard Technicolor usually continued in the general style established1 at the end of the "thirties, which was like a simplified version of black and white photography. That is, the angles of application of the fights was roughly the same, hut overall the number of lighting units used was reduced, and hence the finer shadings. Also the intensity of the backlights was reduced relative to the key light from the front, and sometimes backlighting was left out altogether, (dn'blaok and white filming the intensity of the backlight had1 always been higher than that of the key light from the front, but this was not usually the case in Technicolor.)
However there were some cases of the black and white type of backlighting being used with Technicolor, and one of the more accessible examples is Ray Rennafian's lighting of the dialogue scenes of Lady in the Dark (1944). In this film, as in other Technicolor films of the 'forties, the general levelof-illumination would be described as high-key or mid-key, with very little strong shadow present in the image which was always fairly bright all' over, just about the last technicolor film where a strong-minded director managed |o get large amount, of heavy chiaroscuro and simple Lighting from one or two sources was Reuben MamomWs Bhocl and Sand (1941).
iA*ny cmw^on con.W<ifepractice,-be,,*,in 7:/,0
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), of splashing patches of amber light on parts of the backgrounds of interior 5Cts in period films.
Agfacolor
Agfacolor first became available in the 35 mm. negative-positive form in Germany in 1939, and it was almost immediately used for feature production. Agfacolor negative was produced with two different emulsions, one balanced for exposure under tungsten fight, and the other for exposure under daylight, and their speeds were approximately 2S ASA, These Agfacolor negatives had a three-layer emulsion, the layers being sensitive to red, green, and blue light, w\\}\ the dye formers that produced the colour being included within the layers and held in place by their attachment to long-chain molecules. This was unlike Kodachrome, in which the dyes had to be introduced into the emulsion layers in a series of complicated steps during processing. The result was that the development of Agfacolor was a relatively simple process, to which ordinary processing machines could be adapted without too much difficulty. The other great advantage of the Agfacolor process was that the negative could be exposed in ordinary cameras, but it did have its drawbacks as welk The most serious of these was that there were no intermediate duplicating negative and positive stocks provided in the system, so that jusl as in the early days of black and white, if ordinary camera negative and printing positive were used to make duplicates, then the quality of the final print was noticeably inferior. So fades and dissolves (and also all trick effects), had to be made in the camera, as was done for the same reason in the silent period, and wipes could not be made at all.
(Some early Agfacolor films include what to the casual eye might seem to be wipes, but they arc in fact only the Illusion of wipes achieved by an ingenious trick. What has been done in these cases is that the negatives of the tue shots have been cut straight together, and then the emulsion has been scraped down the length ofthc film to give a clear diagonal band that moves from one side of the film strip to the other, passing just across the mid-point at the position of the cut, This clear band prints as a black line, and when projected it moves across the frame like a wipe line, readily fooling the eye into seeing the picture moving with itj
A s a- res u 11 o f the i m pos si b i lity of sati s facto r i I y du pi i cati ng Agfacolor, all the scenes had to be shot with three cameras simultaneously, to provide two extra negatives for safety, and to make possible the production of a large number of prints.
The performance of Agfacolor in its earliest stages can be represented by Münchhausen (Karel von Baky, 1943). ^ which the Venice Regatta scenes contain material shot ifl
FlL]f STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
1939 This early stock was noticeably inferior to the later material used in the film, with its performance being virtually that of a two-colour system: i.e. giving only reds and blues as well as neutral colours. Even in its final form, Agfacolor did poorly in reproducing bright colours, with bright reds coming out as brick-redt Differentiation of the greens from one another was not good either, The sharpness ofthc image on the other hand was quite good, particularly in the material produced right at the end of the war, being not much inferior to three-strip Technicolor in this respect. Original prints of Agfacolor films show noticeable uncvenness in colour reproduction from scene to scene, and dus was due to variations between the batches of film stock used, reinforced by the fact that the dyes used in the positive print stock proved to be extremely fugitive. All these features continued to characterize the films made after the war by the Russians in \Sovcolor', using the captured Agfa plants, patents, and processes. Even in the 'eighties Russian colour film was incapable of producing an intense red, and the other hues are also slightly muted when compared with Eastman Color. (Again a word of caution: many Russian prestige productions shown in the West were printed on one of the Western film stocks, and then the above comments do not apply.) More recently, Russian production of colour film his been abandoned, and the stocks used are imported.
■Fromaformalpointofvicw, thcmostiiiterestingGerman films made in Agfacolor were Vcit Harlan's Opjergang (1944) and Imrnensee (1943). The handling of colour in these films was bolder than in any Technicolor films made up to that lime, with a particular feature of Qpjergang being the use ol large areas of half-light in the interiors, which was something that was avoided in Technicolor, while in Itnmensee there is a ball scene in which there are shots lit entirely by light of various single colours.
C inecolor
Cinecolor continued to be a two-colour process ui rough out the * forties, and a small number of cheap features were made using the system in those years. The process, iKcugh essentially the same, had now been considerably improved, with better methods of dye-toning being used it the print stage, in Galhni Bess (1946) one can even see a certain amount of differentiation between some greens and some blues, which is quite an achievement for a two-colour process. But inevitably the process could never produce a tniered, or strong blues, or any yellows.
Lighting
A survey of light levels used for interior filming at the major studios published in the July 1940 issue of The American ^topographer gave results which can be summarized as
2S3
follows, Nearly all the negative in use was Hastman Kodak r-ms-X, and at Warner Bros, and Paramount the light levels were around 60 Toot-candles and the usual camera aperture T2-3. At R.K.O. and M.G,M. the light levels were around 150 Toot- candles for an aperture of f2.5, and at Columbia and United Artists the light levels were 40 foot-candles for an aperture of fl 3. The position at Twentieth Century-Fox was quite different, for at that studio it was the rigid policy to photograph everything on interior sets at f3,5 with a light level of ISO foot-candles. These figures show that R,K.O., Fox, and M.G,M. were not concerned about spending three times as much as the other studios on electrical power to secure the particular results they variously wanted, It is also
r m
clear from considering the manufacturer's recommendation of an aperture of f2J for 100 foot-candles and f3.5 for 250 foot-candles when exposing Plus-X that all the studios except RXO. and M.G.M. were underexposing the film and then compensating lor this by increased development while R.K.O. and M.G.M. were overexposing and giving reduced development. The result of these procedures would be diat films from the former group of studios would be slightly more contrasty than those from the latter pair, which would tend to have more middle greys in them, and less blacks and whites. However we have also to remember that the general contrastiness of the image is controlled up to a certain point by the lighting ratio between the lit and shadowed parts of the scene, which is arranged at the will of the individual cameraman, though this cannot completely over-ride the effect I am discussing. All the studios except Fox were clearly working at maximum lens aperture, and hence at the position of worst definition for any lens, and even the 13.5. at Twentieth Century-Fox was some way from the aperture of around 15.6 to fS that gives maximum Image sharpness. This whole situation clearly changed with the trend towards greater depth of field in the late 'forties, but unfortunately no figures are available, for that period.
Before leaving this discussion of the trend towards a greyer image in the late thirties and early 'forties, it is worth mentioning a particularly fine example ofthc style, in the work William Daniels did on Nw Ahon (1940), Here there is a continuous succession of shots with very finely worked chiaroscuro in grey tone*, with the disposition oi the grey shadows being controlled in their pigment to a de^e thaL no-one ever surpassed, and few equalled. But the influence rffiW Kane was to change all that dcsp.t, the initial rejection of Tola** -rk by many Hollywood
-
faster film stock and lower
erful
cameramen-
Because of the move to
|i2ht feed in the ninetecn-lbrlies, l<r« |««M
,il,|e to red^ the number of light* on a parm^r
not pos
m to produce these lower fiffft levels, without at ihc same time changing the style of the lighting. So in 1940 small spotlights with Fresncl lenses and ISO and 300 watt tungsten bulbs as light sources were introduced. They were in fact just miniature versions of the larger incandescent FresncNcns spots that had come in a lew years before, and like them they focussed from parallel spot beam to medium flood positions. They were colloquially referredto as 'dinky
inkics', or just *dinkiesf.
Also in 1940 there appeared what proved to be a passing fancy in the technique of lighting Close Ups. This was the use of fluorescent tube lighting mounted beside, or all around, the camera lens. This did not have too much effect on the style of lighting, as the cameramen concerned still used incandescent floods and spots as well on their Close Ups. and these over-rode any extra softness in the lighting which might have been produced by the fluorescent tubes, in any case the practice was shortly dropped.
But the most: significant development in new lighting equipment produced in 1940 proved to be, in the long run, the introduction of photo flood 'bulbs with reflecting surfaces coated onto the inside of their glass envelopes behind the filament. Developed by General-Electric, these bulbs were just as we know them today, and they produced an even floodlighting over a spread of about 90 degrees. The light source in them was a tungsten filament that was 'over-run', or operated at a voltage higher than that for which it was really designed, andthc result was that a filament consuming 2G0 to 500 Watts could give far more light than one of the same rating run at its correct voltage. The not very serious drawback tothisldea was that thcbulbs only hadalife of a few
FUJI STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
hours. Again, some cameramen tried using these bulbs in groups of 4 to give fill light on Close Ups, but their important application began at the end of the decade witl, the beginning of the move towards filming on location interiors.
This move to location filming was an aesthetic choice no doubt induced by the experience of all concerned with documentary film in World War 2, and the move was made in thc first place with the technical equipment already available in such films as Roma - ciua aperta (1945) and The Naked Cny (I94S). Given that the Italian films concerned were post-synchronised entirely, and the American ones partially there wras no reason why this step could not have been taken in the late 'thirties, if thc desire to do so had existed. But once the move to location filming was underway, some new lighting equipment appeared in 1949 to help it along. This was the Colortran lighting outfit, which consisted of several 500 Watt and 1 kiloWatt lamps powered through one variable transformer from the A .C. mains current. The lamp-heads, which weighed only a few pounds, contained very large bulbs like overgrown reflecting photoflood bulbs, with their rear internal .surfaces shaped and mtrror-coated to produce beams of various kinds, both spot and flood. The voltage applied to the lamps, which was again in excess of their design values, could he varied within certain limits, and hence the brightness of thc lamps, and also the colour of their light, could be controlled. A I kW. Colortran lamp could give roughly the same amount of light as an ordinary 2 kW. film light, although it was several times smaller and lighter. The drawback to these units was that their beams were not as precisely defined, nor could they be as easily
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Scene in a location room in The Naked City basically lit
by William Daniels with flood-lights high right and left, with a little backlight on the women's heads from a spotlight shining, through 'the doable door behind them, - -
1 V
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FihU STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
controlled, as those in the standard Fresnel spots, Colortran yre.were mostly used for the ever-expanding 16 mm. eduction of the 'fifties, but occasionally they were used ^location filming on features,
Asfaras the style of lighting in these location films of the late 'forties is concerned, we can say that in The Naked Qiy there is some simplification of the lighting over what u^uld be expected in a studio film on a similar subject, although in very general terms the approach Is the same as regards the types of lights used and the angles from which thev "'ere applied. There is some reduction In the amount of backlighting used, but William Daniels still manages to cheat it in on most of the close shots, if not on the Long Shots, And the directions from which the lights come arc sometimes not quite as carefully chosen as they would have b^cn in the freedom of the studio. In the case of Roma - ciua aperta, it is important to realize that it contains a number of studio-shot scenes, particularly those in the Gestapo headquarters, and in these the lighting has the polish one would'cxpcct from a European film of this vintage, which is clightly lessthan that in an American film.
The location scenes in Roma - ciua aperta are lit with only 3. very few lights, but these are still carefully disposed to produce reasonably attractive lighting, though without any backlighting. The roughness in these scenes is in what is lit, rather than the way light is applied* But it is in the exteriors, always the crucial test or finesse in applying extra artificial light, that the lighting of this film is crudest. The fill light is just bashtd straight on from the front, and in some Long Shots there is none at all, even though they are taken on ihc kind of overcast day with grubby natural light that is ordinarily avoided, or if not avoided, then sharpened with artificial light. But it must be noted that these observations are not a judgement on the total aesthetic value of this lighting in the context of thisjilm.
Ca
The only new 35 mm. camera produced in any numbers m America during the "forties was the Cunningham Combat camera. This lightweight (13 lb.) camera "'as especially designed for use in World War 2, and it had a three-lens turret, pi lot-pin registration, and took 200 foot daylight toading spook in an interna) magazine. However it had no reflex viewfinding system, and was much less well suited 10 its purpose than the Arriflex cameras used by German military cameramen. In fact Bell & Howell 35 mm. Eyemos 16mm. Filmos were the cameras most used in action by ^Americans, and after the war the Cunningham camera Wished from the scene. (British Army cameramen used Dc Vry Newman-Sinclair, and Sell & Howell cameras, all afwhlch ^ted back to the Jtwenties.)
255
Although the German Arriflex camera made by Arnold & Richter company m introduced in 1937 it was hardly used in fiction filmmaking until after war. Even m Germany documentary cameramen filming sports footage were still using the older Askania (il Debrie) cameras in 193B. The initial form of the Arriflex remained constant to the last IIC version, though a* first it only had a 200 foot magazine, and all the cameras were painted smooth grey, rather than matt black as later. The continuous through-the-lcns viewfinding system by means ofa mirror surfaced-shutter set at 45 degrees to the lens axis was the same as in all 35 mm. Arriflex cameras now, and so was the film movement with its simple single claw driven by an equally simple double-cam gear, The small electric motor powered by rechargeable batteries was set vertically under the small body of the camera, and die detachable magazines incorporated the sprocket drive which was pre-thrcaded when the camera was loaded. The film transport arrangements meant that the magazines of the Arriflex could be changed very quickly in the heat of the moment, and taking into account its light weight (12 lb.) it was ideally suited to its wartime use as a combat camera. Captured Arrlflexes were in use in Hollywood soon after the war, and by 1947 this camera was again being made by Arnold and Richter in West Germany. The first notable use of the handheld possibilities of the Arriflex was in the subjective camera opening sequences of Dclmer Daves1 Dark Passage (1947), but in general application of this camera was very limited in Hollywood". However in Italy, where post-synchronization ol dialogue was very common, the Arriflex became the major production camera in thc nineteen-fifties.
In 1948 a close competitor Tor the Arrillex appeared in France. This was the Eclair Cameflex, which like the Arriflcs had continuous through-the-lens viewing by way ofa mirror-reflex shutter, though in this case the axis of rotation of the mirror-surfaced shutter was set at 4S degrees to the lens from below it, rather than to one side, as in the Arriflex. The Cameflex had a 400 foot displacement-type magazine with thc film sprocket drive included in the magazine, and a weight of 13 lb. unloaded. This eamera had two slight advantages over ihc Arriflex: firstly, that its diiTerentshapeperuiIrted the back of the camera to be rested on the shoulder when hand-held, so making hand-held lakes subtly steadier, and secondly, that the magazines could be changed in two second* while the camera motor was still running, since the film loops and the back pressure- pbte of the film gate were included in the magazine. The of the* features had some effect on some of the MM* VaEuo' films of a decade later, but the immediate effect oi this camera on French production was        What we have
of the dominance ol aesthetic
here is another clear-cut case
2S6
an
av
considerations over technical: possibilities as far as the form
of films is concerned.
During World War 2 a considerable amount of 16 mm. footage was blown up to 35 mm. for use in feature films, d from this point onwards the 16 mm, cameras that were mailable became important for feature film production. The first relatively quiet 16 mm. camera suitable for synchronous sound filming appeared in 1940. This was the Berndt-Maurer Pro camera, but it was quickly displaced by its descendant, the Auricon single-system sound camera that became available in 1942. This latter camera in its original form weighed 37 lb., hada three-lens turret, and an arrangement for through-thedens viewing when not shooting by displacing the film gate and sliding a ground trlass screen behind the lens, The film was pulled through the gate by a simple long curved claw that would only run forwards, and there was no registration-pin system. Sound could be recorded directly onto the edge of the film in the correct soundtrackposition simultaneously with the picture being taken. At this stage in the camera s development only 200 foot magazines of the usual American configuration were fitted, but in 1947 some modifications, including larger magazines, were made to give the Pro model of the Auricon camera which could still be found lurking in some odd corners until fairly recently.
-if
- !
The Ech>r Carney (or |fl ^ ^
able reflex vkwfinder tilted up at the right.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
Camera Supports and the Long Take
As has previously been mentioned, in 1939 there was just beginning to emerge a movement towards the use of longer takes on the part of some directors, led by George Cukor By 1940 Mo ward Hawks had definitely joined in with His Girl Friday having an Average Shot Length of 13 seconds, and so had William Wyler, with an ASL of 13.3 seconds for The Letter, Prior to this both directors had been working with lower Average Shot Lengths. Other notable contributors to the trend included Henry King, George Marshall, and Edmund Goulding. The net result of all this was that the mean ASL for a large sample of Hollywood production went up from 8.S seconds in the late 'thirties, to 9.S seconds in the period 1940-1945, and finally to 10,5 seconds in the period 1946-1950.
In 1940 these longer takes were achieved with conventional dispositions of the actors within the shot, with standard lenses, and without a greatly increased amount of tracking around, though Hawks' method was to use more panning shots than the average. But already in the famous long take of over 4 minutes in The Letter, the lens used is 35 mm. or a bit shorter, and the playing is between actors in Medium Close Up and Long Shot respectively. This kind of approach was to become important shortly, and will be dealt with below.
Another approach to even greater take lengths involved increased camera mobility, and here the leading figure was Vincentc Minnelli, and the key work concerned was The Clock made in 1945. With an ASL of 19 seconds, this film naturally has many takes that are minutes long, and these are mostly covered with camera movement, even including the use of a crane to this end > possibly for the first time in a non-musical film.
Up to this point 1 have been treating of situations that cou I d ibe d e a It w ith u s ing the cq uip m cnt a I rea dy a va i La ble, but as new directors, including notably Otto Prcmingcr, joined the trend, the demand for the ultimate manocuverability ol cameradollies produced the "crab dolly'. (A crab dolly can be steered by all four wheels interconnected to turn together, as well as by the usual two wheel steering Hence it can be instantaneously turned from a movement tracking straight forwards to a 'crabbing1 movement sideways at 90 degrees to the original path.) The first crab dollies produced wert the Houston crab dolly in 1946 and the Sclznick crab dolly in 1948, Both of these dollies had mechanically rising centre posts on which the geared head and camera were mounted, but a crab dolly with hydraulic rise was produced in 1950. In the same year a really small crab dolly was introduced in tM Italian studios, the predecessor of the present-day Elcmack Octopus crab dolly, and this was capable of passing through ordinary-sized doorways and passages. The result of its
m
can
MSTYIE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
,he seen in Rosscllini's Europe '51, in the opening party
scene..
The introduction of the erab dolly is again a clear-cut casc-of film technology meeting a purely aesthetic demand.
Given the stylistic developments outlined above, it can be seen that Alfred Hitchcock s Rope (1948) and Under tyricorn (1549) were not isolated instances that appeared from nowhere, but the culmination of a trend to which Hitchcock did not contribute at first, for it is typical of bis early 'forties films that Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) have ASLs of 7 seconds and 9 seconds, which is very dbsc to the norm for that period. But Under Capricorn, on the other hand, contains so few shots that the exact value of the Average Shot Length no longer has much significance (though it is in fact about 40 seconds), since the nature of the particular screenplay being filmed with such very long takes begins to dictate the exact ASL in a way that it does net with films that contain a large number of shots. To put it another way, it is only if there are upwards of 200 shots in a film that an averaging effect can take place to produce consistency from one film to the next in the work of a , director, regardless of the subject matter. And of course the concept of Average Shot Length has no meaning in the case of a film like Rope where the transitions between the dozen or so shots are intended to be concealed to give the illusion of just one continuous shot throughout the whole film.
It should be added that Hitchcock then dropped the whole idea, and returned to the use of ordinary take-lengths: for instance Stage Fright has an ASL of 10 seconds. Later he moved on to even faster cutting.
Lenses
The first zoom lenses of modern design for 16 mm. use became available at the end of the 'forties. These were the American Zoomar lens in 1947, and the French SOM-Barthiot Pan-Cinor in 1950. The former hod a maximum aperture of f2.S and a zoom range from 17 mm, to SI mm., and the latter a zoom range from 20 mm. to 60 mm., which rather limited their usefulness, and we have to wait till the 'fifties for zoom lens use to become significant. However there are some very rare cases of the use of 3S mm. zoom ^ots in Hollywood films, for example in Raoul Walsh's K'Aite Hcot (1949), where one is used in a transitional exterior shot establishing a new location, and this was presumably done with one of the old Taylor-Hobson zoom leases.
The first practical and-reflective coatings were applied to camera lenses in 1940, and these coatings, which were lav<*s of magnesium fluoride approximately a quarter of a wavelength thick evaporated onto the lens in a vacuum, ^nae jru0 general use From 1941. In an untreated lens there
2S7
is considerable light loss by reflection backwards of the entering beam of light at each air^lass interface, and the coatings whieh were applied to ,urf,Ccs ^ tins loss by an interference effect, in an untreated lens, as ^vell as the loss of light by internal reflection backwards, there is also a general scattering of light in the forwards direction, which produces 'flare1, which is a general pale wash of light over the image. Flare is also drastically reduced by the correct lens coatings.
At the time that this happened there were the usual excessive claims from Hollywood cameramen that tend to greet any technical innovation. In The American Cinemaiogtapher (p.lOS, Vol.21, No.3T 1940) William Stull claimed that, on the basis of some simple tests, a coated lens was one stop faster than a similar uncoatcd lens set at the same aperture. But shortly after this, a group of optical experts and lens designers, including William C. Miller and Dr. Ray ton, agreed that on the basis of precise measurements the increase in light transmission after coating was about 40% for a typical lens, which is a speed increase of less than half a stop. Nevertheless the effect of coating was very real, and particularly useful in situations where flare was likely to occur.
Some years after coated lenses became the usual thing, in 1943 in Fact, the system of calibrating camera lenses in T-stops as well as l-stops was introduced. The T, or transmission stop, is the aperture setting that passes as much light as the f-stop with the same number would in an ideal lens with no light losses whatever. This transmission stop ^ives the correct setting of the aperture for the required exposure regardless of the losses in the particular lens being used, and this became important as lenses with a large number of elements in them were introduced, because such lenses have fairly large transmission losses, even when coated. In fact good IS mm. lenses were just starting to become available from TayEor-Hobson and others at the end of the Mortics, and these inevitably had a large number of elements in them. So the production of these eery » angle lenses was only made possible by the introduction ol lens coating, and likewise the design of zoom lenses with larger zoom ratios in the nineteen-fifties, as these too had a large number of elements in them.
Gregg Totand, Deep Foetus, and Wide-Angle Lenses The first extensive use of coated lenses was in die nhotoeraphy of Mi ^ ^ut before dealing with th» L it is necessary to mention what Gregg Toland had done beforehand. In the films Toland had lit under contract to Goklwyn during the "thirties there is no sign of any dc.p focus in rht Or^o Kan, sense, nor is there much sign of th,
■Tolandesoue' compositions
which typify his work in die
■
forties However 'Inland's films from the fadffi&Offl do show * noticeable simplicity of lighting when compact with-the usual liahiing set-ups ft similar scenes lit by other cameramen, ft was really just a matter of Toland using less lighting units than anybody else, and inevitably having a slightlv unusual disposition of shadows in his scenes. This is one of the things which enables one to. differentiate between the parts of Come and Get It (1936) lit by Tokmd and the parts lit bv Rudolph Mate, as 1 have already discussed. Before leaving Toland's work in the ninetecn-thirties, it is worth noting that as well as its distinctive qualities, it also has shortcomings in some areas. For instance, To!and was not particularly ijood at conventional glamour' photography, as is particularly evident in a ftomber of poorly handled Close Ups of Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (Wylcrs 1939), where her slightly difficult face, which was rather flat around the eyes, is not shown to its best advantage.
In 1940 Gregg Toland lit two films for John Ford, The Gropes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Hoinci and in these there are a very few shots where something of his Cit'r/.ef\ Kane approach becomes evident. In The Grapes of Wrath one or two proto-decp focus shots occur accidentally, for reasons I have given in the previous chapter, particularly in the scene in which Tom Joad goes up to the exterior of his family's deserted house, moving past the camera from Close Up to Long Shotj in sharp focus all the way. In The Long -Voyage Home there are one or two low-an pies on the deck of the ship, and some typical Toland compositions in the crew's bunk room, with darker foreground figures massing into roughly triangular areas across one of the lower corners of the frame. There is even one shot in which special measures have been taken to'get increased depth of field, probably the use of a^ split field dioptre.
Gregg Toland: has given- a good description of the photography of Citizen Kane in The American Cincmatographer (February, 1941), .so only a brief resume is necessary here before making some additional points aboutthis film. Citizen Kane was shot with Super XX negative, and the apertures used throughout were in the range from f8 to fl6. Toland claimed that only lenses of 24 mm. and 28 mm, focal length were used, and: this means .that typical depths of field would have been at one extreme from 2 feet to infinity with the 24 mm. lens at flG, and at the more restricted extreme, from 4 feet to SO feet with the 2E mm, lens at fS. The second case *till carries sharp, focus from -Close % to Long Shot, and the first case represents what can now be called true 'deep focW, with sharpness from Big Close tip to Long Shot. However, close examination of the Him suggests that other senses w^re used as well- The breakfast Table scene between Kane and his wife seem, to W been shot with something like a. 35 mm. lens, as do some of the closer
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
shots of Susan Alexander elsewhere in the filmP These [aiitr scenes also get conventional lens diffusion treatment (Sr> called 'soft focus'), which is otherwise totally absent in the film. The general absence of lens diffusion throughout the photography of Citizen Kane is made more noticeable by ihe sharp-edged lighting style resulting from using powerful arc floodlights without fill lighting in most of the film.
Lens Diffusion
In this reduction of the use of lens diffusion Citizen Kane was in advance of its period, for it was not until the late 'forties that it became usual to limit lens diffusion to a handful of key Close Ups in a film. How important Toland was in causing th is trend is not clear to me, for the increasing ex peri -ence of cameramen with Technicolor filming, in which lens diffusion was never extensively used, may have contributed, as may have the non-photographic concern with * realism1 in the late 'forties. Whatever the cause, one finds that by the. end of the 'forties even in romantic melodramas \]kc Letter Horn an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 194S), there is only very light lens diffusion, even on female Close Ups, so thai this phenomenon certainly cannot be associated solely with the vague category of so-called film noir, as some have tried to do.
Coated Lenses in Citizen Kane
The use of coated lenses made sonic contribution to tlu achievement of a smaller aperture with a given light levd in the photography of Citizen Kane, but not as much as has been claimed, Actually, as 1 have already indicated, uV extra light transmission with coated lenses was only about half a stop, and in fact the use of coated lenses was much more important for securing sharp black and white images in 'against the light' filming situations, such as the scone in the projection room at the beginning of the film. In this scene the figures silhouetted by the strong arc beam from the projection booth would have been turned from Lrisp black to grey by a wash of flare, and their edges would have been quite blurred, if uncoatcd lenses had been used,
Low-Angle Filming
The apertures mentioned as having been used in the photography of Citizen Kane could have been achieved by lighting with large arc spotlights of the kind available from the beginning or the 'twenties, by applying them from above the walls of the set in the conventional way, but this would have meant avoiding the kind of low-angle shots used f much in this film. Once the decision had been taken to use low-angle shots, presumably by Gregg Toland, since he had flirted with this approach before, then of course the set* had to have ceilings on them, and this in its turn meant tltft
m STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
259
A female Close Up wiiham knsdfi fusion in a romantic scene in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). ihis lighting arrangement, with strong backlight and with hey light straight on from a little above eye-levelf was consistently wed by Franz Planerfor photographing the leading actress in thisfilm.
powerful arc floodlights had to be applied from floor stands if ridiculous lighting patterns were to be avoided. Hence the 'DuarcJ floodlights actually used by Toland. These had been available from before I93S, as had 25 mm. lenses, and with the introduction of Super XX negative in that year, deep locus in the Toland style had been possible Tor anyone who wanted to try it. And true deep focus without Ion-angles was possible long before that. So Toland's creation of 'deep focus' filming was simply an aesthetic decision, without the influence of technological pressures.
Like many features of the photography or Citizen Kane, the ex tensive use of low-angles was adopted by Orson Welles is a feature of his own style when he went on to make films with other cameramen. In The Magnificent Amber sons (1942), the use of low angles is quite relentless, and never before or since have so many been laid end to end.
Wide-Angle Lens Staging
The other aspect of Citizen Kane that was to prove most influential through the 'forties and into the 'fifties was the disposition of actors within the field of a wide-angle lens. This followed the pattern already described for some shots in Long Voyage Homet with even stronger emphasis on the iTiangular areas of foreground mass, and also on the implied diagonal of interest between the foreground figure placed awards a lower corner and the head of the background figure ,mvards the opposite top corner. This sort of composition and staging in depth was gradually taken up by many film-maWs, although they usually did not bother about the deep taui element of it, but often let the foreground figures go sliShtE>- out of focus. The heavy and broad chiaroscuro of
Citizen Kane was also not taken up tit general.
One of the first films where the influences of Kane were visible in the way described was The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), where an even wider angle lens of 2i mm. focal length was used to get some of the shots. The most direct imitation of Citizen Kttne, both in screenplay and lighting, was Cukor's The Keeper of the Plame (1943). Tor this film William Daniels used a number of low angles in the Toland manner, and also a fair amount of heavy chiaroscuro, but with far softer^edged shadows and a greater complexity of disposition of the same. And naturally Toland took his ideas with him to the films he subsequently photographed lor William Wyler, though he dropped the heaviness of the Citizen Kane chiaroscuro, Finally, on The fei fiats 4 Our Lives (194Ů), by increasing the light levels even further and stopping down to T22, he managed to get deep ibcus in some shots made with a 50 mm, lens.
The Long Take with Wi<Je-A»gk Len.s Staging
Citizen Hone is not very exceptional lor its poriod as regards take length, as its ASL is only 12 seconds, and it only eontain-s a couple of lakes that gel up around 2 minutes. But the method uf staging within the lieid ol vicw da wide-angle lens already described in CJfi*» Kane proved to be important for the subs,c|Uen. development ol another current in long Ufce filming. This method ol long take filming mostly avoids the use of tracking shots, and a5 well a, using the careful sLaging in dcp.b os m Uro. Kane, it keep the takes going with pans ifac.or movant
some older doctors as well as to newcomer,, and a prime
260
d       in The Keeper of the Flame (1943) lit and composed by William Danish in a slightly dilutedfirm of the Gregg Toland style. The main light source is directly above the centre of the roomed there is very tittlef II light relieving the shadows on the faces.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
■
example of this is Henry King, He took up wide-angle lens staging tentatively in The Song of hernadctte (1944), and very definitely in 19SO in Twelve 0*Clock High and The Cunfightcr, which have ASLs around 1 2 seconds. Another well-known director who took to this -method was Billy Wilder, for whom a good example would be the way many of the dialogue scenes are covered in Double indemnity (1944), which lias an ASL of IS seconds. As a result of these practices involving the frequent use of wide-angle lenses, it was noted in The American Cinemaiographer for September 1950 that in many of the studios a 35 mm. lens was coming to be regarded as a standard lens, instead of the 50 or 40 mm.j as formerly.
■
WidewVngle Lens Staging in Europe
There had always been a slightly greater tendency to use wide-angle lenses occasionally in European films, and the new American fashion increased1 this tendency at the very end of the ninetecn-forties. Wide-angle lens staging was not necessarily associated1 with1 long takes, and one of the more extreme examples of their use, 'Helmut Kautner's Der Apfel ist ah (1948), has an ASL of only 9. S seconds. This iSl [ think, the first film to include extensive use of an IS mm. lens, and die use oftbis very wide-angle lens is made very conspicuous by fast tife and tracks. So Der A&lisi ah is a good place to study die slightly disturbing visual effect ol this conjunction of wide-angle lens and fast camera movement.
The Third'Way
- The iwo Way8 of filming wi,h longer takes already d^ibed, ^ USi„ga very mobile camera withstands!
lenses, or alternatively using wide-angle lenses and staging in depth, were to a large extent separate, for the extensive use of combined tracking and panning with a wide-angle lens is visually disturbing because of the way the various planes in the image shift with respect to each other as the camera moves* Particularly in the case of rapid move minis of a wide-angle lens, objects in the foreground seem to be detached from those in the background and WinY pasl them, unless a certain awkward special measure is taken. This involves shifting the camera back on the supporting head so that the centre of the lens is over the pivot point, and in any case it is doubtful if this not completely satisfactory solution was known at this date. Straight parallel tracking following the actors, and small slow pans arc however quite acceptable with a wide-angle lens. Directors using either of these two mutually exclusive methods of long-take filming also did some of their scenes with fairly conventional staging, and still managed to keep the shots going longer. There was also a third stream in the longer take trend as it developed, involving directors both old and new who were perhaps less filmically imaginative, who used nothing but perfectly conventional stagings and standard lens photography, but who still made films with longer takes in the late 'forties. Directors who spring to mind include George Marshalhvhh films like The tslue Dahlia (1946) with an ASL of 17 seconds, and Joseph Mankiewicz with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(1947)
with an ASL of t| seconds, not to mention the founder ol the school, George Cukor.
And finally a great many directors ignored all this, and went right on doing what they and the others had been doing in the 'thirties, fast cutting and all.
t\f.style and technology in the forties
FIL
c Third Way in Europe
In continental Europe long takes had often been used by film-makers right through the 'thirties, and this continued to he the case in the 'forties. As before, these long takes wiTe mostly done with fairly conventional staging of the action, and only a certain amount of camera movement. In England, the move towards long take filming followed the American example very closely* Although there were a few British directors in the period 1934 to 1939 who shot films ivith long takes, they were not the ones who continued working Into the the 'forties. On the other hand, Anthony Aacjuith, who had been using standard scene dissection in the 'thirties, with ASLs around 7 to 8 seconds, suddenly took up the long take with his Cottage to Let of 1941, which has an ASL of 14.3 seconds, and others joined in a bit later, like Herbert Wilcox. His work used a certain amount of tracking to keep the take going, but since he kept further back from the actors than the American exponents of this style, the result was visually rather boring. And some new directors, like the former cameraman Bernard Knowles, jumped in with both feet, with his A Place of One's Own (1944) having an ASL of 43.7 seconds in the same boring way. Though after this he cased up on this approach, and his subsequent films have ASLs in the 14 to 17 second range, David Lean tried the style out in Brief Encounter (1945), which has an ASL of 14 seconds, but after that he retreated hack towards the norm.
Whereas in the United States, the people like Cukor and Wyler, who started the fashion at the end of the 'thirties, continued right on as the trend developed. This is the reason I think that the influence wa.s from America, even though the change in take lengths was almost simultaneous in England, as you can sec from the distributions of Average Shot Length for the relevant period illustrated here.
However, \ have to sound a of caution here, he cause one British director who joined in the fashion, Thoroid Dickinson, from Gaslight (1939) to Secret People (1950), said tome later in his life that his original inspiration came from Hotel du Nord (I93S), and other Marcel Carnc films.
Dutch Tilts
Dutch tilts or off-angles - shots with the sides of the frame skew to the vertical - had a brief run of popularity with a few European directors at the end of the 'forties. They werc usuai|v asSQCjatec| the extensive use of low-angle shooting, but th ey were not one of those things that were used to any extent in Cirizen Kane, The source of this P^ing fashion was probably Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mbrder
u™f ms (1946), and it'was taken up in the first place "iother German 'trummerflme, The shots using dutch tihs were closely associated with the dramatic events in the ruins
261
that gave these films their na
me, and by 1947 it was possible
to parody the style in Film ohnc Titei (Rudolf jug.rt). (This J** film is also very interesting for its narrative structure h opens with the ostensible makers of the film discussing what to put into it, and after several different beginnings are represented, one basic story h followed through, though with three different endings in three different stvles being shown and discussed by the 'makers1 of the film./
But the peak of the fashion for the use of dutch tilts was reached outside Germany, in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). In this film the greater proportion of the shots arc framed skew, and when this style reaches this extreme it imposes severe demands on the director's grasp of the scene dissection he is using. It had always been usual when a string of dutch tilts occurred in a montage sequence or the like to make sure that successive shots were tilted in opposite directions to the vertical, and this in turn meant that if a large number were used consecutively in ordinary dramatic scenes the director had to keep in mind which shots were going to be next to each other in the finished film when they were shot out of sequence, as was often the case. Carol Reed was able to get this 'right' most of the time in The Third Maa> but the same was not true for other directors involved with this fashion.
Amongst the others who picked up the fashion might be mentioned Max Ophuls, but the style made no headway at all in the United Slates, and as the 'fifties and wide-screen wore on it vanished except in remote corners such as Russia {Devyet dnei odnaxoQoda, jMikhail Romm, i960) and Argentina {la easa del angel, L. Torre Nilsson, 1957),
Optical Effects and Shot Transitions
ff we except the developmentof a travelling matte system for use exclusively with the Technicolor process (The Thief of Baghdad, 1940), there were no major advances in optical effects during the 'forties. The introduction of the Acme-Dunn automatic optical printer In 1943 did no more than increase the efficiency of the basic machine by allowing the exposure of a series of frames to take place automatically from instructions punched into paper tape. This increase in efficiency could only have had a visible outcome in an increase in the number of optical elTects used in films, and H is quite easy to think of reasons why Uiis did not happen.
As far as shot transitions in general are concerned, the innovation for Ho%^od was the use of a fe* jump cuts in though Orson Welles referred to them at
fa time as !lightning mixes'. In this film the jump cm, are mostlv in fact 'shock cuts' accompanied by purposeiulh conspicuous sound cut,, which indicates how they bad been arnved at by derivation from Welle," radio play techniques. !t & not verv likely that the -small previous use ol )ump
262
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES ^T)U AND TECHN0L0GY /jV THE FORTIES
cuts
and shock cuts in European films had registered m Hollywood, and in any case, their use in Citizen Kane djd not make them popular there. In Europe, as indicated ,n the previous chapter, they continued to be used sometimes, particulars in. England, where the major figure most given lo the occasional use of the shock cut was Michael Powell in his films made in the late 'forties, from TKnow Where Fm Going (1945) on to a climax in The Elusive Pimpernel (1950).
The wipe continued tobe widely used to indicate a short time lapse, particularly in action subjects or sequences at most studios, and on all subjects at Warner Brothers. The Warner editing department used a whole range of simple lateral wipes with edges of varying softness, all the way from an almost hard-edged wipe to a wipe with the edge so fuzzy and broad that it covered the whole frame and was almostindistinguishable from a dissolve. The truly hard- or sharp-ed^ed wipe was no longer used on feature films in the 'forties.
There was still no sign of the use of the wipe freeing the dissolve Lb'be used for some purpose other than indicating a time-lapse, but an interesting isolated case of an alternative meaning being attached to dissolves occurs in Waterloo Bridge (Mervp Lc Roy, 1940). In this film, during a romantic scene in which the hero and heroine dance to a small orchestra, -the transitions between the shots of the couple and the shots of the musicians arc done with a scries of dissolves, although the preservation' of strict timecontinuity is indicatediby all conccrncdikecping time to the continuously synchronous inusic, Elsewhere in this film dissolves arc used conventionally to indicate short time lapses, and as might be expected in an M.G.M. film, no wipes are used. This 'lyrical1 use of the dissolve as a form of softer cut seems not to have reappeared till the 'fifties, and not to have become standard practice till the nineteen-sixties.
■
Soundl Record! h g
Inhere were no major developments in sound recording in Hollywood' in the nineteen-forties except for .the introduction of magnetic recording in 1949, and since this bad no great.use until the 1 fifties,, it -is-best considered with respect to that period. Otherwise there continued to be a lew slight improvements in the various stages of sound-on-filni recording, but these liadino efleets on film form. The Disney studio's Fantasound stereophonic sound system was installed inalimited^umber^
the first..r-un.ofF<mto«fll and thereafter dropped completely and in any case it was not intimately connected with the mature of that film, so it is best ignored iivthis survey.
There were some advances in microphone design which should he mentioned for completeness, though they had no formal effects. !n 1*39 Western Electric introduced an
improved type of condenser microphone^ the 640A, which had an extended and flat frequency response up to 10 kHz but moving-coil and ribbon microphones continued to be preferred for film recording in America, though improved condenser microphones held on rather more in Europe The most favoured moving-coil microphone was still the Western Electric 630 (the 'ball and biscuit1), but directional microphones with a cardioid pattern of sound pick-up gradually began to displace it as the decade wore on, Tin? two major types of these were the Western Electric 639 and the R.C.A. Ml-3043, both of which contained ribbon diaphragms. The first also had a moving-coil clement in the same housing to produce the cardioid response by the combination of the two signalsJ and the second had acoustic damping chambers behind the ribbon to alter its respond from the figure-of-eight pattern to the cardioid pattern. These microphones dated from 1941 and 1939 respectively The ribbon elements in both of them were very sensitive to mechanical vibrations as always, and so there were very limited possibilities of movement if they were used on a microphone boom. Nevertheless, they tended to be used whenever possible, because the fact that they picked up sound in the forward direction only meant that they could get clean sound without much background noise further away from the actors than was possible with omni-directional microphones such as the Western Electric 630, Their other advantage was that they had a much more extended and flatter frequency response than earlier microphones.
Reverse-Angle Cutting
The 'forties arc a good point from which to survey the development of reverse-angle cutting in mainstream American cinema, for it was not until this period that this stylistic figure reached its peak exploitation. And it really is just a figure of style, for the use of this kind of cutting varies from director to director, and from period to period, as will be shown. Reverse-angle cutting is taken to include all cuts within a scene which change the camera angle by more than 90 degrees. In the adjoining shots on cither side of a reverse-angle cut the camera can be cither behind, or in front of the shoulders of the two people interacting, hut pairs of shots where the camera is placed very far back from all the participants are excluded from this category. Cuts between a watcher and his Point of View may be included within this category, provided the camera directions sitisty the criteria, but the two categories are definitely not co-extensive. Usually Watcher-POV cuts (and vicc-versaj form only a small proportion of the reverse-angle cuts used in a film, though there is definitely some variation troro director to director in this. For instance, it seems that Alfred Hitchcock used the Point of View shot far more than
proportion of reverse-angle cuts. For instance, J 0 Twin (1951) has about S0% reverse-angle cuts,
other directors, even those making the same type of film, and in fact such cuts make up about half of his rather hi^h
Strangers on and Family
ph (19^6) has 49%, and in both cases about half of these £ Watcher-POV cuts. That is, about a quarter of the cuts in these films are between a watcher and bis POV. The high proportion of POV shots in Hitchcock % films can obviously be related to the voyeuristic strain in his personality which
is quite
evident in his interviews, not to mention the fact
ill at ibis device is simply a good way of securing audience involvement, and so it is really in need of no further explanation.
The quickest way to treat this matter more fully is to quote a list of the percentages ol reverse-angle cuts between shots out of the total number of shot transitions in various films, and then to proceed to an i nVerpretalion of the results. Jl should be noted that the figures quoted are approximate, and subject to several percent error, since they were arrived zi by sampling 30 minute sections of the films involved, but this uncertainty is not enough to invalidate the general conclusions that I will draw. The number of films checked for this quantity is now approaching 1000,
U can be seen from the figures on the next page, and also from the far larger number not quoted, that some sort of consistency can be detected in the use of reverse-angles by some directors; note the figures for Anthony Mann, John Stahl, King Vidor, Howard Hawks, and Raoul Walsh. 11 owcvcr,these percentages arc far from showing the consistency through a director's work that other stylistic parameters such as Average Shot Length and Scale of Shot have been found to have. As far as Hawks is concerned, it is important lo know that his silent films are mostly shot in very different styles, and that it would be difficult for the unprimed viewer to guess that they were all made by the same person. In fact from a formal point of view his style did not begin to sctdeinto a consistent pattern until the 'thirties.
Another anomaly is apparent in the figures for Raoul Walsh's films of the very early 1 forties, but this was a period when higher ^th an -average percentages of reverse-angle cuts tagan to appear in the work of other directors, and Walsh may have been temporarily responding to the new trend. The highest figures of all seem to be restricted to some of ihc directors who started to make films in the 'forties or taw such as Kazan, Sherman, and Mankiewicz. (Nothing above 60% reverse-angle cuts has so far been found for any director who started his career before the nineteen-forties JI><1 continued on through this period.)
It will be remembered that the early history of the use this device really began in the work of Ralph Ince from 1913 to I9i5j for hc was tne first to get an appreciable
263
number of re.crsc-angle cuts into his films. In the early twenhes it was usual for American film, to have ,bou't fA rev^se-angle cuts, though the figure was usually far lower in European films at that time. In the later nineteen-twenties the Hollywood figure was usually in the 20 to 30% range, and as can be seen from the figures quoted on the next pages, the norm kept going slowly up through the nineteen-thirtics. The figure of SI% reverse-angle cuts for The Mod Genius (Michael Oirtiz, i93l) is quite exceptional lor the period as far as I know. On the other hand, note the remarkably low figure for Allan Dwans Suez (19JS), a film which I think would certainly he considered a typical 'classical Hollywood movie* by any viewer. In this case what we are seeing h an example of the difficulty film directors olten have in moving too far away from the style holding when they started directing, and the same effect is visible as regards the device under consideration in the work of Kin^ Vidor and others.
No t vc ry s u r p n s i ngly, t h ere is som e cor re la do n o f I o w- is h percentages of reverse-angle cuts with the films of directors inclined to use long takes, and particularly with films using wide-angle lens staging ol the kind described earlier in this chapter. (AH the Kings Mcnt lody Without o Passport, and The Gunfighter all use wide-angle lens staging.)
The figures at the end ol the table for lour fairly recent films give an indication of the way that the lullest range ol percentages of reverse-anglu cuts still continues to occur, and this observation is supported by a large number of other "sixties films which have been checked, but not quoted. Nevertheless these values happen to be extreme ones, and the bulk of films continue to have between 30 and 40% re verse-angle cuts, as they have had since the ninete^n-thirties. It is also interesting to note the low figure for Un Ihmmc el vnejemme, which shows, just as did D.W. Criifith's films long ago, that a film can have great success with audiences even though it contains very few reverse^ngle cuts. In fact the figure for Un Homme et unejemme may be even lower, since lam not certain that all of the mere 25 reverse-angle cuts recorded in the whole length of this film should truly qualify under the definition.
All these results show once more that there was always a large amount stylistic diversity, not to mention stylistic changes, present in what often seems to be regarded as the .tylisticallv monolithic 'classical cinema'. Although those i make' much play with this term are aJways card u J not lo define exactlv what they mean by it, it se,n.s that they are usually referring to Hollywood films of the 'thirties and in general. It has been claimed by Daniel toyan m
-
264
-
■
The Phantom of the Opera The Cradle Snatchers The Crowd:
■
A Girl in Every Port
Trent's Last Case
The Champ
Sad Sister
The Mad Genius
Red Dust
Back Street
Dr. Jckvll and Mr. Hyde Counsellor at Law It Happened One Night Now and Forever
WLJ/ m&Mm TECHNOLOGY IN THE mWM
■ :
The Devil is a-Woman Show Boat Dodswordi The Road to Glory Ceiling Zero Holiday Sues.
Rebecca of Sunny brook Farm Midnight
When Tom or row Com es The Wizard of Oz The RoaringTwentics They Drive by Night Dark Command Waterloo Bridge •I- Love You Again H.M* Pulham, Esq> Manpower
The Strawberry Blond :High Sierra. Uln fi nished Bu si ness Gentleman -JinY Casablanca The Purple Heart Objective Burma The Adventures of Don Ju Key Largo White Meat All thu King's Men
le
an
1925
1927
19 28
1'92S
1929
1931
1931
1931 1:932
1932
1932
1933 Í934 1!934 1=935
1935
1936 1936 1936 1936 I93S 193S
1938
1939 1939 1939
1939
1940 1940' 1940
1940 ■Ü941
1941 1941 1!941
1941
1942 1942
1945 I94S
1948
1949 1949
R. Julian et al. Howard Hawks King Yidor Howard Hawks Howard Hawks King Vidor Hobart Henley Michael Curtiz V. Fleming John Staid R. Mamoulian William Wyler Frank Capra [-1. Hathaway Fritz Lang J. von Sternberg James Whale William Wyler Howard Jdawks Howard Hawks George Cukor Allan Dwan
All3ii Dwan Mitchell Leisen John Stahl V. Fleming Raoul Walsh RaoulWalsh Raoul Walsh Mcrvyn Le Roy W.S,Van Dyke King Vidor Raoul Walsh RaoulWalsh RaoulWalsh G. La Cava RaoulWalsh Michael Curtiz L. Milestone Raoul Walsh Vincent Sherman John Huston Raoul Walsh Robert Rossen
10%
30%
24%
28%
1S%
23%
21%
51%
29%
25%
41%
17%
1S%
29%
29%
33%
25%
32%
2S%
28%
21%
10%
19%
23%
32%
40%
22%
31%
40%
43%
3S%
23%
55%
40%
24%
3S%
36%
50%
1S%
24%
62%
45%
33%
15%
jmSTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIES
26S
1	The Gunfighter	1950
■	Lady Without a Passport	1950
	Broken Arrow	19SG
	All About Eve	1950
	Winchester'73	1950
	On Dangerous Ground	1951
	Moulin Rouge	1952
	Bend of the River	1952
	El	1953
1	From Here to Eternity	1953
	On the Waterfront	1954
	The Far Country	1955
	Man Without a Star	1955
	War and Peace	1956
	Lust for Life	1956
	The Searchers	1956
	tin Homme et une femme	1965
	Arizona Bushwackers	1967
	Barquero	1970
	Crv of the Banshee	1970
processes at work in the audience's minds. Apart from the fact that in the vast majority of films such cuts form the smaller part, there is no doubt that films almost without thern such as Birth of o Nation can work powerfully on an audience. And further, if the device is so powerlul, why is iinot pushed to the maximum of around 70% reverse-angle cuts in all commercial films, rather than just a few? In any case, deep explanations are unnecessary, since there has always been a direct explanation for the use ofthc revtrrsc-angle device. This is that the expression on a person's face b far easier to read from the front Lnan the side, so actors communicate more when shown Trom the frontal direction. Further than this, the device simply involves the spectator through putting him almost in the position of the characters in the film.
irone wants a deeper explanation of the reverse-angle dtvicc beyond the direct ones I have just given, then scientific psychology (as opposed to the baseless fantasies of psychoanalysis) is in a position to supply one in terms of optimum cortical arousal levels in brain functioning. This in its turn relates to current neurophysiologies investigation ln a CW: way, as can be studied in Aesthetic judgement and «to\isal; An Experimental Contribution to Psjcho-aesthetks (C+ Smets, Leuven University Press, 1973). The point involved tací* that the organism requires sufficiently varied external ^niuli (in this case visual stimuli) for its well-being and
Henry King Joseph H. Lewis Dehn er Daves J. Mankievncz Anthony Mann Nicholas Ray John Huston Anthony Mann Luis Bunuel F. Zinn em an Elia Kazan Andionv Mann King Vidor King Vidor V. Minnelli John Ford Claude Lelouch L. Selandcr Gordon Douglas Gordon Hessler
33%
20% 21% 53% 65% 2S% 56% % 33% 28% 34% 63% 25% 25% 32% 33% 18% 4% 72% 22% 24%
satisfaction; not loo much and not too little, leaving a certain Amount of room for intermediate variation. As far as film is concerned, this means that audience salisfaetion is most easily produced by presenting sufficiently varied views sulficicntly quickly one way or anuthcr, either by angle changes, or by cutting to entirely different scenes, or by camera movement.
The other important neurophysiologies! factor relates to the use ol Cíosc Lips rather than reverse-angles, for the example of the D.W. Griffith films as well as others that were suceesslul with audiences, despite having very few reverse-angle cuts, suggests that the frontal Close Upas>uch> regardless of what is on either $ide of it, is the important device. This must be because the perception of tht- human face seen closely from the iront makes use of ba^ic neural connections, and so has a more powerlul effect than the sideways and more distant new of the human figure. (The fact that the response to the frontal face shape is inborn - or wired into the brain before birth - is demonstrated by the experiments by C.C. Gorent and collaborators in which new-born babies tract a white di*c with a schematic face on it far better than they* do to a white dkc with jumbltd-up or inverted facial features,)
incidentally, the efflirn that ffopn and others make that there was a taboo on an actor looking directly into the lem not completely true &W for the 'thirties and 'fonto,
was
266
103
50
&
JD
American 1940-45
(Ivtean ASL = 8.97 see-.)
100
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FORTIUS American 1946-51
(Mean ASL ^ 10.47 sec.)
■
British ] 940-45
(Mean ASL = 9.9 sec,)
ICO
so
1   £ j 4 5  &  ? b d 10 11 12 13 \4 15 1& 17 1& 19 £021 22
British 1946-SI
(Mean ASL = 10.4 sec.)
so
	13			
				
w 3 i £	t	J"	*	0
11
23. H
^_i_
					15
LD				16	
					
3   i £
1 1
□
1 2 3 4  6 e 7  6  s- 10 11 12 13 u 15 ib 17 1b 10 2021 3223 24 25
Number of Films with' stated Average Shot Length for samples of American and British films, as indicated
and before and after that not true at all. In the silent period close shots of actors, looking straight into the lens were quite common in Griffith's films, and European films in general. All the large number of close shots in JHitchcock's 1928 films Champagne and The Manxman look straight into the lens, and when we move into the ^thirties it is still' possible to find Hollywood films where many of the Close Hps have actors looking straight at the camera, such as.&r. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and Of Human Bondage (1934), while in the 'forties the same is true of Chaplin s Monsieur Verdoux (1947). And at the beginning oft he 'forties Raoul- Walsh made a number of dramas in which characters turn to the eamera and address a line toil. Andaf course in comedies address to the camera had always been possible.
Conclusion
The m aj or for m at develqpmen t i n American film -making duringthe nincteenrforties;the emergence dfa trendtowards long take filming, can be graphically illustrated with, the histograms .on this and1 the next page showing the numbers of films with-different Average Shot Lengths in samples of about five hundred! films from each of the six year .periods 1940-1945 and 1946-1951. When compared to the 1934-39 period; we can see that the distributions are becoming even more asymmetrical, ahddevcloping a lumpy tali to the right, made upof an.increased! number of films w.itli higher ASLs in the region above 13 seconds. The peak number of films with.high-ASLs.in,this tad: was actually achived in the
mm m m m & $m& $M % period, m m gp mm m
began, but I will come to that in a later chapter. Notice also that though the mean value of the ASL keeps increasing from the late 'thirties into the early 'fifties, the modal value still stays the same at 9 seconds. This unchanging modal value corresponds to the persistence of the majority of the directors in shooting films in the same manner as always.
Although some of the directors who helped to consolidate the trend towards longer takes had come into films from the theatre fairly recently, there were others involved who had been in Hollywood for decades, particularly amongst those who began the movement in 1940, so the cause of this development cannot be the influence of the theatre. I1 feel that the likeliest explanation is that directors were becoming bored with having to shoot film after film totally within the walls of the studio, which was a situation that bad hot existed before the latter part of the nineteen -thirties, and so were inclined to welcome a different method of scene dissection once they had noticed it in Holiday (I93S), and other subsequent films made by George Cukon Long-take filming also had the advantage of preventing the ever more obtrusive producers from interfering with the editing of a film. (According to Leo Rosten in Hollywood: iheMw Colony, the Movie Makers, in 1927 there were 34 producers or supcrvisorsinvdlved in the production of 743 feature films in Hollywood. In 1937 220 producers worked on4S4 movies. The number of directors working at those two dateshard!) changed, going from 246 in 1927 to 234 in 1937,) The next steps from this last niece of information take us onto-ground tiliat has been well trodden in writing about films since uk mncteen-thirtics.
m FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
rfif^hc commercial decline of the American cinema X continued throughout the nmetccn-fifties, with rapidly decreasing financial returns to the major studios, ami a decreasing number of films being produced each year. ■Double feature' programmes were eliminated as a standard means or exhibition, and most of the minor studios closed. A new feature of the scene was the increasing number of films made by independent producers, though these were mostly released through the major companies. In a bid to retain the decreasing cinema audiences various novel methods of film projection were introduced, and more and more American films had larger and larger parts of them shot on location, particularly in exotic locales. All of these trends, though present, were less marked in the cinema of other countries.
Film Stock
Although the principal thrust of film stock development in the 'fifties was into colour processes, nevertheless Kodak and Dupont produced still faster black and white negative materials. These were Tri-X from Eastman Kodak with & speed of 200 ASA under tungsten light in 1954, and Superior 4 from Dupont in 1956 with a speed of 2SO ASA, These new stocks had little importance for feature film production, but they were needed for television news and documentary production, which oftenhad to be done under low available light levels. The increased amount of location film ing on feature films continued to be handled with the older stocks such as Superior 2, Super XX, and even Plus X. Plus-X retained its position as the most popular black and white negative, helped by the substitution of an improved emulsion in 1956, but the use of Super XX continued to increase,
Agfacolor and its Derivatives
After World War 2 the Agfacolor patents were considered as the spoils of war, and colour films based on them were manufactured from the early 'fifties onwards by the Fuji company of Japan, Fcrrania in Italy, and Gevaert In Belgium, not to mention the continuation of the original AgfaceV in West Germany. In America, General Aniline and Film, the now completely separate daughter company of hG. Farbcn, had already produced an Agfa-type reversal film in 1947, and this was first used for feature m Production in 1949 in shooting The Man on ihe Eiffel
Wr. This stock was considerably slower than the original German Agfacolor, having a speed of 12 ASA, but when the change to a negative-positive process was made in 1951, the accuracy of the colour reproduction with Anscocolor became better than it had been with Agfacolor, though still lacking the colour saturation obtainable with Technicolor, or even Eastman Color, Much the same could be said of the other Agfacolor derivatives, excluding Sovcolor, which was worse than the German original.
The M.G.M. studio's Metrocolor process was carried out with Ansco negative and positive stock until 1955, after which date Eastman Color was used. This was the end of all use of Anscoeolor in feature films, but 16 mm. Anscochrome reversal stock continued to be produced, and it was joined in 1957 by Super Anscochrome with a speed of 100 ASA. Besides its importance for colour television news and documentary work, this stock was needed for use in the high speed cameras of the missile development programs. (Very high speed cameras have very short exposure times per frame, and cannot be used in daylight without high speed film.)
Another derivative of Agfacolor that was important for a few years was a positive colour print stock made by Dupont from 1949. This was used by Consolidated Film Laboratories to produccTrucolor prints from Eastman Color camera negative until 1958. The well-known peculiarities of the Trucolor process, which were poor definition, high contrast, and restriction of the gamut of hues to rather saturated primaries and orangey- brown neutral colours, as in Johnny Guitar (1954), were probably due not so much to the deficiencies of Dupont print stock as to unsatisfactory intermediate positive and negative stages between the initial negative and the final print, a problem that had been solved ehewhere by Eastman Kodak from 1953.
Eastman Color
The first feature films shot and printed on toman Color positive and negative stork appeared in I9S1 (C.g W of mi® '«ougii «he SuperCinecdlor label
attached by the processing laboratory concealed the process's true identity. In- these newly developed integral Lack materials the dye formers were incorporated ,n the th ec primary colour-*™*** layers in the emu ton after h Agfacolor pattern, bot the dyes used were Afferent to Lin AgfacLr, and the Eastman Color ncga,,ve layers
26$
m incorporated a 'colour mask\ which was responsible for the all-over orange colour of Eastman negatives when developed. This colour mask corrected certain of the deficiencies inevitably present in the colour response of all colour negative systems; deficiencies which prevented the bright and distinct reproduction of greens and blues in particular. Eventually the Agfaeolor derivatives did acquire colour masking systems, but by then Eastman Color had established -its dominance. The other advantage that Eastman Color had in the earlier stages was that the system included intermediate duplicating negative and positive stocks, whereas other systems had to go through either black and white separation positives, or simply use the Eastman intermediate materials. The colour response of Eastman col or was thus superior to that of its competitors, as was its definition and speed, which'was 16 ASA under daylight, although it was still inferior in this respect to the Technicolor three-strip camera process. However in 1953 the Eastman Color process was improved ? in every way, with new intermediate negative and positive stocks, as well as a new camera negative now balanced for tungsten light exposure, with better definition and the improved speed of 24 ASA, This was followed by a yet again improved Eastman Color negative Type 5250 in 1959, with a speed of 50 ASA, and this colour negative decisively established the dominance since maintained inthis field'by Kodak, and also completely eliminated competition in the U.S.A. by its superiority'.
Kodak also replied to Ansco's challenge in the 16 nun.
colour reversalHeldiby introducing EktachromeCommcrcial (25 ASA for tungsten lighten I9SS, and in T9S9 two high speed Ektachrome:E,R. stocks for use under tungsten light and daylight with speeds of] 25 ASA and 160 ASA respectively. These were all low contrast reversal stocks intended to he used'as master materiall for making reversal prints, rather than for direct projection of the original, as was the case with the already existing 16.mm. Kodachrome. From l=9i>5 Eastman Kodak had produced-a reversal'print stock to go with, their camera reversal materials, Type 5269.
■
Technicolor
In I9S0 -Pechriieolor improved their three-strip camera process yet again.making the emulsions.more sensitive, a„d also ba|aneingthemror filming u„der tungsten light without a filler, rather.than the previous daylight balance T5his was because the speed was now .equivalent to somewhere between SO and: 10» ASA, and arc ligluing (which has a white spectral balance fairly .close to daylight) was no onger necessary to give the required light level of about O^M-cand.e, From. ,95,! Eastman Color negative^ " dlSplaee 35 mm. Kodachrome as the mono,Lk camera
in c
-
FILM STYLE AND TECFINOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
material sometimes used for Technicolor production despite its inferior performance to the three-strip camera material The contrast between the two possible camera sources of Technicolor prints can be seen within Rancho Notorious (19S2), where the bulk of the film was shot on monopack a conventional camera, and only the two big Inserts of th stolen brooch shot with the Technicolor three-strip camera These Inserts are far sharper than the rest of the film ai least when seen on an original 35 mm. print.
When the improved Eastman Color appeared in 1953 the use of the three-strip camera was phased out as a negative source for Technicolor films. The diminished advantages of that form of Technicolor production no longer counted against the convenience of shooting a single negative in a smaller conventional camera. So from 1955 onwards the name Technicolor only represents a laboratory carrying out a unique printing process which was, as before, printing by dye transfer via three positive relief matrices held in contact with a 'blank' emulsion on three successive register pin belt machines, one for each of the positive colours. The three positive relief matrices were now made in succession from the single Eastman Color negative printed through three appropriately coloured filters, rather than one-against-one from the three separate negatives from the three-strip camera. The dye transfer printing process was also sufficiently modified and improved in 1953 to finally dispense with the faint black silver ' key" imago that had been photographically printed into the not-quite-blank positive emulsion from 1934 onwards.
Because Technicolor was now being shot with monopack iilm in a conventional camera, it was now possible to use any lens desired on that camera, and in particular it was final Impossible to use good wide-angle lenses tor Technicolor filming. In fact not a great deal of advantage was taken of this possibility^ though one film that did w as John Hustons Moby Dicfc:£1956). This film is also interesting for the special nature of the Technicolor prints that were made for it. To get something of the effect of old coloured engravings in the image, extra black was added to the final print by double printing the three relief matrices with a black and white intermediate negative made from the original colour negative. Actually the principal effect of this process was to desaturatc the colours, though where there was already black in the image, it was spread and intensified slighth-John Huston and his cameraman had previously uken another approach to colour control in Moulin Rouge (1953). In that ease the desaturation of colours in the image was achieved partly by the colours used in the set design, and partly by using moderately heavy artificial fog on the sets, supplemented by the extensive use of log filters. Although this kind of approach became popular in the 'seventies, ii
f\j STYLE AXD TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
m not particularly taken up by other film-makers at this time*
So from 1956 onwards all American 35 mm. colour films for theatrical exhibition were shot with Eastman Color negalive» an<^ exceptions already noted of
Technicolor and Trucolor, printed onto Eastman print stock. The labels War ncrco I or, DeLuxe Color, etc. never signified anvthing more tnari tne laboratory or studio carrying out die Eastman Color process.
The processing of Eastman Color was fairIy si mply carried out in any laboratory by the addition of a few extra tanks to ihc existing type of developing machines, and its printing was made more efficient and easier by the introduction in i9S6ofthe Bell & Howell additive colour printer, which had automatic control of the light regulation for each shot from instructions on punched paper tape. The accuracy of colour control in the grading (U.S. 'timing*) of individual shots was greatly improved by the use of the H axel tine colour analyzer from 19S9 onwards by those laboratories that could afford it. In this machine colour negative is scanned by a colour television camera, and the complementary colours and tones are produced electronically to give a positive colour image on a T.V. screen. Calibrated adjustment of the three colours Is provided to give a read-out of the exact corrections to the negative needed to give accurate colour reproduction when the printing stage is later carried out. This is necessary because the orange mask on the negative, plus the necessity of adjusting three colours, make direct visual guessing of the correct printing exposure for each shot immensely more difficult with colour negative than is the case for black and white negative. In fact it is almost impossible, so that prior to the introduction ol the Hazel tine analyzer and its later competitors, the correct printing exposure for colour films had been arrived at by making repeated trial prints, and then gradually correcting the errors.
Film Lighting
The only innovation in lighting equipment during the 'fifties was the introduction of 'cone lights' in 1951. These £ere really called forth by the demands of the television lighting of that time for a general even overall wash of non-dSrccUonal lightapplied from above, to permit simultaneous multi-caTnerashootinefromalldircctions.Theunitconsisted
ofa large tungsten bulb of up to 10 kiloWatts power inside 1 large conical reflector painted matt m'hite, with the bulb kidded from casting direct light by a matt-white painted talflc. Cone lights produced so-called shadowless" light ^^.present-day 'soft lights1 or north lights1, but as far as standard filmmaking was concerned, they were only used it a considerable distance from the actors, either suspended overhead on some large sets to provide part of the general
269
lightin The m
gs or on floor stands to provide a general fill light .ajor part of the lighting of the actors was still done with spots and Hoods as usual. So cone lights had no great effect on the appearance of film lighting.
The general trend in Him lighting continued in the already established direction of simplification, particulars in colour films. The backlighting df% figurt5] which was already reduced from that in the black and white Riming of the previous decade, was now often eliminated altogether, and the number of lighting units used to light the more distant shots from the front and sides was also reduced. (There was not much room for reduction of the number of lights used to light Close Ups/| This trend reached the point where many of the shots were lit with only a handful ol lights, so that the result is extremely crude if reduced to monochrome either by printing or T.V. transmission, whereas the lighting in * forties colour films still looks reasonably attractive if reduced to black and white.
In this period the lighting for black and white him waa not simplified quite so farT but it was being pushed in the same direction, in part because of the vastly increased number of colour films that cameramen practised upon, and also in part by the continuing experience of location filming in black and white. Location filming of interiors still took place on only a few films, but studio interiors were more and more being built to the same dimensions as real interiors, rather than to the much larger scale that had hecn used before. In either the case of real interiors or correct scale sets, it is difficult to get a large number of lights in, but this restriction fitted in quite well with the continuing m o ve ment to wa rds g reatc r n at u ra 1 i sm i n I ight i ng, as i n ot he r things. Prime examples of this process in operation as far a* lighting is concerned are given by Boris Kaufman's work on On the Watttpmi (3954), and James Wong Howes lighting of TUc Sweet Smell of Soecess (1957), and both films also show the reduction or elimination of supplementary lighting on daylight exteriors, which was another new development a*
rncd,
far as America was conce
Cameras
Apart from the special cameras made for exclusive Use with the various .vide screen processes, which will be considered separately, there were no significant new 3> mm. cameras produced in this decade. For 16 mm. hlmmg ifa Amflcx 16s became available in America during these vears though without having any great impact even on documentary film-making. The Arrifie* » **« the older 35 mm. Arrillex camera in general con fig □ rat, on, „ith a mirror-reflex shutter providing continuous throng^ the-len, viewing, but its basic form took on; 100 Lot
SS I-WW»rn,miri an ]m{ mag"iK'"
270
FILM STYLE ANO TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
A location interior in On the Water^ front (1954), Ik by Boris Kaujmn^ with the realjluoTtscem lights m tht bur Left switched on. But the oauai main lighting is done by film ^ flooded, and high out of shot on the left, with Jill from the right from lights about shoulder height. They are oho producing the small rim backlight on the foreground figure. There is ah0 some light smoke on the setr The picture reproduces the actualframe proportions on the print, which h masked to an aspect ratio of7;/.S,
It was also .possible to use supplementary +00 foot film magazines attached to the top of the camera in.the same way as on the 35 mm. Arriflex^ but these 16 mm. magazines did not include the sprocket drive, which was inside the camera body. The film movement was also different in the 16 mm. Arriflex, with the puIUdown claw entering the filnvfrom the front rather than the back, and the mechanism also included a registration^n system, which was not available in the 35 mm. camera: Small interchangeable electric motors, which could be either battery driven or mains driven, were fixed onto the side of the earn era, rather=t ban underneath asm the 35mm. Arriflex.
Tlie development that proved; to ibe more important immediately was the adaptation of Auricon: Cine-Voice
cameras for hand-held filming in 1957, and then their further adaptation by the Leacock-Pemiebakcr group En 1959 to operate in synchronism with light-weight tape recorders without any connecting cable. The Cine-Voice camera, which was a small form of the Auricon Pro with only a 100 foot internal magazine, was altered to take 40X1 foot magazines, and to rest on the cameraman's shoulder while he viewed the action directly through a beam-splitting view-finder built into the zoom lens which had also been adapted to lit on this camera. All of this, in combination with the developments in sound recording detailed below, made possible the filming of the first 'direct cinema1 films, starting with Primary in I960t
w
The Arriflex 16s camera in its baskform, vtihoui the 400foor supplementary magazine attached on top of the body containing the integral 100Jbot magazine. This is a late model but essentially the same as thefirst cameras in
the scries.
M STXLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
Rutiion KOMBAC (Konvas) camera for non-syncL filming.
Cameras and Ideology
At the beginning of the nineteen-forties the Russians had got hold of at least one Mitchell BNC, and this was used in shooting Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyr amongst other films, u'hiii; in the 'fifties they produced a design of their own, the Moskva EC 32, which was closely based on the Mitchell. A new lightweight Russian camera, the ICOHBAG (Konvas), whichalso appeared around this time, was closely based on
■
the Came flex, It was extensively used lor wild shooting on Russian films, and its most notable outing was in the next decade on Mikhail Kalatozov's Soy Cuba (1964).
When we note that the Communist Chinese film industry of this period used old Mitchell NC's, the only conclusion can be that political ideology has no connection with film technology, whatever some Western Marxists used to say. Much the same could be said about the forms ol mainstream cinema, which arc very similar everywhere. As for ideology in its more general sense, which I take to be mariner and systems of thinking, then film technology is certainly closely determined by the universal system of rational, causal, empirical thinking that has created the industrialized world, but since the cinema could not exist without this, there is nothing more to be said about this question. The sole achievement of Marxism and socialism in this area is to make the invention of any technology nearly impossible, just as it has prevented new aesthetic forms appearing when it has been rigidly applied.
Lenses
Even wider-angle lenses than had been available before speared in the nineteen-fifties: a 9.5 mm. lens for 16 mm. ^meras in 1953T and then in 1958 a S.7 mm. lens for 16 mm. cameras that covered a horizontal field of 108 degrees. For 35 mm. cameras amm. lens became available in 1959. There was also a new ultra-wide-apcrture lens produced
211
for 16 mm. cameras in 1956, no doubt in response to the demands of television filming in low-level available &t situations. This lens was of 25 mm. focal length, and had a maximum aperture of Í0.9S. There had been lenses with apertures this large before, M their quality had always been poor, which was not the case with this Angenieux lens. With this lens, and the fastest black and white film, it was possible to get a picture under just about any lighting conditions,
The most important lens developments of the 1 fifties centred on the new zoom lenses that became available, and just like the wide-angle lenses their construction incorporated a large number of elements, so that their design had only been made possible by the use of the newly available high speed computers, in 1954 the Zoomar Corporation introduced a lens for 35 mm. cameras similar to the one they already made for 16 mm. cameras. Since this only had a zoom ratio of 3 to I it was real!)' no great improvement over die old Taylor-Hobson Vara tans of the * thirties, except that the focus could be varied. There were only isolated instances of its use, lor instance in Apattw (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). The zoom lenses that really made an appreciable d i Here nee to lilm style, though not immediately, appeared in 1956. These were made by SOM- Rcrthiot of France, who gave them their trade name of Pan-Cinor, and I hey had a zoom ratio ol 4 to I. The lens for 16 mm. cameras had a focal length range of 17.5 mm. to 70 mm. with a maximum aperture of □.$, and the lens for 35 mm. cameras had a range from 38,5 mm. to 150 mm., and a maximum aperture ol Two years later the Angeriieux company produced a similar pair of lenses.
In America these new zoom tenses were taken up immediately only for television documentary work, but in continental Europe they were used in some feature films. For instance, RolfThieie's Oos Madchen Roxmorie (195S), contains many zoom shots, some in combination with panning during extended takes, and occasional use of the zoom can be seen in other German films of the period. However, the most notable early use of the zoom lens was in Roberto Rosscllini's ha ě# a Row (1960) and feUb (] 960) In Era none o Roma the extensive use of zoom shots in combination with tracking and panning formed a rather bínation, and after that Rosscllini .vas a l.ttte
dizzying coml
more restrarne
>din his use of the zoom.
Magnetic Recording
Although the first %-inck tap, recorders appear* m America-ear or twoafter the war, it wasnot unul 1949 that Inetic -ording came to be used for hbn^ * thaTvear recorders that recorded sound onto ft (** %
■
211
that was perforated down one edge (i.e. 35 mm. film split down the middle) andcoated with magnetic iron oxide came into tise in Hollywood studios, replacing the optical sound recording cameras as the first stage of studio recording. In this initial stage of the introduction of magnetic recording, sound tracks were then transferred from these magnetic recordings to optical tracks for editing in the usual way, but from the end of 1949 a changeover was made to editing with magnetic recordings on -full-width coated 35 mm. film, as is still done today. The adaptation of existing moviolas to work widi magnetic film was extremely simple and cheap, and despite many initial complaints from editors that they could no longer recognize the exact positions of words as they had in the past by their visible traces on the optical soundtrack, the efficiency of the editing process was in no way changed. The real advantage of magnetic recording over optical recording was in the possibility of instant playback on the sel, and more importantly in improved recording quality, particularly as regards frequency range and the lowering of background noise. Though by the time the recording got back onto the optical track of the finished film prints for theatrical: projection mostof this advantage had been lost again.
Vi-inch. tape recorders that produced a recording synchronized with the camera filming the scene were available from 1950, and they gradually displaced thc magnet!crecordc rs us ingperforated fi]in. These synchronous recorders worked by recording a regular synchronising pulse on a second-parallel track on the same Ví-inch, tape at thc same time as the sound signal; The new synchronous re cord ers, though smallc r than a nyťhi ng previously u sed fo r recording film sound, were far from portable in the sense of it being possible to carry them around in the hand:, so.they made no appreciable difference to film style, It was only in 19S9 that the first truly portable synchronous % inch, tape recorders were produced in Europe, and since they only had an effect on film form from I960 onwards, they wilL'be described in the next chapter?.
Magnetic sound recording was also important for th multUrack.. 'stereophonic' recordings used: in the ne CinemaScopc and 70 mm. film processes. In these processe narrow stripes of *he usua]! ,nagnetic ,rccort]ijlg meijiuni were coated^ down the edge of the final show prints, and' the multiple soundtracks wore magnetically recorded^onto these stripes individually for each print made, It was fairly simpler modify the projectors Uvthe cinemas to play these agnetic tracks by addjng a. set of magnetic replay head *** ťhc film &ate- some improvement ov
e
jviw s
ma
ab
the sound from optical tracks,, (he-S
s er
e magnetic recordings
mm fclV.fcr sfton of pr^nUW idea, of high fidelity sound' 45 J
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
Special Forms of Projection
All the special forms of cinematography and projection that were introduced into commercial film-making in the 'fifties had been demonstrated in the nineteen twenties — all the forms ol stereoscopic cinematography at the beginning of the decade, and multiscreen films, wide films and anamorphic cinematography at the end of it - but none had proved to be commercially viable.
Cinerama
This special form of cinematography and projection involved filming scenes with a special triple camera which was made up of three 35 mm. cameras with 27 mm. lenses, arranged so that their fields joined side by side, with 2 degrees overlap at the edges, to cover a broad panorama. The combined field covered by this multiple camera was I4G degrees horizontally and 5S.5 degrees vertically. Although ordinary 35 mm. film was used in these cameras, the height of thc frame extended over 6 sprocket holes rather than thy usual 4, and in the early years of the process they were run at 26 frames per second rather than the usual 24 frames per second, For projection three projectors were used electrically locked in synchronism to reconstruct the image on a screen that was deeply curved in thc horizontal plane around the front part of the auditorium. The screen also had to be constructed in the form of a series of louvered slats to reduce image degradation through light scatter, so because of this, and also because of the other special arrangements, which included multi-track sound reproduction from a separate sound deck locked to the projectors, Cinerama was only exhibited in a small number of special theatres in the largest cities in thc world. At first the films made in the process and shown exclusively in these theatres were all documentary and travelogue combinations, but finally two fictional films were made in the process. These were How the West Was Won (1962) and Thc Wonderful World of thc Brothers Grimm (1963), and after this the films made by die Cinerama Corporation were shot on 70 mm, film with a single camera, and thc Cinerama theatres were adapted to projection with a single 70 mm. projector, though still on the deeply curved screen. The only really special characteristic of films made in the original three-camera Cinerama was that the stagings made some effort to avoid having the actors stand in positions where the join between the frames passed, as the image was blurred down these two narrow vertical strips. A subsidiary restriction on filming in three-camera Cinerama was that thc lens a*is had to be kept as near horizontal as possible, and yet another minor restriction was that the very wide field of view made ii difficult to get good lighting while keeping the lights outs of shot, Jo the 'sixties fictional films made bv other companies
m STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
in likra Panavision came to be shown in Cinerama theatres, jnd finally even ordinary 70 mm. films. At this point the process
could be considered to be defunct.
Stereoscopic Films
The brief enthusiasm for stereoscopic feature films that lasted from 1952 to 1954 was entirely carried out by using variants of the anaglyph process, which involved two film strips being shot by two synchronized cameras with their lenses effectively set apart by the eye-separation distance, and then projected by synchronized projectors to give superimposed images on a single screen. The images corresponding to the left and right eye views were visually ^pirated by cither projecting them through oppositely polarizing filters on the two lenses, and then having thc audience view the screen with corresponding polarizing filters over each eye, or in the case of films in black and while, by carrying out the same process with red and green filters over thc projector lenses and the audience's eyes. This ensured that each eye only received the Image from the camera in thc position corresponding to the eye. Although strictly speaking both the red-green monochrome process and the polarized light processes were anaglyph processes, in the vernacular only the first was referred to as such, and the polarized light system was called the polari'/cd light system.
■
The cameras used in these processes were cither Cameflexes, Arriflexes, Or Mitchell NCs, and for sync, niming the pair of cameras were enclosed in a common large blimp. Most ordinarily pairs of Mitchell NCs were u^ed, and in this case the combination was very Earge and heavy indeed, weighing over 200 lbsh. This factor, as well as the nature of the stereoscopic effect in itself, considerably restricted the amount of camera movement in stereoscopic tilms. Another drawback to the process was that it was most effective when the photography used as much depth of field as possible, and with the slow colour film of those years this made very high light levels necessary on the set.
Apart from the well-known use of movement towards the camera in stereoscopic films, thc only other point worth niaking about visual style in this connection is to point to Houglas Sirk1s Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), and Hitchcock's W M for Murder (1954) as containing some attempts to create novel compositions in three dimensions. Dial Mfor Murder was unusual amongst stereoscopic films in that it stained quite a number of set-ups in which the foreground objects were out of focus, which was usually avoided as ™ch as possible with this technique.
c<nemaScope
(n 1953 theanamorphic process devised by Henri Chretien
273
m 1928 was revived by Twentieth Century-Fox in exactly the same form, with a supplementary lens incorporating a cylindrical element placed in front of an ordinary camera lens. This produced an image on the film that included twee the horizontal field which would have been included without it, while leaving the vertical field unchanged. When the image was projected with a similar supplementary lens in iront of the ordinary projector lens, the result was an image twice thc usual width on the screen, with an aspect ratio of height to width of 1:2.66. The supplementary lens on the camera had to be focussed separately from the prime lens, and the prime lens on the camera could only be a 50 mm, lens in the initial form of the process. For the first couple of films made in the CinemaScopc process, The Robe and Flow to Marry a Millionaire, there was no soundtrack on thc projected print, and thc image occupied the full width between the perforations, as well as covering what usud to be the thick black bar between the frames. In fact the image on the film was the same size as thc old silent image. The sound was run separately in synchronism with the projector on 35 mmr magnetic film on a reproducing deck, and it was made up of 4 tracks which played 'stereophonicaUy* through right, left, and centre loudspeakers behind the screen, and also through a linked set of'surround' speakers round r.he hack of the auditorium. To create these four sound tracks giving an illusion of sound directionality corresponding to the nominal sources in the ima«e, the original synchronous sound was recorded during the filming in the usual way onto a single track, and then the four 'stereophonic' tracks were created synthetically during the sound track mixing sessions by gradually switching the single track recording from track to track to match the movement of the supposed source of sound in the image.
I3y 195+ the four soundtracks had been transferred to four magnetic alnp^s, on the picture film, with two of the tracks on each sidu- of the frame. Of these two tracks one was outside the sprocket holes, and the odier Inside them. This lost some of the width of the image, and the projected aspect ratio on the screen became 1:2.35. Finally alternative prints came to be made widi a single monogenic optical soundtrack down one side of the film in th, usual place, and this has continued to be the case down to the present day. Because of the synthetic nature of the -stereophonic' sound for CinemaScope-type films, the sound is never complexly convincing realistic throughout the length oi the film and its defects in this direction arc more noticeable than thow of ordinary monophunic soundtrack, The syndironou* recording of true ^reopbW ^ ™^
m to
icropho^ into ™lüpk- «** ****** &**
be u» difficult to    worth purging iL tb* time, fh, vfWaJ perform of ih, original On*f*f*
274
wtem left a lot to be desired; the squeeze ratio (proportion of lateral compression) of the image on the film varied a little depending on the distance of the object photographed from the camera, and in particular faces in Close Up were widened when projected. Because initially only a 50 mm. lens could he used, and also because die film stock was always the very slow colour emulsion of this period, the depth of field tended to be more restricted than usual, and this hindered the use of staging in depth as a mode of scene dissection. However the Cinema Scope system could be very satisfactorily used by those directors engaged in long take filming with camera movement, and indeed in their 1954 films Premier and Minnelli pushed on to even longer takes than the)' had used before. (Carmen Jones has an ASL of 43 seconds, and Brigadoon an ASL of 26 seconds.)
CinemaScope and Take Length
It is commonly supposed that the introduction of CinemaScope suddenly increased the length of the shots in films that used^the process, and thisistrue, though the effect was not that large. As I have already shown, take lengths kept on increasing throughout the 'forties and into the beginning ofthc 'fifties, and CinemaScope entered just at the peak of this process, ff we consider the six American 'Scope films released in 1953, their mean ASL is 13.7 seconds, whereas the mean ASL for a sample of SO American films, both 1 Scppe and non-'Scope, is 9.8 seconds. In 1954, when many more 'Scope films were made, a sample of 29 of them has a mean ASL of 13.6 seconds, against the overall mean ASL of that year of IOs.7 seconds.  Considering CinemaScope films made between 1-9S2 and 1957, we find that their mean Average Shot Length is 13 seconds, whereas in the same six year period a fairly random sample of about 100 American fihni, of all kinds hada mean ASL of 11 seconds. So it seems there was a tendency for 'Scope films to have longer takes, and particularly so in 1953-54, if we look at the results in detail1. But after only a small number of CinemaScope ft 1 had been made, Robert AUlrich demonstrated that it wj possible to cut fast in CinemaScope in- Vera Cray, (1954). which has an ASL of 5 seconds. And; William Wellmanhad gone back t0'something like bis usual cutting rate m Track ofihcQai (1954) with an ASL of S.8 seconds, after making Thc-mgh^thc %%<ASL of 12.5 sec.)carlier in. the year. Another Tast cutter' who returned to his old ways after his fW 'Scope film was Henry Hathaway, w.ith his Prince Valiant (1954} having,an ASL of 6.7 seconds. .However the director who plunged .right into 'Scope filming using his usual fast cutting in 1954 was Robert Aldrich, with, Verc W From V9S5, the mean ASL of 'Scope films bepan gmng down gradually, till it was   10.3 seconds in 1959 m that year the mean ASL for 50 American films of both
ms as
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
kinds was 9.3 seconds. My reading of the situation is ihat although the full range of ASLs were used with 'Scope fihn making after the first year, there was a tendency for those directors who already preferred long takes to use 'Scope in preference to shooting with non-anamorphic film. Amongst the established Llong take' directors who worked almost exclusively with 'Scope, besides those already mentioned one can name Henry King, George Cukor, and Ceorae Marshall, These last three continued to use normal staging rather than excessive camera movement, while of course the use of long takes with wide-angle lens staging on the Qti?en Kane model was completely impossible with CinemaScope,
Composition and CinemaScope
The initial attitude to composition with CinemaScope was to keep the camera back from the actors and line upas many of them as possible across the frame, as in T/ie foahe (1953) and Flow to Marry a Millionaire (1953). The occasional frieze-like processions in the former film were only slightly more imaginative. A rather more subtle approach was visible in Cukor's A Star is Born (1955), where he created a kind of variable masking by filling side areas of the frame with heavy black shadows in some of the shots. Nicholas Ray made occasional use of compositions with bi-latcrai symmetry in Rebel Without a Cause (3955), but mostly everyone shooting 'Scope used conventional ideas about giving compositions lateral balance, including the use of the standard compositional ratios for the lateral divisions between objects of interest and the edges of the screen. The use of the strong diagonal compositions that had been so popular in the previous decade was out of the question with die new screen shape♦ There were also a number of visually unimaginative directors who just kept everything of interest in the central area of the frame and let the sides go hang. These range from Henry Levin to, I regret to say, Eli a Kazan in Wild ftiVar, but Delmer Daves' claim to have done this on purpose in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) is false. His eye got the better of his intentions, and a number of the compositions and groupings in that film make full compositional use of the CinemaScope frame.
Composition in the ordinary sense was inevitably not so important for directors such as Premmger who used long takes with mobile camera, but of this group Minnelli had always had a tendency to break his long takes down into sections where the camera was static, interleaved W sections where it moved with the actors to the next resting point, or 'camera hold'. Minnelli did some rather interesting things with some of his 'Scope compositions in The Cvb^ (1955), using the small bright patch of colour of a bunch of flowers or a lamp at one end of a fairly neutrally colour frame to balance the actor at the other end.
M STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES
FH
Supcrscope
1ihe one process with 'scope in its title that was not essentially identical to CinemaScope was Supcrscope. This was used on a few low-budget films like Riot in Cell Block \) made around 1954. This process was carried out by filming on ordinary 35 mm. film with the part of the image le be used falling within an area excluding the top and bottom of the frame, so that its aspect ratio was 2;K Prints were made in an optical printer which applied vertical anamorphic expansion to this area so that it filled the full height of the positive frame s but left narrow strips at each side blank. These prints were projected in the same manner as CinemaScope through an anamorphic projection lens. In a way this was a partial anticipation of the Techniscope system which became important in the nest decade, but it did not catch on in this form.
Todd-AG and Other 70 mm. Film Systems
In 1955 a new wide-film process using negative 65 mm. wide and print stock 70 mm. wide was introduced. This was Todd-AG, and although various wide films had been unsuccessfully tried before around 1930, some oi them even using 70 mm, film, this new version was compatible with none of its predecessors, as the position of the perforations was different, and the frame was 5 perforations high, with an aspeciratioof 1:2.2. Tbe ex tra 2.5 mm, of width on each side of the positive film outside the perforations accommodated four magnetic soundtracks, with a further two running between the perforations and the outer edges of the frame, five of these tracks fed five separate loudspeakers behind and across the width of the screen, and the sixth track fed *eund to a set of surround speakers around the back of the auditorium. The 'stereophonic' sound was synthesized from monophonic tracks in the mixing studio, just as for CinemaScope sound. The first Todd-AO films were shot and projected at 30 frames per second, and shown only in special cinemas equipped with very large and deeply curved screens, on the pattern of Cinerama. Since these screens occupied a visual angle of about 90 degrees for much of the stance, the use ofthc widest^anglc lens in the system, ivhich had a horizontal acceptance angle of 123 degrees, did not produce as much 'wide-angle' perspective distortion as might be expected. The longest focal length lens for Todd-AQ had a horizontal acceptance angle of 37 degrees, but this
only used for the infrequent Close Ups of actors.
The first films made in Todd-AO tended to use very long just like the first CinemaScope films, betas the use of TCmm. spread, with other identical but differently named ^rsions such as Super Panavision appearing from 195S,
as ordinary cinemas came to use 70 mm. projection on ordinary screens, faster cutting rates were used in 70 mm.
275
films. Films shot in 70 mm. were also reduced in optical printers to give 35 mm, anamorphic prints that were identical to ordmary CinemaScope prints as far as projection was concerned, though they had far better definition, and lost only the finest sliver of the image from the top and bottom or the original 70 mmT frame. The only two films made in the short-lived CinemaScope 55 process, which involved shooting an exactly double width frame on 55 mm. film in a special camera, were also optically reduced in the same way to give ordinary CinemaScope prints for distribution.
Other Wide-Screen Systems
All the wide-screen systems not involving anamorphic compression or the use of special wide film were identical as far as projection was concerned, and also identical with respect to the requirements of image composition. They all involved projecting standard 35 mm. film with a wider-angle lens than usual, and simultaneously masking off the-top and bottom ofthc image io the projector gate aperture. The result was an image that filled the usual screen height, hut whose sides were further out than had previously been the case with the 1:1,35 of the Academy frame, and this changed the aspect ratio (height to width) of the image oh the screen to either 1:1.66 or 1:1.75 or V:I,S5. Initially, in May 1953, amongst the major production companies Paramount chose a wide-screen ratio of 1:1.66, M.G.M, one of l;L75, and Universal and Columbia 1:1.35, but after a few shifts of policy all ratios were used indiscriminately, though 1:175 was eventually little favoured in America, hut much favoured in Britain, Some American producers occasionally masked off the picture area slightly at the top and the bottom of the frame in the camera to a ratio ol I: L 5, hut there was no consistency about this, and it was not a very common practice. It must be made quite clear that nearly all American commercial features made from 1954 onwards have had their images composed by their cameramen to be acceptably projected in one of the wide-screen ratios, and not in the old 1:1.35 Academy ratio, even though the image on the film is still of Academy proportions. When non-anamorphic American films made after 1954 arc printed down to 16 mm. this image in Academy aperture proportions is retained, and since no 16 mm. projector, have any provision for masking the fi-ame to wide screen, the result on the screen is not what was intended or origmally seen when the film was first shown, However it must be mentioned that there were directors and cameramen with a verv strong visual sense who seem to have ignored these cements for image composition, (apart Irom that of keeping the acW faces out of the very top brt ol he frame and their films made aft.r 1954 look better when L full Academy aperture is projected. The most important
276
exhibits herc are Frit,. Lang's filing but others to whom this applies to a lesser extent are King Vidor and Douglas Sir*. When widescrccn projection became usual in Europe a year or two after 1954, many non-anamorphic films made there had their images masked to the correct wide-screen ratio m rheprim, so making it impossible toproject the films in the old (and wrong) ratio.
The result of wide screen projection was that true wide-angle lens photograph)1 was effectively no longer possible. This was because with wide-screen projection the full vertical angle of the taking lens was no longer represented in the screen image, and since the sides of the screen had also been moved out to encompass a wider visual angle for the audience, the same impression of normal perspective that had previously been obtained with a lens of focal length 35 to 40 mm, now required a lens with focal length of approximately 25 mm.. Compared to this, an IS mm. lení, which was the widest available in the 'fifticsj no longer gave the extreme vwide-angle' impression that it had given before, and so the visual effect of the 'wide-angle lens' style was lost. And because of the shape of the image as projected, the possibility of arranging strong diagonal compositions in one way or another was also lost, However depth of focus and the possibility of staging in depth had not been lost if short focal length lenses were used, but since their distinctiveness and noticcability had now gone, interest in using them receded.
VistaVision
The sole peculiarity of Paramount's VistaVision process as it was actually worked, apart from in a few showcase cinemas, was that the image was photographed on a double-sized frame S sprocket holes long on ordinary 35 mm. film running horizontally sideways behind the lens in a special camera. Although ťlic image was o^the same size and proportions as that of a IS mrm still camera, being 24 mm. high and 36 mm. 'long (Lc. 1:1,5 aspect ratio), the left and rjght extremities were not used in any way, and only an 'Academy ratio" portion of it 2+ mm. by 32 mm. was reduced onto 35 mm. positive prints in an optical printer that also turned: the image through 90 degrees to give the correct orientation -for ordinary projection, The view finder of the VistaVision camcraihad markings on the ground glass indicating the composition areas for the usual wide-screen ratios. The sole advantage of-this process over ordinary non^ anamorphic wide-screen photography was that the larger area on^the negative produced a sharper image in the final pr,m. This is because most of the loss in image sharpness occurs at the negative stage, since the.negative emulsion is
W^^ertU     positive emulsion. The principal drawback to the process was that it used twice as much
fllM STYLE &m TECHNOLOGY IN THE mm
negative film as ordinary cinematography, and also that th .special camera was heavier and bulkier than an ordinary 35 mm, camera. In fact it weighed IG5 lb+ in the unblimped form, and it was supplied with a range of lenses from 21 mm. to 1S2 mm., which corresponds for the frame si^in question to a range from true wide-angle to a slightly long focal length, taking into account the angles of view aclualh seen on the screen. So with VistaVision it would have been possible to continue the "staging in depth with wide-angle lens' style of filming that had become popular with some directors in the previous decade, but in fact the people using the process did not seem to be interested in dning that. With the appearance of yet sharper Eastman Color negative (Type 5250) in 1959, the extra definition of ihu VistaVision process was no longer considered important, and the process was abandoned. In more recent times the VistaVision cameras have found a little use for shooting high definition background plates for special effects.
Super Teehniraraa
This process operated by the Technicolor company simply consisted of putting a supplementary an amorphic lens with a squeeze ratio of 1:1.5 in front of the lens of a VistaVision-type camera, and then optically printing the resulting negative onto 35 trim, film with the usual CinemaScope squeeze ratio of 1:2 including all the image as shot, or alternatively printing onto 70 mm. film, when the process was known as Super Technirama 70, The supplementary anamorphoser lens restricted the possible focal lengths of the prime lenses on the camera to 50 mm, 75 mm., and 100 mm.,
Travel ling Mattes
In the 'forties combinations of foreground and background action which had been shot separately were sometimes made in the Technicolor process by filming tihe foreground action in front of a bright blue screen, and using the blue film record from the three-strip Technicolor camera to generate high contrast travelling mattes and counter-mattes to make the required effects. In the lfrhi& the same approach was used with Eastman Color monopack film, with, the black and white matte films being printed from the Eastman Color negative with pure blue light. In this system bright blue colours in the clothing of the actor* had to be avoided, and there was also a tendency to printj through of the background image, as can be seen in some ■fifties films such as The Ladyki Hers (1955), so it was not used any more than could be helped.
For black and white cinematography a new form of travelling matte system using a Technicolor-type beamsplitter camera was invented in Britain at die beginning °[
miSTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIFTIES American 1952-57
(Mean ASL = 10.13 sec.)
277
150
100
so
10 ^
16
12
Ů  6   J   9   Í       , *
□.i_*
American 1958-63
[Mean ASL ^6,80 sec.)
»5
51
54
1 2 3 \ 5 6 7 e 9 10 11 l£ 13 1í 15 li 17 IB 19 20St 22
í7
w 12 . a
1  2 3 4 S 6 1 a % 10 1113 nu 1516*7 13 15120 21 £J 23*,
Number of films with stated Average Shot Length for samples of American films, as indicated
the decade. In diis case the actors performed die foreground jction in front of a br i 1 li a n t y el low sere en i 11 u m inated by m ono-chromatic yellow light from sodium vapour lamps, and the actors themselves were illuminated with incandescent light from which the wavelengths corresponding to the sodium light ucre removed with special filters. Corresponding filters ivcre used in the beam-splitter camera so that only light from the actors went tiirough to die film in one gate of the camera, while only sodium light from the background was deviated by the prism into the other gale which contained another film, When tliis second film was given High contrast development it gave a perfect counter-matte to the actors. Other slightly inferior variants of this process were developed later, but more importantly, the sodium light process was straightforwardly transferred to use with colour film at the end of the decade.
Editing and Scene Dissection
A new trend now appeared in the cutting rate ol Hollywood films: a trend towards scene dissection into shorter shots which was the reverse of the long take trend of the níneteenTortíes. Although, as always, some long ^tahlished Holly wood directors moved with this trend, the change was primarily associated with new, younger directors who started making films at the end of the 'forties or the ^ginning of the 'fifties. Robert Aldrich was one of these, aid he has already been mentioned as using fast cutting Ma CinemaScope film of 3954, Vera Crux, which has an ■Wage Shot Length of 5 seconds. Other films by Aldrich delude Apache (195+) with an ASL of 6.2 seconds, and The %7 iiilh (1959) with an ASL of 5.5 seconds, and other nevv sectors who contributed to the movement included Byron Haskin, Robert Parrish, and Delmer Daves, all of ^horn worked with Average Shot Lengths in the range 6 t0 1 seconds. And there were a number of less well-known ^mes. The fact that these individual directors just named ta exemplify a general trend is shown by the fact that the *ttn Average Shot Lengths for a sample of 69 films for
1951 is 10,5 seconds, whereas for 52 American films from
1952 the mean ASL has decreased to 9.3 seconds. During the 'fifties the modal (most common) value for Average Shot Length remained at close to 9 seconds, where it had stayed for the past 25 years. All of this corresponds to the fact that hardly any new directors were now going in for long-take filming.
The Life and Times of the Jump Cut - Part 2
It was during the nineteen-fifties that the jump cut began to come into its lull glory. As I have already noted, in 1950 Michael Powell's The Elusive Pimpernel contained a fairly large-number, and in 1952 Luis Berlanga made Bicnvenida Mr. Marshall in Spain using jump cuts and shock cuts exclusively to advance from one scene to the next,This film by Berlanga, togedicr with his subsequent films, and also those directed by his scrip twri ting col lab orate r Juan Antonio flardem, seem to have been the main influence in promoting die use of die jump cut in Europe, A few jump cuts dien tagan appearing in a few American films, with Robert Wise's Somebody Up There Likes Me (\95€>) having many of the scene transitions made with straight cuts, diough without consistency, since wipes, dissolves, and fades were also used for this purpose in this film. By 1959, Fred Zinnemann bad gone into the lead with 3S of die 93 scenes in The jVun'r Story' Joined by jump cuts, increasingly towards the end of the film, There is abo one jump cut inside a scene, but it is somewhat concealed by its placing,The distinction between jump cuts made from one scene to the next, instead of the traditional dissolve, wipe etc. and jump cuts made inside a scene, when people suddenlv change position within the picture, is important, because'the ialter is much more noticeable and disruptive Co the continuity, and had not existed before the French
mouvclle vague . ... in m 20 Aim sample- of American films ^«U^
h depth i« Tbt m* $m   Wb* s odd,Tu
ToJno* con,ainS S jump ctf. between «.«.. 4« khin o Scene, >g™ d b *      ^ *
the intensity builds up, Even Stanley Kramer's On the Beach manges two jump cuts between scenes towards the- end cť the film, but tlie other 17 films in the sample contain no jump cuts .t U The use of jump cuts or shock cuts had never been popular with French directors before, but in the 'fifties the style finally began to catch on, and le Bailor, rouge (Pierre Lamorisse, 1956), which is jump cut throughout, was the prelude to the better-known practices of the subsequent N1 ou vel le Vague. One
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FiFii£$
of the curiosities of the adoption of the jump cut by the Nouvelle Vague directors was that Truflaut and Godatd had roundly abused Bard em and Berlanga's use of shod-cuts and jump cuts when they were still film critic^ ]U5l as they did J. Lee-Thomsons Woman in a Dressing Ccuvr and yet this last film undoubtedly gave rise to Truflaut s mannerism in his early films of showing gigantic and gratuitous Inserts of a hand turning a key or a finger pushing a button.
19. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART
; was demonstrated from its beginnings more than L30 years ago, statistical style analysis is a comparative technique, and so needs to establish the stylistic norms holding in the area of film under consideration. Tlic ideal would be to investigate all the films made in that area of film, but although this is possible for American films made in the last several years, it is not for past periods. The next best thing would be to establish the norms by studying a random selection of films from the area in question, but this loo is usually impossible, because substantial numbers of films made before the second world war no longer exist, and for more recent times many films which still exist in some form are not easily accessible. For instance, having decided to investigate American films from 19S9, I find that 151 films were released in that year, and of these, only 61 are currently available on DVD or VHS tapes. A random election of this jrroup would not be equivalent to a random
selection of the complete set, but that is all that we have. The best solution I have to this problem is to make a random selection of the available films, and then adjust it to give it a proportional representation of the production of the American film studios for 1959, and also a proportional representation or the various genres of films released in that year, This is a crude version of the methods used by opinion pollsters to discover voting and other preferences amongst the general population. The opinions of tens of millions of people arc usually estimated by using a sample of about i,0DO, at any rate in England. This sample is selected by weighting it for age, social class, place of residence, and so on, to reflect the proportions of these things existing in the total population, and then making a random selection of people falling Into these categories.
So this is the justification for the following list of 20 films:
TITLE
Ikhcmodi, the Sea Monster The Best of Everything Compulsion
Darby O'Gill and the Little People The five Pennies
The Four Skulls of Jonadian Drake Gidgct
Go, Johnny, Go
fast Train From Gun Hill
North:By North-West
Nuns Story, The
Odds Against Tomorrow
On the Beach
Mow Talk
i
fade Lonesome Shadows
Some Like It Hot «enly, Last Summer en!
Director
Eugene Lourie Jean Negulesco Richard Fleischer Robeert Stevenson Melville Shavelson Edward L* Cahn Paul Wendkus Paul Landres John St urges Alfred Hitchcock Fred Zinnemann Robert Wise Stanley Kramer Michael Gordon Rud lioetticher John Cassavetes Billy Wilder Joseph Mankiewicz Samuel Fuller
Photographer Editor
Desmond Davis William C. Mellor William C. Mellor Win ton Hoch Daniel L. Fapp Maury Gcrtsman Burnett Guffey
Jack Etra Charles Lang, Jr. Robert Boyle Franz Planer Joseph Brun Giuseppe Rotunno Arthur EArling Charles Lawtonjr. Erich Kollmar Charles Lang jack Hildyard Joseph BiroC
Lee Doig Robert Simpson William Reynolds Stanley Johnson Frank P. Keller Edward Mann William A. Lyon Waller Hannemaun Warren Low GcorgeTomasini Walter Thompson Dede Allen Frederic Knudsen Milton Carruth Jerome Thorns Maurice McGndree Arthur P. Schmidt Hornbeck, StafTord Philip Calm
Studio
AA/Diamond
■
20di,-Fox
Zanuck/Fox
Disney
Den a/Par,
Vogue
Columbia
Hal Roach Ida! Wal lis/Par.
MGM
Warner Bros. Harbel
Stanley Kramer Universal Columbia Lion IntL Ashton/Mtrisch Horizon/Co I. Globe Enterprises
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PAUT ? 2S0 i
TakinP tlic simple «yle variables first, here are the sample in the table below. They arc listed in inereo^ values of the Average Shot Lengths (ASLs) in seconds,      size of the ASL, with the average Tor all twenty (Jin,,
- fo*f«t       inserted in the appropriate place in the middle of t|le
percentages of reverse angles (R As) .percentages of Point ofVicw shots (POVs), aňd percentages of Inserts for my
table.
TJTLE
-
-
Darby O-Gill and the Little People Behemoth,The Sea Monster N' o rtb. hy North - Wes t Last Train from Gyn Hill Shadows
Odds Aga in s t Tomorrow
Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, The
Ride Lonesome
-
Ben-Hur Go Johnny, Go! Nun s Story, Hi c Suddenly, Last Summer
Averages
Pillow Talk Compulsion Verboten!
Best of Everting, The
■ ■
■
■
Director
Stevenson, Robert Louric, Eugene Hitchcock j Alfred Sturges, John Cassavetes, John Wise, Robert Cahn, Edward L. Boetticher, Bud Wylcr, William Landres, Paul Zinneman, Fred Mankicwirc, Joseph
ASL
RA POV
INS
4.4	60	10	6
5,6	25	12	19
6.3	S3	24	3
6.7	47	s	
7.1.	31	1	1
7.3	45	7	12
7.7	23	18	14
7.8	57	16	3
3.1	33	S	1
8.2	35	25	4
8.6	44	7	7
S.9	41	3	3
93	40	10	7
■
Some Like it Hot Five Pennies,The On the Beach
Gordon, Michael Fleischer, Richard fuller, Samuel NegulescOj Jean Wendkos, Paul Wilder, Billy Shave I son, Melville Kramer, Stanley
9.5 9.9 10.7 1K3 11.7
15.9 18.4
35 63 22 35 34 49 34 27
20
8 7 7
9
2
13
S
3 3 7
ThemeanASLformysamp^ is 9:3.seconds, as indicated above,. ancV this agrees exactly with the average ASL for a larger group of 71 American feature ifilms from 1959 which
20-,
Largo >sa(ti plo H Prosom Bjimplo
a  4 - S   ft  7.-»   j) !6 IťV^ľíO
1 have already measured this quantity. More than that, the distribution of ASLs for the smaller sample resembles roughly that for the larger sample, a$ you can see from the superimposed graphs of the two distributions at the fell-{The pre sent sample is represented by the shaded bars inside the larger ones.) So my sampling seems to be working fairly well for this dimension of film form, at least.
As usual, it is the extreme values that are interesting-Darby O'GM and the Little People fits with other Disney nl^ of this period in its very fast cutting for the date. TheSho0 Dog (Charles Barton, 1959) has an ASL of 5.7 seconds, and GrctfrhK Bobby (Don ChafTey, 1960) an ASL of 5.0 seconds, and this wasprobably a studio decision, using their iul Is lory-board for the film, and so arrived at before the director took
■0Smm STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES. PART 3
ovCt the other especially fast cut film is Behemoth, and here the fast cutting follows the tradition recipe for covering up less than perfect special effects.
At the other end of the cutting scale, The Five Pennies t* a musical film, with the usual reluctance to break up die performances, and On the Bcaeh, well - that is the way Stanley Kramer dealt with his big subjects - his Inherit the [fW'froni 1960 has an ASL of !4+9 seconds, for instance.
The ran^e in the use of reverse-angle cutting goes from no lower than 22 percent in Vcrboten! to a high of 63 percent in Compulsion, and the distribution of values for lliis quantity is not as strongly peaked around the average, which is 39 percent, as it is for the distribution of ASLs. And the same could be said for the use of POV shots. The exceptional cases at the high end are for Go. Johnny. Go! (25% POV cuts), and North by Northwest (24%), The former film has so many POV shots because it is largely consists
2$\
of rock-and-roll performances before audience*, so it mev.tably h*s lots of shots of the audience intercut with the performers they are looking aL On the other hand, in Konh by Wmmtm as always with Hitchcock, the POV shots are working dramatically to put the audience in ihe threatened protagonist's position. Somethingsimilar is also managed by The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (18% POV), Verhotenl (20% POV), and Ride Lonesome (16% POV), though it is nowhere nearly as well planned in these films as it is by Hitchcock.
Scale of Shot
The Scale of Shot distributions for these films are as shown here, and an extra graph showing the average Scale of Shot profile for these 20 films leads the display. The films are arranged in the order of their resemblance to this average distribution.
The first twelve cities show a fair resemblance to
m ú
Average Scale? ol Shot for t959
1«
y.
	ti	m	62	B*
				
	r.cu	MS	F.US	LS
150 ZW Ii» IM
GidgĽt
no
í*
F*
IG1
tí
frC J    CU   MC U    IÄ    IAS    L5 V15
1H
Dvby O'Gill and diu LíuJu Penpk:
iT*
ti
M
\*\
K 0
1!
(S3 S3
'ŕ
		72	7Ü	•4	
					S
cu		i&	}A$	LS	VLS
	[tide Lonesome				
IJT					
					
		M			
					
					7
cu	IrCU	MS		IS	VLS
NordÉbvNnrthAVtíi *					
		M	Ti	151	
					
					
cu	"CU	MS	v; s	E_B	VLS
2JQ
SI D
PilloivTilt
1(2
IV)
i		lír)				
i			ŕ?			
						
t						r
ecu	cu	'.t:u			IS	VLS
	0uP Johnnyt Gu[					
			1 i Z	I1|		
		M				
É						
r" '"t ecu	cu			h!5		VLB
2 Si CC
	11F	its			1«	
			tí	75		
17						
						
ecu	CU			MS	ts	1AS
			p/f Uvcrything			
	11T			11C		
						
					íl	
' 51						
						7
						
GCU	cu			■	LS	vis
	Some Like Ii Hol irr					
			i    3 -rt		*i	
1						i
BCU				ML3	LS	'AS
■
On di ľ Heath
riß
Su-ítlcTil), Lin Sumíucf
?7
r
tit
W    CU    "CU    MS    »-5    ^ ',VJ
■
■
i
2S2
statistical style analysis Of motion pictures. Part3
Ben-Nur
150
0
					
					
					
		H	,4 jo		
			i		
IT			.		
					
2«
The Nun's Sion*
«3
f v 71
Gl
250 2w iso -] 100
so -f 0
Last '["rain J rum Gun Hill
12
ECU
:u   mCV LS VLS
BGU    CO    MGU    MS     J.LS     LS VLS
				101
				
CU    řXIU    MS F.LS				LS
The Five Pennies
řw ■!
tří
iqú
so
o-
	tos p—■—1	132		
				■
				4
3S3
» D
Behcmoih, tlíc Sea Monster
						
					141	
	IM					
■It						
						
						""""]
ISO 100
o
Verbaten!
14-5
St
	E4	1 W
		
í-5
ECLľ    CU    F.ČU    F.S     KLS     LS VLS
BGU    CU    MCJ    F.^S     řAS     LS VLS
ecu   c u   r^cu   j.45   f.ls   ls í**
Tht Four Skulls of Jonathan Drahé
		-			
-	jí*			■	
			??		■
					
1					
	_ .				f I
ecu -	cu ■	mgu	Fß	p.ts	ls vls
	337	
Mí-		
		
IM		
so		
0 ■		-
Compulsion
77
JI		í Cr
		
2íd
150 100
50-J O
Shadows
i as
ÖGU    GU    MEJU    MS     F,LS     LS VLS
SD	Jí
	
Fh«	r/LS
2ř
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per S00 shots for the films named
- ■
1
the norm, but by the time we get to The Nun's Story the profiles arc beginning to deviate markedly from the norm in various directions. For instance, the choice of shots is piled up in the middle range for The Five Pennies, but the opposite is tr.ue for Behemoth, the Sen Monster, with the largest amount of shots either Close Shots or Long Shots. Some of these stylistic differences are due to story and generic requirements, so Behemotht the Seo Monster inevitably has lot oFVery Long Shots (VLS) to accomodate the immense mutated: monster of the title, when it finally comes into the open and lays waste to London. North by Northwest is part of Hitchcock's Paramount 'Vistavision period, when that high resolution format seems to faswe encouraged him to give distant landscapes more screen time. You can make the comparison with the Hitchcock films on pages 244 and 2+5 of this book. More unusual choices of shot scale come in with Qdds Against Tomorrow, which is about a small-time bank robbery, a subject not usually treated with loU of Very Long Shots (VLS).Thcre is quite possibly an-expressive intention here, as these distant shots are used when the bunch öf New York losers head out into the country to rob a small up-state bank, and arc bound1 for doom because of their character fhjw
Personal and idiosyncratic choice, of shot scale by the nim-maker definitely emerge in Ride Lonesome, which substantially less VLS, and even LS, than the usual Western, and m particular than Last Trainjrom Gun IHIL (Ridclonew «.^Hso very unusual in other ways, particularly as regard* the distribution of shot lengths.) Verbotenl also has lis pecuhanties in respect of shot length distributions, which can be studied on the Cinemctries website. The amount of ^ng Shot in its Scale Of Shot distribution is not unusual 6x 2Wai ,Q,m> the reduction in the amount of Medium Shot »s, a, can be seen by comparison with the contemporary mm So Fetv illustrated here.
The 'heavy concentration on close shots in Compulsion and Shadows\s exceptional for this date, though not for more recent times,
■
Camera Movement
Me use of camera movment in these films is tabulated helow, starting with the film with least movement, and working up to the onc with most. The average movement w the 20 films, rounded to integer values, is included in the middle of the table.
s.
mnßmi STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 3
2S3
Pan   Tilt Pan with   Track   Track with r
irackiMth Crane Zoom Total
Tilt
Pan & Tilt
IDarby 0'Gill and the Little People	24	4	9	S	3 0 1 it
iRide Lonesome	23	2	12	9	
Behemoth,The Sea Monster	20	7	14	23	i -9 0
Shadows	55	4	11	2	+ 0 29 S
Compulsion	19	4	3	17	
Go Johnny, Go!	3S	1	0	9	37 0
North by North-West	20	3	a	29	22 3
Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, The	43	3	12	IS	IS 3
Average	38	6	is	21	27 3
PiltowTalk	21	6	6	23	56 2
Verboten!	35	7	19	19	34 2
Nun's Story, The	36	10	16	28	n 0
Gidget	73	5	17	9	17 0
five Pennies,The	28	4	] 1	30	42 4
ifien-Hur	24	12	14	5S	15 4
Suddenly, Last Summer	2S	4	14	IS	49 7
LastTrain from Gun Hill	77	14	IS		9 3
Some Like it Hot	51	9	24	28	33 0
ÜdÜs Aga i nst To m 0 rrow	SS	6	53	9	15 0
:Best of'Everything, The	54	7	1:3	21	56 0
On the Beach	31	4	20	36	52 IS
0
o J
o
0
G
1
3
0 0 Ů 0 2 0 0 0
o
7 0 0
44 72
74
75 77 S6 87
]QS
110
113 117 IIS 120 120 123 123 13S 1+4 145 1S6 160
I would say that my subjective sense of there being * special amount or camera movement, either more or 1, E normal, only sets in when the amount of earner movement is more or less than 10% of the average. That ivfrom Ben-Mur upward to climax with mj* ^ However, how noticeable the moves are depends on^cm being not closely tied to actor movement. So, desp <-number of moves involved, I do not have a strong feelmg o * lot or camera movement in Odds Aaainst Tomorrow, ana
in S0mc Like h Hoi because they are assoc.ated ^^ m St
ukes, which always draws attention to camera moveme ^
Unlike the crane shots in On the Beach, those in Ride Lowo^
are not particularly noticeable, as they are hardly mo. c ^
^mcra rise, as is also the case for the small ™m™^
to listed as crane movements in the other films in
% +c in Last tram sample. The large number of panning shots
fa* Gun Mill is no doubt one of the causes ol Ana
Sarris characterizing John Sturges in The American Cinema (page 202) with "... Sturges' stock-in-trade for superficial visual analysis is the wasteful pan.'* If one has only seen this Sturges film, this might seem convincing, as it does have some protracted panning shots showing Anthony Quinn wandering around in front of his mansion on his ranch, bin Sturges also made N$0 So Fen- in 1959, which only has 21 pans per 500 shots, and they don't get in the way of the action. Most of Sarris' one-liners on film style hit the nail on the head, but this one is a bit dubious. My sample is quite typical of the limited and tentative of use of the good zoom lenses that had been available for a few years. The handful of zoom shots in these films arc used quite discreetly, and only Odds Against Tomorrow reaches the still small proportion of 7 per 500 shots. In this film they arc entirely confined to
location exteriors.
Goinff in rbe oihcr direction towards Jess camera movement, it is obvious that Cassavetes dkl not have a
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART
5
dolly for most of the shooting of Shadows, except for a few crude moves in the rehearsal room scene, and Behemoth, the Sea Monster is hmited in camera movement partly by the number of special clTcc© shots in it. So is Dorby O'Gill, but again, I think the complete story-boarding of the film may liave contributed to this lack of camera movement. I would say that the fast cutting m Darby h not the reason for the lack
of camera movement, as more recent films shmv etL*
wmv that you
can get quite a lot of camera movement into a film with rerage Shot Length of 4.4 seconds, if you want to All the results in this chapter will be used later in book to show the basic changes in American film style across forty years of film history.
■
1
1
.tr.
, FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
■
lil, the swinging 'sixties, when anything and cvery-TLthing seemed possible! This may have had something to do with the change in the film audience, for the continuing decline in total admissions really reflected the loss of the older part of the audience: those over thirty. This change had some effect on the subject matter of Hollywood films, and also helped a number of young film-makers to get a chance to direct feature films. Like the nineteen-twen-ties, theninetecn-sixties was a period when European film-ma Icing had a considerable influence on American cinema, but in this case the major innovations in film form came from France rather than Germany, and they were partly transmitted indirectly by way of British films of the middle 'sixties* It was also a period when more of what were essentially American productions were filmed overseas than ever before, and if we add in the activities of expatriates like Joseph Losey, the concept of 'national cinemas' becomes uselessly vague. The other obvious feature of the decade was the increasing dominance and influence of television over
the older medium,
■
Film Stock and Laboratory Methods
The ad vent of colour television in America must have encouraged the introduction of new faster colour film slocks, though this would undoubtedly have eventually happened in any case, just as it had done in the past with black and white stocks, through the self-propelling dynamics of competition, research, and development. Eastman Kodak retained their lead in this field with yet another new Eastman Color negative (Type 5251) introduced in 1962, which had the same speed of S0 ASA, but improved definition and colour rendition. The equivalent 16 mm. stock (Type 7251) Mftl only available to special order in the United States before 1967, but in England, where the practice in 16 mm. filming had mostly been to use negative rather than reversal stock, (which was the opposite of American practice), the new 72 SI negative became available from Kodak as a standard item at the same time as the new 35 mm. stock, Type S2S1.
Improvements in reversal stocks continued apace, with Kodak replacing Ektachrome em. in 1965 with Ekta-chromc E.F, Type 7242 (125 ASA for use under tungsten '^t) and Type 7241 (160 ASA for daylight use). These n™ Ektachrornes had much better colour rendition, and a
marked reduction in grain size, and hence better definition, and in fact the improvement in these stocks, together with thatof Eastman Color in 1959, represented the largest jump in quality so far made in the history of three-colour processes. The new Ektachrornes were designed to be processed in a modified developing system running Paster than usual and at higher temperatures, and they were also suitable for forced (or extended) development. This enabled them to be exposed with less light than was correct for their normal rating, and meant that the ASA rating of Type 7242 could be increased by one, two, or three stops from the normal \ 25 ASA to 250 ASA, or SOQ ASA, or even 1000 ASA. The deterioration of image quality caused by extended development of one stop was barely perceptible, but when pushed to 1000 ASA the saturation and correctness of the hues was very noticeably reduced, and there was a great increase in granularity and loss in definition. Nevertheless this feature of Ektachrome E.F. was extensively used in documentary work from 1965 onwards, not to mention in television news filming* 35 mm. Ektachrome 'E/F. was available to special order, and was used on very rare occasions in feature filmmaking, as in Peter Brook's Tell Me l/e* (1967), in which a night street scene was shot with available light using this stock, and then copied onto intcrncgative, and interpolated into the film, which was otherwise shot on 35 mm. Eastman Color.
In fact forced development had occasionally been used with the earlier High Speed Ektachrome E>R. in documentary work, and Robert Alt man had made a telefilm in 1964, Once Upon a Savage Night, which was entirely shot on 3S mm. Ektachrome E.R.. This film included night street scenes shot with available light, and with the stock pushed to 500 ASA. In this case the image quality roust certainly
have been very poor.
The higher temperature developing baths introduced for processing Ektachrome were in part a response for television's need to get news footage onto the screen lastcr, but it also had economic advantages for the film laboratories, as did the slighdy earlier use of the same technique lor process, inacf 35 mm. re leas, prints. In me latter case the ostensible reason tftf the changing demands of film release patterns at the beginning of the decade, which called for larger numbers ofprintfof any particular subject In .950 the „al deve oping process for Eastman Color -pa** film had
i
2S6
called for 4S minutes of wet time at 70 F. in the developing machine, hut film laboratories had begun to reduce this to IS minutes at 75 Ŕ3 and then, "finally with Kodak collaboration, to 20 minutes at SO F. in 1966.
Encouraged by these developments, cameramen began underexposing 35 mm. Eastman Color negative, and giving it forced development to increase its speed. The first notable instance of this was in You'rec Big Boy Now (rFrancis Coppola, 1967), in which the stock was pushed three stops to an effective speed of 400 ASA to get shots of the interior of a big department store under available light. From this point onwards increasing resource was had to this technique for the occasional scene in colour feature films, though usually wirh only one stop forced development.
An associated technique which also produces a speed increase, and dc-saturates the colours as well, was used for the first time On Jim Deadly Affair (Sidney L u met, 1966). This was a matter of pre-flashing tlie unexposed negative, before its use in shooting the scene proper, by control led exposure to white light in a printer, in just the same way as for the 'latensi fixation' process used in the late nineteen-for Lies, In the particular cast of The Deadly Affair the intention was to use the de-saturation of the colour for expressive purposes.
A very original idea, which proceeded in the opposite direction, was developed by Conrad Wall, starting with Hell in the Pacific (I96S). this was a matter of over-exposing the film, developing it normally to give a very dense negative, and then having the over-exposure correctedin the printing. The idea was to change the saturation of the colours, and in the fully developed .form of the technique, as used by Hall in Batch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (\97Q) (sec the American Cinematographer \fM n>S p.434-) the overexposure was twostops. The net result was that colours were considerably desaiurated1, and this was accentuated in this film by the use of fairly heavy Fog filters throughout.
There were also other essays in colour control in The Taming, of ike Shrew and Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1967, The colours in the initial run of prints of these films were restricted: largely to ibrowns and! reds (iie. the greens and blues were mostly suppressed);by using additional stages of dye transfer printing with extra matrices derivedifrom the greenand blue records which had been given an extra expo^ sure to a black andi while negative derived! from the original colour negative. Reflections in c Golden fye was shown hardly anywhere in this W, and the general run of distribution took place with .prints made in the conventional way This special teclmique, applicable only to the Technicolor dye iransler printing process, though-hardly used subsequently
w* capable of a number of other finely controlled colour variations.
Another simpler form- of colour modification ftflfcfl
in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
with Technicolor printing involved the interchange 0r the three matrices that printed each of the three primary co lours, which resulted in false colours in the objects iri thc film shots undergoing this treatment. This process ua,sfirst used in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) the 'trip through space and time' sequence towards the end and also subsequently in one or two other films, it is also possible to use this technique of colour modification with ordinary methods of colour printing, hut in that case it can no longer be done simply and directly, but involves an extra stage of duplication going through colour separation iru<jr_ positives before returning to the final colour print.
A superficially rather similar result was also achieved in 196S in Girl on a Motor-Cycle by Jack Cardiff, only tare the images from the origin a) standard colour negative wert transferred to videotape, and then the colours were transformed electronically before the video image was refilmcd: This too became an available technique, though it was not frequently used in the next few decades, (You could see it as a crude anticipation of the kind of digital colour alteration that is now commonplace in the 21". Century.)
Returning to the developments in colour stock, Ansco responded to the challenge from Eastman Kodak by making a new range of 16 mm. and 35 mm, colour reversal materials available in 1963: as well as two Anscochronies with speeds of 100 ASA for use under daylight and tungsten light respectively, they also produced a faster material with a speed of 200 ASA for daylight filming. All of these slocks, like those they replaced, were of higher contrast than the Kodak reversal films, and were intended solely for use of the original by direct projection, rather than as a master for making reversal prints. For this reason they were hardly used even in documentary production. In 1964 Ansco added a 50 ASA stock balanced for daylight to their range, ami Kodak also produced a similar 64 ASA stock, but hoth of these were unsuitable as master material for reversal print making, and again irrelevant to my concerns.
The final major development in colour during the 'sixties was the replacement in 1968 of Eastman Color negative Type 5251 by a new emulsion, Type 5254, which was one stop Taster at 100 ASA. There was no marked improvement in colour rendition or image sharpness with this new stock, but the increase in speed was quite Important, in the same way as the developments in forced processing just described, in helping to cope with the continuing move all through the decade towards shooting more and more interiors on location. Even the conventional middle of the mainstream of film-making joined in this trend, and although in these cases the location interiors were substantially lit with extra artificial light, there were physical limitations to how much the light level could be raised on real interiors, so faster
flUf STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
^lour negative had become essential.
In i96S Kodak produced a new improved colour in-ierncgatlve> and far more importantly, a Colour Reversal Intermediate {CRI) stock. This latter material, which had not existed before, gave a duplicate negative from an origi-I camera-negative in one stage, rather than having to go through an extra intcrpositive film as well, as had previously been the case. Because this new material produced no increase in contrast, and hardly any loss in definition and colour, the duplicate negative so produced was virtually indistinguishable from the original, Not only did this improve die quality of final show prints in general, but it also meant that the sudden loss in quality just before, and during, fades aid'dissolves in Eastman Color prints no longer took place. Prior to the introduction of Eastman CRI stock the attentive viewer could always sec a fade or dissolve coming just before it actually happened in Eastman Color films.
The use of CRI stock was associated with another technical development in laboratory work. Tins was the increasing use of 'liquid gate' printing, both for contact printing and optical printing, in a liquid gate printer, the negative film in the gate of the printer is completely immersed in a transparent liquid of very nearly the same refractive index as the clear emulsion and acetate base of the film while light is passing through it on its way to produce an exposure in the print stock. This liquid fills any small scratches in the negative and to some extent stops them being photographically reproduced on the positive image. Although the idea had been developed by Eastman Kodak in the 'twenties, it was not taken up seriously till the ninetccn-fi files, when Kodak, Disney, and Technicolor did more work on it, with Kodak publishing a list of liquids suitable for the purpose. In the Wties there began to be more films blown up from 16 mm, to J5 mm. for theatrical distribution, and liquid gate printing to using an optical printer became important for this purpose. One of the first feature films for which this was done was ftuss Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. With ita introduction of Eastman Color Reversal Intermediate Stock in I96S, it became common to use this in conjunction with liquid gate printing for such blow-ups,
Black and White Stock
Despite the rapidly decreasing importance of filming in black and white, new camera slocks of increasing speed continued to be introduced in the ninetcen-sixiies. 11 lord in England put a negative film faster than any there had been before on the market at the beginning of the decade. This ivas.HPS wiTh a speed of 400 ASA, and then in 1962 Ansco
out Hy par. (200 ASA), and in 1964 Kodak caught up "ith4X, which had a speed of 400 ASA, The availability of [Jfc*d HPS had actually been anticipated by Raoul Coutard
2S?
in the filming of Jean-Luc Godard W bout dc .ouffhm 1959 He took IS metre lengths of HPS which were alrcadv bcin* sold for use in 35 mm. m c,m ^ ^
together to make 120 metre rolls which he used in a Came-flex movie camera in the shooting of that film, Coutard also gave this 11 ford HPS negative special development which increased Us speed to 800 ASA, for Godard wanted to film all the scenes or the film on location with available light. This was something that had never been done before on a fictional film. Admittedly the same thing could have been done by using one of the existing film slocks, such as Tri-X, and giving il two stops of forced development^ but the visual effect would have been quite different, with a rather contrast)' and grainy image. Apart from Godard's subsequent Alphai'ilie, it is doubtful if there were any other feature films shot entirely with available tight, although 11 lord II PS and Kodak +X were used on a number of later films in which the interiors were lit with added lights to a greater or lesser extent.
The other film manufacturers also updated their black and white stocks in the middle speed range, but this was of rapidly decreasing importance, except that IIford had a considerable success with their new Mark V negative, introduced in 1965. This was preferred by many cameramen to the other competing 200 ASA stocks because il was considered to have slightly finer grain. Ilford achieved this trick with this stock, as they did with their HPS also, by increasing the red light sensitivity of the emulsion to a greater e\^ tent than usual, bui this produced no visible change in the Colour response.
Lighting
For most of the 'sixties Hollywood lighting practice was much the same as it had been in the previous decade, which was still a somewhat simplified version of Arties lighting-But in Europe new trends were just beginning that eventually, towards the end of the sixties, began to have their first rficcts on American lighting. The central figure in these radical changes was Raoul Coutard, not only in his work lor J„n-Uc Godard, but also in the lighting he did for Franks Truffaut and other 'rWlle Vague' director,. One # the styles of interior lighting Coutard developed began with CodanT. next film after A bout de souffle, which was gflg sMat made in I960. In this film Coutard introduced ihc practice of bouncing light oil the ceiling from rows ofjho-
W door frames, and pointing upward, at the ceding. 1 n* le of luting mimics and boosts the natural light pud*
ugh i %m m n * m *g JJJ " m
b" with supers stock „nW giving it forced dg* iso,becau,e of the rather n on-directional nature,
this light, it permits filming from all directions during a long take without the lighting units getting into the shot. Advantage was taken of this in Le Petit pMk sometimes in conjunction with hand-held moving camera. The drawback to this approach to lighting is that it only works well in all-white rooms, particularly in colour filming, and also that it tends to leave the eyes of the actors slightly shadowed. Associated with this last point is.an absence of "catch lights' showing in the actors' eyeballs, which are those tiny reflections of the light sources which are conventionally con-sidered to oivc 'life' to the actor s expression in close shots. Bounce lighting is also a very inefficient method of lighting, owing to die large light losses on reflection, and two to four times the wattage is needed to achieve the same light level on the set as with ordinary direct lighting.
Given the slowness of colour stock for most of the 'six-tics, this last point made bounce lighting in its pure form difficult to use - in fact it could only be done with colour by putting a large number of lighting units on 'pole-cats' below the ceiling. (Pole-cats are extensible tubes which can be wedged between opposite walls just below the ceiling to carry small lighting units clamped to them.) Such an arrangement produces the unfortunate result that the upper parts of the walls which are visible in shot just below the lighting units and the top of the frame arc brighter than the lower parts of the walls, and this looks rather unnatural, This effect can be studied in Truffatit's/o Mar ice ha\t en noir (1968). If a set filmed with bounce light contains substantial areas of strong colour, all'the surfaces, including the actors' faces, will be suffused with a weak wash of light of that colour, and this kind of 'colour cast' is impossible to remove completely by colour correction at the printing stage. This flaw can:be seen in some scenes of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (!966)/in which most of the interiors were lit by bounce light, this being yet another of the instances in which Hitchcock seized on a new technical1 development and; applied it to his films in modified form. The interiors.of Torn Curtain were shot entirely in the studio on sets which had no ceilings, so the Goutard style Of bounce lighting was out of the question. Instead, the horizontal beams of very large spot^ lights outside the \ va Us of .the sets were-diffused! downwards into the sets by bouncing them from large flats .painted matt white and suspended at 45. degrees ito the walls.and above them. This rather elaborate procedure was never repeated but it marks the beginning of the Hollywood interest in recent European cinematographic techniques.
When Coutard, began shooting colour with Godard oivtfn, rW mn^j^ dropped.the bounce
lighting approach, and used ordinary direct lighting on the sets and figures, though done very simply the European manner: However in this film, and in. subsequent Godard
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
films shot in white rooms or on white sets with ceilings di rect lighting produces a large amount of stray Ugh t bouncing about the set, and so produces a softer effect in a way that docs not happen on studio sets without ceilings when direct light is applied to them. While I am discussing Coutards work on Godard's films, I should mention that from kMeprh onwards, he made further variations in the relative amount of bounce lighting and direct lighting applied to the various room locations: with more bounce and less direct used on Pierrot leJon (1965), and very little bounce and lots of direct on Deux ou trois chases que je so is d'ellc (1966). All this work was done with the older existing types of lighting units, but in America at the end of the decade the first use of other forms of Indirect soft lighting involved new types of lighting units that had just been developed.
Lighting Units
In I960 a new system of lighting units based on large 500 watt reflector bulbs was designed by Ross Lowcl. These units used a lamp socket attached by a small universal joint to a flat aluminium plate a few inches in she. These plates and the lamps they carried could be attached to any flat surface by strips of broad adhesive tape {'gaffer tape') since they only weighed ten ounces, or alternatively the units could be attached to the tops of lightweight telescopic lamp stands by a small.chain. Small lightweight 'barn doors' could be attached to the front of the reflector bulb by a spring harness, and the whole unit was small enough Lo be hidden out of shot in corners or near the ceiling of actual rooms on location. The universal joint on the holder enabled the light to be directed where desired, and the standard kit of three units was enough to light a small room when the fastest film stock was used. These Lowcl light kits were extensively used for news and documentary filming over the next few years, along with the already existing Colortran lighting system, to which they were nicely complementary (A new and more powerful floodlight, theSuperSO, which consumed 1.5 kVV. of power was added to the Colortran system in 1962).
However, another type of lighting unit began to displace the Colortran boosted-volt age system for small-scale location filming from 1964 onwards. This was also manufactured by the Colortran company amongst others, but it was colloquially referred to as the Quartz-Iodine Multibcam. It was the principal one of a number of new lighting units designed around the new small quartz-iodine (or tungsten-halogen) lamp bulbs. Multibeam lights consisted of a cylindrical housing 6 inches in diameter by S inches long weighing only a couple of pounds, and containing a 650 or 1000 watt quartz-iodine bulb which could be moved in front of a rough-surfaced parabolic mirror to give a beam focussing
H0STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
between
'flood1, with a spread of 60 degrees, and 'medium ip0i\ with a spread of 30 degrees. The light they gave was slighrJy harder (i.e. it cast sharper shadows) than that from conventional Fresnel lens spotlights, and also from units containing reflector bulbs of one sort or another, and there u^s no sharp fall-off in the light intensity past the edge of the main beam of light. All of these features were slightly less than ideal for most feature film purposes, but the snail size and light weight for relatively high light levels ensured that these Multibeam units came to dominate news and documentary filming almost immediately. They were often used to give bounce lighting off the ceiling of small locations by cameramen who had plenty of them available, and who were in no hurry. lo\vol lighting produced their own improved version of this type of unit in 1967 called the Lowcl-Quartz system, and the lighting units in this could, though they were much larger than the earlier Lowe I system, be taped (just) to walls, etc. by cameramen who had bis-of gaffer tape and lots of nerve.
Other forms of standard lighting unit such as simple flood-lights (broads) and so on gradually came to be fit-ted with large Quartz-Iodine bulbs, rather than the earlier tungsten bulbs, from the late 'sixties onwards, but this made no difference to the quality of light they gave.
Another quite new type of lighting unit introduced in 1968 was the iMinibrute, colloquially called a 'nine light' or nincr, because it was made up of three groups of three 650 watt sealed-beam quartz-iodine reflector spotlight bulbs (PAR bulbs) mounted on three adjustable panels, with the whole unit measuring altogether about two Teet by two feet. These sea led-beam spotlight bulbs had a rather narrow bum-of only several degrees spread, so the unit could be used as a less powerful replacement for the vastly larger and heavier Brute arc spotlights, in their function of providing figure lighting for actors on exteriors when the lights had to be some distance away. A slight drawback to the use of *bis lighting unit was that it cast multiple shadows if the actors happened to be close to a wall, but nevertheless it was
immediately used a great deal on the exterior shooting of tature fi|m5.
Soft Lighting
'Soft lighting or 'north lighting' is correctly used tode-ttribe the kind of light that comes into a room in daytime through a large north-facing window, or some arrangement *at produces an identical effect with artificial means. This W of light results in extremely soft-edged shadows being by the protuberances of the face on itself, and is some-l»^es wrongly called 'shadowless' lighting, despite the fact tat under it figures do cast shadows, though very tenuous ^blurred ones. Although vaguely like the lighting used in
2S9
film interiors before 1914, it is certainly not identical, since that early form of lighting was produced in south facing stu-AN by mrcct sunlight diffused by cotton blinds and translucent glass, supplemcmcd by Cooper-Hewius and arcs op-phed from a number of angks. fe fact such early light! came from a far greater range of angles than modem 'soft light;
The modem lighting unit called a 'soft light' or 'north light" came into use for film lighting in 1967, prompted in part by the European use of bounce lighting, and in part by recent fashions in the lighting for commercial still photography. These soft lights were first marketed hy Colortran in the form of a large sheet-metal box about three feet square On the open side, and with a very irregular interior surface painted matt white. Long quartz-iodine lamp tubes shone onto this surface from behind a narrow baffle that stopped them radiating light directly forward, and after a number of rci lections from the white walls, the light emerged from the front opening of the box as a non-directional glow: indeed very like the light emerging through a north-facing window of rather small size. Different powers were available, from 1,25 kW. to 5 k\V,n and those lights quickly came to be widely used, but mainly in non-theatrical film-making. On feature films they tended to be used for general fill lighting rather than as key lights producing the main illumination on actors* faces, but European cameramen were rather more inclined to use them as the principal light sources for a scene - e.g. Freddie Young on Ryan's Daughter {1969).
An alternative kind of soft-lighting unit, also taken over from still photography* where it had made a come-back af-ter sixty years in limbo, was the 'umbrella light'. The reflector of this unit was, as at the start of the century In still photography, a large white umbrella which had one to four quartz-iodine lights attached to the handle and shining into the cove of it. The first cameraman to make use of this light in feature films was Haskell Wexler on The Thvmos Crown Affair (1968), but it* use thereafter on features was very limited, as most cameramen preferred to Use other forms
1
of soft lighting.
Yd another method of gyrating large-area soft lighting was also taken over from still .photography and television commercials by David Wtfkin in his lighting of Peter Brook's The M*MtS<* (19*7). This technique did no. in-voK- any new lighting units, but was done by shining a bank of powerful conventional! ight* from fairly close range onto , large vertical sheet of translucent material, which coud be « Jug paper or spun glass, and then using the diffuse hgh, that Struggled through it and emerged on the other ,de as
& Sole ifght **** « tiK "** ? ^'"f JJ source formed a whole glowing wall about thirty feet square UT ut Of Shot at one side of the set. A similar method was
290
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SiXTtK
A scene in 200]; A Space Odyssey in solely by a large number of lighu behind thi translucent ceiling panels, producing [ruty shadowless illumination. The steep pcrspeain distortion from the im wide-angle lens used can also be noted
used to li^ht a conference room set in 2001; A Space Odyssey, and variants which had lights behind translucent panels covering the ceiling or the floor were used as the sole source elsewhere in 2001: A- Space Odyssey. After tins, the method tended to be restricted to window-sized areas in ordinary room sets.
Black and White Lighting in England
Towards the middle of the nineteen-sixties a distinctive trend-in the lighting of black, and white films, which were sti 11'fairly com mo n i n E ngland, em erged1 a mongst the you jji g-cr cameramen such as Waller Lass a ly and Ken Higgins. Tins was to light in a fairly high key even in ordinary scenes in dramatic films, with rather flat lighting on the figures, and very frequently no backlight. This was done by using direct light with a low ratio between the key- and fill-light.
Cameras
The major development in cine cameras during the nineteen^ six tics was the proliferation of I jght-weight silenced
cameras for 16 mm. sync, sound filming. The first step in this direction was not taken by camera manufacturers but byfil m cameramen who had earlier decided that they wanted to shoot documentary scenes with sound as they a dually happened, rather than restaging them for the camera as had almost invariably been the case up to this point in history. The cameras most used for shooting synchronise] sound were the Auricon range, but of these the Pro 600 and Pro 1200 were too large and unwieldy for hand-holding, and the Cine-Voice only accepted 100 foot spools of film running for 2 mim 45 seconds. The men who changed all this were the documentary cameramen Richard Leacoek and Dorm Alan Penncbakcr, in the years immediately prior to 1959 they had moved towards what they came to call 'Direct Cinema', by shooting documentary films containing unrehearsed scenes with hand-held light weigh team eras arid simultaneously taking unsynchronized dialogue recordings with portable tape recorders, and then fudging the picture and sound records into approximate synchronism by editing. To further this approach, which was aimed at the television
Lighting of a scene in Darling -(IMS), with only hard frontal light, andflo
hackly
fsLt\i:STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
^rtet in 1959 they adapted an Auricon Cine-Voice canv crl.J'or shoulder holding by modifying the viewfirider, replacing the internal 100 foot magazine with a changeable 400 foot external magazine, and replacing the drive motor iťitha battery powered motor whose speed was governed to h'erv high accuracy by control from the tuning fork oscillator from a fruiova Accutron electric watch. The speed of the up c recorder synchronizing pulse was determined by an identical-watch oscillator, and so film and sound synchronism could be maintained without any direct connection Itfhveen the camera and recorder, in an exactly analogous manner to present-day arrangements using crystal oscil-ktorí on camera and recorder. Leacock and Penncbaker s films were shot by one or more t wo-man teams of cameraman and recordist following impromptu action wherever it led, without the intervention of either a director or assistants. The first film in which they managed to get this technique to work properly, at least some of the time, was Primary, made in 1959, but subsequently they applied it to a number of television documentaries over the next several years* Others who were associated with them such as the Mays les brothers, and also outsiders, took up these methods of documentary production. Though nearly all concerned applied this approach to intrinsically dramatic material such is an appeal against a death sentence, as in The Chair (1963 J, or ihe dealings of a big film producer in Showman (David and Albert Maysles, 1962), the results were not popular with the major television networks at the time, however influential they were with other film-makers.
Parallel developments in France, where the equivalent ol -Direct Cinema' was called 'Cinema Veríte', led to the design of a silent camera by Michel Coutant, the man who deigned the C a me flex for the Eclair camera company. One of his:prototypes, which was very different to the final design, was used in filming part of Rouch and Morin-s Quo-ni^iJun hé (1961), This first design weighed only 8 lb., and iťas definitely not completely silent, so that it had to be used inside a barney (soft padded cover), and all in all it was not much of an improvement on a Bolex Reflex with electric motor drive. Coutanťs final design, called the Eclair weighed 19 !b. and was specially designed so that a large part of this weight was transferred to the cameraman's sWdder through the bottom of the magazine, winch was Jir^ctly behind the rest of the works in the fashion of the Camcflex. The 400 foot feed and take-up film compart merits were arranged side bv side coaxiallv, and just as in
Umellex, the film drive sprockets and film loops were <^tamed in the magazine rather than in the body of the C3iiera. The film emerged from a light-tight slit in the front °rthe magazine to run down between the back pressure M fixed to the front of the magazine, and the front of the
291
Both the W, whlcll m fc usua, Cime(.bx U and the $m pill, tnterc(! t[le m ^ from jkn front «*mb|y. ,t w„ po^ „ ^ ^ tffe Ä camera without Mopping the camera, jus^s -n the Camcľlex. A mirror-rel^ shutter gave coming hrougUhc-lcns viewing through an Hlat coul[1
b| oncntcd in any direction over 3É0 decrees, which en-ablcd the cameraman to (llm backwards over his shoulder if necessary. The Eclair N PR had a rotating lens turret Ä places for two lenses.and almost invariably one oľ these was an Angénieux 12 mm. to 120 mm, zoom. í ľ the other lens in the turret was a 10 mm. wide-angle Ions, it was necessary to remove the zoom lens Irom the other port before usingit, as the v.oom protruded into the wide-angle field oľ view. This camera became available from 1963, and immediately came into wide use, particularly in Europe: Front the beginning it was supplied with an optional crystal oscillator controlled motor, so that it could be used for cordless svnchroniia-
. 'j
tion with a portable tape recorder similarly fitted with a crystal oscillator. One of ihe first notable films on which tliis camera was used was Chris Marker's Upli Mai (] 963). This ill m, along with Chronique ďun ere, was blown up from 16 mm. to 35 mm. for theatrical exhibition, as also happened with some of the American * direct cinema1 films shot in (6 mm. colour in the later 'sixties*
The other major 16 mm. camera that became available in the mnctccn-sEXties for sync, sound filming was the Ar-riflex 16 RL Unlike the Eclair NPR, this was not j completely new design, but was simply a version of the already existing Arn'fleji 16 M with an extra sound deadening cosing and quieter plastic gearing in Us mechanism. A soundproof casing was also provided around the Jens of the camera, which now fitted into a single fixed port in the front of the camera, rather than into a turret with ports lor three lenses, as in die earlier model. The Him movement was the same as in the previous Arriflex 16 mm, cameras, as was the mirror-reflex shutter viewfinding system. However the viewfinder was supplied with a modified eyepiece which could be attached lo move ihe eye position forward, so that the cameraman could rest 0* back of ihe camera on his shoulder, although unfortunately it was not very comibrt-ablc in this position, and most cameramen who speared in hand-held cinema veríte work continued to prefer to use the Eclair NPR when the A r rito 16 BL became available in 1965 The 16 BL was not compk'tciv silent any more than the Eclair NPR. but in the average location interior their running noise was swallow! in the general background ^ J™ careful use of the microphone* in r.cordmg. The residual noise of the mechanism of both cameras made them unsuitable ibr genuine studio iT.m-making wtfhtut
m
applying mm ™»nd staling ■material to them, but although both gave the same measured residual noise level when running, the noise of the Eclair had the advantage of haVmtJ less or an intermittent 2S frame per second compo^ nent.^nd so was .e*s noticeable. On the other hand:, the Arriflex 16 BL had the advantage of being more robust and less temperamental, and so tended toappeal to large tclovi-si on organizations.
The other lightweight cameras designed for 16 mm, svneh. sound shooting that appeared in the sixties - the Dcbrie Sinmor, the Bolex Pro 16, and thc Beckmann and Whitley - were alii unsuccessful to a greater or lesser extent, and prodded no competition to the Arriflex, the Eclair, and the older Auricons which were still being usedt
35 mm. Cameras
There were no major new developments in 35 mm. cameras during the 'sixties, for all new types were closely modelled on proven designs. Both the new Mitchell Mark If and the various Panavision cameras used :the standard Mitchell movement including the usual film gate, pulldown and register pins, and:they were also similar to the old Mitchells in their basic shutter design and also that of the film magazines, though this was not always apparent to the casual glance. The one of these new cameras that was most nearly original was the Mitchell.R-35, which was available from 1963. All the usual! Mitchell works were enclosed in a smaller, though stilf substantial, body, and a mirror-reflex shutter was added in front of the ordinary shutter with its variable blades. This was in contradistinction to the Euro-pean.reflex cameras, where a single shutter performed both functions, a ndit hardly counts as inspired design. There was a three-lens rotating turret in front of the reflex shutter, following the Atfrifilex pattern. The magazine, of thc usual Mitchell type, could be mounted ih a couple or unorthodox positions slant-wise at the back of the camera, feeding the film, into itihe body of the camera' through a long throat. ■Both erect and inverted mountings of the magazine couM be used; Wiethe latter position putting ,the 400 foot ca-padty magazine half underneath the camera body so that it could form a.shoulder rest if the camera was usedi for handheld filming. Sincere loadedicamera weighed over 40 lb. It was.never.usedim.thiswaytb.mylknowlcdg^ naturally preferred: to stick loathe far, far lighter Ar-riflcx or Cameflexforhand,holding, The Mitehe'll Mark ill was not a silent camera, since it made aboutas much noise as the old Mitchell NG, and for syne, shooting it had«3he enclosed m , abl.mp, w)nch,pretty well negated any. advantage ithad^ver ^MitcheU.BNC,.particularly Wreflex versions of,he mC were being made W 1962. onwards. The only area, 01 film production where the Mitchell MarkI* found much
05
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SlXTj^
use were in the making of television commercial ^hery a totally steady pin-registered image was desirable for combination with superimposed titles and other optical effects and sync, sound was usually not required. It also found I place in the production of expensive films in Italy and oth countries where total post-synchronization of dialogue u the norm.
The first 50 Mitchell R-35 cameras had a design defect so were recalled, fixed, and reissued as System 35, rjj^ Mark II. Subsequent slight modification to the design were the S35R, which could take a magazine in the traditioEial position directly on top of the body, as well as in thc rear slant positions, and thc S35RB, which had a single Ifts'CR lens mount on a fixed front rather than the turret mounts of the initial design.
As just remarked, independent companies started to make reflex modifications of the Mitchell BNC by introducing a beam-splitting prism or a semi-reflecting pellicle mirror into thc mount behind the lens from 1962 onwards, as the increasing use of zoom and long focal length lenses for ordinary feature filmmaking came to demand such a modification. It was not until I96S that the Mitchell Camera Corporation produced their own standard production modification of the BNC to reflex viewing by adding another reflex mirror shutter in front of the ordinary shutte^ just as in the Mark It Mitchell. This version of the BNC was called the BNCR.
Camera Supports
The increasing use of long focal length lenses to follow action that only began to become a marked trend towards the end of the 'sixties was anticipated at the beginning ol the decade by the provision of tripod heads with built-in hydraulic fluid damping to their movements. The O'Connor 100 fluid head, which could take cameras as heavy as the Mitchell BNC, was avai lablc from I960, and towards d* end of the decade the Miller head Tor lightweight cameras was joined by models from Sachtler and Wolf, Ron ford, and other makers. Fluid heads are preferred under cameras fitted'with long focal length lenses, because when a panning shot is made with a focal length longer than 200 mm. (100 mm. in 16 mm. filming) fitted to a camera mounted on an ordinary tripod head with friction joints, small jerks are mr variably observed in the movement or the image across the frame due to tiny stickings and releases between the friction surfaces. These tiny jerks in tlhe panning movement of ftffi image across the screen also exist when ordinary lenses an? used on a friction head, but in chat case they are too small to be apparent to the eye. The already existing geared heads used for studio shooting also give smooth movement with long focal length lenses, but they make it more difficult to
ffLM.STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
foliosslight unforeseen changes in the action in such a shot, Geared heads are also heavier than is convenient Tor wild' jhooting on location.
Tft,e continuing trend towards more location filming tflledlbrth other lighter-weight crab dollys to join the Moviola crab dolly, which nevertheless remained the principal one used on American feature film shooting on location. Its size, weight, and fairly large pneumatic balloon tyres meant I hatit ^ve smooth and steady motion underneath the camera even on city roads and pavements, whereas its principal CCMn pet i tors among the new crab dollys could not be used in this way* These were the Colortran and the Elcmack Spy der d0t]iesT which both became available in the United States in 1966, though the Elcmack was introduced in Europe in 1962. It was designed in Italy by Santc Zella, who had previously produced other hydraulic dollies. The Colortran crab dollv was the smallest of"its kind, and it had a hydraulic centre column that could raise and lower the camera during the shot. Its width was only 27 inches, which meant that it could be tracked through normal-sized doorways in location interiors. This was not the case with thc Moviola crab dolly. The Colortran dolly only weighed 222 lb., which meant that it could be carried up narrow stairs into difficult locations, but it was limited in its usefulness by thc fact that it had small wheels with hard rubber tyres which only gave good travel on smooth surfaces, and even more by the fact that it was not perfectly stable, A heavy camera on a Colortran dolly wobbles very slightly when it is tracked.
This was not the case with the Elcmack Spy der dolly (sorndimes also referred to as the Octopus dolly), which had an equally low weight (210 lb,) and minimum size, hot which had a camera column that could not be lowered and raised during the shot. Dcspite this siight drawback: the Elcmack Spyder immediately became thc other major location crab dolly for feature film production, since its characteristics were nicely complementary to those oi the Moviola crab dolly,The solid rubber tyres that the Elemack u?as fitted with could be quickly replaced by flanged bogey wheels for running on tubular tracking laid down over rough surfaces, It should be emphasized here that all crab tally's can be steered by two wheels only when it is desired to do so, a* well as having the four-wheel steering for crabbing, Inevitably it was in European films that the most visible use was made of the crabbing facility of the Elemock Spyd er. Notable examples occur in Truffauts Fahrenheit % (1966), and iVliklos Jancso s Szegenyhgenyek (I 965): in the former following people from room to room, and in "Matter much more conspicuously tracking in a square r^und astatic group. Szegenylegenyek was a leader in a small tond that developed in European art cinema towards the ^ of complex tracking shots around quasi-static scenes
293
no effect on the American cinema, even its new 'an film' wing.
Helicopter Mounts and Anticipation Devices
In 1964 the increasing inclination of directors on major feature films to use elaborate helicopter .hots produced the Tyler camera mount for helicopter filming. Vibration from the camera vehicle causes image blurring with long focal length lenses, and this die Tyler mount overcame to some extent. It was used straight away on such films as hurfir Texas (Robert Aldrich, ]%+), but a more striking application followed in This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack-1966), which opens with a helicopter tracking shot of a passenger at a train window taken at the long focal length end of a zoom lens, which goes into a continuous zoom out and a rise up and away by thc helicopter-borne camera to give a very distant shot of the whole train.
Even with thc Tyler mount there was a certain amount of vibration that got through to the camera, and this was finally removed by thc Dynalens in 1965.This device was effectively a section of a flexible prism with a very narrow angle between the two faces which could be altered at high speed electro-magnetically, and this deviated the ima^e passing through it to the lens by exactly the tiny amount required to compensate for the vibration movements of the lens in the opposite direction, at die very moment they happened. This development was one of the increasing number of instances of the use of very advanced technology in film-making, The Dynalens was not used in film production till 1963 in the documentary film of the Olympic Games, and in 1969 for aerial shots in the feature films Darling I.ili and Cawh-22.
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Lenses
The major lens development in thc nincicen-sialics was the introduction in 1963 by Angenieux of worn lenses with . zoom range of 10 to 1. The version for 16 nun. camer: as had a range of focal lengths from 12 mm. to 120 mm., which is a range from true wide-angle to telephoto, and a maximum aperlure of 1*3., and the version for 3S mm. cameras had an equivalent range from 25 mm. to 250 mm., with a maximum aperture of T3.2.. Like all zoom lenses they were best suited to cameras with reflex viewing Jems, but they were also mad, available in version* wid, Keflex viewfinding system buiJl into the lens iwll. and this form they were used with such cameras as the M.tch-dl BNC and 'the Auricon. In the latter case they became thc standard lens fined to that camera. The 36 mm. Aj 2L, lens may f*c most ^ Le for vast numbers are still being used 20 year, later,
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,s thcv hid been supplied as a standard lining on thousands of new Eclair NPR arid Arriflex 16 BL cameras. The fact that die image definition of this lens was just noticeably inferior to that of ordinary fixed local length lenses mattered little against its convenience for 16 mm. documentary and news work, particularly since in this application the entire film was usually shot with it, which allowed audiences no standard of comparison. When uscd; for just the occasional shot, as Angenieux 25 to 250 mm. zooms mostly were in American 35 mm. feature films, the drop in definition can be rather noticeable, particularly at the extremes of their range where their performance was worst-In the early 'sixties the use of zoom lenses even for just the occasional shot was still largely restricted to European cinema (e.g. Billy Liar, John Schlesinger, 1963), but when the 'swinging' and post-Nouvcllc Vague cinema finally attracted attention in the United States with films like Darling (J, Schlesinger, 1965) and Un Homme et unefemmc (Claude Lelouch, 1965), some Hollywood films began to use com spicuous zoom shots, as in The Professionals (Richard Brooks, I966)+ There was however considerable resistance to this in Hollywood-, and the use of a slow zoom as a cheap substitute for a tracking shot, which also happens a couple of times in iiln Homme ct uncfemme, was confined1 to T.V. film-making unr i Ith t n i netec n- seve nti c s,
Digressioni What Lelouch Did
Although Lelouch s photography of iJn I'hmme et ane femmc, like other aspects of that film, had a large and fast influence, this was to some.extent through a misunderstand-ing of how it was carried' out. For instance, though it fairly certainly encouraged the use of heavy lens diffusion applied indiscriminately throughout subsequent films, mlifn Homme ci unefemme itself there is no use of lens diffusion Avhatever. But it docs contain noticeably poor -definition in many shots resulting from the inadequacies of tcleplioto lenses, and more particularly of zoom lenses used in the telephoto position and. shooting at full aperture,, often against the light. There is at least one wcl 1-known-occasion, involving a dog on the beach, when the shot is right out of focus as wdll. Shooting against the light, in the sense of having a strong light source firmly behind the figures, had been rigorously avoided in films before the 'sixties, since the resulting flare of light bouncing round in the lens not only puts a x*ash of while over the whole image,, butalso seriously i^dls^ Shooting direetly against the light in this wav had be-gun to appear occasionally in Nouvelle Vague films from the beginning of the decade, but.in the late 'sixties Hollywood cameramen were content to approximate the effect by using heavy ions diffusion on standard lenses, since this also produces a loss of^fmitian and:»scattering of white light
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
over the whole image. They may also have been encouraged in this practice by an increasing use of heavy d][hj5jon Eft the filming of television commercials, though the detailed chronology of this process is by no means clear to me. I did not see any television in the early 'sixties, and in a sarnpfe of a twenty or so television commercials from 1963 to \%<\. that is all I have been able to examine from this period there is no heavy lens diffusion (except for lpack shots') in all but one of the commercials. It is only in the late nineteen-six ties that one can sec this kind of heavy lens diffusion appearing on general shots in a few Hollywood movies such as The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1968) and Goodbye Coittmhus (Larry Pecrce, 1969).
There were however other aspects of Lelouch's photography that were not imitated in commercial film-making and these included bis practice of shooting just before am! just after sunset without any special colour compensating filters, so that the shots immediately before sunset have a very strong orange cast ail over them, and those just a her sunset have a very strong blue cast. His more or less random use, with little narrative connection, of a mixture of black and white and colour stock also had little effect on large scale commercial cinema, which preferred to retain some expressive connection with the story when this was do tit, though it seems likely that Lindsay Anderson was following Lelouch in a muted way in /f (1969)+
Finally, I must mention that the increasing use in the late 'sixties of very long focal length lenses to cover staged dramatic action was undoubtedly encouraged by the commercial success of Un Homme et vnefemms* In America this was mostly confined to the new "art cinema* section of production, as in Brian de Palrnas Greetings (1968), but there were eventually some conspicuous examples in ordinary features, such as Batch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), In the? later case a zoom lens was used at its maximum focal length of 500 mm. to cover some of the 'Super Posse1 scenes, ami also the bicycle-riding scene. Here the long focal length leni coverage was used in the most common way, which waste follow a single point of interest in the shot with continuous adjustment of focus. The more flashy mode of staging with a long lens, naturally rarer, is to be seen in Greetings, and this consists of pulling (or 'racking') focus from a foreground object to a background object, and vice versa, within die length of a shot.
The Image of Michelangelo A n ton ion i
Michelangelo An ton ion i was another film-maker important for his early use of long focal length lenses in // 0$% rosso (1964), In his case he was interested in them as a means of producing near-abstract compositions of hard-edg^d areas of flat colour, and a considerable proportion of// deserto 0*
mi STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
-i$ shot with lenses of focal length from 100 mm. upwards. As far back as La nottz (1961), Antonioni had been creat-,^^positions influenced by the school of 'hard-edged1 abstract painting descended from Barnett Mew man (an Italian representative was Bruno Marani), though initially he hid'dc-ne this with standard-lens cinematography. This was the First time since the nine teen-twenties that the advanced
ainting of the recent past had an influence on film image composition. Antonioni'$ style of image composition had relatively little influence in Europe, though other aspects of bis films did, and none at all in America, though it is just possible that John Boorman's Point Bionk (1967) has some trace of it along with echoes of Alain Rcsnais' methods of film construction.
Other Specialized Lenses
The first 'fish-eye' lens including the full ISO degree field in front of the camera, which was produced by Kinop-tikin 1961, would only just cover the 16 mm. frame size, and il applied to a 35 mm. camera produced a circular image of 17mm. diameter in the middle of the frame surrounded bra black vignette- But 4 or 5 years later 'fish-eye' lenses that could cover the full 35 mm. frame became available, though they were hardly used in feature film work except for the rare subjective effect in drug trip sequences and the like, as in Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969).
It was only in I96S that an ultra-wide aperture 10.95 Ions uf SO mm. focal length was adapted for normal filming in 35 mm., although such lenses had been used for a decade in 16 mm,. At this date this fO.95 lens was only used on an Eyemo camera for available light location filming on The Indent and The Thomas Crown Affair, because the rear elements of the lens went so far back towards the film plane that it couldnot be used on any camera with a reflex viewdlnding system, In fact there was very little demand for shooting at such a wide aperture in feature film workT because under these conditions the depth of Held is less than three feet even for a Medium Shot, and this places excessively severe restrictions on the placing of the actors within the shot, Thcr e is of course more depth of field with the equivalent U mm. lens at T0.95 in 16 mm. work, but it is worth noting that when one is working at this aperture with very fast lilrn umior a few foot-candles of available light, it is very difficult to see anything clearly through a reflex viewfinder, and indeed very difficult to focus correctly in an impromptu situation.
ThcPatiavision Systems
The Panavision company *ot its start in 1954 making amorphic attachments to go on the front of ordinary pro-Jtcrion knses lor the showing of GnemaScope films. These
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^re in great demand at the time, and Robert E. Go^ -halk, the founder of Panavision, got his hands on a superior design, which used prisms rather than the usual cvlindri-cal elements to produce the unsqueezing effect. One of the beauties ok a prism anamorphoscr is that it is easv to design it with a variable squeeze ratio, and this led to Panavision bemg commissioned to produce an anamorphic attachment for the large camera lenses used in MGMs Camera (55 sys^ tern. The Camera 65 system involved photography on 65 mm. film plus an extra anamorphic compression of 1.33:1, and it was used for the first time on Raintree County in 1957. This system was then further developed by Panavision as Ultra Panavision,
Ultra Panavision
In 1959 the UltraPanavison system was introduced using the same film (65 mm. negative, 70 mm. positive) as the other 70 mm. processes, but with lenses that gave an anamorphic compression in the horizontal direction of 1:1.25, Very few films wore made in this system since it required special anamorphic lenses on the 70 mm. projectors used for exhibition, and also a further sidewavs extension of the cinema screen, as the aspect ratio of the height to width of the projected image was 1:2.7, The cost involved in all this ensured that all that happened was that the small number of Cinerama theatres using the three-projector Cinerama system changed over to this projection format. Hut by the late sixties the Ultra Panavision process had been abandonedT and the Cinerama theatres were reduced to screening ordinary 70 mm. films on their deeply curved screens, which wore now reduced in width to accommodate tin- 1:2.1 as-pect ratio of such films, The only notable film made in Ultra Panavision was The Greatest Siory Ever Told (GeurgL- Stevens, 1964), and only a very limited range of lenses were used in this process, with focal lengths from 57 mm. to 210 mm., which do*$ not cover the wide-angle and telcpholo region for the 70 mm. film image. But this was hardly a drawback for a proems that was only intended to be projected on large, deeply curved screens half surrounding th^r audience.
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Super Panavision
It was only after this beginning that I'anaeision had IU own ordinary, non-anamorpbk len,es designed for straigh! filing in 6S am, M they wliedthe system using (hem
JL*. -ring with £W* .nd *j ** *7 «
\\\ these (on^otP^hion lenses and cameras were onls
Ibic as comp- 9— T'       'r0m £S si0n Corporation, unlike all ordinary cameras,M 3 «35! -d then p^ps rented - by .dependent.
. 1 ■ >
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film equipment hire companies As well as chc direct hire charges, people using Panavision equipment had to contract to pay a royalty on the finished film prints of productions using tlie process. This approach was possible because of the marked superiority of the Panavision lenses. ■
The Development of Anamorphic Cinematography
In the sixties CinemaScope-type films came increasingly to be shot with the anamorphic lenses made by the Panavision Corporation rather than with the lenses which had been originally produced for the process by Bausch and Lomk These so-called' 'block' anamorphic lenses had the cylindrical-surfaced elements producing die lateral image compression designed as an integral part of the complete lens, and so they did not require separate focussing. Their performance was gready improved over the original CinemaScope lenses, particularly with regard to constancy o[ squeeze ratio with focussing distance, and; in the "sixties tliey, together with the cameras rented with them by the Panavision Corporation, came to oust all competition in the English-speaking world. In Europe, and also to some extent elsewhere, there were for some years a number of anamorphic processes identical to CinemaScope which had names such as Dyaliscopc, or this-Scopc or thai-Scope, but they were only used by those who could not got their hands on Panavision.
Panavision obtained the 35 mm. cameras which they rented out in conjunction with their lenses by buying up second-hand Mitchell BNCs, and'rebuilding them with a true reflex viewing system, at first using a sem i ^reflecting pellicle beam-splitter in-front of the film aperture, as the Panavision PSR camera. They hadi the opportunity to buy many used Mitchell11JNC cameras because there was a change from shooting teJevision programs on film to recording diem on videotape at die beginning of the 'sixties in the United States. Later they produced the Panavision Super Ř^OGwith a niirror shutter viewfinding system like that of the Arriflexbuílt onto the Mitchell BMC bodies. In all cases the outer sound-proof casing of the BNC was replaced with a newly designed one, which made the iPanavision cameras appear more of an original creation than they were,
Between i960 and 1963 the range of Panavision block anamor.phie lenses for 35 mm, use was built up to fully cover the range from a really wide-angle 25 mm. lens to 360 mm- telephoto lens by way.of a large number of W, of intermediate focal length. This range included an ultra wide aperture 5<W. sundardi lens-whichhada maximum aperture of 11, and: so was faster than any lens available for standard-cinematography in I960. Up to 1964 the range of Panavision zooms was much more restricted, as none had a '^om i^igeofmuehmore than 3 to I: from 50 mm to ISO
a
ses
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
mm., for instance. A couple of years later this was remedied by the availability of 10 to I ratio zooms. Over the same period roughly the same range of lenses became available for Super Pan avis ion, a 70 mm. Him system using ordinary spherical lenses rather than anamorphic lenses.
In the nineteen-sixties most of the filming in standard Panavision in Europe, and a good deal of it in America, was done with Mitchell and Arriflex cameras which had thcir lens mounts adapted to take Panavision lenses, as well as having a couple of other minor alterations to the film aper^ ture and the view-finding system. The sole original Panavi^ sion designs were for the Panaflcx hand-held cameras, the first of which was one for use with 65 mm. film introduced in I960, This had a basic resemblance to the 35 mm. Arriflex, with a slant-mount 500 foot magazine towards the back, and a mirror-reflex shutter at one side, but the small body housed the usual Mitchell type of movement with pin registration, rather than the simple single cam driven claw of the Arriflex, and it was far heavier at 24 lb.. Since only a part of the weight rested on the shoulder it had to be supported with a brace resting on the camera operator's waist for hand-held work. It was not a silent camera, and was only suitable for 'wild' shooting. The same was true of a similar 35 mm. Panaflcx that became available in 1963, but both cameras saw quite a lot of use with the increasing trend towards slipping a lew hand-held shots into Hollywood movies where they would not be too conspicuous, in crowd scones and subjective shots, as in Grand Prix (J, Fran ken heimer, 1966), (This 1963 model Panaflex was not the same as the present-day Panaflcx, which is a silent self-blimped camera, whereas the original Panaflex was used only for 'wild' filming, since il was definitely not silent,)
The economic history of the Panavision Corporation is a particularly clear cut example of a company being built up from great initial success in a niche market, in this case tht supply of projection lenses for CinemaScope, and after that by the recognition of further opportunities for business in wider and wider related fields within the industry, until the natural limit of this method ol expansion is reached.
Forms and Characteristics of 70 mm. Films
In most format respects 70 mm. films were equivalent to 35 mm. cScope films, but there was a difference with regard to the average depth of field on interiors. Because the standard lens for 70 mm. which gave the impression of normal perspective on the screen had a foca! length a littlf longer than that for CinemaScope, the depth of field was somewhat reduced, and taken in conjunction with the much higher image definition in 70 mm., this tended to draw attention to any areas in the image which were out of focus*m a way fchjtf did not happen with the smaller gauge. Becau^
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fllMSTmEAND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
of the nature of the subjects filmed in 70 mm. there were rathcrless interior scenes than usual, and the camera tended to-be ^ell back most of the time, but this defect does show up in the rare intimate scene filmed with low light levels.
Splitting Up the Screen
The only movie to begin to develop a new form out of the ^rial:propertiesof70mmJ film was Jacques T^tV s Playtime (I96S), Tati made use of the very high definition given by the large 70 mm. image area to stage most scenes in Very Long Shot, with separate actions involving small groups of people taking place in different parts of the frame simultaneously, and yet still with everything they were doing being dearly visible. Despite the claims made by Noel Burch and Jonathan Rosenbaum that these separate actions in different parts of the frame actually involve different simultaneous comedy interests, calm viewing of the film shows that this is mil so, and that there is only one point of any real narrative or comedy interest going on at any one instant, within just one area of the frame. The rest of the action is really just background distraction which makes it a little difficult to find where the main point of interest lies.
The idea of simultaneous actions in different areas of the frame was really only fully developed in a number of films using various split screen effects to give multiple images printed onto different areas of the 70 mm. or 'Scope frame in the late 'sixties. The first examples were The Boston St ran -jiff (Richard Fleischer) and Char!/ (Ralph Nelson) made in I96S, which used a screen divided vertically into two parts or more parts for some sequences, mostly involving parallel actinn. There were occasionally other examples in later jifcirs, the most famous example being Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), which had 16 mm. documentary footage printed into different areas of a 70 mm. frame. The inspiration for all these developments was probably the various forms of special multiple projection systems shown at the International Exposition in Montreal in 1967,
Tcchniscope
In I960 the Italian Technicolor laboratories invented incw wide-screen system which was called Tcchniscope, This involved shooting 35 rnm+ Him in a camera with an binary lens, and with the film transport system and claw raiment modified to pull down the film by two perforations for each exposure, rather than the usual four. The madcingof the film aperture was restricted so that the inv ^heightcorresponded to the halved pull-down distance,
the result was an image on the film whose actual dimen-corresponded to the aspect ratio that CinemaScope ^ °ft the scjeefii namely 1:2.35. The other result of this auction of the image height on the negative was that there
297
m *m as many image, on a given length of negative. When a pr.nt was made from this negative it ™ do2 in an optical step printer which had an anamorphic lens between the negatwe and positive which doubled the height of the image while leaving the horizontal dimension exactly the same. The final result on the print was an image of exactlv the same kind as CinemaScope and Panavision print images', with anamorphic compression in the usual \_2 ratio, and which could be projected in exactly the same way with the same anamorphic projection lens. Unlike CinemaScope, ordinary lenses (which arc now referred to as spherical lenses to make the distinction) were used on the camera, but to get the same field of view as the corresponding 'Scope lens, they had to be of half the focal length. The result of using shorter focal length lenses was greatly increased depth of held, and this was put to good use by a feu- directors, most notably Sergio Leone in his Perun puono di dollori (1964) and subsequent films. The other main attraction of the process was that since it used only half the usual amount of nega^ tivc for the same running time, it was slightly cheaper than other modes of 35 mm, filming. This was of very little significance for the ordinary budgeted Hollywood Film with an ordinary shooting ratio, and Lhe result was that when the process was made available in America in 1963, it was only used for cheap films of no particular interest.
The image definition ol Tcchniscope was inevitably inferior to that of Panavision, since the negative Image was much smaller, but it was not so very inferior to ordinary 35 mm, film when the latter was projected in the wide-screen format.
Process Work and Special Effects
The major forms of process cinematography at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties continued to be straightforward background projection, and also the system of blue-screen travelling mattes established in the previous decade. In the early 'sixties the blue screen travelling matte process wa.s developed into an improved form that could cope with semi-transparent objects in front of the background scene, but the process was still quite likely to leave 'minors round the figures. In 1964 the sodium light travelling matte proems using a Technicolor beamsplitter camera that had been developed in England in the 'fifties was imported into Hollywood bv the Disney studios for Mary Popping and tins proc;,s oave lhe best results of any travelling matte system there has ever been, particularly after the introduction of Eastman Color Reveal Intermediate stock in J96S.
The major innovation in this decade ™ the ,„t use oi front projection in feature films. The practicability crfita sv<tem hid been demonstrated experimently as «rf> » ^9 aftd it depended on die new WhV relW.
I
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material which hod just become available then, but for some unknown reason the process was not used in actual Htaf till the 'sixties. Scotchlite has the unique property that light felting on it from any particular direction is all reflected back exactly in that direction, and no other. No previous directional))- 'reflective coating had tins property, for all such materials 'reflected light in directions other than that in which it was incident. The arrangement used for carrying out front projection was that the actors performed, lit in the usuaE way, in front of a large screen made of Scotchlite, and they were filmed by a camera with a semi-reflecting mirror in front of it set at 45 degrees to the lens. The background scene to he combined with the foreground action was projected at exactly 90 degrees to this lens axis onto the front of the sem i-re fie cling mirror, and reflected by it onto the Scotchlite screen. Assuming that the alignment of camera, mirror, and projector was perfectly adjusted, the light forming the background i triage was all reflected back from the Scotchlite screen exactly into the camera lens. Those parts of the background image falling on the actors' bodies were invisible from the lens position, as they were comp Ictely wa she d; ou t by th c br ígli t ne ss o f the I igh l$ i 11 u m i -nating tbc actors. To put it another way, from the lens position the Scotchlite screen was a 200 times better reflector for the projected'image than lihe actors were. As witilvback projection, the success or otherwise of the combination of background:and foreground live action could be seen as the scene was being shot. The drawback to the method, as it was initially workcd, was that camera movements were impossible, and the precise alignment of the projector, semi-refle cti ng m írro r, a nď ca mer a was. a t j mc-eon stí m í n g bu t v i -ta I affair. AI though in principle front projection can be used with moving backgrounds projected1 from a motion-picture projector, in fact it seems only to have been used with the projection of still backgrounds up to 1969: Such was the case when front projection was first used; in a feature film in 2001-. A Space Qdjwzy (1969), in which the backgrounds for the 'Dawn of Man3 sequence and some other later sequences were front projected Trom large 10 inch by 3 inch arencies.
Specie Effects in 2001
Without going into the matter in detail, since literature on theproductions20&kA ^ccOdj^c/is readily available, it can be said that the special effects.used in making thisfilm were mostly remarkably simple. The travelling mattes were mostly made % rotoscoping die action, and then painting the mattes by hand: for every frame where areas of combined action were to be matted in. In other words this was a-re version to the way travelling mattes had been made at the beginning of the Wties. Some parts of the 'trip through
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
space and time' sequence were done by interchanging t|lc Technicolor printing matrices to produce unnatural colours in the low-level aerial footage used, and some parts were done by ma crop holography of coloured oil and water mixtures. The rest of this sequence was generated by the scan' technique created specially for this picture which I do not propose to discuss, since this was a less efficient wav of doing what can he more easily done by means of computer generated graphics. Other than this, most of the effectiveness CÁ2001 was due to building the sets and models big, ami then shooting the models with great depth of field.
Sound Recording
In the 'sixties there were a number of new developments in sound recording procedures in Europe, particularly with respect to microphones and tape recorders, and these eventually had an efleet on the American scene,
Microphones
In this decade American film recording practice continued to favour moving-coil dynamic microphones, prin-ci pally the Electro voice 66S, which was directional with a cardiod pick-up pattern. In Europe the A KG 2S card in id moving-coil microphone was more common until later in the decade when moving-coil microphones began to be displaced by the new condenser (capacitor) microphones introduced by Sennheiser and A KG. As with most of these new developments in these years, television and documentary film-makers led the way in the acceptance of the new technology, which was then taken over into location work on feature films, and finally into the film studio.
Sennheiser, the brand leader in capacitor microphones, introduced a small cardioid-response capacitor microphone the M-HK 405, in 1963. This was about seven inches Ions; and 3/4 inch in diameter, and had a far more extended Ire-quency response than any moving-coil microphone. Lib all capacitor microphones it had to have a power supply source and pre-amplifier, but this could now be very small and distant from the actual microphone through the use of transistor circuitry. The řvtHK 40S and other subsequent capacitor microphones were small and light enough to be swung from a hand-he Id boom for location recording in a way that the heavier moving-coil microphones could not, particularly on a long take. In 1966 Sennheiser produced an ultra-directional capacitor microphone, the S04 (or Sua), and this had a long slotted tube in front of die actual transducer unit, with a total length of about IS inches. This tube produced the extra directionality in the response through multiple resonance effects on the sound waves coming Irom the forward direction, but as with all such microphone, some sound was picked up from the side, particularly *1
fit
M STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
i
ThcEkctrovoice E-V 642 ukra-directional microphone
the lower frequencies. The Scmihciscr 40S and SOS immediately became the major microphones for documentary and location work in Europe, but they were more slowly accepted in America, in part because Electro voice had earlier produced an ultra-directional microphone, the 642, on ik1 same principal as the SGS in 1964, but with a large and heavy moving-coil unit at the transducer end* Most interested parties in the United States had already acquired this for location recording, and presumably they were reluctant to write off their investment so quickly, even though the Scnrihciscr was superior in every way. One must also keep in mind that the upper limits of the frequency response of film soundtracks and theatre sound systems were far lower than those of the latest capacitor microphones, which were levefup to 20 kHz. In 196S A KG produced a multi-purpose capacitor microphone, the C-45 IE, This could be changed irom omni-dircctional, to cardioid, to ultradirectional response patterns by screwing slotted tubes of different lengdi on the front of the transducer unit, but it made hardly any impression on feature film recording during the 'sixties.
The other approach to separating out the desired sound from background noise in location recording, besides the use of ultra-direction al microphones, was the use of lavalier (or chest) microphones. These small moving-coil microphones uere slung by a cord round the neck and hidden under die dmhing of the actors, and had come into extensive use in television studios in the 'fifties. The favoured types were fife Electro voice 646 and the PLC,A. BK/6b\ They had an °mn .-directional pick-up pattern, but relied on their closers to the mouth to separate voice from background. Their frequency response was modified to allow for the greater emphasis on bass notes found near the chest, and they were *P tunable to a certain extent to allow for variations in th's bas5 emphasis, For close shots they could be directly connected by wire to the recorder by taking a lead down trough the clothing, but to be used in Lon^ Shots they had
299
n 1« actors costume, and tncn ^ ~    , f
ape recorder. This use 0f radio-connected mi ^ M been mtroduced into televise stndios in the ninetcen-rtfta, but U m very slaw to be taken up in film recording, principally became the radio link between microphone and recorder was prone to failure, and also liable to be upset by electrical interference on location. Nevertheless radio mikes, as the combination of neck microphone and miniature radio transmitter was ^Id, were occasionally used in the recording of scenes in American films, from The Outage (196+) onwards. But their extensive use in a way that made it possible to devise new ways of staging and filming scenus had to wait until they became more reliable in the 'seven-tics.
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Tape Recorders
At the beginning of the sixties a good number of the sound recordings in film studios in the United States were still being made on recorders using magnetic coated film with standard sprocket holes, of either 16 mm., 17.5 mm., or 3S mm. gauge. This situation gradually changed until only 54 inch synchronous tape recorders 6Í one type or another were used for film recording. Two European-made tape recorders became available in 1959 which lor the first linie permitted synchronous recordings to be made on a truly porta tile machine, floth these recorders achieved this by recording a synchronizing pulse onto die 14 inch tape along with the sound signal, this puhe being derived either from a pulse generator attached to the camera mechanism, or from a quart/ crystal oscillator attached to the recorder. The Naffra ill made by Kudclskf in Switzerland proved to be the more successful of these two recorders, and by ihe end of the decade it was easily the most used film rcicordc-r in the world. It weighed 14 lb., measured 12 in. by 9 in. by 4 in., and could be carried slung by j strap from the recordist's shoulder. í inch reels of tape could be accommodated with the lid closed (or carrying, and the tape -speeds possible were IS inches per second, 7.5 in. per sec, and iJS in. per sec. The lirst of these speeds was used lor feature Jilm work, and gave a recorded frequency range from 20 Hz. to IS kHz., while the 7.S in. per«xofld speed gave more than adequate results for 16 mm. filming. The Nagra HI had controls for all the usual monitoring and playback functions, and a small
#mm <*m p1™1 tbt coul,j combinc ** i"pul"i lrdra
3 microphones was also available logo wfth.it.
Sir m 'the Nagra HI, but a couple of inches larger in mmh and widtb, and weighing 16 Ib.. It only had on,
The tfbt portable recorder that became available in 59 was the French-made Perlcetone, which was rather
length a
3&0
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY ÍN THE SIXTIES
tape speed, 7.5 inches per second\ Partly because of these characteristics, bm also because it did not have the servo-feedback control of the speed of the tape drive that the Nagrahadi the Pcrfeetone ran a bad second to the Nagra in sales, though the fact that it was cheaper recommended it to some television organizations.
These two recorders were those used by European exponents of Cinema V6rite, but as already described, the American Direct Cinema film-makers turned ordinary non-synchronous portable recorders into synchronous ones bv their own individual adaptations. Amongst the other less important synchronous tape recorders were the Stel-lavox which was rather similar to the Nagra, but smaller and lighter at 6 lb. The big disadvantage of this machine was that it cost a lot more than the Nagra, and lacked some of the Nagra s facilities. The tlhcr I00G Report model with Pilot-tone synchronizing pulse that appeared in 1967 was about the same size and weight as the Nagra, and though much inferior to that machine, it was judged just adequate to serve for low-grade television synchronous filming, such as news reporting. 1
... -
Single System Sound Cameras
Although all the major 16 mm. camera manufacturers such as Arriflex and Eclair produced models of their silent cameras that woukbrccord sound; in the cameraon a magnetic stripe down the edge of the film simultaneously with the taking of the pictures, these "single system' sound cameras never became widely used, even for television news filming. The reason for this was, that for the maximum quality in re1-cord i ng it is neeess ary lo h ave a second'person m anipu 1 ati ng the microphone and regulating the sounddevels, so he might as welt be carrying and operating a portable recorder, since this gives better recording quality than that irom an edge stripe on the film. Another minor point counting against them is that single system cameras .take longer to thread with film after the contents of each film -magazine has been
"se mi-
Sound Dubbing or Re-mixing;
At the beginning of the 'sixties it was becoming usual in. 16 mm, sound mixing or dubbing studios ta use what was coiled 'rock and roll' or '.rollback' mixing, in which the projector showing the cutting copy ol- the film could be Slopped and run backwards, without losing the interlock between it a„d; (He decks transporting the separate soundtracks on. magnetic Rim which were feeing mixed In some syslcms it waseven possible todo *his « double speed' Ins lacibty made mixing the separate.soundtracks-into the m combined track much more efficient than the old system of having to realign all the tracks from the'beginning if
they were stopped because of a mistake or an othcrw satisfactory mixing nun. Towards the end of the decade this facility was becoming generally available in 35 mm. sound mixing studios as well.
Editing Machines
During the 'sixties there was a major transformation in the type of machine used for viewing the separate picture and sound tracks during the editing process, particularly in Europe. Up to this point in America the Hollywood Moviola or similar machines had been used almost exclusively but this kind of machine was not particularly convenient for the very long-running shots that were becoming usual in television work> particularly in 16 mm, documentary films, Also, when an editor is using a Hollywood Moviola he needs an assistant present nearly all the time to rewind the shots for him and so on, and this was an expense that the lower television budgets could do without. (There ere assistant editors in television editing, but they are occupied with other absolutely essential tasks such as synchronizing rushes and editing sound tracks.)
As it happens, there had been a tradition in continental Europe from the 'thirties onwards ol using another type of editing machine for feature film work which was designed to work with large rolls of film which were left on the machine while working, rather than continuously putting different shorter lengths through the machine as with the I Hollywood Moviola- These machines, which were referred to as editing tables, or 'flat-pi ate machines', or simply,by the maker's name in recent times, carried the feed and take-up rolls of film and soundtrack lying Hat on rotating discs, which led them continuously, not intermittently, past the picture gak and sound headt To produce a stationary image without ilie film being held stationary for each frame, as was the clone in Moviola-type machines, the frame was scanned through a multi-sided polygonal prism with parallel opposite faces, rotating between the film and the lens in such a way that the image displacement produced by the path of the light through the prism exactly compensated for the continu-ousidisplacement of the film frame. As the next frame came along the next pair of faces of the prism took over the same function. (A pre-war version of this general type of editing machine made by Zeiss used a moving mirror rather than a rotating prism.) Earlier versions of these machines, the most popular of which at the beginning of the 'sixties was made by the Italian firm of Prevost, projected the image through* series of mirrors onto a screen several inches across fixed to the far side or the table. This arrangement allowed several people to see the picture simultaneously, which was also a great convenience on occasion, as was the fact that such machines could easily be adapted to project an anamorpmc
fllMSTTlEAm TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
inia^e & unsqueezed form. The Prevost machines and their subsequent competitors were produced in a variety of mod-
cither running a single picture track, or picture track toother with one, or two, or three sound tracks, and most coukl be converted from 16 mm. to 35 mm. gauge by the simple substitution of a central module.
En British television film editing from the late 'fifties onwards, a closely related type of editing table, the Acmade Mark II, which ran the picture and sound track continuously from vertical rolls at either side, was extensively used as ii ivas smaller and cheaper than the Prevost and similar machines. About 1965 what proved to be the most successful of these table editing machines, the Steenbeck, became available in Europe from its German manufacturers. This was a*am similar to the Prevost, with the only major difference being that the image was back-projected onto a large ground glass screen for viewing. A further advantage of these editing tables was that the models with multiple soundtracks could give an impression of what the finished film would be Like with the final mixed soundtracks by setting the volume controls for each track at the appropriate level.
All of these machines had hardly any impact on American feature film-making during the 'sixties, and very little rjn that in Britain, but in documentary filmmaking in Europe they came to dominate the scene by the end of the 'sixties.
The Pict u rc-Sy tich r o n i z cr
In I96S the Acmade company in Britain produced a very cheap alternative to the editing tables just described. Called a picture synchronizer, or colloquially a pic-sync (now the ConipEditor in the U.S.), this was essentially a 4 track 16 mm. sound synchronizer with the front sprocket-drum carrying the picture track modified to include inside it a small rotating polygonal prism block of the same kind and function as those described above in editing tables. This prism block, which produced a stationary image on a small ground glass screen on the front of the machine, was driven at the correct speed by a train of gears inside the Iront sprocket drum, and the whole device was driven in its turn by a crank handle mounted on the usual large knob on the from of the main shaft ofthc synchronizer. The picture synchronizer was used on an editing bench in the same way as ft ordinary sound synchronizer without the picture head, with the picture and sound tracks being fed through it from split spools mounted on winders on cither end of the bench. A motor driven version of the pic-sync became available ah m*st immediately, and in this form the device was almost equivalent to a flat plate editing machine at one tenth of the price. lD facta picture synchronizer together with a double-^aded projector was all that was necessary to edit with
30/
speed and efficiency, and the swing to such combinations m immediate in Great Britain, although owing to supply problem, this device did not really pirate the United States market till over a decade after its invention. American editors working on low budgets made do with the ad hoc but inferior arrangement of a cheap 16 mm. movie viewer Fixed in line with the rear drum of an ordinary sound svn^ chronic through which the picture passed after passing tlí rough the viewer.
The C.I.R. Tape Spli ccr
In 1964 a new form of butt splicer for IG and 3S mm. film was produced in Italy. The butt splicers previously available had used transparent adhesive tape of the same width as the film being joined, with sprocket holes already punched in the tape, which was laid over the butt join between two pie ccs of film al ignc d on a jig with p i ns t h rough I he s procket holes of the film. It was a fiddly business to get the tape in the right place with these splicers, but with the Chit, splicer unperforated polyester tape was laid across the butt join, and then a combined guillotine and punch was pushed down to cut through the tape along the edges of the film, at the same Lime perforating it where it overlaid the sprocket holes of the film. If desired the film could then be flipped over and a second tape layer applied to the other side o I die join, This was much more efficient than the previous type of tape splicer, and since the C.I.R, splicer was a butt splicer cutting through the middle of the frame line, splices made with it could be undone and Lhen remade, without having lost any frames1 if the editing of a scene had to be changed on the work print. Given these advantages, the CU.R. tape splicer immediately became standard in European editing rooms, but yet again Its penetration ofthc American feature film industry was slow.
-
Editing Patterns in the 'Sixties
The innovations in editing equipment described above had no influence on trends in the way film scenes were dissected. Although the flat plate editing machines made the handling of large qualifies of lengthy sync, shots easier, the trend towards the use of very long lakes in Cinema V*. rite and Direct Cinema had already started Wore the new equipment became available, and in feature film-mabng people had always managed to handle the editing ol bog take films with the older equipment when necessary. Io fact the trend during the nineteen-six.ies in the scene d.ssedon 0f fictional films w» in quite the opposite d.recuon. and this trend had started in the late 'mU«.
lfonc looks at Lhe histograms showing the d.tnbut.on r 1        Shot Length* for American films made during
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302
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
ISO i
American J 958-63
ISC i
-
100
ej ei
so
50
American 1964-69
Ů1
13
70
^1
3>
11
2   2 j
15C
too
■
tj345C(6? io it i?   h is's <7 ii -ie a ai a 2124 25
British 1958-63
ISO
100
so
I]
J5 "1 J?
lf>
1 1 1
1 1
L.i .1 , r
I   2 3 4 5  6  7 6 3 10 tl 12 1J U IS 1& 17 19 id 2021 Q n?4
British 1964-69
£5
Ü 52
45
r
11
7 i
1 i     l    1 í    £ 1
—i—I-------
i a
l J. 3 - & 5 7 0 f£.13 H 15 JC-171B 1&20Í1 E2 23 2J S5
I  £ 3 J  5 6 7 i 9 tO 11 12 13 14 15 IE IŤ 10 l& 20 21 £2 23 24 25
Number of Films with Average Shot Lengths in the given ranges for samples of American and British dims
usual on a sample óf more than a hundred'films for each period, and then compares them; with those for the earlier six year periods, one can easily see the way the general cutting rate speeded up as the 'sixties wore on. The mean value of ASL for the sample had'already comedown from 10seconds to 9 seconds in 1958-1963, and'in. the next six years, it had fallen even further to 7.1 seconds, its lowest value since the silent period. It must be emphasized that this increase in the number of shots used to film a scene is not immediately obvious to the casual viewer, and indeed has not even been noticed by people writing about films, largely because it has been achieved with the use of continuity cutting in the conventional manner. The 1964-69 sample includes two films with ASLs below 3sccond&, for the llrst time ever for sound films. These are The Wild Racersi]S6bV) with ASL - 2.6 seconds, and Russ Meyer's Cherry, Tiarry, and Raquél(;\H9) with ASL = 2;2' seconds, $ am not aware of anyone commenting on this at the time;
The caused thisinorease in-the cutting rate is so far ob scure. It seems tiiirly certain thai the trendwasnot fed. from
methods of scene dissection being used in television produc-lion, for a sample of IS American television programs of all k,nds - dramas, Wester,,, series, comedy shows - made around 1966: all have ASLs in the range 7 to 40 second*
includes both .productions shot on lilm in thc an(| k.nescope. recordings of live shows, (line stylisticsof telcvi-*on programmes from the -.fifties onwards can be sCudied
in Moving Into Pictures.) On the other hand the trend was not led from Europe either, because its beginning at the end of the nine teen-fifties predates the renewed American inter est in European film developments. British production had closely followed American trends in a]] through the sound period. In fact the mean ASL for Uhe sample of British films from 1964-1969 which is illustrated is 7.7 second^ which is just the same as that for the American sample. The sample of films from continental Europe is only made up of 39 films, which is not large enough to be completely confident about what is going on there, but it is made up of quite a high proportion of films with ASLs longer than 10 seconds, andithe mean ASL is 10.7 seconds. This suggests that things had changed little in Europe in this respect, but certainly the young European makers of'art films* used even longer takes than their older predecessors. In fact the best generalisation that 1 can make about the use of long takes is that they now largely came to be associated with high artistic ambition in feature films from any country. To cite just two examples from among many, Jean-Luc Godaid's A Root Jc Souffles an ASL of 15 seconds, and Joseph LoseyV'f/ie Savant (1964), which I count as a British film, has an ASL of 20 seconds. When the United States finally acquired a definiie 'art film1 sector of production at the end of the "sixties, the films from the directors who formed part of it such as Bob Rafaelson also mostly used long takes. It must be added at this point that the increasing tendency to use a large proportion of jump cuts for shot transitions in the art films of
f1b]i STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SIXTIES
all countries probably tends to conceal the great length of !tl0St of the shots* by increasing the number of 'noticeable' cut$ u'hen compared to ordinary commercial films of the
same p(
- period.
The Life and Times of the Jump Cut - Part 3,
The limited increase in the use of the simpler kind of jump cut which I have briefly indicated in the previous diapteras taking place during the 'fifties continued into the early 'sixties in European art films. The simpler and softer kind of jump cut makes a simultaneous time and space transition from a character (or characters) seen in one location lo ihe same character seen in another place at a later time, and just how soft (Leun noticeable) this kind of jump cut is fell lo be depends on bow much explanatory and preparatory information has been provided before the cuL To take ^ obvious example, if we have already seen a series of shots ol an actor running down different streets, another cut to a shot of him running down yet another street will be seen as i fairly soft kind of jump cut. Other factors involved in ik softness or hardness of the jump cut are the relative positions und movements of the actor in the frames on cither side of the cut. In the example just mentioned, if the cut is made with a good action match it will be even softer, while if the cut changes the actor's direction of movement to the opposite direction in the frame it will be a harder jump cut, just as is the case for ordinary cuts. As such jump cuts slowly diffused into mainstream film-making, the tendency Wis lo use them in a conventionally expressive way, as in UeL Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962), where just such a progress through the streets as that described above takes place, and these jump cuts in this film were intended to indicate the heroine s agitation, according to a statement by the film's editor.
The harder type of jump cut, in which the same actor is shown in different positions in the some location on either sttle of the cut, probably first appeared in GodardW bout de »uj/rc (1959). In this film there is a continuous sequence ol shots of the female lead sitting in the front scat of an open car while she is driven around Paris. The shots are taken from a fixed camera position in the car, and joined by cuts across which her position in the seat and the frame change sAnly, as dots the background behind her. in subsequent films by Nouvelle Vague directors, including Godard hinv seir, there was a tendency to naturali'/e, and hence slightly s»tan, this hardest form of the jump cut. For instance, in ; Ward's lc Pan soldai (1961), a similar series of jump cuts on Close tips of the female lead are established as Point of \W shots of a photographer through being preceded by a general shot of the scene showing him photographing her. Tnus although the Close Ups are in live action, they can
303
t takCrt ¥ * hiS SUCCeSsion * P^ographs.
However the hardest form of the jump cut did ccnLe to
be a possibility, as can be scen in JWddfc fjmWje fB Bertolucci, 1962).
The two categories of jump cut just described - space* time jumps from scene to scene, and time jumps inside a scene - just about exhaust the possible varieties or jump cuts, since a cut that shows a different person or group in another place will always be taken to be a cut to" parallel action, or at least a continuity cut, unless the second shot contains immediate evidence to the contrary. The 'shock cut' variety of jump cut in which there is a great discrepancy in sound as well as image across the cut came to be less used in the 'sixties.
As interest in the jump cut mode of shot transition ^rew in the United States, some directors there consciously took up the challenge of making 111ms in which cuts form the only kind of shot transition used. Examples that spring to mind include TheIlonged Man (Don Siegcl, 1964), and Hurry Sundown (Otto Premingcr, 1966);
Ambiguities of the Cut
Dissolves and other special forms of shot transition had always been the site of ambiguity of meaning, so when tihns came to be made with cuts as the only form of shot transition there was an increase in the potential ambiguity of the cut. Use was made of this ambiguity in L'Annec dernierc a Marienhad (Alain Resnais, 1961) and some other subsequent films, with the intention of presenting I he audience with a puzzle as to the correct temporal order of the scenes in the film, which might, or might not, be soluble. This new ambiguity of the cut was only a potential ambiguity, as it was quite possible in a film, if desired, to give a definite indication of the temporal relation of successive shots by the things, actions, or words included in the filmed scenes in those shots.
Ambiguities of the Scene
It was only at the beginning of the nimtcen-sixttes, with the film £W*w in particular, that the increasing use of W mm became widely noticed in European art
Cinema. /WnwM 0ft- ]960> '
ber of scenes which appear to have no obvious function in advancing the plot or illuminating the characters, and when they were combined with the enigma that was w centre of'that film's narrative, they had much more m a t
L the episodes ^^^^5^^ readv appeared in the previous couple of years m tlu r. Irks of the French Nouvelle Vague, In fact it seems that
304
■
chologv, but it also seems that this was act effective with most audiences, and that the actual effect was one of pronounced uncertainty as to the character's internal states. This aspect of Antonioni's films bad some influence on the European art films of the 'sixties, as in Patroni-Griffi's II
uwtc and others.
The Nouvellc Vague kind of temps mort with its lighter fooling around proved rather more assimilable into mainstream cinema, particularly as strained through the British cinema of the "swinging London' period, from such 1963 films as Ken Russell's French Dressing and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones onwards. What we are dealing with here is really more in the nature of entertaining digressions irrelevant to the plot than temps mori in its full sense.
The Newest Naturalism
flie main seal of a move towards an even greater naturalism in incident and acting than had ever been achieved before in film was in the Gtecli cinema, particularly in the films of Milos Forman (Ccmy Pmy 1963), Ivan Passer (7n-timi Qsrcstleni, 1966), and Jiri Menzei {Qstre SkdovancYIahy, ] 966), but this liad: little impact in ordinary commercial film-making in the rest of tlie world in the nineteen-sixtics. There were some small parallel developments in England and America; in the former country inspired perhaps by new developments in television drama that were now taken over into the cinemaiby their creators, as in Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967), In the United States the new naturalism was almost the personal property of John Cassavetes, who began it with the first entry in the development of the American art film, Shadows (I960). (The other main participants in this movement, which they called the New American Cinema, were Adolfas Mekas and- Shirley Clark, with Hallelujah ihti mils (1963) and The Connection (I960). 'However HalJctujtih the Hills was much.closer in style to the Nouvellc Vague, which had: inspired1 the movement in die first place.)
Improvisation
Cassavetes' Shadows was original in that it was created partly through guided:group improvisation, and Cassavetes continued to use the idea in his low^budget films for some time, but such-use of improvisation has remained very rare in mainstream cinema fur obvious reasons, Limited use of improvisation also had its place in Peter Brooks' Lord of the
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY J N THE SIXTIES
Flics (1962). Those Nouvellc Vague films which at first glance appear to be improvised were in Tact more or less scripted though some had the lines given to die actors just before the scene was shot, and a few had die lines fed to them during die shoo ring of what were to be post-synchronized scents However Nouvelle Vague directors, and in particular Jeai]. Luc Godard, often altered dieir scripts according to the in. spiration of die day of shooting, and they also used unforeseen moves by the actors that were dictated by the particular location chosen, as well as actual accidents such as slips anil falls that happened during die shot.
Large-Scale Film Construction
Apart from the large-scale constructional features already mentioned, another innovation due again to Godani was tlie presentation of a lil mina number o I discrete sec-tions preceded by descriptive inter titles, as in Vivre sa vit (1962). The effect of this was not so very far away from the type of construction used in many early films before the advent of dialogue titles. This device was imitated directly by others, mainly in comedy films, as in Billy Wildcrs The Fortune Cookie (1966). This was also true of the related weaker form, which was the simple use of the occasional sil en I-style intertitle, as opposed to die complete division of the filmby intertitles, These joky intertilles penetrated down to even the more banal levels of film-making in the later ninclecn-six ties. The use of the free/.e frame as a concluding device or indeed elsewhere in serious films, began to appear in a certain number of movies, as at the end ofTruffauťs la Qjjci-tre cent coups (1959), Like other Nouvellc Vague tricks^ llib took up a device which had been promoted elsewhere earlier in die 'fifties, in diis case in All About Eve (1954), a film well known to Truffaut. However, the way the device was used in lex Quatre cent coups represented a real development in i is relation to film narration, in that the story of the film was cut short at this point, when what might happen next to die pro-tagonist was a matter of real interest and uncertainty, wnkh is not tlie case in All About Eve,
The odier obvious feature of much of the new international Art Cinema, partly connected with some of the constructional features I have just discussed, is a disregard of some of die rules of traditional script construction, in particular causality in character motivation and dramatic progression,
In the 'seventies 1 began to feci a certain lack of interest in die subject matter and attitudes of most of mainstream anema. The source of this disaffection is probably the fact ttat most of the movies are now written, produced, and directed by people younger than myself, and mostly aimed il audiences young enough to be my grand-children. This was a new situation, and not just for me. Even though the bulk of the cinema audience has always been young, there was once a substantial older component that was taken into account by people making ordinary commercial film. This older component was much diminished by the ninetccn-scv-eruies, and in any case the relative youth of those on the production side is quite a new situation. As a result, I did not follow developments quite as closely as I used to, and so missed some significant trends. Developments in avant-garde cinema are quite another matter, since avant-garde rinema is always mostly concerned with kinetic visual processes, and in fact quite a lot of interesting work continued to be done in the 'seventies, both in the U.S. and in other countries*
Besides a marked increase in the introduction of new technology, the nineteen-scventics also saw an increase in the amount and depth of technicalities discussed in the journals associated with the film industry, in books, and elsewhere. This was in marked contrast to the high Hollywood period of the 'twenties to the forties, when film technicians quite intentionally kept much of their art and nmtery to themselves and their chosen associates. I feel this reuses me from giving extra space to all the details of these new techniques, since they can be read in American Cincma-tMTaphcrznd other magazines by anyone really interested. However, Twill continue to summarize the main trends, as tafote, particularly since such a summary of trends is not citable elsewhere. A certain caution abouL all the extra technical detail being published nowadays is also quite ncc-ewy. T0 gjve an cxamp|e in an interview reply an page w in Masters of Light by Denis Schacfer and Larry Salvato, williarn Fraker says that when filming 194\, ",,.we tried not to put anything in front of the lens.", and implies that he tt« aiming at a very sharp negative. However, in an Ameri-m ^m^r&ffm interview"(Vol. 60, No 12,, p- 12QS), fraker says that he used a No.2 Fog filler plus a 1/2 Coral flller rignt throughout the production, and indeed the use <*a heavy Fog filter is very evident when viewing prints of
the actual film, Although Masters of light and other recent and similar books are some improvement cm most of the interview material published in previous decades, the film industry interviewees are still being allowed to get away with quite bit of wild talk, much of it as misleading as the example I have just cited.
Film Stock
This decade saw the first occasion when American cin-cmatographers decisively rejected a new Film stock introduced by Eastman Kodak, in 1974 Kodak produced the colour negative type 5247, which was intended as a replacement for the existing Eastman Color Type 5254. Although the new emu Lion was rated at the same speed as Type 5254, i.e. 100 ASA, it needed a new development process similar to tlie M G-4 process used lor lhe Kodak high speed reversal stocks of the previous decade, with higher temperature <level opment balanced by a faster speed through the developing bath. Amongst o t he r c on sequences, tfmncw developing process made it possible to increase the throughput of film laboratories. The new 5247 stock lor i5 mm. (anil the 7247 for 16 mm.) also had sharply improved definition, and most significantly, greater saturation of the colours. The change in the hues of the dyes was allegedly the problem for the cameramen, but I suspect that the increase in their saturation was the real source of objection. As it happens, the 5247 emulsion produced in England at the Kodak Harrow plant from 1975 onwards was not identical io the American emulsion, and was accepted more or liiss immediately by British cameramen, who photographed many feature I í Inn, using it during 1975. On the other hand, in the U.S. none at all used the American version of die stuck. Eventually, in 1976 Eastman Kodak in the U.S. replaced the lint 5247 emulsion with a modified emulsion rather s\m\hr to that from the Urilfch plant, caílíng it '5247 Serie* ťOO\ arid American cameramen immediately began to use tins on fea-
ture productions.
SlíehtJy kibre Kodak inlroducwJ its m* n«ig*li«vUK Mi cipam of japa*. alrcdy a large .w.u&cn^r ol « L ...II ~film nin* th, AKiÍ m-nhod, ol ancWmg
Ľturv
h ují
luiir suli cara«ra tiba using
lbe d« form«*, induced a profÄal mo,,o0 g* ne„dve .hid, had ,hc       *M - *J*
oí Asa), bUt -hid, ha«»m mm*. * *■ tó rŕ
. ■
u<cd for feature motion in thc United Slates, though it was extensively usee) for TV filming there, purely because it was cheaper than Kodak stock. A few American feature cameramen at the time of the S247 debacle did say that they would have liked to use Fuji negative because it was 'solter' (i.e. the colours were less saturated), but it was only in Europe that Fuji negative was taken up to a limited extent, for use in some Wbudget feature films. It was generally agreed bv cameramen that the colour reproduction of the Fuji stock was not quite as faithful to reality as that of Eastman material, and also that it was more contrast)' than East-mancolor S2S4, being more like the previous 5251 negative in this respect. In 1976 Agfa-Gevaert also introduced a new colour negative using the same development process as thc old Kodak film. This had the designation T6.S0, but just like the Fuji negative, it was not greatly used for feature film work, though Claude Lelouch did shoot le Chat d k souris with it.
The nineteen-seventies were also the period when 16 mm. negative finally began to be used regularly Tor documentary, industrial, and television production in thc United States, tip to this point, Ekta chrome Commercial ('ECO.) 16 mm. reversal stock was the preferred medium for these applications, and it was frequently pushed one or two stops to SO: ASA or 100 ASA by American cameramen, rather than use Eastman col or Negative, To cater for this preference, in 1970 Eastman Kodak introduced a new improved version of Ehtachrome Commercial, type 7252, which had the same speed; tout slightly improved colour rendition and sharpness. 'It needed a-new higher temperature developing process like that used; for High Speed Ektachromc 7242, The previous High Speed Ektachromc iEF was replaced; by Eastman Video News.Film, types 7240 and 7241', still with the same speed of 12 S ASA under tungsten and: daylight, ibut with noticeable decrease in graininess, more detail1 in shadows, better whites^ and generally warmer colour response. Agfa-Gevaerl also introduced! new Gevachrome 16 mm. reversal stocks iiv 1970, Types 6.00 and 6.05, with speeds of SO' ASA and V25 ASA under tungsten light respectively. These were replaced :in :19tf5 with Gevachrome I* types 710: (125 ASA' tungsten) arid'type 720'(12S ASA daylight),
Eastern European Practices
Although film stock based on the Agfa patents continued to be produced in the Soviet Union, and also in East Germany under the Orwo. label, film-makers preferred to use imported Eastman Kodak negative, if theycould get it. And infactlimitedquahtities of Kodak negative were made avail-able by the authorities in ^Communist Block countries.for what they considered would he the more prestigious produces. Examples range from things like the Bondarchuk
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
Ydina i mir (1966) to Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Zerhah (1975), and in some cases the important export prints of such films would also be printed on Eastman print stock However, it seems that prints for internal distribution were usually made on locally produced stock, which continued to be inferior to Western products, with the usual characteristic lack of saturation in the colours, poor differentiation in the greens, and a slight orange tinge to the reds. These deficiencies in Soviet film stocks were put to effective use in Tarkovsky s Stalker (1979), which mixed sequences in black and white with others in colour, as had his previous Zerhlo. (n Stalker in particular the black and white sections printed onto Soviet stock had an oily quality, with a faintly greenish cast to thc blacks, that blended nicely with the restricted range of tones in thc colour sections* Tarkovsky's use oh he contrast of colour against black and white may have hcen encouraged by the continuing practice in Eastern Europe of editing colour films using a black and white work prim, as well as by the restrictions on the amount ol good Western colour stock available,
Laboratory Procedures
The greatest resistance to the use of 16 mm, colour negative actually came from American film laboratories rather than from cameramen, presumably because they would! have to exercise greater care in handling it to keep it free from dirt and scratches, and even more importantly, because they would have to buy new developing machines to process it, 'However, the fact that European television companieSj and in particular the BBC, had been using Eastman Color negative as standard for all TV production (cx~ cept news reporting) for some time began to be noticed by American cameramen, and they began to publicly register scepticism about thc laboratory managements' claims about the difficulty of handling 16 mm, negative.
In film photography thc use of pre-flashing of camera negative to reduce its contrast and lower the saturation of the colours had now become quite common, with the variations on this technique being given special proprietary names. One process which may have been slightly different from the others was the 'C hem-tone' process developed by TVC Laboratories in New York. It was suggested this was a matter of a special pre-development chemical bath rather than exposing thc negative to light, though thc firm was very secretive about it. 'Chem-tone' was said to bring out the shadow detail and .produce speed increases up to 500 ASA, with no degradation of definition and colour at 250 ASA, and it proved to be quite popular with cameramen; early examples of its use being on Rancho Deluxe, and Harry and Tontot
The use of forced development of camera negative to e(-
mi STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
fectivély increase its speed continued to increase. For shooting flight exteriors on location this had long been standard, but the exact choices and combinations of flashing the negative and1 special development beyond that was a matter ofin-dividuät preference by particular cameramen, tempered by ihc nature of the story being filmed. These practices were continued with the new Eastman Color negative in thc lat-l(:r part of the seventies, though this stock did not respond well to extended development beyond that required to give vonc-stop increase in speed.
As always, there were a few special tricks carried out jn the laboratory to get unusual qualities in the image. For ihe catacomb scene in Francesco Rosis Cadavcri cccclicnu (1976), thc negative was given a preliminary development in the sound negative developing bath first to produce high contrast cdlo U i\ while in John Boo r man's Deliverance (1972), the desatu rating method was similar to that used on Moby flktto desaturatc the colours. This process involved printing with a second 13 &W negative derived from the original colour negative. In the particular case of Deliverance, the co-Jours of things appearing in the original scenes were also controlled to eliminate bright colours, and the effect was reinforced h y only shooting on overcast dayfs where possible.
In 1978 Eastman Kodak introduced a new intermediate stock, Eastmancolor Internegativc II (5243/7243), Unusually, this could he used as both interpositive and inter negative successive I y in the d up I i eating process. When this was done, it was claimed that the combination was almost as good as Eastman CK1 in producing a duplicate print, Flow-ever, ihe real need for improved interpositive and negative was for special purposes such as making film titles.
The continuing pressure for increased productivity in the making of release prints led to Kodak introducing new print stocks 5383/7383 in 3 974, together with a new high temperature developing process for them, in the style of the 16 mm. reversal processes used since the 'sixties. This process was called ECP-2, and had a bath temperature of 9SF, which reduced the wet time to 10 minutes, The new colour print stocks had a ten Told increase In resistance to fading, antl made the previous low fade stock type 73S7 unnecessary. (Producers hadn't been using that stock, as it cost 10% roorettun ordinary release print stock.)
lighting Units
During this decade more and more feature films were raade entirely on location throughout the Western world, ttmetmies with a new production approach, which consist-W of using a large rented interior space of some kind on lotion as an improvised studio in which sets could be built. T^rc was also a tendencv to build interior sets, both under
307
1 «01 ywood studio,, ,ith solid ceiling and comply wall, Notable examples of this include (f 976) where the oOice sets were built by installing new solid walls
w*hm onc noor ofa %scr3per of|1cc b      ^ ^ ^
Presidents Men (1976) wherea total solid reproduction of the interior of the Washington Post offices was built in the studio, but there were many other examples as well. All this "■as in part to avoid the large fixed studio charges in Hollywood, but even so labour costs continued to escalate on these all-location productions. ('Runaway" productions in American parlance). A partial solution to all these financial pressures was to use smaller and lighter, but more power-ful, lighting units, and these were forthcoming:
Two new kinds of light source, the enclosed xenon arc and the enclosed metal halide arc, were part of the technological response. The first of these was an electric are enclosed inside a quartz envelope containing a high pressure atmosphere of xenon gas. This light, which produced a daylight-type light of colour temperature 6,000 Kelvin, had been developed and produced initially Tor searchlights for American Army tanks, hut it was adapted for use as a spotlight lor other purposes by Xcnoteeh, Inc, The Xenon arc was marketed in 1970 as the 'Sunbrute1, weighed about 30 lbs., and gave almost as much light as an ordinary 'Brute' arc spotlight, while consuming only 4000 watts ol power from a 30 volt D,C. source. Although these new lights were put into use immediately for daylight fill lighting when shooting location exterior scenes, diey had the drawback that the bulb containing the arc was sometimes liable to explode dangerously when handled.
The metal halide arc came in two varieties, bodi developed in Europe with television application in mind; the CSI bulb originated by Thorn in the U.K., and the Osram MM I bulb made in Germany, and die latter proved to be the more popular for film pur poses/fhese two patented devices differed in the rare eard. rnctaU inside die bulb which were ionized by an initial high voltage current, and which then emitted light in an arc between die electrodes powered by the ordinary A.C. main, voltage of 240 or 1 20 Volts, a, the case might be. The CSI bulb had no strict colour temper^ ture as it was not a black body source, but die I-IMI bulb Save an approximation to 5,500 K light, and hence needed L correction for daylight use. Like the Xenon are, these l^p, oave 2 to 3 umes more light than ordinary lighting uniU for the same power consumed. A .light dadvantage to
their use was that the bulbs broke easily and became opaque prematurely, and also had poor colour
I important disadvantage tftfti that uW bright-U in lime with the mains voltage frequency J This was no problem il the lamp*
A more s fluctuated in lime
on which they operate
30S
-
were user! in conjunction with video cameras, but there could be problems with 'strobing1 or 'flicker' when using a film camera under their light, just as had been the case with AC arc lights when the)' were introduced in the early days before World War I, (hi this context 'strobing or 'nicker' is the fluctuation in brightness of the film image at a low frequency which is the di(Terence between the frequency of the opening and closing of the camera shutter, and the frequency of the light source.) In Europe the problem did not exist for filming at 25 frames per second, which was now completely standard for 16 mm, film shot for TV, but at the 24 frame per second feature film rate the flicker would be at 1 TIz, while in the US, with 60 Hz mains current and 24 -f.p.s: filming for all purposes, the flicker was at 6 Hz. However, this flicker could be eliminated by choosing a suitable non-standard camera shutter opening, which was 172,8° for a SO Ms electricity supply, and 144* for 60 hK, as long a$ the camera speed and1 ma ins supply were kept very constant.
? An alternative solution to the flicker problem was to generate A.C, power for the lights and camera from a special frequency-regulated generator, and this eventually became the most popular solution in the United States, where the light weight of KM I lights made them very attractive for location lighting, when compared to the giant old-style arc lights previously usedT Mot to mention the fact that they could be run without an electrician always standing by them to adjust them, as the big old arc spotlights required.
Another general solution to the flicker problem was to modify the ballast unit, which produced the initial hi^h voltage to strike the are when the lamp was switched on, smoothed out small variations in mains voltage, and held voltage current relationship.constant as the electrodes slowly burnt away during the 200 hour life of the lamp, so increasing the gap. The modification required was to include circuitry to that changed the sinusoidal AC. voltage into a square wave voltage, but this was only possible for lamp powers up to \im watts, The Thorn CSIlights in the iLcc Electric 2k 'Twinhcad' housing had some use in England, on p4 Slipper and the Hose (1976), Superman (1978),and;other films, despite this lamp housing being less :fllexible th the standard type used for the   Ml mctaLhalidc lights.
When metal halide lighting was first made available 1974, the major European, lighting equipment manufacturers produced fennel lens spotlight units in a number ol sizes matched to.all the available bulb powers from ?00 watts up to 4 kW, in fairly even steps. The most prominent makers of these WMl units were laniro in Italy and LTM in fjai^e shortly followed, by Arri in Germany. Eventually Mole- Richardson in the U.S. also prodded a range of HMI lamp units. to
an
in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
For small-scale location lighting, Ross Lowel and h[s3s sociates in New York continued their innovations, the most important of which during this period was the Tota-light system, which centered on a new type of very small flood light. The Tota-light incorporated the novel idea of having reflecting barn doors on a very small trough containing a 1000 watt Quartz halidc bulb (S00 watt for 240 Vrjlt use), all of which folded up when not in use to a package 12'x3'x2\ The unit gave ISO foot candles at 10 feet, and was port of a complete modular 'Lowellink' system including reflecting umbrellas, flags, clamps, stands, and extensible mounting poles. At the end of the decade Lowell added to this system a new type of unit, the Omni light, which took a 1000 watt metal halidc bulb in a reflector with a double parabolic curved surface. This made a change from narrow spot to wide flood accompanied by an 11 to 1 brightness change possible for the first time. Lowell and others also produced new designs of smaller lightweight 'soft lights' ('north lights') early in the decade. For instance the Lowe I! design of soft light only weighed 7 lb., and folded up into a small space, while the Berkey Colortran unit weighed 3.5
ib.
A novel lighting unit introduced towards the end of ille decade in England was David Watkin s * Wendy1 light. This was made up of 4 large square grids, each carrying 44 PAR type reflector bulbs, all pointing forwards. The sections were.loosely hinged together, enabling them to be inclined at a small angle to each other, so that there could be a crude focussing or spreading effect of their combined beams. It was hoisted on a large crane for night shots, and gave 10 footcandlcs over a wide area from 300 yards distance.
General Trends in Cinematography
In film photography, the major trend was the destruction of the ever-higher image definition and colour reproduction made possible by the improvements in film stocks and lenses. The use of heavy lens diffusion throughout whole films, on Long Shots as well as closer shots, continued to increase and the use of artificial smoke on film sets, without much regard^ for plausibility, intensified the result. The interact tion of these techniques with the lighting produced quite a now look in the film image,
As far as reducing image sharpness by putting things in front Of the lens other than the standard diffusion fillers and nets wasconcerneel, there was now frequent use throughout whole films of the heaviest kind of glass diffusion filters, called *ibg filters'. These were originally designed to produce the effect of a mist or fog when a mist or a fog "ras not actually present, and they created a moderately convincing fuzzy effect to this end, as long as the lighting was right, and the camera didn't move. But by the beginning ol the
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
decade even the heaviest kind of Fog filter (No. 4) was being u5Cdon.action movies shot outdoors in sunlight, and also on scenes indoors under fairly ordinary lighting as wcll. One of the most notable cases of this was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), but there were large numbers of others gsthcdecade wore on.
Various other ways of deforming the natural response of tlie negative were also used, starting with the incorrect exposure of the stock. That is, it was frequently underexposed, either with extra development to compensate for this, or sometimes just given ordinary development to produce a 'thin' (low density) negative, which was then corrected at the printing stage. Of course, underexposure had always been used occasionally when there was not sufficient light, followed by forced processing to compensate, but with the ever-increasing trend to location filming, this became standard for night exteriors. However, some cin-ematographcrs, led by Gordon Willis and Vittorio Storaro, specified normal development even though they were underexposing the film. When the resulting thin negative was printed, the result was inevitably slightly reduced definition of the imagcT while at the same time the saturation of the colours was slightly increased. That is, the image was both fuzzed and brightened, Willis started this on the The Landlord in 1970T but the really important film in this connection was The Gadfathert shot in 1971. For the latter, he exposed Eastman Color 5254 as 250 ASA, but only had it forced one stop in development. This meant that the negative was still about a 1/2 stop underexposed. The intention ivas expressive, and referring to the New York scenes in the film, Willis said, "... the film should be brown and black in feeling, and occasionally hanging on the edge from the standpoint of what you see and what you don't sec. A lot of cameramen work to increase the quality of the image, but in this specific case I'm working to decrease it." (American Onematographcr, Vol. 52, No. 6, Feb. 1971, p. 563). Another cameraman using this idea was Owen Roizman on The framh Connection (1971). He said he wanted, u~.a rough, almost documentary look." and T wanted the images to have a dismal dreary look." (American Cinematographer Feb 1972 V*3N2 p. 158)
The cameramen Vittorio Storaro, working for the director Rernardo Bertolucci in Italy, also arrived at a rather similar effect, though not as a conscious expressive device, but more under the pressure of lighting low budget films on location, when it is difficult to get enough light into an interior. The films in question were Straiegia del ragno (1969) ^d // conformist (1970). Storaro s basic idea, which must tavc been supported by Bertolucci's fine visual sense, was to let the light from a diffuse source out of shot, well away from the centre of action at one side of the set, fight its way
309
tWugh to light the actors, bouncing oil'the walls of the set on its way. This approach, which only appeared tentatively m !i eonformista (1970), tends to leave the image in low-key, with only small areas at full exposure leveled it also means that the light picks up the major colour of the walls ot the set, as can be seen in Last Tango in Paris (1972), where all the interiors are lit in this way. Both Gordon Williss and Vittorio Storaro s approach had in common the look resulting from a large-area soft-light moderately remote from the main part of the scene, however 3t was actually achieved. By the end of the decade this style was beginning to spread, with the result was that the interiors in a number of ordinary dramatic films were now continuously photographed in low-key, which was something that had never happened before. Perhaps the most graphic demonstration of the rise of the fashion for general low key lighting is given by the photography of the Star Wars series of films. The first of these has in general the ordinary kind of mid-key lighting that one would expect for a children's adventure film, hut by the Empire Strikes Bach (1980) the lighting is fairly consistently low key, even on daylight exteriors such as the 'Ewok1 scenes. Such an approach does have the virtue of concealing the matte lines in the many process shots in the film, although i don't believe that this was the reason for it.
The developments just described were mostly associated with a concept of increasing importance in American cameramen's minds; namely 'source lighting1. This meant producing a closer approximation to the appearance of the lighting in a real room that was just like the film set that they were lighting, with the direction of light apparently coming from its nominal sources within the scene. Although good cameramen had always made some effort to roughly mimic the effect of (lie fait ol' light in .1 real room, these attempts had usually been verv partial, except in low-key situations. (Bad cameramen didn't bother at ail about relating their lighting to reality when lighting in mid- or high-key on the typical film set.) This new trend was ol' course following the direction set by some European cameramen working in the previous decade, most importantly Raoul Coutard and other Europeans who were influenced by him in their turn-Some of the most notable of these, such as Svcn Nykvs., Nestor Almendros, and Vittorio Storaro, lit American films during the ninetcen-scventics.
Nvkvist took the 'source lighting' idea to its natural conclusion on One Daj u,ée Life o/hvn D<MwU<h (1972), Limine this store of life in a Soviet Arctic prison camp complete-] * ith available light. In consequence, many of the dawn, dusk and lamplit scene, had a very muddy image qu.nl.ty m notional term,, bot this could be considered to go wtth £S£ in an expressive way, Almendros went almost*
3W
conditions, since this subject was mostly shot under higher fcvelsof natural daylight. In this film many interiors had no supplementary lighting at all, and on H relit scenes the Close Hps were lit by the flames from propane burners. Quite a number of the scenes in this film were shot in the last Clow of day, using a Tl.l lens to get an exposure. For the closer shotl of exterior scenes under full daylight Almen-dros exposed for the shadow areas without fill light, so the skv burnt out. This was an extreme case, anda more typical piece of Almendros' work was Going South (1979), which was also shot on location, but boosting natural light slightly, and sometimes using some soft fill on exteriors,
Stanley Kubrick continued to encourage his cameramen towards new ideas. For Barry Lyndon, the daytime i menors in location interiors were basically lit with translucent plastic sheets over the windows, and with mini-brutes shining onto them from outside. This technique had been common in the lighting of television commercials for several years, but had not been extensively used for feature films before. The resulting lighting in the rooms mimicked the fall; of natural light fairly well, hut at the higher levels required by film photography. Some extra fill'light was supplied from inside the rooms with lowcl lights directed into white umbrella reflectors. Kubrick had been using these since A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Cameramen, like other film-makers, were becoming much more aesthetically self-conscious about what they were doing as the result of increasing interest in their work outside the film industry, and this accelerated the speed of change in fashions in lighting style, For instance, by the end of the decade there was already beginning to he a reaction against the general use of heavy lens diffusion of various kinds. To quote one example amongst a number in which
A location interior scene in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), basically fe by light through the window This synthetic window light ti&S created by powerful spots outside the windows diffused by translucent sheets fixed over ih0< There is also a little softpti from right of the camera onto the foreground figuresJoeing us.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
the cinematographer's intentions are recorded, Las-do Ko vacs did not use lens diffusion on F.l.S.T (1978), which was set in the 'thirties, in conscious reaction to the many other films using diffusion on period subjects, He also used direct light, not soft light, but the art direction of the film JiJ limit the tones of the sets and locations to earth colours.
Another of the leading young cameramen, Bill Butler shot Grease (1978) with no lens filters at all, and also used direct (though diffused) lighting throughout, except for the fantasy sequence, which had soft lighting. Yet another example of the way cameramen more readily varied their approach to lighting from film to film is given by Conrad Half He dropped his very original idea ol overexposing and underdevelopingj which he had previously worked out from Hell in rhe Pacific through to Butch Cassidy and {he Sundance Kid, when he lit The Day of the Locust and Smile in 197S. ]n fact on the latter film he did the reverse, underexposing even on the exteriors, and then restoring the density in printing.
Colouring Colour Films
What was really a new kind of'flashing' process was invented by Gerald Turpin, a British cameraman, and used on Young Winston in 1973 to give a different overall colour bias to scenes taking place in different locations. This was at first called the 'Turpin Col or flex1 system, and it was carried out by reflecting light from fairly small sources behind ;i coloured filter into the camera lens with a half silvered optical flat placed in front of it at +5° to the optical axis- Turpin claimed that this treatment did not affect lace colours or the whites in the scene, but this was visibly not true. It could ahu be used with white light, when its effect was very like other forms of flashing the film, producing desaturation ol the co-
■
ffLllf STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
lours and some speed increase. Under the new name of the ■Ljohtflcx system, the fully developed version of this device was taken up for vise on quite a number of films in the following years.
[t now became fairly common to add a greater overall colour bias for films set in the past. When this was done, it was almost always an overall warm tone, which was added u-ith coloured filters on the lens, or alternatively after shooting at the printing stage. Amongst numerous examples of added colour tinting there were; amber added in printing to the Runner Stumbles and The Day of the Locust, brown gauze fillers on fiddler on the iXoof brown-beige added in printing lo Chinatown, pink chiffon net behind the lens for Caddie, and yellow net in front of the lens on Picnic at Hanging Koch. And, as just mentioned, Young Winston was tinted in many varied colours depending on the location. Just to show that film-makers were not going to succumb to any mindless conformism on this issue, all the footage of The Hindenburg was printed slightly blue for the release prints, and in any arc, some period films were not given any overall colour bias ataJl. Obvious examples include The Wild Party, MocAr-ihut, and Days oj Heaven.
films in Black & White
A small return to filming in black and white was initiated by The Lost Picture Show (1971), shot by Robert Surtees entirely on location exteriors and interiors. Curiously enough, this production approach was apparently combined with some sort of Orson Welles influence in the mind ol the director, Peter fiogdanovitch. The light level was high, with apertures in the f8 to flO range, and a 2S mm. lens was used throughout. This inevitably gave Chi/en tone-type tleup Incus, and there was also some staging in depth to go tvilh-tliis, diough nowhere near as much as in Kane. But the result was bound to be different, because The La si Picture Shaw was Iramed in wide-screen, and in this format a 28 nun. lens gives an effect of normal perspective in the screen linage, rather than the forced perspective effect apparent in in Academy ratio image shot with this lens. Robert Surtees •it with old-style direct light, mostly from floor stands, and W also consciously avoided the use of back light, except "dien justified by the practical lighting visible in shot. In m)' opinion the result was rather on the crude side in a lot of the scenes, and I don't care that the photography of The k«i Picture Show won an Academy Award. However, Rob-m Price's black and white photography improved with Practice, and Lenny (1974) is a lot better, basically because * moves more consistently in the direction of the available light look.
Filming in black & white was also used for filming pe-n*d parodies, as in Young Frankenstein (1974), where Cer^
311
M Hirschfeld used heavy backlight and made l^tmar, XX contrary by p^g 110 SGQ ASA (2 stops). This was not enough to accurately recreate the look of' thirties lighting.
From the late 'seventies onwards, Woody Allen used black and white most often of American directors, and the various cameramen handling the lighting for him also used more conventional modern location lighting, with softer sources used in a rather more naturalistic way.
Coloured Lighting
Yet another new trend in lighting that began to emerge during these years was the use of different coloured light in different areas of the fill
im
-----------......-       scene, My interpretation of
this development is that it largely began accidentally, due
i        :„^,M^r-_______......     r.i ■   . ...
om ur
to an increasing acceptance of the natural situation in In cation filming. In the contemporary world there are two things thai naturally produce light of different colours within lilmed scenes, one being the presence of daylight and tungsten light in different areas of the picture, and the other being the contrasts between ihe different sorts of electric lighting in the contemporary world — tungsten bulbs, different types of fluoreseats, sodium vapour lights, etc. In the past it had been the practice to eliminate these colour dMfercnces by various means when location filming, such as pulling colour correcting filters over windows, or by swamping the light ft fiuoresccnts with extra film lights of the correct colo temperature, hut in the 'seventies it became increasingly common not to bother with such correction. This trend can be seen increasing through such films as The Frtrich Connection (1971). In this cose, railway station and train fluorescent* were left as they were; some warm, mtiers cold. For The Exoiau (1973), The Sugar land Express (1974) and Toxi Driver (1976), most location scenes with lluores-cent lights were left uncorrected. In the last of these Mm* there are some scenes in which the light through windows is left blue, and this control between blue daylight and orange tungsten light within the scene is developed in The Deer Ihnur (J97S). Fnr the steel town scenes in this film Vllmos Zsigmond shot the exteriors early and late in the day, and also had them printed a bit on the blue &fc (It vm actually summer, and exterior vegetation was defoliated and browned, j For Interiors, the light kept warm, and what was visible of the outside d,rougb open windows and door, was allowed to go blue, without U ttimM m windoW,.The fordier development ol us trend, with coloured light pUy.d onto scenes rom him |,.h* with coloured gels over them, begins mlh The t<-2 // - The Heretic (1977, lit by William 1-raker. Mere the
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Cameras
This was the most active period there has.been since the first: decade of cinema for the development of new cameras, with the most innovative designs continuing to come from Europe. In 1971 the Eclair company of France made its final contribution with the extremely lightweight 16 mm. ACL camera, which continued the concept of their NPR camera in a reduced size. It had similar prc-thrcaded coaxial magazines that could be instantly clipped onto the front part of the camera containing the shutter and drive mechanism. In the process of reducing the size of camera, the shutter was changed from a rotating one to a single small mirrored blade which oscillated backwards and forwards in front of the film aperture; and more significantly for 16 mm. camera design, the tiny driving motor used semi-conductor technology and the Hall effect for power. This meant that it could run off a nickel-cadmium battery weighing only 1 lb., which could be easily slipped into the cameraman?s pocket. This motor also initiated a trend for the motors for new camera designs to have quart-/;crystal oscillator speed control built into them, so that they could be used in conjunction with recorders with built-in crystal oscillators for 'cordless' synchronization. Unlike the Eclair NPR, the ACL did not have a register pin, which meant that it was rather sensitive to the correctness of the film threading in the magazine. All the new features just mentioned made the ACL noticeably quieter than the NPR, and; indeed! quieter than any other 16 mm, camera available at the time. It was initially sold in 1971 with 200 foot magazines, in which form it weighed 8.5 lbs. Although it produced1 a remarkable sense of freedom when handheld, it has to be said thai a camera of this weight is on the edge of being too light for its inertia to iron out the tiny jiggles that can occur in the cameraman* hands. A 400 foot magazine was quickly made available, and in this form the ACL aJso marked the move towards designing lightweight cameras so that they could be carried with their centre of gravity directly above the shoulder when hand-held.
Arnold & Richter in Germany now dropped their previous design approach, and took up some of the Eclair concepts for their new Arri cameras. Their new sc.fdm'mped 35 mm. camera, the Arriflex 35 BL5 had the same general lay-out as the Eclair NPR, with, a magazine with coaxial feed and take-up compartments directly behind: the lens, shutter, gate and. drive unit. It also had its rotating mjrror shutter below the lens like the Eclair cameras, rather than at the side in the previous Arr if lex style, the claw movement was stillWally like that of the original 35 mm. Arriflex, but tlie newly added register ,pins were driven by another separate cam- from behind the film gate. At about ISlbs ^houtfilm it was light enough to be comfortably shouU der held, and prototypes were made available in I$72 Th
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SE VENTiES f0fStm I'VD TECHNOLOGY IN THE SE VENT1ES
is
was the first 35 mm. production camera to fully realize the concept of being completely balanced when handheld on the cameraman's shoulder, which was inserted into a notch between the lens, mirror shutter, view finder, and gate unii in front, and the magazine behind. Of course it could also be used on a tripod head in the standard way. One of the prototypes was used to shoot Across 110th StreaL (1972) entirely on location interiors and exteriors in New York, with much hand-held footage, but initially this design was a little too noisy for studio use, since it produced about 33 dB ai 3 feet. Various small design changes, such as making die body castings from heavier aluminium rather than magnesium putting the lens in a blimp, and redesigning the pulhdown claw, reduced the noise level to about 28 dB for the series manufactured models from 1973, though when a zoom lens was used on it the noise went up to 33 dB again. Finally in I9S0 the Mark HI version of the 35 BL, which had further modifications to the movement mechanism, achieved a noise level of about 25 dBA without the necessity for even a lens blimp, by which point it was quite suitable for studio shooting.
The 16 mm, equivalent of this design from Arnold & Richter was the Arri 16 SR, available from early in 1975. Although the general layout of the major parts of the cam-era was like that of the Arri 35 BL, and even more like die Eclair NPR, the claw and register pin mechanism was rather different. But the register pin did enter the film from the front, just like the Eclair NPR. The Arri 36 SR also had a rotating mirror shutter with 1S0r' opening below uV lens and film gate, and weighed 11 lbs. with a 200 ft. coaxial magazine. The view finder was ori en table and could be swung to either side of the camera body, to allow for left-eyed cameramen. A built-in thro ugh-the-I ens exposure meter was fitted, and the Zeiss 10-100 mm. zoom lens was fitted as standard. It had a 24-2S fps crystal controlled mn-tor, and the speed could be varied continuously from MO frames per second with an accessory control.
Panavision cameras were now definitely the preferred choice for the productions or the major American film companies, and this was sealed by the introduction of a scries ol ordinary spherical lenses made by Panavision for their cameras. At the beginning of the 'seventies the Panavision company had been making do with a special fibre-glass blimp around a modified Arriflex 2C for use on the shoulder u satisfy the increasing demand for hand-held sync, sound filming, but they were also working on an original design for a new silent reflex camera. This appeared in 1973, and wascalled thePanaflex, though it was different to the earlier camera with the same name. The new Panaflex mechanic was still based'on the Mitchell movement but in a slightly smaller and more refined form, and the camera as a "'Iro'f
VI"
' much smaller and lighter. In part this was achieved ihrough the use of modern electric motor technology, in pari by simplifying the drive gears, and in part by going to asimplified mirror reflex shutter technology along the lines of the European cameras. The new Panaflex weighed 25 lbs uitha 250 ft. magazine, and 34 lbs with a loaded SOO ft. magazine. The noise level was about 27 dB. It had a 200fl shulter, and the motor could run from at any speed from 6 l0 3 ?:fps( with crystal control on 24 and 25 fps. By changing the movement the camera could be used at 100 fps. it had an orientablc viewfinder in short and long lengths, with a built indc-anamorphoser.
The first Pan a Hex was used on The Suyarland Express by Steven Spielberg, where he shot scenes that were previously impossible in 35 mm., such as hand-held sync, dialogue s\iolsinside a moving car.
The old American camera making companies began to fade from the scene in the nineteen-seventies. The Mitchell Camera Corporation made a number of efforts to produce neiv designs that imitated the foreign-led innovations, such is a Mitchell Mark ill, and also made two attempts at light -weight hand-held 16 mm. syncr cameras, but these got nowhere in the market, being too late, too heavy, and too expensive. The ossification of the Mitchell company's thinking was strongly underlined by Edmund DiGiuglioY who had uorked there from 1963 to 1967, and who then left to let up Cinema Products in .1968, at first specializing in the conversion of Mitchell RNC's to true reflex cameras by putting a partially reflecting 45° pellicle mirror in front of the ihuuer. Within a few years most of the BNC's still in use in the United States had been given this treatment, by Cinema Products or somebody else, and then in 1971 DiCiuglio's company introduced a new lightweight (15 lbs.) syne+ sound 16 rnm. camera, the CP-16. Although built from scratch, diis uas in essence a reduced svze version of the old Auricon cameras, but with a modern crystal controlled battery-powered motor drive. It did not have a built-in re Ilex system, bui relied on having the model of the Angcnieux 10 to I zoom (ens that included its own beam-splitter viewing system and tube being permanently mounted on the camera. In fact it was essentially a polished-up version of the homemade Aurtcon conversions of the Leacock-Pcnnebaker team a decade before. The beauty of this camera was that it was cheap compared to the imported Eclair and Arriflex cam-particularly given the weakness of the dollar during lhe 'unties. American TV stations, 64% of which were S«U using Auricons in 1973, re-equipped principally with Lhe CP.]6F and Cinema Products had sold 2,000 CP-16 and CMSR'sby 1975. The CP-16R was a version of the CP-16 w'th integral mirror reflex shutter that was introduced in a^ this version was able to compete successfully for
ita, much more like layout, with the magazine behind the
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313
use in TV news shoo tin o cr^n htLr
n   , uulin* c^n    the European market. The
- the GSMO, introduced in 1976. This was a smaller and I'ghtcr quiet mirror shutter ref]ex came the ArriHex I GSR in 1 hotly.
In 1973 Cinema Products also succeeded with a new 35 mm. camera where the Mitchell Company was now failing
when it introduced the X35R Aa-.in riii*-* -
miw .v^u. Again, this was in tact just
a rclined version of the Mitchell camera, designed with an integral mirror reflex shutter, and weighing 93 lbs. witho lens and film. It had a single lens mount of the BNCR pat tern, which meant that all those old Mitchell lenses could be still used, and its noise level at 27 dB was just suitable for studio use, The improvements made to the design by Cine-ma Products included a shutter which stopped closed, and a new stroke length and entry adjustment for the daw. There was still a market for a suitably priced modern studio camera in the United States and elsewhere because many producers did not wish to meet the requirements of the Panavision Company when its equipment was used on a film. (Remember that Panavision did not sell its equipment, but only hired it out, and also required a footage royalty on the number of release prints finally struck of any film made with Panavision cameras.) One ol the first Cinema Products X35Us was used in shooting Apocalypse j\W (1979), with anamorphie lenses produced by the new Italian Technovjsion company, These lenses were actually made for die Tech no vision company by Rank Taylor-Mobson, and quickly acquired a reputation for superior definition. Cinema Products even bought the design rights to the Bell & Howell Pi Into and Eye mo cameras, when that company finally abandoned the camera
business entirely.
Apart from the Panaflcx, the most successful ol the new cameras using the Mitchell movement was the Moiiecam 3N, This was made in Austria to a design by Priu C, Bauer, and weighed only 27 lbs. when loaded with 500 ft. of film. It was the most silent of all mm. cameras, registering less than 13 dBA at 3 feet. It also N hi8hcst ol" electronic control of any camera produced up to this point. There was a built in digisiate which printed the scene number onto the negative, and the speed could be varied dunng shot with a linked lens aperture change. There was a plug-rn tfmc coding module, and also a phase-shifter module available A fitting for the addition of vide, assist was also standard The motor ran from 1 w SO frames per second, and the shuLter could be adjusted from 0 lo 176 fp.s
The Photonics comply, which had long been a major maker of very highspeed — for special purpo^
Lducud a camera which had a somewhat inited States during thi, period. This camera was the 11 D,
314-
Wtoch could film at all speeds from 16 to 200 fri#6S per second in its standard form, with an alternative version which could manage 500 frames per second, even though It had pin registration. This was a firit in this area. Viewing was through a beam-splitting arrangement behind the Ions, and the camera came lo be particularly popular for sports filming.
As a result of take-over and re-organinational manoeu-vers involving the Eclair company and the older French Dehric company and others, the team led by Beauviala which had designed the ACL camera left Eclair, and then set up a company which produced the new Aaton 16 mm, camera in 1974. This was similar to the Arri I6SR in general lavout, though a bit heavier at 16.5 lb. Its noise level of 30 dr> at ! metre was not especially remarkable either. The intermittent mechanism was a remarkable return to the basic conception of thu- Williamson camera movement from the beginning of the century, Fligh claims, at least partly justified, were made for the image steadiness of this simple arrangement, despite the camera not having a register pin. Part of the reason for the extra weight was the inclusion of a small video lube as a standard: part of the viewfinder system, which could produce a signal for an external TV monitor if desired. The Aaton was moderately successful, but did not Slop the Arriflex I6SJI From becoming the new standard 16 mm. camera.
Although video monitor systems for filming had been used in the 'sixties, the imperfections of small lightweight vidicon tubes that had to be used1 on the movie camera to produce the video image had: restricted their appeal, Now that these small1 vidicon tubes had improved, video monitor systems became popular with more film-makers, as a way for the director to see exactly what he was getting on the film without waiting for the rushes on the next day. At first, the video camera was just attached to the film camera with some kind of arrangement that reduced the parallax between them to a minimum, but eventually systems were devised^ which- took the video image through the film camera lens with some'kind1 of beam-splitting arrangement in the film camera viewfinding system.
Super -16
At the beginning of the decade a completely new film formal was introducedlThisWSupei-16\ and it was effected ■by using a 16 mm. camera which had been specially adapted by having the film, aperture in the gate filed out at one side so duit the negative was exposed1 right out toahc edge of the film, over"what would he die sound .track area on an ordinary finishedTG ,nm, married print. Since ordinary 16 mm lenses were eoimrueted lo justcover the areaof the ordinary 16 mm, Irame with the highest possible definition, and their
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY JN THE SEVENTIES
optical performance usually declined outside that area it was necessary to re-centre the position of the lens mount by moving it 1 mm, to the side, and also to use lenses designed for television cameras, or in some cases, lenses for 35 min cameras.The first feature shot in Super-16 was Lyekhgc Skier (1970), photographed by Rune Erics on. He shot it en Easi-man Color 7254 using an Eclair NPR with Canon Vidicon lenses. The Eclair NPR proved to be the most popular camera for conversion to Super-16, as Its viewfinder showed lots of space at the sides beyond the ordinary 16 mm. frame, and this could easily accommodate the extension of the Super-16 image. In fact, the new format was not greatly taken up fur feature filhi-making, as its use did not save much moncv for an ordinary feature production. Although Super-16 reduced the cost of the film used through to the cutting stagey tlie saving was very small compared to the average Tea lure Dim budget, and also, despite the improvement in image quality over the ordinary 16 mm. image when projected onto a bi^ cinema screen, the Super-16 image was in its turn still inferior to the image originated on 35 mm. negative. For very low budget feature film production, on the other hand, uV cost of tile Cftl intermediate necessary for producing a final print in 35 mm. was quit* high, so Super -16 was not really a lot of help there either, Nevertheless, there were some other less notable films shot in Super-16 during the decade, both in America and Europe.
Stereoscopic Cinema
A small revival of interest in 3-D films had begun at the end of the 'sixties with Arch Oboler s The Babble (1966) shot in 'Spacevision', and this continued into the new decade to* Tore guttering out again. 'Spacevision1 was the invention of Colonel Robert Bernier, and involved the images from two laterally separated lenses being placed by prism system* in the upper and lower halves of the 'Scope frame area on 3a mm. film in 'Scope proportions.Thus the layout on the Him itself looked rather like that on Techniscope negative when inspected directly, though the process did not actually involve anamorphic lenses at any point. Projection reversed this pro-cess, with a special double prism and lens system replacing the I ens on an ordinary projector. There were Polaroid fillers over the two projection lenses with their polarization axes crossed, and the audience had to wear glasses widi Polaroid fillers on them as usual .The more expensive productions in this new ripple of 3-D such as Flesh for Frankenstein (l9?4| used the 'Spacevision" system, but older, cruder equipment was resurrected for other really cheap productions, most ol them sex films.
Camera Mounts, etc
During the nineteen-seventies there were a number 0
MM.S1YLS Am TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
important developments in ways of mounting moving carries to get various kinds of control over their motion. At-wmp^ io use a computer to control the detail of all the niavemcnts of a camera mounted on some kind of dolly or
Wl crjnc m a rEPro(Jucible wa.V startecl in the de-uJe. Apart from the computer, the other basic part ofthc new technology needed for this was the 'stepping motor1, ndiva standard electrical product. This was a small electric motor in which the drive shaft could be controlled electronically to turn through an exact fraction of a revolution [n either direction, rather than just rotating continuously in one direction. Such motors could be attached to gears to drive the wheels of a dolly, or to move the arm of a small camera crane in response to signals recorded on a computer <thk, and such a series of signals could be changed gradually through a series of trials to get the motion desired, which could then be repeated precisely as often as needed. This Wii something no human operator could do.
The first important step towards a remotely controlled camera mount was the Lou ma crane. This was a French invention that was developed into a practical system with the support of Samuel son Film Services tti London. The Louma crane was rather like a more sophisticated, and bigger than ubuaLk microphone boom, A tubular extensible arm with a n-jch of 23fl. 8 in. all the way out was pivoted at its balance point on a stand, and could be rotated in any direction. At tht end of the boom the camera was suspended from a pan and till mount whose movements could be controlled by stepping motors. The camera was of course fitted with a remote video viewing system, which enabled the operator to mc the effect of his movement of the remote pan, lilt, and locus controls. The poinl of the device was to enable camera nnovi^s that were otherwise impossible, such as forward and backward tracks through very narrow spaces, and this is the way ii was used occasionally in films in Britain from 1976, and in the U.S. from 197S.
Working on a cruder level, bul very effective for all that, ^re various devices to make the movement of a camera while hand-held easier and smoother. The first of these was the Fleximount, of which 200 had been sold by the mkl-tl't of 1973, This mount supported the camera in front of the operator on a cross-piece at one end of two bars which ^rebalanced across the operators shoulders, while being sighed down at their ends behind him by the camera bat^ supplemented by springs pulling down to fastenings on ^ Wk of a waisi belt.
This gadget was supplanted by another which may have tan partly inspired by it, Garrett Brown's 'Stcadicam'. Af-«rsomc years of development by its cameraman inventor, jjfcwu pul 0n.saJi; by Qncma Produce in 1976. The Stea-4am-had two main parts. One was a Hexed folding arm
m
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ou ted. the cameraman's waist on a joint fixed to a chest
-uaist harness that he wore. The arm contained inte, nal springs acting like those in the well-known »ML& Jesk lamp to support the object at it, outer end, tLL in th«S case they had to be much stronger to carry about 10 U ^ camera, etc. On the end of this arm there was a gimbal ]omt, through which passed a vertical rod capable of rotating in every direction about this joint. On the top end ofthc rod, several inches above the joint, was the camera, and at the bottom end, about a foot helow the joint, was the camera battery, in the prototype system the camera, which was an Arrinex 2C modified to have its magazine on a gooseneck behind it, and also a video tube inserted in the viewing system, was permanently fastened to the mount, and it had a very small high intensity video monitor mounted above it. This part of the device was probably inspired by the now fairly standard construction of helicopter camera mounts such as the Tyler mount, or the late Albert Lamorisse's 'Hell vision5 mount. The leverage of the spring system in the arm was adjusted to compensate for all hut a pound or two oi the weight of ihc camera, leaving this last fraction ol thu weight supported and com rolled by the cameraman's own arm grasping a handgrip on the rod below the jumbal joint. Through the joints on the arm system the camera could be moved up and down across in front of the cameraman's body, and also out to the side, while the gimba! permitted it to be tilted and turned in any direction. With the Stca-dicam, it was possible nut only to get a smooth flat motion while the cameraman walked around, which could already be done by a skilled operator doing ordinary hand-holding, but even to run with the camera without any up and down bounce being visible, Indeed what was possible with the device used by a skilled operator ;vas quite remarkable. The drawback to the Sleadicam was that il required not only quite a bit of training to use it well, but also quite a lut of strength to support it for any length of time, a_s the arm and harness weighed about 12 Ih., and the camera, etc. mounted on it about 30 lb. The first films the -Steadieam wa* us.d on were Hound/or6hry(\<mi Moroihon Man (I976j, and Bocky (1976), and f3rown did most of the operating of the device on these. Bound for Glory included a number of clever tricb, which have since become standard, such as starting a shot with the operator carrying the camera on a crane platlorm ,vhich is then lowered to the ground, and having h.ru walk off the platform and around and about through M M$
filming all the time. t t
A universal mode! ofthc Sleadicam. which did Ml Have
the camera built onto i«. and could take any camera wc gh-
Z up to about m lb., wa, produced almost imm.hatc.y I or rental by Cinema Product, ThUbad the iramm
llr in the battery base unit, wi.b * — mdmed
S16
mmk km*thc hW monitor on tlie carlicr vcrslon
was nuich better for framing control by the operator, m fact, even with the earlier version, framing while in motion could not be as precise as that done by a cameraman with liis eye to the reflex viewfinding system of an ordinary handheld camera. In use, the Steadicam tends to feel as though it has a life of its own, which is the reason for the training in its use being necessary, and shots including slowish sideways movemems~tendcd to have a slight look of1 balloon-like' motion to them. A whole style was created round this movement quality of the Steadicam by John Carpenter in his film Hoilowccn (197S), by establishing at die beginning of it that this kind of movement of the camera was associated with the POV of the mad sex-killer, and then repeatedly tricking the cinema audience by revealing that sometimes it was just a purely objective shot. This notion proved to have quite an appeal to immature sensibilities, and hence a long life afterwards in the commercial cinema of recent times.
Another novel camera sup port system was the Wcsscam, This was conceived by the Istcc Corporation of Canada for use in taking helicopter shots, where there was a restriction on camera pans and tilts, because of the necessity for the mount to be inside the aircraft, with the camera shooting out through an open door. The actual design was done by the American Wcstinghouse company, and involved a camera housed inside a libreglass sphere 117 cm, in diameter, with its panning and tilting remotely controlled by servo motors, and monitored on a TV screen. The whole apparatus weighed SI Kg;, and was suspended outside the helicopter in its initial application. It was found that it removed all vibration even with a 250 mm. camera lcns^ and was then taken up Tor use in other situations, for instance suspended on a car in filming the 1976 Montreal Olympics, For feature films it was also suspended from a crane, and used to get the maze shots in Sleuth (1972). Its most famous accomplishment was the final shot of A moment's Reporter (197$).
Lenses
In this period the vast, ever-expanding world television industry had a strong indirect influence on the new lenses produced for film cameras. For some time, television cameras had; been equipped only with permanently mounted zoom lenses, and this meant that the market for new fixed focal length lenses for film cameras was relatively minor, particularly since it was often the practice to adapt good Older lenses for mounting-cm,the new film camera designs.
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Asa result of this, the venerable Tavlor-Hobson England stopped making fixed foc^ er, and concentrated its effort on zoom lens manufacture ere a television camera Wdesign could be fairly easily vorked; lor film use: And they W a good: sra ^
wh
rew
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTH
their Cooke Varotal 5 to 1 (2Q-10Qmm) z0Cjm introduced in 1970. This had a T3.2 maximum aperture, and focussed as close as 0.34 m. One of the most interesting aspects was that it was not focused by rotating the front of the lens as had been necessary with all previous zoom lenses, but bv twisting a ring further down the lens barrel. This feature was almost essential for use on broadcast type video cameras, and was also much more convenient for film use.
In 197S Taylor-Hobson made a similar lens for 16 mt]1 cameras, the Cooke Varotal 9-50 mm. zoom. Its maximum aperture was T2.5 and it focussed as close as 9 inches. It also had a fixed front element, which was even more helpful to cinema veríte and news cameramen who pulled focus for themselves without an assistant.
Canon, the major Japanese manufacturer of lenses tor still cameras, now entered the film lens market in collaboration with the large American equipment hire firms, producing sets of lenses to their specification. Like Taylor'Hob-son, and likewise in the interest of getting the highest possible optical resolution, Canon did not try to make zooms covering a focal length change of 10 to 1, but were satisfied with a zoom ratio of around S to 1. In 197! they produced a 25-120 mm. zoom with a maximum aperture of T2.S, and anamorphic zooms of focal length ranges 40 A35 mm. and 79-200 mm., both with maximum aperture of T4.5. A little later there was a Canon zoom for 16 mm. with a focal length lange of 12,5^75 mm. and maximum aperture of T2.L All these Canon zooms had a so-called Macro facility of the kind now familiar to still camera enthusiasts, so that by a twist of a ring on the lens it could be set to focus very close to the front element, even as close as 3,125 inches in the case of the 16 mm. zoom. This permitted great magnification of any tiny object being filmed, The special features of these Canon lenses was in part made possible by the replacement of some glass elements by internal elements made of synthetic fluorite crystal, which has a much higher refractive index than any glass. Although this was a well-known theoretical possibility, it bad been avoided because fluorite absorbs water vapour and swells under some conditions. However, Canon apparently worked out a way round this problem. In 1974 they also produced a series ol fixed focal length lenses of high resolution and higher speed than visual, and here the trick was to use elements with 'aspher-Le surfaces. (Unlike ordinary lens elements, in which all surfaces are sections of a sphere, these were ground »ith computer calculated curves that helped reduce thc aberra* tions of the total lens further than had been possible before.) The maximum apertures of these lenses was mostly H+■ And all had multiple layers of anti-flare coatings on uVir surfaces, instead of the single layer that had been standard for film lenses up to this point, which reduced even further
\f STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY S N THE SEVENTIES
than usual the light flare which can degrade the image.
Also in 1974, Zeiss produced a very similar series of flvcd focaMcngth lenses using thc same techniques, but willi the extra innovation of having 'floating' internal elects which moved relative to the outer groups of elements rthen the focus was changed, rather in the way that zoom lenses have moving internal elements to change the focal length. Zeiss also made a similar set for 16 mm. photography though in this case the maximum aperture was T1J. These new Zeiss lenses were generally referred to as the SuperSpced range, and proved very successful. Zeiss also produced a zoom lens for 16 mm,, the Vario Sonnar, which was likewise popular, with a range of 10-100 mm. and maximum aperture of f2.8T
One crucial point in zoom lens spccilication from a cameraman's point of view, both in 16 mm. and 35 mm., is u> have a shortest focal length of about 10 mm. or 20 mm., depending on the gauge ol film, This means that a location <cenc in a small space could be covered without having to replace the zoom lens with a wider angle fixed focus lens. Another point is to have the maximum possible aperture available on the same lens for filming under low light conditions. Taylor-Mobson and Zeiss zooms satisfied thc best combination of these requirements in general.
The French Angenieux company continued to bring out new models of zoom lenses, working in the same direction as the newer entrants to the competition, which was to reduce the zoom range and increase the maximum aperture ind optical performance. However, Angenieux stayed with older design techniques, and so began to lose their com mamling position. However, they did retain their lead in lewcs with ever greater zoom ranges. They produced a zoom lens with a 20 to 1 zoom ratio of 25-500 mm- especially for the Samucisons film equipment rental company to London in 1970, and in 1974 a IS to I (10-150 mm.) loom with a maximum aperture of T3.2 for 16 mm. cameras. And Cinema Products in Los Angeles bad another 20 to 1 zoom (24-480 mm.) made out of Angenieux parts at the request of Stanley Kubrick. This lens can be seen used in farry Lyndon (1975) doing quite slow zooms straight in and outon exterior scenes in the beautifully landscaped grounds W English country mansions, and this forms an important P^t of the style of that film. Finally, Angenieux put on sale to I ratio^oom (25-625 mm.) for 3S mm. photography This had a maximum aperture of TS,
Following the lead of Haskell Wcxler in the previous d«*<k, Stanley Kubrick had two Zeiss 50 mm, f0.7 still lenses originally made for NASA adapted for movie ttmora mounting for his production of Barry Lyndon. One ^ kept as a 50 mm. lens, and the other was converted into a k mm. ]ens witLj an iCiaptor Because the rear clement
317
of these lenses had■ to be VCry %    £ ^ onl) be mounted on a specially adap,cc] M BNc M-tchell camera. By forcing the Eastman Color negative one stop to 200 ASA, with these l.nses it was p,i to photograph interior scenes lit only by candles, in fret with hght at a measured level of 3 foot-candles. The resulting shots were of very poor definition, and in the finished film they were left with the inevitable strong orange bias ef low temperature light, but it could be argued that they served their function in the overall film. Since thc field of sharp focus at f0.7 is only inches deep, focus changes to accommodate actor movement had to be judged by a special video system reproducing the scene as seen from the side on a monitor with a distance graticule on its face. This part of the operation was an idea with no future.
The Technovision anamorphic lenses made by Rank Tay-lor-Hobson for the Italian company of that name were made available for rental in U .S. from 1977, and could be used on any of the standard cameras as desired.
A small-scale trend in film photography during the 'seventies was thc use by some directors of very wide-angle lenses, with focal lengths in the range from 10 mm, to 15 mm, for the photography of a large proportion of the ordinary scenes in their films, A good example of this is provided by Fred Ferry's Roncho D<r£u.w(1974)I but other films in which such very wide-angle lenses were used some of the time include Chorlcy Vurnck (Don Siygel, 1973), and Dcoih Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), Pctton gives an example of this in 70 mm,, with much of the Him shot with the 2H mm. Todd-AG lens. Unlike the trend towards the use of wide-angle lenses in the ninetecn-lbrttes, in which their u*e was associated with the staging of the action in depth, between actors near the camera and others in the background, this new trend merely used these very wide angle lensev with ordinary staging of the scenes, even though they gave greater depth of field. The inspiration lor this use ol very wide-angle lenses may have come from a fashion for their u*e in still photography a few years before, where they hid been taken up as soon as they became available lor still cameras. Although lenses with focal lengths of 9.S mm. and 14 mm. were available lor cinematography from before l%>, had hardly ever been used on feature films, A rather >imdar nation had arisen previously in the 'sixties wJth the use of Ion, focal-length lenses, which though always available for S cameras, were only used to film ordinary M *™ they had become fashionable in still photography a, uSe be-winning of that decade.
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Ti r „ but lliere w» still »fi.e Intmsl in ^g'ng in of deep focus bu <l>c , ^ wm|j.
depth, occasion^)' under iik t>en m
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Lions of photography using 'Scope as well. To achieve depth of Held when 'Scope filming, resort was had to the use ol spin field dioptres - supplementary lenses which covered onlv part of the lens field. Examples of this include scenes
which David M. Walsh used two dioptres simultaneously in front of the two sides of thc lens to get 3 separate areas of the scene having different depths in focus at the same time. Non'Scope films whiehstrovc to obtain even greater depth of field with the use of split dioptres, even though they were already being shot at f4,5, included All the President's Men (1976) and Thclcartan Comeih (1973)
Sound
The major new film sound recorder in this period was the tiny Nagra SN recorder produced by Kude I ski in 1971, The dimensions of this were only S.7S" x 4" x 1", and its weight Mb. I ox. To achieve this size, it recorded on 150 mil tape of the same width as that used in amateur cassette recorders, but the quality of the recording was quite good enough for film purposes, and it could also give crystal synchronization. It was used1 sometimes connected to a chest microphone and carried in an actor's pocket in situations where a radio microphone link would not work, but its principal application was in the kind of documentary filming which was physically, awkward1 for a sound recordist, such as filming mountain climbing with, sync, sound, Although such things were mostly a concern of non-fiction filming, the device was also useful for filmingpartS'of some features, such as The Eigcr Sanction (1975).
The KudeMi company was unsuccessful with its other innovation of the 'seventies, the Nagra 15-D recorder. Roughly speaking, this had; the same facilities as the old Nagra HI, but in a smaller and lighter unit (10 lbs,). In fact it was rather similar in size and weight to the Stellavox recorder. Bui the Nagra IS-'D was only 20% less in price than the Nagra W, while lacking the capacity for the extra inter^ nal features such as crystal sync, unit and transfer fesoIver that the latter had'. The Nagra IV was now also available in a stereo sound version, which used a different and incompatible syne, pulse system to the original Nagra Pilotone. Towards the end of the period the stereo Nagra IV SI came to be increasingly used for film recording, not to record stereo sound directly, but as a*wo channel recorder^ talcing thc signals from tAvo microphones on- di flercnt :parts of the set, so that the balance of their sound could be readjusted later at leisure. Nagra recorders continued to be used for nearly allteature film recording world-wide, including in Russia and 1-astern Europe.
Sennheiser microphones dtf not have .quite the same dominance, iWalthougl, older microphones of other makes
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
were continually being replaced, new condenser micro phones from Schoeps in the United States and A KG [i Austria took some of the business, basically because tKey were cheaper in the U.S. and European market respectively than the Sennheiser microphones, and not that much inferior to them as welL All were available in models that gave omni-directional, or cardioid, or ultra-directional sound pick~up. The A KG models used thc new idea of having just one basic diaphragm unit, onto which were screwed inter-changeable slotted tubes of various lengths to get the ap. propriate degree of directionality. Sennheiser introduced a new condenser microphone into its range in 1971, thc 415 This had a spatial response pattern intermediate between the cardioid 4GS and the ultra-directional SOS, combined with a frequency response virtually as flat as the 405, and eventually it proved to be the most popular of all with film sound recordists, replacing the 405 as the preferred option in most situations.
Another general development was the use of the elec-tret' type of microphone for film purposes. These were a type of capacitor microphone in which the electric charge on thc diaphragm was applied permanently during manufacture, rather than by power supplied from batteries or the recorder during use. Although electret microphones arc: in general far cheaper than powered capacitor microphones, their performance is also slightly inferior, and it is possible to destroy them with a sharp very loud sound which drives line diaphragm onto the back plate of thc capacitor, so discharging the device, Nevertheless, Sennheiser and others produced ranges of electret mikes, but they had little use in professional film-ma king, except as neck-microphones or lapel microphones, which w'ere now so small they could even be pinned to the outside of performers' clothing fairly inconspicuously.
Gn the technological side, thc major developments was the increasing use of radio microphones, now that these were finally reliable for location use. One of thc new tricks to ensure reliability was the use of two separate receivers for the signals from the transmitters on thc actors, so eliminating any 'dead spots1 in reception in location filming situations.
Robert Ahman's Methods
it seems to me that thc only American director who has created a truly distinctive format style during the "seventies was Robert Altman, and he was also thc director who has made most use of thc new technological developments just mentioned. Already in 1969, in That Cold Day in the lie was beginning to develop a special way of using camera movements in combination with zooms and actor moment. At first, in M,A,S.H. (1971), the result was to k^P
01STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
factors roughly the same size in the frame while they traced out a complex path on the set, but by The Long Good-tr (1973) some of the zooming in and out was being applied in jrandom way to nearly stationary actors, and this trend fas since continued in Altman's work.
Simultaneously with these developments on the visual sjJe Altman also pushed the use of overlapping dialogue be-vond earlier models, which had restricted themselves to thc ovcrlapping of the beginning and ends of lines of dialogue spoken hy di fie rent actors. Altman used whole sentences spoken simultaneously, and initially this was done by post-ivnehronizing the extra layers of speech, but he quickly moved on to make use of thc improved radio microphones in combination with a multi-track recorder to record the dialogue from several actors separately, for later adjustment In the mixing* This idea was introduced in California Split (,|974)lo overcome the staging restrictions Altman had experienced while making McCabe and Airs. Miller (1971), and also to allow improvisation and overlapping of on-screen dialogue* as well as the incorporation of off-screen dialogue into direct recordings.
Altman used a recorder designed for music recording, which was a Stevens Electronics S track 1" machine run-nfngat IS inches per sec, and in this application one track was used to record a sync, pulse, and the other seven for thu different microphones that might be needed. A quartz crystal sync, pulse generator, resolver, and V.S.O. (speed wrier) were added to the standard machine. Altman had several of these recorders, with two 8 input, 4 output channel mixers for each recorder, and two such recorders were used interlocked for the recording of A Wedding (1978). In general, Sony ECM-S0 electret lavalier mikes and Artech radio links were used for each performer, but some fixed mik-s were also used on the sets. It was, of course, impossible to balance all these properly during the initial recording. These individual microphone tracks were transferred to three-track recordings on 3S mm, sprocketed magnetic film, which produced two or more of these magnetic films, ami the editing was done on a six plate KEM editing table, with a special added 9 channel amplifier. Altman also had Kvo portable projectors with triple head double head facility which could be interlocked to an extra 35 mm. magnetic Mm deck, After editing, the tracks were separated back to single trackJS mmT magnetic films for the final mixing ses^ aon in a conventional dubbing theatre.
This multi-track recording system was subsequently usc<l on all Altman films and also on Alan Rudolphs Wel-Wtto U. (1976), In the case of Altman's Nashville (1975) ^separate dialogue tracks were mixed to give the usual fe'riy realistic sound perspective, but by the time of/! Wcd-f]97S) Altman was no longer bothering with this, and
319
22of tó***tracks É ihc sa™ w« « ft
a^.wa,WhatoneistornakeofthisiandalSotheran, fen —g in Altman s later films I do not know. In m case, AltmaiVs methods in their fullest form did not catch on wnh anyone else, in part heeause the sound quality from neck microphones fell short of the highest standards. However, it did become increasingly common for sound record-ists to tab recordings when using more than one
microphone simultaneously, quite often by using the two tracks of a stereo Nagra independently for this purpose.
A quite opposite approach to the treatment ofsounrl was followed over this same period by John Roorman. In his case all oi his Rims were post-synchronized throughout, using a sync, guide track taken at the time of shooting.
Scnsurround
Scnsurround was introduced hy Universal Studios as a special feature for presentations of F-arthtjuoke (1974). It involved the installation of special loudspeakers and horns in cinemas which relayed very low frequency .sound, mostly belowr audibility, this low frequency sound was generated electronically in special units when they were triggered by signals on the optical sound track of the film, and then am pi i Hed by special 1000 watt amplifiers. Some actual low frequency recorded sounds, such as thai of rushing flood-water, were also taken from the optical track and fed into these extra amplifiers and speakers to accompany appropri-ate scenes in the film, The system was also used on Midnay (1976) and Rollcrcoostcr (1977), but on the latter it was simplified, with the required very low frequency sound, down to 15 Hit, being recorded on the optical track, and simply amplified for playback through thc spe-daJ extra amplifiers and low frequency speakers in the theatres, rather than being synthesized on receipt of a coded signal. After this the idea was swept away by the developments in the Dolby system of film sound recording.
Dolby System Recording
The Dolby noise reduction process was lirsi u««l film purges in the profesi Dolby A lorn, for tin-wund mixing S.ag« oCCtaW Or^ (1971). The Dolby process W» then applied to thc optl«i recording ol mono-
Jhonlc film sound M
Lk from 1974 to 1977, sorting «rirh
3nd 5»«h« (197+). Dolby rc-.ordíng was aUo«?fW « J
2» Lp*k tm mě ***** ^Jkl f;,TI
v„ in theses for Thc Lad, »** (197+) and •faction <" tl eaircí -o R^k and
At the same torn?, Irom
I 1    nuicklv brLbt Dolbv L*WWrte
320
■ .
r-t1- r~
created a number ol>oblcms, including compatibility with monophonic tracks.) the Dolby theatre system synthesized a signal for the -centre speaker behind the screen from the dtflbrencc between, the two recorded tracks, and the two basic tracks were reproduced through the standard left and riaht theatre speakers. Tammy (1975) was released in Europe using this system in 1975, and A Star is Bom in 1976 in the U.S.A. Sound for the surround speakers already installed ibr Cinemascope could be reproduced by the Sansui matrix (QS) system encoding onto the two recorded tracks. It was decided to use this last refinement of the system on Star Wars before the production on that fiIm was started in 1975. For Star Wars Dolby encoding was used on the original recordings onto '/i-inch tape, without limiting and equalization, and also with no high, frequency boost. The final mix was to four tracks-Ml, right, centre, and surround, and these were remixed to 6 tracks for the 76mm. magnetic sound prints. When production on Star fVars started, it was anticipated that more than 5Q% of the first-wave release theatres would be Dolby equipped'.
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Editing
During the 'seventies flat-bed editing machines continued to gain in popularity, even invading feature film-editing in the United1 States. The most popular make continued to be the S teen beck, but the market was so big that various other companies kept trying to get some of the business, mostly without much success^ A new entrant that had some success was the KEM machine, also from Germany, despite the fact that its price was much-higher than the Stcenbeek. Part of its attraction: was its modular construction, so that it was possible to create various combinations within its four track form. That is, you eouldhavc one picture !head and three sound: tracks locked together, or run two pictures and two sound1 tracks simultaneously, or three pictures and one sound-track. Such facilities were particularly useful for films which were shot with multiple cameras.
Fhe ve nerablc Mo v i ola compa ny final ly .produce d a sue -ccssful American flatbed machine in 1971, and this was known colloquially as the Magnasync Moviola, The layout of this machine was very similar to that of the Stcenbeek, but the technology was more advanced, with independent electric motors driving each, of the take-up and'feed :plates, as well as.caclt of the drive sprockets. The optics of the ma' chine were also an; improvement onthose of the Steenbeck, withspecially ground tacetsontherotating.prism that made the transitionfrpm one frame to the next on the screen quite invisible, no matter how slowly the film- was advanced
rime-Code Systems
Starting in 1973, the broadea
sting companies making
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
up the European Broadcasting Union (EBLI) collaborated to develop a system that encoded synchronizing signals con* taining the exact instant of shoo ting down the whole length of both the sound and picture track recordings, in the case of the sound track the signals were recorded on a specially adapted recorder as an extra track on the la inch tape, while in the camera there was an array of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that imprinted a type of bar code at intervals down the length of the edge of the negative. The timing signals were generated by oscillators in small solid state electronic units included In both the recorder and camera. These were synchronized by making a connection from a master generator to them at the beginning of the days shoot, after whtch the time-code generators would hold the synchronism in the signals they produced for some hours. Inevitably, a competing system appeared in 1976 from the Aäton camera company which was basically similar, but which identified the instant of filming with small Arabic numerals down the edge of the film. The EBU system was used from 1976 for television purposes^ but neither system was used for ordinary feature film-making. The main use of time-code systems proved to be for multiple camera filming
General Editing Trends
The trend in cutting rates towards faster and faster cutting that was underway in the previous decade continued and reached a peak, with by far the most common Average Shot Length being about 6 seconds. Average Shot Lengths of 4 seconds or less were now fairly common, with George A. Romero's The Crazies (2.9 sec) and Dawn of the Dead (2.5 sec.) joining Russ Meyer below the 3 second mark. Hardly anyr ordinary commercial American films had ASLs longer than 13 seconds, as can be seen from the graphs showing the distributions for this quantity. Long Average Shot Lengths were now almost exclusively associated with high artistic ambition, as such rare American examples as Betty There (Hal Ashby, 1980) and American Gigolo (Paul Schräder, 1979) indicate. For a sample of 3S7 American films made in the six year period from 1970 to 1975, the mean ASL was 6.6 seconds, but when we look at 410 American films made during the next six-year period 1976 to 198=1, we find that the mean ASL has remained exactly the same. So the cutting rate in American films had stopped decreasing over this period. In European art movies, the long take continued to be the standard mode; in fact, the higher the pretensions, the longer the take.
It seems that the break-down of the studio system and the long apprenticeship of editors associated with it meant that knowledge of what 1 called 'the dialogue cutting point, when writing about editing in the 'thirties, was lost. Well-known films made in the 'seventies which contain dialogs
jÖp$ AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE SEVENTIES
American 1970-75
(Mean ASL = 6,6 sec.)
321
aw
ISA
ioa
so
American 1976-81
(Mean ASL = 6,6sec.)
5   3   2   1 3
1 1
ST
3 3 j s     7 s 9 t0 11 12 131^ '5 16 if 18 19 20 & 22 23 2i 35
11    —i i—■— ■
1  2 3 J 5 S 7 & 3 |011 12 ig
16 17 16 35 SWS
Number of films with Average Shot Length (ASL1 in the eiven ranees
juries in which the cuts from one speaker to another are made almost at random include The Long Goodbye, The God-fiithir //, and New York, New York. Another trend in cutting styk was that the use of nothing but jump cuts to progress
i
from one scene to the next was largely abandoned, and mix-turcs of jump cuts, dissolves, and fades used at will becamt the usual thing. The use of wipes remained very rare, anc this continued into the next decade,
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11.
l~Xuring uk nineteen-eighties, film-makers working on IL/ordinary commercial features and niade-foiM;clcvision films in the United States and Britain came under increasing pressure to complete footing as quickly as possible. This had a noticeable effect on production procedures, and even some slight effect on the forms of cinema, Because of thc increasing cost of using Hollywood studios, and also he-cause thc number of these available for feature film-making decreased, the established trend towards shooting more and more American features away from Hollywood continued. Any sets needed were usually built in improvised studios near thc locations being used, but studios around Vancouver in Canada, and the big Churubuseo studios near Mexico City were also used more and more. However, by the end of the decade, the cost of shooting in the Vancouver studios was approaching that of shooting in Los Angeles, and the construction of a brand new studio complex in Los Angeles was begun. In Europe, the television financing of feature films became even more important.
There was also a lot of activity on the technical side of filmmaking during the decade, only partly connected with the pursuit of the perfect illusion in special effects.
New Production Procedures
The use of story boards on tpjite a number of ordinary dramatic films, as opposed to films dependent on special effects, continued throughout the decade, Brian de Palma's variant of the technique used photographic images of the intended shots taken \vith stand-inson location, rather than hand-drawn images.
Also during the eighties, Francis Coppola went one better on Hubert Altmnn's conception of movie-making as a technical circus of which the director was the ringmaster. The first stage of his vision, of what ihe called 'the electronic cinema? was realised with the filming of OncErom the Heart in 1982. After the script for this film was storyboarded in the standard way there were actor rehearses which were recorded on sound: This sound was combined with music and effects, and transferred as an accompaniment track to the storyboard drawings rccorded.on videotape. After vicw-mgthis vid,otape,or 'electronicstorvboard', the script was modified. Then the actors were taken to Las Vegas and then- perlormance of the script was video-recorded, and then roughly edited; This footage was edited into the 'elec-
tronic story board1, replacing the corresponding storyboard drawings. Next the studio sets were built as accurate reproductions of the original Las Vegas locations. On the actual shoot, the Tech no vision cameras had video taps, and Coppola watched what was being shot on a monitor in his con* trol vehicle while communicating by radio with the studio stage. The tapes from thc video assist cameras were woven into the electronic storyboard, and Coppola then viewed an edited version of previous day s shooting with music and effects. Thc final editing of the film was also done on video.
The claim was made at the time about this method that:-" Remarkably cost efficient, the 'electronic cinema5 allows the film-makers to continually preview the film. This advance opportunity to 'see' the film leads to tightening of the script and elimination of unnecessary scenes and sets, further cutting the cost of the movie.'1 (American Cincmm^-rapher January 1982 V.63 n.t pT22) fn this particular ease this was certainly not true, because not only was the film very costly for what it was, but it was also very unsuccessful at the box office. The unsurprising result was that nobudv else took up Coppola's ideas about production methods, and he himself quickly retreated from them. For his next film, Rumblejish, he was still using a reduced form of electronic storyboarding using material from video-recorded rehearsals done on location, plus other rehearsals shot against j blu e screen in thc studio- But the actual editing of the film was completely conventional. By 19S7 and Gardens of St one t all that was left of Coppola s 'electronic cinema' was two weeks of videotaped rehearsals.
A simpler (and actually successful) method of increasing production efficiency was the greater use of multi-camera filming. This had always been standard for the shooting of mass action scenes, and was also quite often used for filming musical numbers, but rarely before this period for filming ordinary scenes. Towards the end of the 'eighties it became much more common, led by the way it had been used in previous years for filming scenes with extremely expensive and lav.y actors like Marlon Brando. Some of the directors who used multi-camera il lining, such as Michael Cimmo, obviously did not have any clear idea how the shots in their films would be put together, and used it as protection, while others, such as Walter Hill, who worked with very short Average Shot Lengths, needed it to double or treble the number of set-ups they could get in a given length of time.
AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
Tbcrc *as another very small group of British directors, .jlna strong visual sense and training, who had got their p^jng advertising films, who also used two-camera [ihiinii ^'hen they started feature film-making, Adrian aJ1(J Ridley Scott insisted on having a second camera that they could be allowed to operate themselves, to get just exactly the compositions they wanted, rather than those the official camera operator would give them. However, by the end of the decade, most directors with a strong idea of the kind of images they wanted settled for the help of the increasingly tii&i vk1co assist in getting their ideal pictures.
FilmStock
During the 'eighties, the near total dominance of Eastman Kodak film stocks in professional film-making weakened for the first time. There were two factors at work h^c; One was the fact that the Fuji and Agfa companies were prepared to undercut Kodak prices slightly in search of a larger share of the market, and the other was that Ko-ffafc was alow in introducing a very fast colour negative. This latter point gave Fuji, and to some extent Agfa-Gcvaert, a dunce, to supply something which was increasingly needed klilm-makcvs who were shooting more and more on locate, and in particular in location interiors.
The first of these new fast negative stocks was Fuji A250 (Type SSI3), introduced at thc end of I9S0, which had a speed of 250 ASA. It was most used in Europe, where a small saving on stock costs was important, but it was also used on a number of American features for filming night &T&f, A year later, at thc end of J'9S1, Eastman Kodak ^ponded with their own equally fast 2SO ASA negatives, 5293 and,7293, for 35 mm, and 16 mm- respectively. But ihe important point was they were not first with a fast colour stock, (Prior to this, many American cameramen had ulved the problem of filming under low light levels by forcing Eastman Color S247 up to 40G ASA.) Agfa-Gevaerl also intrrnluccd a fast colour negative, type 722, but this was of
significance,
Kodak now entered a period of almost continuous improvement in the negative stocks they manufactured. Film speeds, which had previously been described in terms of clothe American Standards Association (ASA) system, or amatively by the Deutsche Industrie Normcn (DIN) Of seiner system in continental Europe, were now described tyilic consolidation of these various systems into ISO num-regulated hy the International Standards Organization. rW ISO numbers were in fact the continuation of the P^ious systems in one combined number. For example, Eastman Color 5294T which replaced 5293 at the
323
«** H 400. Inev^y, most cameramen in England and the n.ted States continued to refer to film speeds in terms ol ASA numbers for the rest of the decade, and in practice this did not create any cenfusion. 1 shall use the designation Exposure Index or EI for the rest of this history. At this same time, Eastman Kodak took the opportunity to re-rate thc speed of their standard professional negative 5247 from ASA !00 to El 125. In 16 mm,, the new fast Kodak stock was 7294, with an Exposure Index (El) of 320 under tungsten light.
Fuji Film also improved their negative films in 19S3, with Fujicolor AX (Type 85 IS) becoming the new fast stock with an increased speed of El 320, and Fujicolor A the norma] speed stock with a speed of El 125 under tungsten li^hl. In 1985 Fuji got their nose in front ajj.iin with AX S5!4 and AX 3524 for 35 mm. and 16 mm. respectively, which both had an 1:1 of 500, These stocks, like their predecessors, had cjuite prominent grain, and hence a noticeable lack ol definition, and compared to the fast Kodak stocks the colours they produced were quite markedly desaturated, Fuji claimed that the^e d esa I u rated colours were an aesthetic choice, but / think that it was more a matter of what they could achieve practically. Nevertheless, the fast Fuji slocks saw quite a lot of use for location night scenes, mure particularly in Europe, but even to somu extent in the United States. Fuji film of various kinds was most used in the USA on films shot for television, where the slightly lower price compared to that for Eastman materials wa<» an important
consideration ►
Control oJ the Agla-ticvaert company had been bought by the German chemical company Haycr in I97S, and in the 'eighties the Cevaert name was gradually dropped, and the film stocks produced bv this company came to be referred to ;implvas Agfa films. Jn the early nineteen-eighties the new ■amera natives from this company were Agfa XTI2S and
to the
3'nmng of 19S4, was officially ISO 400/27. But to con
lu*cthc issue lurcher, Kodak replaced the ISO tag with ihe actors.
camera negatives
Wa XT320, with Exposure Indices ^responding induded numbers. These slocks wereJmally made available in the USA in I98S. This seems to be cameramen, particular!) Chris Merges and Dav.d Wat. them on big Hlms *« <lu '
Z that vea, David MM 0* * & "ft £ *"gj J XT320 lhat il bad greater la.hude than MN> £ ha<l taken • very idiosyucra.ic approae to IU-j£ .    r„ v the 'sKlies. and in the case of Out oj AJn^a
<««>• hC ""'t l' n .1 mteri,,rs, so reversing the «« ^ Sk'7 ' aXlt e bright background parts
oi the dayhght t ^x^h (vWl m
324
also gainst the traditions still holding for Hollywood film* i n 1 he n i ne teen - eighti es.
Another reason for the eventual popularity ol Agfa XT320 was that it reproduced the greens of foliage as a lighter hoe than the more accurate Kodak stocks. The problem, to which this was a solution, is that most of the greenery in the real world makes a rather dull mass if reproduced in its true colours in outdoor daylight scenes, and so cameramen prefer an artificially lighter colour to help in composing a more 'artistic' picture, following the various conventional ideas on this point. (At any rate, that is my interpretation of the matter)
The major development at the end of the decade was Kodak's gradual introduction of a negative emulsion containing a new type of silver halide crystal. These crystals had a tabular form, being thin plates, rather than the irregular chunky crystals into which the silver halides naturally crystallize, and which everyone had used up to this point. Kodak called these 'T-grains1, and they made it possible to coat the emulsion into much thinner layers for the same sensitivity to light. This increased sensitivity for smaller emulsion volume was aided by the tendency of the T-grains to tessellate when the emulsion containing them was coated onto the hase material. That is, the edges of the adjoining grains tend ad to line up like tiles within the one plane, lea v-ing no empty space between the grains for light .photons to get through without hitting and activating a halide crystal.
T-grain emulsion had been first used in 19S3 by Eastman Kodak in their Kodacolor VR 1000 negative made for still photography, but for film purposes this technology was first used in the high speed ÍG mm. negative 7292 released in 1986 to replace the previous 7394 negative. T-grain halides were only used in some of the colour responsive layers in 7292, as was also the case when they were first applied to 35 mm, negative in the fast 5295 stock which replaced 529+ in J9S7, Finally, in 1989 and 1-990, a range of new camera negatives using T-grain material completely throughout was built up under the designation of 'EXIV stocks. Those introduced in I9S9 were Type 5296 with El 500 Tungsten and, 5245 with O SO Daylight for 3S mm, and 724$ with & 100 Tungsten and 72+5 with E|i SO Daylight for 16 mm, They were specially designed: to .record, truer colours under fluorescent light, which was an ever more important con-sideration, as more and'more scenes were being filmed on location inter-iors. in 1990 Kodak added the medium speed negative OXft S248. withSf 10D Tungsten for 35 mm and the last EXR 7296 with EI S0G tungsten for 16 mn, film-
Another innovation with these Kodak negative stocks was that the traditional edge numbers which were printed into d,e film every foot on manufacture (ořhalfToot in die
T-1LM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHT}as
case of 16 mm,)i were supplemented with a kind of bar cod? imprint every 6 frames, which identified the exact length ol film to that point. Ever)' 24 frames there was also a barcode identifying the serial roll number in the order that the film was produced by Kodak. This system was trade-marked is 'Keycode1, and may prove to be important in the future though the traditional latent image Arabic edge numbers were still provided to give equivalent information.
Fuji Film's response to Kodak's major Innovation in photographic emulsion technique was what they called 'double structure' grains, which were first used in motion picture negative m 1988. The new stocks were Fujicolor Negative film F-64 for tungsten light, and the F-500 negative was renamed to high speed film AX 500. There were also 1-^ 64 D for daylight, F-125 for tungsten light, and moderately fast F-250 tungsten. Fuji did not publicize the exact nature of the grain structure of these new silver halide materials, but the visible result on the screen come nowhere near the perfection in colour response, latitude, and definition of the Kodak EXR materials.
During this decade there was some development in prim stocks as well. At the beginning of the "eighties a certain amount of justified fuss was made about the fading of old colour films by a number of people, most notably Martin Scorsese. This helped to prod the film stock makers into introducing new print materials containing dyes that weru much more resistant to fading. The chemistry for doing this had existed for some time, and indeed for many years Kodak had been making available a low-fade 16 mm. print stock alongside its normal material, but this low-fade stock was little used, in part because its price was higher than the standard print stock. So when Fuji introduced new positive print materials Types &8I6 and SS26 in 1983, which were claimed to match the colour response of the standard Kodak print materials, they emphasised their low-fade proper-ties as well, Kodak in their turn then drew attention to the long-lasting dyes in their new low contrast print stocks introduced in 198+ especially for making prints for television transmission, which were types 53SG and 7380.
Laboratory Work and Special Treatment Techniques
The kinds of special treatment of film introduced in the previous couple of decades such as pre- and post-flashing of negative continued to be used when judged appropriate. Panavision introduced a way for the cameraman to do this h i m sel f i n the camera w i th th ei r ' Pa n a f I a slier' device. Th is fitted onto the maga/Jne port of the camera, and it exposed the film to a weak controlled light as it passed cither on iui way to the gate of the camera, or on its way back into die magazine. An increasingly popular alternative for in-camera
\t STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
flying cliaptcr.
^as the Light flex device, described in the previous In 1985 the rights to this were bought by Arnold &
aitfkin a slightly redesigned form it became the Arri Ijehtfle^ MBeiS *rri completely redesigned it as the Arri VariCoiv a much smaller device that was used from 1990 onwards on a number of films. In this form it was an opti-rJrtat held perpendicularly in front of the lens, with light injected into it through its edges- The amount of light was controlled by variable apertures, and its colour by filters as
before.
Another enthusiasm of this period was a new kind of lament applied to positive release prints of some films. The first form of this was developed in Italy, following on from die special treatment given to part of Cadaveri ecceknii mentioned in the previous chapter, and it was now called the GNR process. It was a form of secondary development of the Win, by passing it through another developing bath after the initial one. Vittorio Storaro used it on the prints of Reds (1981) for better integration of the black and while footage with the colour material making up the main body of the film. Eventually it became available in the United States as 'Colour Contrast Enhancement" or CCE, but seems to have been little used. It is not clear whether this was the same as llit process used for the release prints of Top Gun (1986), which were passed through the developer a second time to enrich the blacks with more silver. In this case, the general effect was to make the film look more contrast)-. Another iltemative method of altered development was omitting the passage oF the colour negative through the bleach bath. This fame to be called 'bleach bypass', and was used on the film !9$i directed in England in 19S4 by Michael Radford, and processed by Kays Laboratories in London, The desatura-tion of colour in this film, together with the added black, give a powerful amplification to its vision of Orwell's rundown alternative future under totalitarian rule.
Another interesting variant of the idea was used in frinte on Un dimanehe a h campagnc (19S4). The release pdnts of this film were developed without the bleach bath give far denser blacks in the image. The idea of the mak-Wisto give this story, which was set in 1912, the look "■tlic Lumiere Autochrome colour process for slill photog-raphy, which had just come into use at thai date. But the ^lt did not really look all that similar to an Autochrome pwurc, and because of the highly increased contrast in the lmag£5, special make-up was needed to compensate for the *»J it whitened the faces of the actors. Another feature of W photography of Un dlmanche a la campagne, also part of tntstriving for a period effect, was that St was photographed 0r m ^stman 5293, and lit to a sufficient level to getap-j*iUrts0fT5,6 indoors and Tl I outdoors, so giving a fairly liTg^ depth of field.
to
32$
Lighting
The major development in lighting equipment was the increasing use of metal halide arc 0-1 Ml) lights, which now became available in more and more powerful forms The major manufacturers - LTM, Arri, lamro, and Mole-Rich-ardson - introduced 6 kW units in I9SI, 12 kW units in I9S4-SS, and finally IS kW units from I9S9. Although the manufacturers elaimed that the 12 kW lamp unit, were as powerful as old style 'Brute' arc spotlights, this was not quite true, and only became so when units with IS kW bulbs appeared. Nevertheless, even before 19S9, Brutes were being used less and less for large area fill light on bright sunlit exteriors, and likewise Tor night exteriors.
HMl bulbs also came to be used in sett light or north light units from 1931, when LTM put their Soft-Daylight lamps on the market, with wattages from 575 to 1200, in single and dual units. The main solution to the possibility of stroboscope flicker in the image generated by the difference between the frequency of the camera shutter and that of the AC current driving the lights was the use of power generators whose frequency was accurately controlled to match that of the camera shutter. Lee Lighting continued to develop square wave ballast units that also eliminated the problem, but although they produced a model that would handle the current for a 12 kW HMl, such ballasts were large and heavy, and only the smaller models came to be used for small HMl lights.
The other major lighting unit developed with HMl lights in the United States was the Musco Mobile link, which was really a more sophisticated version of David Watkins 'Wendy' light, by now- known in America as well as Britain. The Musco mobile light was made up of IS lightweight lamp heads, each containing a 6 kW MM I bulb, and fixed on a *nd on top of a large mobile construction crane, which ha*d a generator added to its chassis. In the initial 19S3 form of the device, the angle and direction of th, whole gr.d ol Mits could be remotely controlled, but on the improved 19S5 model each lamp head could be directed independently from the ground after it was raised. Because ol the speed ilth MM it could be set up, the Musco mobile hght h» came a popular solution to the rapid lighting ol larger nieht location exteriors.
Another new lighting ^ - oí k
Slabo had bcUg*«l coiour balance
as
panicui.rK as má wm tma ^šůf inte™l>r llg3ll
than usual and also could be dimmed to some extent. An sample in point was The Color cf Money (19S6)> in which
the pool table scenes were tit by I'luoi events in the fixtures over the tables, and 111 I light was often supplied from outside the film frame by extra racks of fluorescent* ft> the way mentioned. This practice became one of the standard ways of dealing with fluorescent lighting on location. The older method, Which continued to have its adherents, was toover-ride the ftjbt level from the existing fluorescent fixtures with extra light of approximately the right colour from ordinary film tungsten lighting units.
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Photographic Sty lie
During the nineteen-eighties a great range of lighting stvies co-existed in the American cinema, For example, an irredeemably old-fashioned item like The Living &aylights (I9S7) wasdit by Alec Mills with direct light, and! with diffusion on the lights, though not on the lens. On the ouhcr hand, Don Peterman used backlighting whenever possible on Cocoon (19S 5), though with soft lights .providing the key light. Probably the largest group of cameramen believed in source lighting',, but modified this as necessary with light from non-realistic directions when it was desired to get a more attractive image* A few insisted-on using no lens diffusion, but then lit almost entirely with soft light, so that the resulting images still had enough softness to satisfy conventional ideas of attractiveness. The use of really hard lighting and clear lenses continued to be unknown, except for such a very idiosyncratic project as Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982),. which had:the live action scenes lit with arcs with clear glass, and no lens filters, Fhis fitted with the general unrealistic nature of the film, and! in particular with the grotesque imagery of the animation sequences.:
The great and innovative individualist Nestor Almen-dros continued with his minimalist approach,,£vcn on fairly straightforward' commercial1 subjects, such a Kramer vs. Kramer (\913)\ For The Blue ^^(19 SO), he returned^ the improvised simplicity of his beginnings oirla CdlkcUonncosc (1967). The Blue Lagoon was entirely filmed1 on location, and on the exteriors only fill light from the sunbdunccd off reflectors was uscdi Thescenesdnside the children's hut were done in a specially builthut that was partly open at the top, with diffusing silk over it, so that no artificial lighting was needed Tor the daytime scenes, iPhe nigln scenes were shot withblaek fabric draped overlhe hutvbtil withopen cracks to tetinbit5 of daylight that registered as a blue nightelfect because tlie scene was shot without^he 85 conversion filter on the lens. However, some artifieial^ght was used to.rein-orcc the flame light in ^enes involving a-fire. On the other hand, Jbr Hearlh^mG)h, shot the mainmterior scenes
mm STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTH
on a studio set lit to a high level to give apertures of fS ^ and deep focus. Nevertheless, this lighting was still app|itl| as though coming from the apparent sources.
In 19S7 Almendros turned against some or the trends he had initiated when he lit Places in the Heari (I9S4) w\y\ white light, and avoided sunsets and shooting at the magic hour'. It is worth pointing out that Almendros* technics did require that he have quite a lot of control over staging and scene dissection, For instance, onNadine (19S7) he hat] the positions of things in the scene changed to suit his lighting, and in one scene he had a glass brick wall put into tin? set for a better lighting effect. Although Almendros much preferred to follow the Continental tradition of the lighting cameraman operating as well, in the United States he had to make do with the use of video monitoring of the vieufindtr image to control what the camera operator was doingr
In general, a major theme of the decade was the greater use of coloured light in film photography, This had been developing at the end of the previous decade, but it had not gone much further than using the wrong colour imparted by existing light sources in location scenes. Now this effect came to be pushed much further in many films, A notable example of this trend was Gremlins (1984), lor which J oil n Mora used much coloured light, unjustified by any existing visible sources within the scenes. The bright colours were apparently the idea of the director, Joe Dante, There was a repeat performance, with even more exaggeration, in Gremlins 2 - the New Botch (1990), and the idea was much imitated. This has proved to he largely a passing trend.
As far as more serious subjects were concerned1 coloured light was increasingly used as part ol the more and more elaborate expressive schemes that some film-makers developed to go with the narratives of their films. The main influence here was Vittorio Storaro, who had begun to put forward such expressive programmes to go with the lighting of the films he did for Bernardo Bcrtolucci in the previous decade. Such a Storaro programme for One Erom die Heart (I9S2), with its would-be philosophical underpinnings* can be read in The American Cinemoiogropher (Volume 63, Hu.\t ;Ph22), and his most elaborate scheme so far was for The Last Emperor (1987). In this film he claimed to be using as dominant colours for each scene the whole spectral rangt in succession, starting with red, and going through orange yellow, etc. to violet, as the film wore on. just where the art director's choices of colours for the sets and accessor^ of these films came into the matter has not so far been satisfactorily explained.
The low budget independent sector of American hlm-making was particularly fond of the use of striking *$! somewhat unrealistic colour schemes in both the lighting and the set design, and this was another source of the tr^nd
til
usr)UAm TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
h3vc been describing. In particular, the very low budget ■ ^ were made by people associated with the New y [j 'pJew Wave1 music and art scene tended to be in what ^■thought of as flmnoir style, plus a certain amount of li nation technique, A few of the personnel crossed over [rom onC aTťa 10 t^ic otncl7 suc^ os l'lc Ci,mciarnart Ed tiding wnG IW tJriiofi fry ín ^79 f°r ^ark Reichcrt. for this fiirn Lachman used coloured gels on the lights, on sets which were already unnaturally brightly coloured. Some ear* later on Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) he col labor at-fliin a highly designed colour presentation with the director who herself had art training. The basic scheme was soft lí^tandícolours plus static camera for the suburban housewife's world, and primary colours with a more chiaroscuro id plus moving camera for the punk's world. This latter Act was'further emphasised 'by shooting on Eastman 5294 o^rexposed about one stop to give more saturated colours. Further than this, the designer and director had worked out designs with two distinct colour areas in a number of scenes. Lachman lit pink rooms with pink light, green with green, but left white light areas in the frame as well. The listing fluoresccnts in the locations were exaggerated with green gels on the film lights. I have described the principles consciously used by the film-makers in their lighting schemes in this film, but it seems to me that in this, and a number of other similar cases, the colour schemes used for the set design make a much stronger effect than the colour of the light played upon thenru
Someone else who crossed over into more standard film-making from the New York independent scene was Johanna Heer, She had already lit Amos Pa cs Subway Riders using unnatural coloured lighting, and then she was engaged id photograph Percy Adloirs I9S6 Sugorbaby, on which she used coloured gels and filters on nearly every shot. The first stílion of this film was in cooler greens and blues, which men moved to reds, oranges, and magentas as the heroine gets closer to THE MAN. The camera movements were also '^grated with the narrative development,
basic mainstream film-making, the expressive con-lauuions of lighting were much more conventional, and indeed banaL For instance, in Wall Street (1.9S7), as the aspir^ young man who wants to get seriously wealthy becomes W$ "solved with the big monev man he admires, the "gbtseen in the background on the windows becomes more goliltn. This was done by increasing the colour of the gels 0(1 die windows from J/i density Wratten SS to full SS filter material, hut with daylight-balanced light inside. In scenes jdfen money was involved, the camera made off-balance
°^s,and the shots were connected with hard cuts. In op-Pinion to this, the scenes with the protagonist's morally LP^ghr father were shot with static frames and low angles.
327
By 1937 the idea of overexposing by one stop to get better colour saturation and grain structure had become quite popular with the more adventurous directors of photography, particularly those working from New York. Lach-man, Ballhaus, Judith Irola, Willis, and Dickerson were amongst those involved. Laehman also used polari/crs and graduated filters to accentuate the saturated look on David Byrne's True Stories, Slightly more subtle was Married to the Mob (19SS). Here cameraman Tak Fujimoio and director Jonathan Dcmme used red colour for the Mafia scenes, and blue light for those where the heroine was away from the Mob, with a progression from one to the other, and ^reen and blue at the end of the film,
They did not use No. S5 colour correcting filters on the windows for the Long Island scenes, allegedly to suggest the divided the nature of the heroine. The film also used yet another expressive device, which was making a small come-back in these years, namely Dutch tilts for suggesting tension in the scene,
Many other films with less detailed expressive programs in the use of lighting and lenses and camera placement included Bom on the Fourth of July, The Hot Spci, Frances, Heath-(pří, and The Bonfire of the Vanities.
One of the most influential pieces of lighting of the "eighties was Jordan Cronenweth's work on Blade fiunncr (Ridley Scott, 19S2)H Scott had already used a tot of smoke on some scenes of his Alien (1979), and now he developed this use of smoke relentlessly on both interiors and exteriors, often combined with artificial rain, and these scenes were frequently backlit with very strong beams of light or with sources of light within the shot lighting the smoke. This produces what is effectively a blurred wall of light behind the actors which is brighter than their faces. Letting large area windows behind the actors go overexposed on interior scenes produces much the same kind of effect, and this also became more common as the 'eighties turned into the "nineties. Cameramen had always avoided having this happen in the past, as they had also always kept any background less brightly lit than the actors, even in high-key us - that is, scenes that are mostly bright all over. This
scenes
style only really caught on in the next decade, and its most extreme development, which used all these three kinds of bright backgrounds behind actors pretty well continuously throughout, was The Last Boy Scout, photographed by Ward Kussell for Tony Scott in I99L Nothing has since matched thi< to my knowledge, but many films now use this style a good deal'of the time, particularly big action and science™ fiction films.
The Dark Side of Science The 'eighties were also nota
ble for the application of
mm STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY iN THE EIGHTIES
IE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
Shot, in Blade Runner wkh the background lir brighter th$n thc act Or^ nho is underexposed, There is a lot of artificial smoke spreading rJie background light as tvelL
low-key lighting to subjects for which -if had previously been considered unsuitable. The first of these was science fiction. The fashion was probably set by. Alien (1979), and it showed its power in thc way it affected1 the photography of the Star Miseries of films, The first of these had the ordinary kind of m id-key lighting in general that one would expect on a children's adventure film, but in Thc Empire Strikes Rack (198 0) the I igh ti ng' b ecomes fa i rI y con s i stc nt ly 1 bw key, e ven on daylight exteriors such as the 'Ewok' scenes. Such an approach does have the virtue of concealing the matte lines in the many process shots in the film, although 1 don't believe that this was the reason for it. Another example from 1930 was tlie Disney Studio's.The Black Hole, for which an overall low-key look was chosen at thc design stage, and carried through with thc: photography following the designs carefully. Amongst other subsequent examples of this trend, the third in thc Star Wars scries, The Return ofthejedi, was even darker throughout. Although there were yet more followers, the automatic application of low-key lighting to science fiction films showed some signs of weakening by the end: of the decade.
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A New Angle on Comedy
Even stranger was the use of Jockey lighting for some comedy subjects, giving a literal' meaning to the :phrase 'black comedy*. This appeared near the end of the decade with the first directorial! effort of the actor Danny De Vito, Throw Mima Fr0m,iHe Train (19S8). Barry SonnenfeId lit this withsolt light without fillfromhay lights, andkept the.light off the walls, which were dark greenand rcdl About half die shots were done with the -new Panavision Přímo 2X mm lens, including dose shots of De Vito,:hut not the close shots oťthe-other leads, fee was quite possibly an influence herefrom his cameraman, Barry SonnenleMv who had made byname working >vith Joel ^Bdun^on ^ and RoisingAr^ (1987), for which the others con til
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'wacky enough". The filming of Raising Arizona certainly did not pursue the idea of low-key photography to any greal length, though it did use a lot of wide-angle iens shots from extreme positions.
In his subsequent comedy films Danny Oe Vito retreated a little from the low-key idea, but persisted with the use of wide-angle lenses. Other films which applied low-key tight-ing to comedy subjects included We?re No Angels (1990) and I Love You to Death (1990). All of these comedy films we re not particularly big successes at the box-office, but it Is impossible to say whether a lighting style which had previously been considered to be inappropriate for comedy had anything to do with this.
Other Wacky Ideas about Slyle
By now, it was not uncommon for films to consciously refer to earlier films in one way or another, and in the process some slightly off-centre ideas about the distinguishing stylistic features or old-time movies surfaced. For instance, Matthew Lconetti claimed that his lighting of Byewitnift*. was in 'forties style because it had shadows on the walls. Other odd notions included John Bailey's claim that his photography of The Accidental Tourist (I9S8) was inspired by Egon Schicle, but he was more down-to-earth and beEiev-able in his claim that American Gigolo (1979) was shot with hard concentrated light without diffusion to get the look ot French and Italian fashion photography, Stephen H. Bu-rum was also more rational in supposing that the period feel of The Untouchables (1987) might be conveyed by looser framing with more space around the people, and the use of shorter focal-icngiih lenses without lens diffusion, except on Close Ups. He also avoided the use of an overall colour bias in his images for this film.
But tihe feather-brain award goes to Adrian Lync for his belief that one of .the things that will set his Fteshdonx (1983) apart from other contemporary master works such as All That Jazz (1979) and Saturday Night fever (1977) u'JS that
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rrl fie dance number was inspired by a Maxell tape ^oneSpCLlM
commercial'.
txpressivc Lens Use
fts well as using non-standard lighting arrangements for L rcssivc purposes, a number ofdirectors, in collaboration °jdi their cameramen, used different focal length lenses in ■Jliferent sections of their films with the intention of com-1Urotating the appropriate feelings to the cinema audience. fůr instante, in Ordinary People (1980) which centered on lhepyclioanalysis of a disturbed youngster, thc analysis scs-siojit-wtrcfilmed: with a progression from 29 and 35 mm. io75 and 100 mm. lenses as thc film wore on. As usual, this ^■combined with lighting changes, which were naturalists ly justified by the time of day. The last night meeting scene was shot with ISO to 200 mm. lenses, and an overbad, coffin box' light plus a little bounce. Another example ůím expressive scheme depending on focal length control wisLúiirtAmerica (1985). This was shot with a 29 mm. lens until the dramatic turning point in the middle of the film, ífhicli was shot with a 1000 mm, lens, and then a zoom lens waiused for the final New York scenes An almost contrary jpnroach to the possible expressive meaning of iens focal length was given by Cocoon, which was shot with colder Lighting and widc-angje lenses at first, and then shifted to warmer lighting and longer lenses when the rejuvenated old people begin to feel better,
A Change of Speed
An expressive device which had been much used in the sfkntperiod, filming at non-standard speeds, was now extend ed into new areas. In a neat reversal, Barry LcVinson's Áwhii (1990}p which had a frame story set in 194'8-51t and flashbacks to L9i45 1926, and 1939, plus a flash forward to lhe 'sixties, had the silent period sequences shot at 16 fps. ine1 then stretch-printed to 24 fps. A more technical development was to shoot sync, sound scenes in some films speeds other than 24 fps. For Top Gun some scenes were sho* at-28 fps., and all of Deepstar Six (I9S9) was shot at 3? fps to get feeling of frenetic activity. For these last two films the voice recordings were 'harmonized'; that is, the Wording was varied to exactly match 24 fps., and then the pilch of the voices was altered electronically back to that of "V originals. Such a trick depended on the newly available electronic devices that could accomplish this.
i
Filming in Black and White
A
minor trend to sliooti nga whole film in monochrome, which had just begun at the end of the previous decade, continued into the early 'eighties. For ordinary commer-^ Injects tins option was only available to film-makers
329
of considerable standing. The notable instances of this were mostly Woody Allan films; Stardust Memoes (1980), fffi-haaan (1979), Zelig (1983), and Broadly Danny Rose (1934). The other outstanding examples were Scorsese s RaSmg Bull (19S0) and Coppolas Rambkfsh (]983). On the first of these thc use of monochrome was due in pan to Scorsese s worry at that time about the permanence of colour film stock, coupled with a justification because of the period setting of the film, while on the second the use was more purely wilful. The visual treatment of Rumbkfish was also distinctive in that the Plus-X and XX negative was pushed into greater contrast in development, and most of the film was shot with wide-angle lenses, sometimes even a 9.8 mm. Shadows were sometimes painted onto the sets.
At the truly low-budget end of feature film-making, there was much less to stop a director choosing to film in black and white, though this was no longer a way of making a cheaper film in the United States. By the end of thc decade, shooting in black and white didn't really save much money in other Western countries cither, But there continued to be intermittent examples of this, such as Si ranker Than Paradise and Last Night ci thc Alamo, The director of the latter film in particular pretended that the incompetence of the lighting was a stylistic choice. (Its lighting left the figures darker than thc background, and in general its photography was muddy in exactly the way that every other film made by absolute beginners manages without trying at all,) As for Stranger Than Paradise, some of the look of this film was due to it being shot with old short-ends of film stock teft over from Wim Wendcrs Lightning Over Water, which were then processed badly. As well as that, it was also shot with fairly wide-angle lenses of 18 and 25 mm* focal Jengdi, but since the camera height was mostly up around eye level, the general look of it was nothing like the old-style Citizen Kane wide-angle lens stagings.
_
Cameras
Around thc beginning of lhe decade, the French Aaton company made a clever strategic alliance ivith the American Panavision company, The Aaton cameras KJ led a gap for lightweight cameras where Panavision had nothing, and in return Panavision promoted thc Aaton time-code system m the- United States. The Aaton 15 mm. camera, the S-3i>,
£ it m ««* W*™.evc[ltuallv CMWto b* ,lsctJ bjV VS
people Other than j-L. Godard, when it became arable L!i 198? as a production model. In this linal<?) form it weighed 7 kg, and had a noise level of 32 dB « one ^
lJScd on a Hollywood Rim in Triumph ofme <U90). or some sccJ which reared hand-held, sync sound, a. thL was the only good reason for using it. As miglu
330
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peered from fe quoted noise level, the Aáton proved to be not as silent as might be desired. The 16 mm. Aatort camera continued its successful career all over the world, and in particular it was the camera most used for filming in Super* 16, in part because its standard'version was now built so that it could be immediately adapted for this process. Although Panavision themselves finally produced'a 16 mm: camera in I9S4, the Panailcx-16, dicy clearly did this just because they felt they had to protect them selves, in case filming in 16 mm. became generally accepted for American TV production. Actually the Panaflcx-16 made no impression in the 16 mm. field, but for the record I note that it was essentially the same as the 35 mm. Panaflcx.
Arnold & Richter continued to make detailed improvements in their Arriflex range. The 15BL passed through a series of models; the 3SBL-JII in I960, and the 3SBL-4 in I9SS, by which time they claimed to have got the hoise level down under 20 dBA, and then finally the Arriflex 535. Although this last was still in essence tihe same camera, :it had redesigned body castings, and^more built-in electronics. The most important of the electronics was an electrical interlinking of the variable shutter and the aperture diaphragm, so that changes in either one of these during the course of the shot would change the other to keep the exposure automatically constant. The Arriflex 535 also had a built-in SMPŤE time code and Kodak Kcycode generator. Its other new feature was a modification to the view-finder system so that it could be swung over from the left to the right side of the camera if desired. The viewfinder also included a set ofíll um i na ted frame markings on the ground glass viewing screen, which made it much easier for the camera operator to .see what he was including in. the picture under low light levels. In fact these improvements were designed to keep the Arri 3S mm. sync, sound camera competitive with the Panaflcx camera, for these two companies, together with Moviecam, were the only major ones left in tlie. com petition to sell new professional 3S mm, cameras.
Of course various other companies tried to produce new 35 mm. cameras, mostly based on the Mitchell movement particularly in the United States, hut none of these made any lasting impression, whether they were from Cinema
Products(the OP 35), Continental Camera (the ;Feaťheřcam GM35i), or anyone else.
There was evenmorc activity in 65 mm. camera design m part because of the demand: for cameras to take special effects shots for later optical combination, and in part be cause of excitement about special projection systems such as Douglas Trumbull's 'Showscan' process. This last was equally just the existing 70 p, iproccsSi W shot and projected at 60 lrames.per second, ]n, 19S7 Cinema Product, produced:a.65 mm, camera specially for the Showscan
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
company, the CP-65, which was claimed to be the first self blimped 65 mm. camera with mirror reflex shutter e^r made, (The earlier quiet cameras for 65 mm, were of the old Mitchell type, with rackover viewing system, and no reflex shutter.} Todd-AO also made a rather crude 'new' 65 mm. camera by putting mirror shutters on old Mitchell AP 65 mm. cameras, but despite all this effort, the Showseaa system did not catch on. In 19S9, just in case, Arri also pro-duced a brand new 70 mm. camera based on their 35 ql called the 765, which naturally was also self-blimped, and had a mirror reflex viewfindmg system, and was a lot smaller and handier than the rest, to boot. All of these cameras had crystal controlled motors with fixed speeds of 24, 30h and 60 frames per second, so they could be used for ordinary filming and television filming, as well as for Showscan, The Arri 765 also had continuously variable speeds from 2 frames per second up to 100 frames per second, and was available with a complete set of new Zeiss lenses, ivhich should be altogether conclusive in this competition.
There were also a number of individually handmade Vistavision cameras produced during the decade, basically for the benefit of the independent special effects companies.
Lenses
There wras a certain amount of improvement in lens construction during the decade, mostly centering on the use of new types of glass for some elements of the lens. These special glasses, which were mostly of the Huophosphatc type, had higher refractive indices than had been practicable before. Such glass made it possible to design lens combination? which were nearer the theoretical ideal, and of course there continued to be improvements in the computerized design systems that the lens manufacturers used. The dominant companies specializing in professional movie camera lenses were now Zeiss, Rank Taylor-Hob son, and Angenieux, with the latter two specialising in zoom lenses, and Zeiss making very successful fixed focal length lenses as well as zoom Jenses. Hank Taylor-Hobson continued to make anamorphie lenses for tihe Tech no vision system, which was available in Britain and the United States, as well as in Italy. Panavision had its own lenses, both anamorphie and spherical, made lor it by the Canadian Leitz company, and a new range o\ spherical lenses called the Primo range were introduced in 1987. These had maximum apertures of about Tl.4, clearly intended to compete with the Zeiss Supers peed range which had been available for several years, and as usual these Pri-mo lenses were only available for hire as part of the whole Panavision royalty-payment camera package.
On the zoom lens side, the new Angenieux designs adopted .the Taylor-Hobson practice of having the front cle-
g00/ffl TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
iff
ft he lens fixed and no n-rot a ting, though they were ^tte Loiproduce 3 '^es'Sn      %vou'ť^ ^so *oCusi á t distances
wri1 l <!í1 rin as most cameramen prefer. There condor uiari ou Lm-) 1
i. I,,* finite a bit of small-scale activity in converting iinued to ue ijyi^ j c
stil camera lenses tor use on movie cam-Cincn anu JNiMwi SL,M
- To serve well in this way, these lenses had to be rebuilt \[lh new stronger barrels, as the construction of still eam-ťrii]inses is too flimsy to stand up to film use. Zoom lenses which were converted also had to be realigned, as they were prone lo image drift during a change in focal length. This to not matter for still photography, but is fatal for film purposes. Those still camera lenses that were converted had faca! lengths in special ranges, like the Canon 20 to 35 mm. icon), iťhicK was adapted to get a really lightweight variable local length lens for Stcadicam use.
Camera Supports
As far as moving cameras about in space goes, there vere both major and minor developments. To start at the less significant end, the Italian Elemack company, which hid acquired a major part of the market for relatively lightweight location dolly equipment long ago with its Spyder (or Octopus) crab dolly, produced an improved version in the Cricket dolly. This was essentially the same as the Spyder, Uu;ith the hydraulic rise and fall of the centre column carryings he camera head powered hy an electric pump, rather tka relying on manually, or rather pedally, created pressure. This meant that the camera could be raised and lowered during the shot, rather than it being a somewhat jerky operation that had to take place between shots. In 1983 ihe German Panther company introduced a dolly with that jume, which was very similar to the Elemack, but with the rise and fa H of the camera support column powered directly by an electric motor. The Panther dolly had its wheels set to uV same width as those of the Elemack dollies, so that it cňuld run on what had become the standard tracking, and N like the Elemack, its bogie wheels could be changed Írom rimmed wheels for use on tracks to rubber wheels lor "Scon tracking boards, or indeed on other existing smooth hard flat surfaces. The Panther had quite a lot of success.
The Dutch Egripment company was also very success-
Sf隊th lightweight camera supports. The standard cam-
era craries made by Chapman and others were excessively
krge and heavy for the kind of equipment now used in this
P^'&d, which had to be moved faster and faster from one
Wion to another. The old-style cranes usually had built-in
^Lors to power them during tracking shots, and to move
™«™ h-om place to place. This was not really necessary for 'the mc(j
ium size cranes supporting the newer lighter cam-and because of improvements in materials, it was now ■]*«iMe lo buiid httice girder jib arms lighter, but with suf-
331
ficient strength, This is whore Egripment scored with its lunp crane, introduced at the beginning of the 'eighties, and they built on this with an improved^model, the 'Piccolo', at the end of the decade. These cranes had a total rise and fall of about 15 feet, and fitted on to a fairly small dolly. In theory they could carry the camera operator and focus-puller as well as the camera on the platform on the end of the jib arm, but their stability was not particularly £ood when used Tor complicated crane movements loaded "with two people in this way. This was not a serious objection, given the increasing use of video viewfinders and remote focus control.
Remote control
The idea of using remote control of the panning and tilting movements of cameras gained more and more ground during this decade. The Louma crane, which had been used on a number of films for several years previously, was joined by various other devices incorporating electric motors driving a pan and tilt head that could be attached to any standard camera support system. These came to be called generically 'hot heads', and the first of them was the Ncttman Cam-Rcmote system, which became availahle from 1984. Fairly inevitably its facility for rotating the camera through 360 was straightaway used by Francis Coppola on Cwton Club (19S4). Other very similar devices appearing in the next few years included the Power Pod head and the lechnovi-sion Sputnik. These devices allied themselves naturally with the ever-ex pan ding use of motion control, which got more sophisticated as the decade progressed, and as computer power for the controlling of the motion became more sophisticated and cheaper, in I9S0 the major special effects companies such as Industrial Light and Magic were still using mini-computer systems for motion control, with the control data stored on tape drives, but by the end of the eighties ordinary microcomputers could easily do the job. For Instance, the Ultimatte Memory Head was produced as a standard product in I93S. It had the feel of fluid head, and it recorded move-, and zoom* and focus pulls onto inch diskettes, after which it could then repeat them exactly.
There were also more elaborate combinations of devices such as putting motion control heads together with specially moMe<l dollies into a package that could be used on location, rather than only in a specially built stumo^viroiv ment u bad been the case in the previous decade One such combination was Industrial Light and Magics Tondreau MW or <V7staglide\ built in I9S9. This was essentially a Pamher dollv with exira wheels attached to measure -ts po-I ion along I path, and which then fed this <hlt to the mo; £ control computer, which in turn control e the motor, ZZ the wheels. This motion-controlled dolly - used
332
on Bach to the Fawn - Port // (1990) to produce split-screen eriects for the doubling of characters, not only on interiors, but also when they were walking around outside followed by a tracking camera. Although the use of split-screen double exposure to let the same actor act with himself or herself had been accomplished during panning shots in ancient times, doing it while simultaneously tracking had been impossible up to this point. The same effect was also achieved in Dead Ringers, with a similar system.
The use of the Steadicam camera support device increased throughout the decade, and in particular it was used more and more as a substitute for standard tracking shots In general, and not just because physical ci rum stances made the use of tracks and: a dolly impossible. This trend occurred because of the production pressures mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. (Laying tracks for a tracking shot takes quite a -while, not to mention the number of rehearsals needed1 to co-ordinate bhe efforts of the dolly-pushing grips, camera operator and focus-puller.) A novel intermediate strategy to increase production speed in this area was to have a Steadicam operator riding a pneumatic-tyred^ dolly over a rough surface, instead of attempting to get a smooth dolly movement by laying levelled tracks in the old way. Other devices were invented which attempted to mimic some of the virtues of the Steadicam, the most notable and noticeable of which was the 'Shakicam'. This wasa crudchand^made improvisation invented by the cameraman Caleb Dcschanel for the film More American Grajfui (J979), and it consisted1 of a. U foot length of 2' by 2' timber, with cross pieces used as carrying handles at each-end, A wild Arriflcx with a very wide angle lens (usually 9:8 mm,) was fixed to the centre of the beam at right angles to it, and the contraption was used to get. a high speed tracking shot close to the ground, by having it car.r-icd forwards at run^ ning speedby two grips who heldieachend.of the beam. The flexibility of the beainactcd as a spring smoothing out the joggling caused'by the irregularity in-the running motion of its carriers, It was subsequently applied for shock effect* a number 6F cheap films made by *uch people as the C brothers and1 Sam Raimi.
Ga^eu Brown himself attained to top his Steadicam with the ultimate remote camera movement device which he called the Sfcycam. This had: a camera mounted' at the
s in oen
hottom of a vertical shaft with
a counterweight at the othei
end, the shaft being suspended by a gM joiin nca,. . centre just like that of the Steadicam when i, was used in the undersbug position. The directional control which the cameramanihand provided: for the Steadicam woshere sup-£ T ^cmotors;drivi„gseolorgeai, on the j^gj
m ^piW point. The whole d,vice w= suspended ,n mid-air ^ ^ CQm.
as
s
in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
at the top of four tall towers set up at the corners of the area to be covered by the general horizontal movement 2t the camera. This movement in the horizontal plane was ac complished by the four support wires being paid out and/or reeled in at differential rates from four electrically driven winch drums at the base of the support pillars. All the mo tors involved were under computer control, regulated |)v positional feed-back to the control program. Brown got thtj very complicated device to work more or less properly 1984, when it was used for one shot in Birdy (1985). a ^ also used briefly on The Slugger's Wiß (J9S5), but although commercially available since then, the device is obviously not ve r y pra ctica I fo r or d i n a r y fi I m prod uc t i o n.
Special Wide Screen Systems
Filming in Super-16 continued to be used in a small way on some low budget films during the nine teen-eight ics, particularly in Sweden, where Rune Ericsson, one of its originators, now ran a film laboratory, and energetically promoted the system. To some extent Its use was a matter of fashion, for instance, a group of films backed by the British Film institute Production Board in the early eighties, starting with Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Comma (1983), were shot in Supcr-16, hut this institutional promotion died out, and certainly Greenaway preferred to have his subsequent films shot in ordinary 35 mm. Although a number of low budget American films also used the pro-cess at the beginning of the decade, most notably Rohcrt Ailtman's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, jimmy Dean (1982), the enthusiasm for Stiper-16 tended iodic down there as well. At the same time, other well known directors in the 'independent* sector, such as John SayK were perfectly happy to use ordinary 16 mm+ film, and then blow that up to 35 mm. for wide-screen projection in tlic standard way. The truth of the matter is that even with the best of the negative stocks, Eastman Color 7247, the quality ol a Super-16 blow-up to 35 mm, was still visibly inferior to ordinary 3S mm,, and the use of the process did not save that much money, even on a low budget film.
Eventually, someone had the idea of applying similar concepts to 35 mm. film, and 'Super 35 mm/, and other new ^Supers', were born. All of these new filming process involved letting the picture image extend into the area ol the camera negative reserved for the future sound track on the línal printj or in other words, returning to the use ol the lull silent aperture for recording the picture. This was possible with most of the major professional cameras, just by replacing the film aperture plate in the gate of the camera. The Inst of the various alternatives now taken up was SuperTechniscope. This involved shooting with ordinary spherical lenses, and composing for an image of 'Scope shap^
,sr)UAN0 TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES vMch extended across the top of the full silent aperture,
an
>c was then printed with a near 2:1 vertical anamor-h[c expansion on an optical printer. This was almost the P c ihe Technicolor company's previous Techniscope j,l same optical printers could be used with a jj^ht adjustment. The differences from Techniscope were Iteily thai the same footage of negative was used as in or-$tm. filming, instead of half the amount as with the old Techniscope system, and secondly that there was a slight improvement in definition over the old Techniscope, as a r^ultof Hie slightly greater negative area used.
One ol the first films made using the SupcrTcchniscope stftoa Grcystoke (19S4), and in this case the bottom of the frame was masked off in the gate of the camera during exposure to give a 1:1.35 aspect ratio negative image. The process was not worked this way in general, so that the bottom strip of the exposed image that was not used for the 'Srape prints for theatrical exhibition could be recovered far video and television exhibition, it turned out that, unlike 1 lie original Techniscope, Technicolor could not patent this variant process, so other laboratories could use it is well, as they did under the general title of Super 35. Yet Another slight variant was Super 1.85. (n this case the full silent aperture was exposed, but the essential action was kept wiihtn what was roughly the top 2/3 of the frame, in an area with the aspect ratio of 1:1,85. In this case too, the full height of the aperture be used to generate the TV and video copies if desired, as long as nothing unwanted had crept into the bottom of the full frame image. Of course, to make the theatrical release prints, the top 1:1.S5 wide-screen part of the negative image had to be reduced slightly, and also displaced to one side to fail within the usual Academy aperture Mi SO leaving the sound track area free. This process was uirl to have been invented by Jim Dickson for the TV series CtiuMtlicr
A filming system which was related to these ideas was italofusinga three perforation pull-down in 3 5 mm. film-[% rather than the standard film advance of 4 perforate^ for each exposure. This process naturally gives a wide screen image of aspect ratio almost 1:1.35, if the full width ofthe film between the sprocket holes is used. Because this «ta nadbeen suggested at various times in the past, again *>-Ane could patent the idea, though Rune Ericsson, in al-iviLh Pani,vkjon, did manage to copyright the name . /We-pcrf.' for tne pr0CeSS. This did not get them any-UW, since anybody could still talk about and advertise *eProration filming, it was fairly easy to adjust most ttmeras to give a three perforation pull-down, and by the of the decade the facility was being built into the new-^roadd cameras from the major makers. The idea proved
333
Suite popular with American television production companies, for whom the 25% reduction in negative stock costs was important, even though for present television purpose, they did not need to use the full width oi the image, but only the central part of it, to give a picture with the usual +:3 TV-aspect ratio, But it did give them protection for future exploitation of their product in wide-screen 'High Definition Television3 (l-IDTVy Given the continual improvement in the definition of negative stocks, it is probable that some form of Super 35 has a very good future for feature filmmaking, as it enables ordinary spherical lenses to be used, and so the depth of field problems with anamorphic lenses can be avoided.
As might be expected, given the involvement of Rune Ericsson, 'Three-perIV is used quite a bit in Swedish filmmaking. Another money-saving Swedish trick used in recent times is to reduce film shot on 35 mm. to 16 mm. for editing, and then to conform the 35 mm. negative to the cutting copy of the final prints. These things are not usually done in other European countries,
3-D
There was yet another brief burst of interest in stereoscopic filming in 1981 Nearly all the features produced used what were now described as the 'under-over1 processes. These took left and right eye images in 'Scope proportions, and shifted them with a.special prism system into the area of one ordinary mm. frame, where they appeared like two Techniscope frames one above the other. The final print was made by contact printing from this negative, and another special prism and lens system on the projector put them into s up e rim position on the cinema screen, after they had passed through the usual Polaroid filters. The audience viewed through glasses with Polaroid lenses as usual too. The most popular stereoscopic system of this type was now Arrivision, though another called Depix did quire well while the craze lasted. The films themselves were all from the exploitation end of American production, though *ome had more money spent on them than others. One of the main intentions was to give a bit of a lift to Lhe third rcpet, tion of series items Iike>- ftfe jM£» i-0, and Friday I3ih - Part 3.
Special Effects ' , . ■
The major innovations in special effects technique during this period revolved arouod the use of motion control Ich I L al-dv deah with The blue screen travdhng r<« continued to be the ma or means ol proouL-ES      - "d -n the Disnev studios dropped
L; The main 'process competing wi.b blue «recn »
334
producing composite images was front projection, with hack projection running third. A minor new idea in travelling mattes was the 'reverse blue screen' process. This was only applicable to combining shots of moving models with other moving images, and involved photographing thc model against a totally black ground, and then coaling it with a transparent paint that phosphoresced under ultra-violet li^ht. A second pass was filmed with the model 'illuminated by ultra-violet light, and repeating its movements exactly under motion control, so generating the matte that would hold back the background image where thc model was. The point about this was that it was possible to reproduce objects with shiny surfaces and recessed areas without partial print-through of the background scene. The first film this process was used on was Fircfox (■] 982)v and1 it reappeared thereafter on appropriate occasions.
Another minor innovation in the increasing use of moving puppeis in fantasy films was what was called 'go-motion'. When object animation is done in the convention a] way, the puppet or other object, is moved' only between the exposure of each individual frame. But for what are meant to be seen as fast moving objects, this produces a jerky, flickcry effect, since in the real world fast-moving objects produce a streaked-out image on each frame when filmed conventionally. fn "go motion' animation themodcJ is moved by remote control while thc shutter is open to get tins more realistic effect. It was first used on Dragonslaycr (1981) and subsequently on Young Sherlock Holmes 09&S) and other films.
■
■
Computer Animation
Almost as soon as computer animation was developed to a reasonably high level it was used'to create scenes for movies, in Trcn (I9S2) it was only used to a limited extent, despite the fact that most of the story of this fantasy took place inside a computer, where more or less anything might be considered1 acceptable. Contrary to appearances, most of the film was done with conventional animation; the only exception being the Long Shots of the imaginary futuristic vehicles doing this and that. A higher !level of realism was achieved: in the space scenes in The lax Siatfghter^^ » w-hicb23(}scencS were created withcomputcr graphics; Le about 20 minutes running time in total. Pan of the reason for tins script being made was that John Whitney jr had been looking for something to show off the computer animation which his.firm was able top.oduce, using the most .powerful supercomputer available at the time. The com outer,mages were produced! to a resolution of about 2G00 bnes, but even so, the definition of,the computer-crated pictures waS.appreciably inferior to that of the Jive action
las.moved' the goalposts
parts of the filrm Since 19S4 Kodak h
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES again, witlr the increased resolution of its latest stocks
Video Onto Film
Given the money the Sony Corporation was prepared to put into promoting its high definition television system (HDTV), it was inevitable that someone would be pcrsuad cd to shoot a production on HDTV that was at least partly intended for ordinary theatrical release in cinemas. In 1987 Julia and ft I fa (also known as Borderlines) was shot on Son)' HDTV in Italy, and then transferred to film in Japan, The film prints were given the ENR treatment using an extra black and white developing bath to add silver to the blacks The next year a feature length pop music film, Do k Up, was shot on HDTV. Both those films didn't get anywhere much as far as theatrical release was concerned. A^am, the definition offered after transfer from HDTV to film was noticeably inferior to that of straight 35 mm. film, and in any case broadcast HDTV was still far from being established in thc 'eighties.
There were also isolated attempts to use video tech-tiic|ties for producing film special effects, of which the most prominent was in Flash Gordon (I9S3). For this film six matte shots were composited in an electronic optical printer at 3,300 lines resolution, which in theory approaches ordinary 35 mm, film resolution, and then transfer red back from video to film for the final print. Despite the vury high video resolution used, there was still some slight loss in definition compared to travelJing matte shots done in thc conventional film way, probably due to imperfections in the video to film transfer process, so nothing more was heard of the idea at this time.
Sound
There were only detailed improvements in the established means of recording film sound during thc decade, and thc microphones and recorders used stayed essentially thc same as before. The music industry had already been working with digital sound as standard from the beginning of tihe -eighties, when Compact Discs were introduced, so much of tlie technology was theoretically available for use in film with minimal modification. Digital tape recording was standard in the music recording industry, but its application to film was limited .This was basically because digital tape recorders remained bulky and expensive, and because the extra fidelity obtainable in this way was likely to be lost on the reproduction of a film sound track in even the best equipped cinema. There was some use of digital recording and1 mixing of music for American leature film sound from I9S2, and in 1984 digital recording was used in the treat-ment of sound effects for Indiana Jones and the Temple oj'Doom, ng what was described as a 'computer-controlled digital
Wm^M TECHNOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES
usi
^divork station at Ucasfilm.
n ^her important 'eighties development was the use of
trolled motorized fader controls on film sound d-/i[i]puter c ^
\\   jcs^s jfi the dubbing theatres. Previous to this,
T'^wliibbine mixer was adjusting the levels of the vanned a cum^ii g w i      ♦ i soundtracks being re-recorded to produce thc mixed
rvd track, he had to remember where he had set the vol-- control faders at each instant when another pass was fring made to get the relative sound levels just right. The fawniNingdesks to use computer systems to memorize the flings of the faders at every instant were introduced for purposes at thc very beginning of the nineteen-eight-. These made a substantial improvement to the efficiency of the sound mixing process, but since they were extremely expensive to buy, they were only slowly introduced into the lup end of the film industry through the 'eighties. However, surtins around the middle of the decade, the background music for some Disney Studio films was digitally recorded, mil the digital recording was retained through the mixing siigtf. Examples of this include Something Wicked This Way to(!9S3), Splash (I9S+), and Country (I9S4).
Another dubbing studio idea from the television industry wjs also tried out in a limited way- This was the mixing of ordinary analogue sound-tracks on 2 inch multi-track sound upe synchronized to a video copy of thc picture track. This approach was particularly relevant to a few films for wivich tk iound effects were synthesized electronically, such as 1m, The creation of synthesized effects was almost entirely confined to some science fiction films, such as Star Trek (1979) and The Final Countdown (I9S0). In all of these cases tklmal mix with the voice tracks was done using conventual film dubbing equipment, with tlie sound tracks on mm.perforated magnetic film, and with the film being projected in sync, in the old way.
, Total use of digital recording all through the various
JUges of film production and exhibition was sure to come
tvcniually, and it soon already appeared in the final stage of
film sound reproduction, with thc first use of thc Cinema
fligiial Sound system in 1990. This system was the result
oE a collaboration between Kodak and Optical Radiation
corporation. It involves the digital recording of dots rep-
renting binary digits across and down the sound track
with 6 separate sound channels and 2 control tracks
on both 35mm. and 70 mm.prints of a film. Thc
*4y't was done is that sound for each of the eight tracks is
^oded digitally, and then interleaved into a single digi-
^stream, This stream was subdivided into 180 parallel
itr^ms and these are recorded down the sound track area
special very fine grain negative, using a row of LEDs to
W* IS0 lracks of microscopic width made up of a succession 0f
microscopic black and white dots, which represent
335
digital zeros and ones. The final print is made by priming this special sound traek negative and the picture negative in succession in the conventional way. Under a microscope thc sound track area looks rather like a long crossword puzzle that hasn't been filled m. The sound is recorded in advance of the picture, just like the standard film magnetic sound track used to be on GncmaScopc prints, and it is read by a CCD sensor above the projector gate near thc position of the conventional magnetic track heads. The CCD sensor has a row of 512 light sensitive spots across the track width, and no matter how the track weaves about, all the ISO individual tracks arc picked up. The encoding is to the same standard as ordinary domestic compact discs, with 16-bit word s s t re am i ng a14 4.1 k rI
The Cinema Digital Sound system has already been used on Dick Tracy (1990) and Days of Thunder (1 990) in 70 mm. form. However, Dolby Laboratories has demonstrated another similar system, in which a digital track is recorded in blocks between the sprocket holes of the print, and since this new Dolby system enabled the print to retain an ordinary conventional analogue sound track as well, the odds w^crc that this would become the standard in the "nineties. There were minor improvements in the control of thc post-synchronization of film sound in dubbing theatres, all centering on the application of computer control. The most generally applied methods were called Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR), but this name gives a much-exaggerated Idea of what was basically a system of automatic control of exactly when the sounds to be replaced are brought up in relation to the picture. There are also patented systems, such as ^Wordlit", which do actually seek out the synchronism point between the sounds on the guide track and those produced for thc re-recorded track, without human intervention, but they have not vet become generally used,
New Editing Systems
The major developments affecting editing were time code systems, and the related methods for filing Mm using ft videotape transfer of the original rushes; In most Western countries there was some use of time-coding I NX* 198+onwards for music films shot with multiple cameras, but otherwise its use was restricted to some television programmes made on film. fn the United States the Aaton system, ivlndi conformed to the SMPTE standard for time coding, was promoted by Panavision, and its first use in Y> mm, was or the Star Trel TV series in 1987. There was also use ol th, earlier EBU svstem in 16 mm. in Europe. Alter andy car. i there was a strong feeling in the United Mate* that le o time coded rushes ofJVred absoluteV no advantage lnlu ,l, „u jv|e 'Ho vwootl mow-
if the editing «'as <)onfc °" lhC °     • , ' olw, which rn»«jr «titors still preferred.
336
The other new develop merit of some significance was theuse of Wdeo systems for editing material shot and finally released on fflm/As T have noted in the Production Pro* ccdurcs section of this chapter, Francis Coppola tried out a specia 1 !y cons tru c ted v i deo ed i ti ng system on h i s 19 S 2 fi I m One From the Heart, but he subsequently abandoned this part of his production methods. As the decade wore on, a similar system called Ediflcx became increasingly accepted for the production of television series in the United States:, and to a limited extent elsewhere. This worked by making multiple video copies ofthc rushes onto Vt inch cassettes from the developed negative, using a standard telecinc, which applied television time coding to them. The uncut shots were organized into groups on the video cassettes according to the scenes thev were to fall into in the finished film. These video cassettes were run simultaneously on hanks of vid-eocassette players under computer control, so that experimental cuts from one shot to another could be tried out very quickly using a videotape editing system. The editing points chosen were then recorded on the computer system so that a Yz inch videotape edited version could'be automatically assembled and studied as the editing process continued1. Two other variants of this idea were attempted under the trade names of Montage and Editdroid, die latter being a joint venture of Convergence Corporation and George Lucas. These two systems, which used: the slightly more sophisticated idea of intermediate video recordings onto large capacity magnetic disks, encountered various financial and technical problems on-the way to market, though they were functioning by the end of the 'eighties, Gy this time there finally came to be a lew feature films edited on videotape, including Bcntoluccrs The Sheltering Sky (1990).
Editing
The small retreat by some American directors from a very fast cutting rate that had begun at the end^of the -seven-tits. continuedLinto this decade, but there were signs.that the
■
MM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY i N THE EIGHT I
overall increase in cutting rate, and decrease of the ASL had now resumed. A sample of 61 2 American films from tl/ six year period I9S2-19S7 (inclusive) gives a mean value for the Average Shot Length of 6 J seconds, which k 6% Wcr than the previous two six-year periods. The most popular values of ASL have fallen to around S seconds.
It was now rare to have a mainstream film that us*) nothing but jump cuts for transitions between scenes arid much more usual to see the use of a mixture of old-style djs-solves.and fades for the scene transitions, spiced up with just a few jump cuts, e.g. The Vostman Always Rings Twice {\%\) Somedircctors dropped the use of jump cuts altogether
There was a very definite trend, as part of the ever-increasing increasing self-consciousness of American movie directors, towards tweaking the 'rules' of scene dissectiun. Scorsese is an obvious example again here, and is reported by his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker as making cuts 'unsmooth' on purpose, and this can readily be observed in such films as The Color of Alaney. This trend reached the point where even Clint Eastwood sometimes 'crossed t lie eyeline' on purpose in his films. The i mention was always of course expressive, though í must remind the reader a ^ai n that the extent to which this is effective with the average au d ience is q uest i on a blc.
And a New Trend in Movie Construction?
At the beginning ofthc nineteen-nineties, there were some signs that the conventional wisdom about the best sort ol script construction to use for box-office success may be wrong: There began to appear extremely successful films, such as Total Recall, which do not have the traditional a I terns-í ion of types of dramatic scene, but arc almost totally made up of tense action scenes. Some of these films are also lacking in dramatic logic as well, but this does not seem to harm them in the least at the box-office. It will be interesting to see if this is just a temporary anomaly, or whether it portends a truly new trend in film c on str u cti on.
»sc -
■
B. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
rlf^he generally rising prosperity in most of the world I ensured that film production in most countries held up in quantity during the nineteen-nineties. However, the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union caused a nusiive shrinkage in Russian film production, and the same fflcot was noticeable to some extent in the rest of Eastern Europe, The positive side of these events was that amongst (he films that did get made in Eastern Europe, there were j number that were innovative in subject matter and style, and also a.number of previously banned films were released. A f son -tn anymore fi I m prod uct ions origi na t i n g fr o m A m cr i ca inil Western Europe came to be made on location and in the studios of the former Eastern Bloct In the West, German ill reproduction weakened as the local audience continued to turn away from the films made by the local subsidised art film sector.
In the United States, on the other hand, the continuing riscin wealth for most of the population and in particular the middle classes, meant that American art films were made in increasing numbers, it is not too difficult to get hold of a half a million dollars if you have enough push, and dangle the glamour of film-making in front of Americans with more money than they need. This trend was institutionalized by tlie Sundance Institute and Pilm Festival, created by Robert Red ford in 1981 to encourage the production of artistically adventurous independent films. By the nineties, this festival was very successful, and the existing American film distribution companies were competing to buy the frtosi commercially appealing products from the movement, flierc was a fairly successful attempt in the United States to usurp the title "independent film* purely for what had teen caNcd up to this point, *art films'. The Independent Feature Project, which was an organization founded in '^9 at the New York Film Festival to market American Jrt films, defined 'independent films' as having their hunting put together by the film-maker. This financing foul J include studio money, but the film could not be a P"*c film, an action thriller, or be 'canned Hollywood product': Admittedly, this would exclude an art film set up and funded by a studio, but these were not common.
por ordinary commercial production in the United the movement away from shooting in the Hollywood tfudios continued, and was so pervasive that the derogatory J^m runaway production* was no longer used as often as it ™ Wn. In particular, shooting American films in Canada
was now common.
In the 1990s, the content of independent films became increasingly misanthropic, reflecting the way generat social attitudes have become more and more cynical and nihilistic in recent decades, and some of these films contained only stupid or despicable characters in the main parts, which was unthinkable a few decades ago. Leading film-makers in this respect arc Neil UBute (In the Company of Men, (997), and Todd Solondz {Happiness, I99S). Similar cynical and nihilistic attitudes arc also evident in ordinary commercial American cinema, and were even quite conscious amongst some film-makers. For instance, John Carpenter said in an interview in the American Cincmaiographer (p.70 September 19S3) "I must tell you that my criticisms of society and the film business are not entirely serious. I've made a lot of money out of the film business the way it is run today, and I am a complete capitalist. Pm just advocating a little humanity in the world. In order to do that, you have to go strong in the other direction, be a little outrageous, It's lun to attack the status quo." And in (September 1996) about his Escape from JUL, "But I wanted to do to L>Ah what we did to New York, which was to have a great time with it in a cynical and sarcastic way
Nevertheless, there has been a somewhat countervailing trend in American commercial film-making through the latter part of the 'nineties, which was towards a reduction in the amount of extreme violence and sexuality. This is apparently due to a public backlash against the handJing ot such matters in ordinary Hollywood films, and was given expression in a book by Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America; Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Vahcs0992), nd a following discussion of the matter in the American dia, Unlike the backlash against the content of Holly wood films io the early thirties, this was not orchestrated by the Roman Catholic church, but it equally represented a real public concern about the content of Hollywood films-Another connected factor is the economic ramifications of the content rating system used by the MPAA, in which a new category, NC-17. was introduced in 1990.
In the oinetecn-nineties, film technology conclusively lost its autonomv. Developments in lighting for television had been taken over into film lighting in the previous decade but now developments in computer technology ioined aether with developments which had happened first in tension and music recording, and these were taken
a mc
33$
over into film use, European equipment makers continued to make a strong showing in these areas, and also in more purely traditional film technology, with lighting equipment from Arriflcx and Dedo Weigcn in Germany, and LTM in France, and cameras from Fritz Bauer in Austria selling well in the American and other markets.
Production Procedures
The tendency in American film production towards using multiple cameras on all scenes, already noted for the nine teen-eighties in the previous chapter^ continued to grow, to the point where it was exceptional for only a single camera to be used on ordinary scenes. For some directors, the practice was to use the two cameras from the same direction, with a longer lens on one of them to get closer shots, and for others to use one of them on the reverse angle in dialogue scenes. On action scenes, there was a tendency to use even more cameras than had been habitually used in these situations. An extreme was reached'by John Woo in Hard Target. (1993), in which the big action scenes were shot with seven or more cameras from every possible direction, rather than with them only on one side ofthc scene, as was usual Independent films, and also productions in. other countries, did not have the budgets to pursue the multi-camcra method. The amount of scenes shot with Stead icam mounts also continued to increase on American films, to the point where many had around half their footage filmed in this way.
Film Stock
Eastman Kodak film stock continued to dominate the market, particularly in the United Slates, where little else was used in ordinary commercial film-making. In television, Fuji stocks had a certain share, as the Fuji materials continued to be cheaper than Kodak, m, Europe, Fuji did rather better, audi some cameramen continued; to prefer it, because of its less saturated colours and! lower definition! Sometimes American cameramen also chose -Fuji negative for these reasons, Agfa stocks were fading a way through the nineties, althoughnewnegatives balanced for tungsten light were introduced in \m (XT 100) and 1992 fXT3?0 and: XT400). ■
The slow Kodak fcXR stock 5245 0 SO and daylight balanced), which was introduced in I9S9, and SH8 (El 100 and tungsten light balanced), which was introduced m mm continued to be used extensively when rilminp under high light levels throughout the nineties, and were neaherupgradedior replaced. All the development in Kodak this U| was conllned to the last negatives
rated 500 ISO .(or £ replied the 5296 negative, and in
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NíNiiTíEs
199G, the introduction of a whole new range of negating was begun with the release of the first in the 'Visi0nf series, namely Vision 500T and 320T negatives. The firstoľ these replaced the still new 5298, and the second replaCCf| Eastman Color 5287, These new negatives had reduced grain size, and were claimed to have greater latitude than their predecessors, and were also said by some cameramen tfrta warmer in colour response. Kodak said that these stocks had their colour response adjusted to what cameramen wanted, which was in its turn influenced by their Cťcr greater use of H Ml and fluorescent lights for film lighting purposes. Both of these sources, and particularly the latter had uneven emission of wavelengths across the visible spectrum, and hence generated some slightly incorrect colour reproduction. This was a major turning point, for up to this point, the effort of Eastman Kodak scientists had always been to create film stocks that approached as nearly as possible to perfect colour reproduction under the even spectral light ol daylight and tungsten light.
Later additions in 1998 to the Vision series included an 300 El tungsten balanced negative, type number 5289t which was the fastest film so far available, and a 200 Ef tungsten negative for special effects green and blue screen filming, to replace the older S293 negative previously used for this purpose. This was last was modified in 1999 to make it less contrasty. A special low contrast Vision Color Teleprint positive (Type 2395) for use in telecine transfers was added to the range at the end of 1999, The point of this stock was that, although the telecine-ing of films was usually done from a negative, sometimes prints were needed of a new film for export to other countries that had d i (Tl rent television systems.
In I99S, Eastman Kodak also produced the first of a new series of negatives purely for television purposes, called IVimetirne 640T, which had an exposure index (HI) of 640 under tungsten light. This had even less con tras tines* than their other fast motion picture negatives, and was not intended for making prints, but had its colour response optimized for direct transfer to videotape in telecinc machines. Eastman Kodak also upgraded its intermediate film stocks with EX R intermediate 5244 in 1992, and then in 1998 there was 2 383 and 2393, all of which could be used either as intermediate positive, or intermediate negative in the duplicating process. The 2393 stock had more contrast and more colour saturation than the 2383 material, which was useful for cinema tog rapher s who wanted to get brighter colours than normal.
The Fuji company introduced some new or improved film stocks throughout the decade, with the new Fuji F-2S0D (a fast daylight negative identified as Type 8570) and the fast tungsten balanced stock F-S00 improved in 199L
■
■
sr)UAND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
m-r ,vas replaced by the new Super F series F-500,
mm ^mbm 8571 for35 mTT1 *nd 8671 for 16 mm
ni]997 There was also a new Fuji intermediate stock ^ duced in 1These new Fuji stocks did not gain the v any ground in the competition. Throughout the 'nineties, the trend continued towards
fa^H rn6re and more ^'ms 1T10St^'1 or sometime5
^sirely, on cho lastest StGek] n° d°ubt cncouraSccl h)r Lhe continually improving Kodak fast negatives. This had some
IdJlatnceonthe look of the film image, as the use of lower
lidu levels on the scene that follows from the use of faster
J^ranegative changes the behaviour or light within a film
swne. With 500 El (or ISO) negative, a light intensity of 10
foot-candles gives an aperture of f2 for correct exposure,
jnd many cameramen were working down towards this sort
of level in the 'nineties. Under these conditions, the light
tmiued by the sources lighting the scene, not just the Him
lights, but also any practical lights on the set, is reflected
jrcl re-cmitted by the surfaces it hits, and after bouncing
jrourirHurther, adds up to a general undirected wash of light
:tat gives an intensity of a foot-candle or so, and creates
the effect of uncontrolled and non-directional fill light. At
higher levels of the light emitted by film lights, this does
not happen proportionally to the same extent. The result of
(hi* wash of mukipfy-rcflecLed light at low light levels does
not resemble the effect of fill light intentionally put onto the
figures, etc, directly from film lighting sources, even the
softest ones.
The only new black and white Him introduced during uns period was an IIford negative intended for special clfceis ivorl^ called IIlord SFX 200, which had extended ^nativity into the infra-red region of the spectrum, and Man Exposure Index of 200 under tungsten light and 100 under daylight, which was the reverse of the usual order of things with black and white negative.
The professional use of Super 8 mm. film continued, particularly with the trend to include sections shot in 8 Tnrn. in feature films, as described below. This encouraged ^American firm Super S Sound to buy 3 5 mm. negative from Eastman Kodak in 1996, and have it slit and perforated t0 ute Super 8 gauge, and then resell it to professional ^makers. Super 8 Sound also provided processing and ^inc facilities for S mm. film.
■
Moratory Work and Special Treatment Techniques
The kind of special film processing techniques that had 'PRttred in the eighties, starting with the Technicolor ENR P^fifc (mentioned in the previous chapter), were used ■^-widely in many countries. To give a concise and more ^ratt description of them, they all involved omitting, or
339
reducing the duration of the bleach bath which comes after the colour development bath in the development of colour film. The colour development bath, which is the first stage of the active processing of colour film, produces a silver image in each ofthc three layers of the emulsion, just as in ordinary black and white film, hut also a colour image made up of varying amounts of dye, which surrounds the developed silver grains. The function of the bleach bath is to remove the silver image, and just leave the colour imaac,
■■■■   " ■
so il it U omitted, or the bleaching chemicals are reduced in strength, all or some of the black silver ima^c will be retained. All film laboratories can carry out this process if they wish to, and some that do so give it a proprietary name, e.g. CrTs 'Silver Tint' and  LTC\s 'NbX\ If the process is used in producing a positive print, the most intense colours in the image will be darkened by the silver, and the blacks will become very black. If the process is used in negative developing, it will reduce the colour intensity in the brightest parts.of the image, and also make the overall image more ccntrasty. As in all the most effective uses of silver retention techniques, the efleet was aided by the colours used in the sets. In the 'nineties, silver retention processes were in general used for this kind of effect; that is, for the creation of a depressing atmosphere, as in Seven (1995) And Fight Club (1999). The silver retention process works slightly differently in the most visually novel part of Delicatessen (1990), where the sewer scimes are lit In the m id-key and high-key range, instead of working towards low-key as is usual in this sort of situation. The sewer sets contain so much black metal and dark walls, not to mention hordes of Troglodists wearing black rubber wet suits, that the heavy dose of added silver in this emphasises the shiny blackness and the reflected highlights from the lighting which are scattered over the curved wet black surfaces create a truly
distinctive look.
Technicolor's CNK process, the first silver retention process involved an extra developing stage as well as the omission of the bleach bath. This extra bath developed more of the undeveloped silver remaining in the emulsion after lk< colour development, This produces the same kind of effect as simple bleach bath bypassing, but with more degrees of control, and the possibility of even stronger efilt  if desired. The CC£ prucc* offered by Deluxe
laboratories is carried out in muc
h the same ^ort of way
a< the FN II process, but other ffl* laboratory do not
I    n Juivalenl as it involve introducing «... extra provide an equuaiuu, «j» ^
development
lank into the standard machinery.
net are usually used on
All the silver retention processes
a prints ofthc Him. »Ud> M* ÄJP 1 " ' Lrt«. since the silver in lhe film stock u no
s:3;::iProcesSin^iU:i--.hco,
ua I way fur
340
resale by the film laboratory. This means that the producing company may on ly have the process used on some of the prints of the film that are released, and not on all the extra prints made, Neverdtcless, the use of these processes increased in the 'nineties, but still only on a minority of films. It must be noted that since video cassettes and DVDs are usually produced from a film negative, the exact equivalent effect may not be visible on copies of the film released in these ways. The silver retention processes are not usually used on the negative, though they can be.
In this decade silver retention processes have often been used in conjunction with flashing the film stock, particularly with the Arri Lighten n device, and also with the Pa na Has her, both adding white or coloured light to the exposure in the camera, and both of diem introduced in the previous decade. In the case o I Saving Private Ryan (1998), the strongly desa t u rated colours were due at least as much to flashing the film as to the EN R silver enhancement process that was also used.
a new idea that appeared in the 'nineties is the use of reversal colour film slock as though it was negative film. Th is was referred to as 'cross processing'. Tlie reversal stock (usually Kodak Ektachrome) is exposed in the camera in the usual way, and then given ordinary colour negative developing. The resulting image has higher contrast and increased grain, and can give some alteration of the colours or hues in the scene, particularly in the highlights, and shadows. The increased contrast and colour alteration was visible in the first film to use this technique, Spike Lee's CheLw (1995)
There were attempts to revive the Technicolor dye imbibition printing process in die United States in this decade, but they did not get anywhere much,
Li ght in g Ec] u ipm ent
European companies making lighting units, such as France's LTM and Germany's Arri and Kinoflocompanies, continued to became more important internationally in the 'nineties, particularly i n the U n í Led; States, and they did this partly by introducing new types oflighting units. The most significant new types of lighting equipment in the "nineties had actually first appeared at the end: of the previous decade. These were the Kino Plo system using fluorescent lights, and HMl PAR lights, which were lamp-heads with parabolic reflectors and open fronts that used anew type of single-ended AMI bulb.
The Kino Flo system was the result of the use by the cameraman Robby Mueller and his gaiters of ordinary
^^m^^ special high frequency ballad on the   ,1m (1937). 0,d|        |:|^
powered m the standard way from the mains suffer from
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
Kino Flo lamphcadi
a stroboscope effect caused by the difference between the mains frequency and the frequency of opening and closing of the shutter of a film camera. This shows as a visible fluctuation in the brightness of the film scene lit by ordinary fluorescent lights. This was solved by the use of a ballast unit generating high frequency alternating current, just as in the electronic ballasts that were starting to be used for HMl lights to solve the same problem. The second defect of Muorescent lights for colour photography is the uneven Intensity of the wavelengths they emit across the visible spectrum, when compared to sunlight and tungsten lights. In particular, they show large peaks of emission at certain blue and green wavelengths from the ionised mercury vapour inside them. When the Kino Flo company put a commercial product on the market in the nineties, they solved this, up to a point, by having special phosphors made for their fluorescent tubes. In fact, the peaks in the emission spectrum of Kino Flo tubes were nor eliminated, only reduced to the point where they did not have too obvious an efiect on the reproduction of colour in film scenes, I regret to say tihat the Kino Flo company sought to obfuscate this by publishing a specially devised sort of spectral graph for their lights, and an accompanying specially devised colour reproduction index (CRI).
flL
M STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
341
In the Kino Flo system, their special rtuorcscent tubes ure put111 un't£ as rac^s °' various sixes, containing various numbers of tubes. Standard sizes of fluorescent tubes or lengths from 8 feet to 2 feet can be used, and the units held from one to eight tubes. Effectively, their lamp-beads are shallow trays, with a metal reflective surface behind, and large barn doors at the sides in the longitudinal direction. This gives a certain amount of directionality to the light, as does the optional addition of 'egg crate5 baffles (a grid of 0pcn cells made of black plastic) that can be clipped on the front of the units. Some models could be dimmed, up to a point. Very small units called Jviim-flos taking 12 inch tubes were added to the range, and these could run from 12 voh DC as well as normal AC power sources. In 1993 a new range of even smaller units called 'Micro-flosf, taking S inch long tubes were produced for the system. These could also run from 12 volt DC batteries or 120 volt AC. Kino Flo units essentially act as soft sources, just like the old softlight and northiiglit units containing incandescent bulbs. Kino Flos saw rapidly increasing use by film cameramen throughout the -nineties*
New MM I type lamps continued to be developed in this decade, and they were used more and more. HMl bulbs in rrcsncl lens lamp-heads increasingly displaced spotlights with tungsten bulbs in standard use, particularly for filming in daylight, but also on studio sets. If MI tubes were improved with.a shorter gap between the electrodes, which increased the light output. A new type of bulb was created at the end of the eighties, when HMl tubes were put inside large PAR type bulbs, (PAR bulbs had existed for many decades, in tht first.place for car headlights and aircraft landing lights, and then taken over for film purposes, as mentioned on page 2S9). PAR bulbs were moulded of heavy glass with a parabolic reflector making up the back half, and a sort of prismatic lens sealed onto the front. The II Ml variant had an inner HMl tube sealed inside the envelope instead of the bare tungsten filament in the older types. They were being made in sizes up to 1200 watts at the beginning of the 'nineties, and like all HMl lights produced a spectrum that approximated to daylight. Also like all HMI lights, they needed a special ballast unit to power them, and now these »crc all of the high frequency electronic type that removed the problems with stroboscope elTects from the camera shutter frequency.
However, another newly Important kind of light confusingly referred to as a HMl PAR light had a different construction. These units had a deep parabolic reflector that was independent of the actual HMl lamp or globe. In fact it was somewhat like the first quartz-iodine (or tungsten-h3]ogen) fi|m Qc thc nineteen-sixties, called first
Multibeams, then various other names as they were made
etc.
by different makers, e.g. LowclQuartz or Redheads, ____ These all had rough surfaced parabolic metal reflectors that could be focussed over a certain middle Hood range. The new lights had deeper parabolic reflectors with a polished surface, and a new type of single-ended 11 MI lamp bulb projecting through a hole in the centre of the bottom of the reflector. Up to this point, HMl lamp tubes were all made with the two contacts for the electric current at opposite ends of the tube, which was referred to as 'double-ended1 construction. The new type of lamps had the actual HMl tube Inside another larger tube with two electrical contact pins on its base, which was referred to as 'single-ended' construction. Thc complete HMl PAR lamp unit produced a very narrow spot beam with a spread of only about 6 degrees that could scarcely he varied by moving the lamp back and forth inside the reflector. However thev could be converted to give flood beams of various width by putting accessory lenses of various kinds over the open front of the lamp. These included a Fresnel lens, which could vary the beam spread from around 40 degrees to 60 degrees.
The power and size of these units gradually moved upward over the 'nineties from 2+5 Kw in 1990, to 4Kw around 1994-, to 6 Kw in 1995, and so on to 12 Kw at thc end of the decade, and they were extensively used from their introduction for location and set lighting, but not for lighting the actors directly.
A new type of small lighting unit appeared at the beginning of the decade, designed by the German cameraman Dedo Wcigcrt, and called 'Dcdolights'. These had a new and efficient focussing sytem, Involving a moving section with a 12 volt 100 watt tungsten halide bulb with a spherical reflector behind it, and a convex lens in front. This moved inside the tubular body with respect to another convex lens fixed to the front of the unit. This double lens
A diagram of the foaming system of* Dedolight, with the bulb, reflector, and internal fats shown at the left (spot) potithns, and in dashid outline in the right (flood) position.
342
A DMight and the am it iitttmwatcs at the sem'hspot focus poshhn.
system gave a beam angle from 4.S degrees to 46 degrees, and also a very even intensity across the width of the beam in the middle focussing range (around medium flood beam), dropping very quickly to zero once past the edge. This was unlike all1 the standard film lighting units of the past, which had a soft edge to their beams; a penumbra of at least several degrees, The sharp edge to the Dcdolight beam was not a great advantage, as in general it is preferable that the beam of light from any lighting unit melts into the surrounding illumination, in the way that light docs from real world sources. Tlowever, the optical efficiency of Dedoliglits was an advantage, as was their small si'/c and light weight - they were about 160 mm, lonp and: 10Q mm. wide, and weighed about 700 gram. The type of construction used, with a lens very close to the lamp, meant that the design couldnot be used for large lights, though the Dedo company eventually produced a 300 watt model Another factor in their success, as was also the case for the Kinoflo lights, was that cameramen were using the new fast film stocks more and more in photographing films, and hence tended to use small lighting units more. Nevertheless, Dcdolights were only used as supplementary lights, not for general set lighting. Their lack of sensitivity to vibration was another factor in their adoption in certain situations, such as moving car and plane interiors.
Another newcomer in 1993 was a device called a Chimera. This was an accessory that could be attached to the front of spotlights, and was a sort of -diffusa- that softened the beam very considerably. It was in fact not a new idea, but a commercial version of the 'croniecone* invented by the cameraman Jordan Croncnweth in the eighties. This was a truncated: cone about a metre long made of light rigid opaque sheet, which had its narrow end fixed to the front of a spotlight, and had the wider end covered with a sheet of translucent diffusing material. The point.of this device was that it diffused the spot beam mure than would a sheet ofdiifusing material fixed just in front of the lens of
■
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
a spotlight, but less than a larger sheet of diffusing material held several metres in front of a spotlight on stands, Thj$ latter device needed more setting up, and also acted as a completely soft (non-directional) source. To put it another way, the light from a croniecone still had a certain amount of directionality in it. The Chimera, which was marketed in the United States by a company of that name, had a rectangular frame held out from the attachment on front of a spotlight by curved struts to each corner, and covered with black fabric, except at the front, which was covered with white translucent sheet, A further advantage that the Chimera had over the original Croniecone was that it was collapsible. Other companies produced similar diffusing devices, for instance Lowellight designed a 'Rilalite' for attachement to their lighting units, and such things were classified under the general title "lightbanks1. These devices caught on fairly rapidly in the 'nineties, and spread to other countries quite quickly.
Although it had been previously used on The River (1984), it was only during this decade that a new type of soft light became really important. These were helium-filled balloons made of white translucent material which had a light source suspended inside them near their centre. They had first been developed for the lighting of large scale construction sites, but in films their main use was to light very large and high interior spaces where it was difficult or impossible to rig ordinary film lighting above the action being filmed. Leading companies in the introduction of these fighting balloons for film purposes were LTM, Publux, and Lee Lighting. The balloons were usually about 2 metres in diameter, and the lights inside were 4 Kw or 8 Kw tungsten bulbs, though KM I lamps were also used, In America, an alternative idea for the same purpose was to use white weather balloons, without lights inside them, as rcl'lectors over a large indoor area, with powerful spots shone up onto them from the floor,
A smaller and simpler spherical soft light source had first been used in the previous decade, but became more prominent in the 'nineties. This was the Chinese lantern. These were widely available as a domestic lighting device, and they consist of a sphere of thjn white paper kept in shape by a series of circular rings on the inside, about hall a metre in diameter, and with openings al the top and bottom. For film purposes, a more powerful lamp of some hundreds of watts might be used, and this radiated soft light in all directions and falling off quite rapidly in intensity. A standard technique was to hang one from the end of a fislipole so that a lighting technician could move it about to give a bit of extra light on a moving actor as the scene developed.
Traditional Fresnel lens spotlights continued to be used
nii\t STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
most in lighting sets overall, and the main development in this area was that most makes were redesigned to be a hit smaller and lighter, though essentially the same. Many or the lighting manufacturing companies gave their smaller units individual names, such as 'Bambino', cMizar', and Tcpper\ instead of just using the traditional nicknames such a 'Dinky1 and Tups for those with powers in the 100 t[> 500 watt region. No doubt this was connected with die marketing obsession with 'branding' and 'intellectual property1 that has become so dominant in recent times. At the more powerful end of the Fresnel spotlight range, development had centered on creating units with ever more powerful HMl lamps inside, and maximum wattages reached 18 Kw in 1990, where they stayed for the rest of the decade,
A quite new accessory material for film lighting appeared early in the 'nineties, and was much used. This was 'Blackwrap', which was a sheet of very thick aluminium foil with a black coating on both sidesH This proved very useful for moulding around the front of lighting units to add extra control and delimitation of the light beam coming from them, with an extra degree of precision beyond that given by the traditional 'barn doors', 'snoots1, and so on.
Lighting Styles
Foreign cameramen were used more and more on American films during the 'nineties. One reason was that it was easier to get away with this, as more production tnok place outside the reach of the Hollywood unions, and another was that good foreign cameramen were cheaper than American cameramen, and yet another was that they were faster. This last was because their lighting was on the whole simpler, though remaining good-looking, riritish television drama was a particularly good training ground for these qualities. The American made-for-television him industry was not so useful for developing high quality lighting technique, as the producers continued to insist oti low lighting ratios being used on their films, which tends to produce a bland flatness in their visual appearance.
Although television commercials and pop music promo shorts had an increasing influence on film style, and began to contribute more new directors to feature film-making, very few new film cameraman came up solely through lighting them, the only obvious examples of this career structure taing Bfll p0p(. afKl Kcn Ktlsch.
A major topic in the professional d iscussion of film lighting in this decade was the search for a special 'look' lor a film, and how this might be achieved. It was acknowledged that Lhe production design of a film was important in this respect (as indeed it is very important indeed), but cameramen and came raw am en were very eager to put their own mark on a
343
film. The special treatment techniques described above were very important in this respect, and these were used rather more than in the previous decade, though still not on the majority of films, because of their extra cost, particularly when applied to the final distribution prints of a film.
The continuing collaboration of Robert Richardson with the director Oliver Stone led to some or the most distinctive and influential pictures in American filmmaking during the  nineties. The peak or this was Natural flom Killers (1994), which used many different techniques to produce obviously noticeable disjunctions in the image flow, to go with the very aggressive content of this film. The film was shot on a mixture of 35 mm, colour, Super S colour, 16 mm. black and white and 35 mm. black and white, and on colour video as well. Although the experienced eye could make out the visual difference between these different media, the only major noticeable distinction for general audiences was between the colour material and the black and white material. This is because the 3S mm, colour cinematography was entirely done with diffusion filters on the lens, and this, combined with Robert Richardson's trick ol letting pans of the image flare out, made most of the 35 mm. material not much less fuzzy than the Super 8 footage blown up to 35 mmr
Oliver Stone had an expressive program for the use of all the different effects in the film, as can be read in American Cincmatographer (November 1994, Vol.75 No. II, p.36-56), but as usual in this area, the relation between the visual effects and the content was not completely consistent. To start at the beginning, the introduction of the black and white footage into the narrative starts before the aggression in the cafe scene develops, and not at the same time, as Stone claimed. On the lighting side, there is the occasional use of top and backlight on the actors that goes far into over-exposure, and again the application of this strays from a strong connection with the moods of the principal characters. Other exaggerated lighting effects include colour scenes totally in red light and green light. There arc three of the latter, and these are particularly striking, as they arc done by having nearly a II die light sources giving oil' the same strong green light contrasted with some tiny areas in the image lit with white light. Throw in wide-angle lens cinematography combined with swaying hand-hefd camera and speed changes, not to mention scenes in front of hack projection showing archive film footage, and you haw a peak in visual aggression that has not been exceeded since. And there are drawn animation scenes cut in suddenly as
i
well.
The use of over-exposure in parts oi the image was developed to an extreme in Robert Richardson's W&A 6& another inherently aggressive fiirn-mak-r, Martin Sow****,
344
A strong spodighr coming straight dowh plus a low backlight burn out the airm where they strike* and she km dijfitshu puts a fare around these over-exposed me&s in Natural Bom Killers.
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
in bringing Out the Dead (1999), This film is a symphony of burri-out and flare, particularly in the driving scenes. This is due in the first place to the inherent cent lustiness of the scenes being filmed, with the white of medical uniforms and ambulances, plus lots of white street lights against the dark of night appearing inside the shot. Then this contrastiness is accentuated by the bleach bypass treatment given to the prints, and on top of that is the sheer overexposure of the white areas allowed by Richardson. The colours in the image are desaturated by the bleach bypass, which together with the predominance of white and black in the ima^c, takes the look of the film a long way towards high contrast monochrome. The flare from the burnt-out whites is also accentuated by diffusion filters on the lens of the camera throughout the whole film. (Richardson claimed that this lens diffusion was intended to reduce the extra contrast in the image produced by the bleach bypass process, but with tlie contrast already so extreme, due to the factors listed, there is no visible effect in the opposite direction.)
The major dimension in the general description of lighting style is that between the use of soft and hard li^ht. This is a manner of description taken from the practitioners - to quote Bryan England in American Cinematographr (Vol, 71 No.l jan 1990 p.29), talking of his recent work on /, Madman, "The general lighting style for the film involved very direct sources, but it was not what 1 would call a chard light1 show. I wince when people say 'Was it a hard light show or a soft light show?' It's a 'both' show, depending on what was right for the scene. We have direct source lighting, hard and soft, as the case called for it," This is a fairly typical sort of middle of the read approach. The claim to be using only 'source" lighting, meaning only putting film hght, onto the scene from the directions of the ostensible
real sources M'ithin the scene, which was so common in the previous decade, became a bit less obsessive with cameramen in the 'nineties, but didn't go away, even when it was not completely true, indeed, there was even the case of Frederick Elmes saying that he didn't use source lighting on The fee Storm (1997). Incidentally, it is a contradiction in terms to call any sort of real soft lighting 'direct', hut although the discussion by cameramen of what they were doing became both more precise and more detailed in the 'nineties, they could still say muddled and contradictory things sometimes when being interviewed.
At one extreme of the hard/soft spectrum, we find the ultimate in soft lighting from the Old Master David Watkin in Critical Care (1997). The sets of this hospital-based 11 lm are lit in a high key entirely with large area soft sources thai produces the ultimate in creamy beauty. An outstanding piece of work with soft light in low key is Interriav with the Vampire, in which Philippe Rousselot did most of the lighting with soft sources, working at low light levels around 10-20 foot candles with fast film stock (Kodak 5296). The more intimate scenes are lit with a small number of Chinese lanterns from the directions of the apparent practical sources within the scene, such as candles or fires, and with absolutely no backlight, The larger scale night exteriors are lit with bunches of 10 spacclights hung from big cranes over the scene, with only a weak bias in the blue direction in the colour of the light. Rousselot characterised this look as 'overcast moonlight', and it was utterly distinctive, and completely different to the usual hard blue directional light Irom Musco lights or the like which are commonly used.
At the other extreme, one could mention Anthony Richmond's work on Condyman (1992), which is mostly done with hard light, without the intervention of much
fILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
£ production still showing a set-up in Interview widi die Vampire lit h Philippe Rousselot with Chinese lanterns.
34S
diffusion to speak of on the lights or the camera lens, another accomplished hard light show was The Hot Spot+ lit byUehSleiger in 1990.
The hard and .soft light distinction was used as part of the expressive program on Dead Again (1991) - hard light and a black and white picture for the past scenes, and soft light and colour film for the present day scenes. More elaborate expressive programmes worked out over the length of the film narrative, and involving various aspects of cinematography, were quite frequent during the nineties,
The use of smoke on film scenes continued to increase in this decade, though it was not all-pervasive. Synthetic smoke is not obviously noticeable if used very lightly,
but some cameramen used it very heavily and visibly in circumstances where it was implausible, rotable in this respect was Peter Hyams, who sustained his double career as lighting cameraman as well as director of his films by Lhe relentless use of smoke on interiors. The thing about smoke is that it scatters and spreads the light around in all directions, so eliminating what would otherwise be visible failures in getting the light into particular areas ol the film scene, l-ieavy lens diffusion works in somewhat the same way, and both can fool most people into dunking the lighting is better than it is.
Another lighting theme carried ovurfrom the previous decade, though it has maybe even weakened a hit, is the use
The shot resulting from the arrangement of Onnett lanterns shoum in the production still above. This lighting <tyle loses its magic when reduced from the itcluttl eohur in the fdm to rnvMchfome, as here.
346
Philippe Roussehr's "ovcrctist moonlight" type of lighting on an exterior of Interview with the Vampire,
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
of coloured light. This is perhaps more important in Britain than in the United States, for making British city locations, both interior and exterior, less boring than they really are. Examples can be seen in many films, both famous, like Trainspotting (1995), and less so.
Cameras
No new camera companies emerged to challenge the world-wide dominance of Am, Panavision, and the Fritz Bauer company making the Movie cam. The Arnolds Richter company took to using 'Arri' as their company name, and new Arri cameras continued to emerge from Munich. The Arriflex 535 was first shown in I9S9, and was described in the previous chapter, but it was not actually available until 1990. To repeat its major features, it was in general layout and basic construction and features based on the 35 BL4, However, it had redesigned body castings, and more
built-in electronics. The most important of the electronics was an electrical interlinking of the variable shutter and the camera speed (frame rate), so that changes in either one of these during the course of the shot would change the other to keep the exposure automatically constant. The Arriflex 535 also had a built-in SMPTE time code and Kodak Keycodc generators. The data from the internal electronic controls regulating all the functions of the camera could be read out through a serial data port on the body. This was almost immediately made use of by Marc Shipman-Muellcr to connect to a laptop computer running a program to read out the data and control the camera. This did not have that much efiect at the time, but it was eventually developed into the Data Capture System used on the Star Wars Episode One: The Pho mom Menace in 1999,
The other new feature of the Arriflex 535 was a modification to the view-finder system so that it could be
The Arrijlex 555* % later B model is illustrated, bur rhe Jirsr version w/is eisentiiitty the saM.
flLMSTVLZ AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
sivung over from the left to the right side of the camera if desired, and also angled out sideways. The viewfinder a|So included a set of illuminated frame markings on the oround glass viewing screen, which made it much easier for the camera operator to sec what he was including in the picture under low light levels. In I act these improvements were designed to keep the Arri 35 mm. sync, sound camera competitive with the Panaflex.
All of these new features were taken over into the 16 mm. Arri 16 SR3, which came out in 1993. Otherwise, this camera was very similar to the preceding Arri 16 SR2, and it continued the Arri domination of the world market for 16 mm, cameras.
Arri introduced a new 35 mm, camera called the 435 in 1996. This was intended solely for non-synch filming, and would run at speeds up to ISO fps. It weighed 6,5 Kg without the magazine, and had the traditional layout of the old Arriflex 3S mm, cameras, with a slanting displacement magazine on top of the body, rather than the coaxial magazine directly behind the body of the BL series and the 53S camera. There was also a new Arriflex 65 mm. camera called the 765 introduced in 1990. This also had the old Arri Ilex layout with mirror reflex shutter. However, it was much heavier at 32 Kg., and also appreciably noisier than the other contemporary Arriflex cameras, with noise of 25 dBA at I metre from the camera. It would run up to 100 Ips.
There was a new model of the Moviecam in 1991, replacing the Super Am erica model. This was called the 'Compact1, and it was indeed a bit smaller and lighter than the previous model, weighing only 6.3 Kg with lens and film, but it contained no significant new features. The tighter weight and smaller size gave it a real advantage for use on a Steadicam mount, which was very important given the Increasing use of this device.
Panavision brought out a new high speed model in 1991 called the Panastar. This was just like the existing models, but could be run at up to 1 20 fps (frames per second) in forward and reverse. The major Panaflex camera through the 'nineties continued to be the Platinum model, until Panavision introduced the Millennium Panaflex in 1999, Although this latter camera had a reworked body that was a nit smaller and lighter (39,4 lb.) than the previous model, it was basically the same as far as genera! layout and mechanics and film movement. There were more internal electronics for speed and shutter control, and some improvements in the viewfinder system and the video assist, all the kind of things that the competition from Arriflex had been doing earlier. Us top film speed remained at 50 fps.
The French Aaton camera company dropped the pretentious dicresis on the second letter of their name at the beginning of the decade, and from this point on
347
their cameras were just Aalons. (Both forms of the name meant nothing, but were apparently just intended to put the company at the head of any alphabetical listing in a noticeable way.) Their new 35 mm. camera, which had a similar construction to the 16 mm. model, had some use during the decade in Europe, but in general made little headway in the feature film industry, as although U had a lower physical profile than other cameras, it was no lighter than the Moviecam Compact, and also it was rather noisier than the competition. However, the 16 mm Aaton, now called the XTR model, was used by many cinema vcritc practitioners such as Frederick Wiseman, In 1992 a model called the X-Prod was introduced which took Panavision PL mount lenses, and in 1999 Aaton came out with a new 16mm. camera called the A-Minima. This used the same movement as the other Aaton cameras, but it had a new body that was much smaller than the others, being 9.7 inches long, 5.5 inches high, and 4.4 inches wide. This was possible because it only took 200 loot daylight loading spools in its magazine. It weighed only 4 lbs. all up, including an onboard battery that would take through I hours worth of film. The motor would run from 2 to 50 Ips, and it also had a built-in intervalometcr for time-lapse photography. It was cheap, too, at around SI 5,000.
There was some activity amongst special purpose cameras, with new small 35 mm. cameras called the Robings SL, which only weighed 6 lbs when fully loaded, and was used on Strange Buys (1995) for the long POV shots which were basic to that films plot. The Clairmont Camera Co. adapted some Mitchell GC cameras from the late 'fifties giving them a mirror reflex shutter. The point about these was their extremely low height of 6 3/4 inches, which was useful forgetting them into small spaces, or for having cars
drive over them.
in 1990 there was a new high speed 35 mm. camera from the General Camera Corporation - the image 300and then in 1992 the Wilcam company made the Wilearn \1 for Clairmont Camera. Both had pin registration, and both would go up to 300 fps. In this area the competition was the Photosonics 4ER from the previous decade, which would do 360 Tps. The really significant use of these cameras came later in the decade, when science fiction films like ThcMouix made much play with slow motion acrobatics.
Photosonics, the longest established firm making >low^ motion cameras, also introduced a new extreme high speed reflex camera in 1992T the 4B/4C, which would run at 2,500 fps, though without pin registration, and with of course a rotating prism shutter,
in 1993 the VVilcam company also made some new VfciaVision cameras for hire by the Clairmont Camera Co. These were the W7 and the VV9, which were for shooting
34$
without sound, and would nun aL .speeds from 2 to 200 fps in the case of the first; and 2 to 100 fps in the case of the second. There was also the W11 for synch, sound shooting, which would run at 24, 25 or 30 fps, and was not as quiet as it might have been, producing 24 dBA at 3 metres. All these cameras were provided with a range of lenses from 28 mm. to 135 mm.
Messing with the Camera
The interna) interconnection between camera speed and shutter an^Jc in the Arri 535 and subsequent models of the Arri cameras made it easier to compensate for the change in exposure resulting from speed changes of the camera during a shol> Such changes in camera speed, from normal motion to slow motion or accelerated motion, or vice versa, became increasingly fashionable during the "nineties. As a result, the technique acquired.a special name in the United .States, and came ro be described as 'ramping' the camera speed. However, this new internal electronic control was not necessary to this technique, as the first famous and intentionally noticeable use of it occurred in Raging Bull in I9S0, before such advanced camera features were available. The change in aperture to compensate for the camera speed change could still be done by hand, as it was then. And these interna I elect ionic controls of speed and shutter angle, etc. were not foolproof, as a lag in the reaction of the system to changes made, to the speed sometimes occurred under certain conditions,
Another new camera trick involved shooting scenes with the shutter angle reduced from its usual ISOdegree opening to 90 or 45 degrees. The effect of this is nhat fast moving objects appear as a scries of sharply defined shapes on the film frame, instead of having a certain amount of blurring out in the direction-of their motion. In other words, the illusion of smooth movement of fast moving objects across the screen is disrupted^ for the film audience. The first notable use of this technique in feature films occurred; in Saving Private ftydn (199% where it was applied to some battle scenes. The intention, as describedJby the cameraman Janusz Kaniinski in American Cinematcgwpher^ugusi 1998), was to create"... a definite sense Of urgency and reality," Now, this technique possibly creates something like a sense of urgency, but it has nothing to do with a sense of reality, since all the cameras used to film the World War 11 all had shutters fixed at ISO degrees (or nearby), so the effect does not occur in actual footage From, the Normandy landings or anywhere else. The technique was purely expressive, like other things that Spielberg and Kaminski dkt on this film and that had already been used by others. These include shooting some of the footage with uncoated* lenses, as done by David Watkinin The Charge of the Light Brigade (I96S),
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
and adding extra vibration mechanically and optically to the cameras in the battle scenes, as had been previously done in The Pock (1996). Another technique Spielberg used was to have the camera shutters put slightly out of synchronism with the film pull-down mechanism, so that there was a vertical streaking of the-high lights i n the image, as previously in Full Metal jacket (I9S7). So Spielberg piled them all up, and audiences seemed to like it. Actually, defective font age that was taken with a shaking or out-of-focus camera was in general not included in newsrecls during World War II so there is no sense of reality in such methods from this point of view either. An "illusion of reality' for present-da v audiences, maybe.
Although it is strictly outside my concerns here, I can't help remarking on another aspect of this and other recent war films in their treatment of reality. This is that the troops on the beach, the parachutists dropping, the planes flying overhead, and so on, arc shown as packed far closer together than they were in reality back in World War II. This tendency was by no means so marked in the war films made in the 'fifties and "sixties, presumably because so many of the fil m-makcrs then had actually been around during World War 111 Careful inspection of the archive news re el footage docs show how it actually was in those days, but this kind of realism is quite incompatible with the stylistic development of entertainment film-making in recent times. What is desired in this area is more visual and sound jolts per millisecond, and excess in every possible way.
Camera Lenses
There were no major developments in ordinary lenses for cinematography in the decade, but a certain amount of updating of designs from the major firms. Cooke Ecpm lenses continued to be made by Taylor-Mob son, with a neu IS-100mm. Varotal model appearing in 1992 and a new 25 250 mm, Cmetal model in 1993. But in !99S Cooke Optics Ltd, became an independent company, so going against the general trend of industrial consolidation into larger and larger companies, and they marked this occasion with a return to making fixed focal length prime lenses. Cooke Optics also took over the continued production of the zoom lenses. The new S4 series had a maximum aperture of T2, and focal lengths of 18 mm., 25 mm.s 32 mm,, 50 mm., 75 mm., and 100 mm. The company also continued to design and make lenses for others over this decade. For instance, they produced a new series of anamorphic zoom lenses for the Technovision brand in 1992; specifically 18-90 mm T2.3, 25-2SO mmT T2.3, and IS.5-55.5 mm T2+4 lenses*
Carl Zeiss continued to make lenses exclusively for if& Arri cameras, and in 1995 added a scries of what they called variable;prime lenses. These had local lengths that could be
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
varied over a very short 2:1 range, so could not reasonably be described as 'zoom' lenses. The advantage to this was that they could be almost the same sii:c, and have almost as little distortion, as ordinary fixed focus lenses, and also hove a larger maximum aperture of T2.2. The focal length j^jngc of the three lenses in this group went in three steps from 16 mm. to 105 mm.
Angénieux zoom lenses also continued to be made, and a new zoom labelled the H R for Super-16 filming was Introduced in 1998, It had a focal length from 7-81 mm and a maximum aperture of T2,4, The wide angle end of its range at 7 mm. was the shortest focal length available in a zoom lens, which was a definite advantage, as was its extended zoom range. Super 16 filming became more important in the 'nineties, and there was little point now in an optical company producing new lenses that just covered the ordinary 16 mm, frame area. Super ]£ lenses from the Russian Optica company were being imported into other countries from 1995. The range ran from S mm. to 50 mm. with a maximum aperture of T 1.31 and also included a rather unadventurous 25-80 mm, zoom with a maximum aperture of T3.3. Century Precision Optics in the United States made a better contribution to covering the extreme wide-angle end of Super 16 filming with their 6mm, T 1,9 lens in 1995. In 1999 Optex did even better, with a range of Super- \6 wide-angle lenses of focal lengths 4 mm,, 5. S mm, and S mm,, all with maximum aperture ol fl.9.
Russia was also involved in a new range of anamorphic lenses for 35 mm. filming marketed under the name Hawk in 1997. The design for these was done in Russia, but the lenses were actually made in Germany by the Ro den stock optica) company. Focal lengths ran from 25 mm. to 100 mm. with a maximum aperture of T2,2, and then with some longer lenses going the rest of the way to 250 mm. with a maximum aperture of T3. These were well received, and used on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1991), amongst other films,
There was a flurry of development in the area of specialised lenses, with the introduction of a new group oi lenses with swivelling mounts, It is not clear what caused the revival of this idea, which had been used in the late 'thirties as part of the interest in getting greater depth of field, as described on page 229. With 500 El film stock widely used, and good wide-angle lenses readily avai lable, Gregg Toland type deep focus would be no problem in the nineties. Perhaps the contemporary habit of working near maximum aperture was so ingrained that this approach W*s not considered. In any case, the Clairmont Camera Company announced in 1992 what they called 'swing/ shift" lenses with 24mm,, 28mm., and 35 mm. lenses in special mounts in which the lens could be rotated off its
349
axis. Focussing was by moving the front part of the lens on tracks. Panavision also came out with its own lenses of this type, which they called 'slant focus' lenses, which term gives a better idea of bow the idea worked. They had a 45 mm T2.S Tor ordinary 35 mm. filming, and a 90 mm. T4.5 Tor anamorphic use. Possibly provoked by the independent Bergcrson company putting a scries of Nikon still camera lenses in tilt mounts with an Arri PL fitting Arri eventually produced its own 'shift and tilt" lens system in 1996. One common situation where the staggered depth of field of tilting lenses was useful is when filming two people sifting side by side in a car. Frequently one wants to get a shot from about 45 degrees to the line joining them - it would be an over the shoulder shot if they were facing each other - and keep them both in focus. Using a very wide an^le lens to get greater depth of field to achieve this brings with ii a certain amount of perspective distortion, and a swinging or tilting lens of normal focal length avoids this. Certainly this is one ol the ways that swing/shift lenses were used when they became available again in this decade, though it was not how they were used when they were first invented in the 'thirties.
There was new activity in another area of specialized lens design, This was in the production ol what were called in the nineteen-sixties ^snorkel1, or probe, or periscope lenses. These lenses were mounted on the end oi a long tube, either in line with the tube axis, or at right angles to iL In the latter case there was a prism or mirror included to turn the image through ninety degrees. The extension tube has to include extra relay or field lenses inside itself to maintain the focus of the lens used. The point of this device was to film inside very constricted spaces, particularly small-scale three-dimensional models, as desired in the production of some commercials. It was usual to use a wide angle lens on the device, and this pruduces an even more striking wide-angle deep focus visual effect than il the same lens was mounted directly on the camera. These lenses had a restricted maximum aperture off 11 at best.
As the competition to spice up feature films with ever more striking shots increased, this sort of lens moved into feature film production. So in 1995 Panavision introduced a new version of this kind of lens, called the Frazier Jems system, after the Australian wild-Life cameraman Jim Frazier, who had worked it out lor his own filming of insect* I the like. His design bad lbt main fens mounted on two ;jveiling joints that could rotate independently of each ther through 360 degrees at the tip of the extension tube. This could put the taking lem at any desired angle relative to the camera body. Any rotation of these joints inevitably produced a rotation of the image, and this wa* competed for bv a special prism at the back end of the system which
ant
swjv o
i
350
routed -die image back to vertical. The adapted still camera lenses used en the device gave a maximum aperture of T7, ivhich was another significant advance. Eventually all the movements of the system were motorized, so it could he used when motion control was required for special effects compositing. The Frazier system was used on Titanic (1997). Men in Black (1991), Saving Private Ryan (1998)., and Love is the Devil, amongst other features made in the late "nineties. The success of the Frazier system-prompted other manufacturers to produce very similar [ens systems at the end of the decade.
Love is i he Devi! (John Maybury, 199S) also tried a few other kinds of camera tricks to produce a film equivalent to the distortions hi the paintings of Francis Bacon, who was the subject of this fiction feature. The former British avant-garde film-maker John Maybury borrowed from his more famous avant-garde predecessors such devices as removing the camera shutter, and replacing il with rotating vanes on an electric drill liejd hi front of the lens, and shooting through the bottom of a glass ashtray, as the great Brakhage had done long beforeH But actually most of the quasi-Baconian visual sty lings of Love is thc Devil were done by lighting the scenes with a well-placed top light, pi us a fair am ou n t o f 1 c ns d i ffu sion.
The movements of the Zeitgeist hadtheClairmont Camera Company in the United States producing a commercial methods for creating the 'through an ashtray3 or fun-bouse mirror !kihd of effect, simultaneously with the production of Love is the Deri A This was. their Ls qui shy lensJ, which produced a wobbly image surrounding a clear tindistortcd area. The distorted shapes it produced could be altered and moved around:, up to a point, by controls mounted1 on the lens, Of course this ikind of device was becoming fairly pointless as It is much easier to do. this sort of =thing with computer graphics manipulation, as anyone with a decent image editing program on their computer knows.
Camera Supports
Ittc only really new idea :in devices for supporting a movie camera, was the Cinesaddle, a cheap Australian invention.thatbecamc available in other countries in 1$90. This was a.canvas bag about 40'tin. each way, loosely filled with plasticgranules, rather I ikea small version of the "bean bag ehair^ofthe sixties, It could$t piauedion any surface, irregular or not, and tlienacamera couldf be plumped down into it to point in the appropriate direction. It allowed smooth rotations of the camera over small angles, and could' also be tied down with.die supplied:ropesi* make a quick carhood moumfor car shots, Other related.trieks were also possible with the device.
Od^wiseiherc wer.cnom^prdevelbprnentsin camera
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
supports in the 'nineties, just somewhat improved versions of existing devices. The Steadicam patents expired around 1994 in the United States, and in 1997 a copy of the concept was marketed as the Glide Cam. At first only a lightweight version taking small cameras was sold, though heavy dutv models were announced. It does not seem to have been taken up for feature film-making to any great extent in the 'nineties. In 1991 a device called the Pogocam was produced, which was very like the central support post and gimbal section of thc Stcadicam. That is, it was a vertical rod with a pivoted hand grip in the middle, to which the camera attached at the top with a small video assist on it, and a long dumbell shaped counterweight at the bottom of the rod+ Other similar devices also appeared subsequently, but unlike thc original Stcadicam, they did not prove very important.
Dollies made by the German Panther company were already made with digital control of their movements, and were preferred lor motion control use. There was a fair amountofactivity amongstsmaller manufacturers producing new and improved hot heads, though the only significant innovation was adding an extra degree of rotation. This could be of some use occasionally, hut not a lot in general. New jib arms to carry cameras on hot heads also appeared, and Lhe most successful of these was the Technoerane made by the Technovision company, and introduced at die beginning of the decade in Europe. Th is had a jib arm which could extend out to 21 feet. This and other similar cranes ■were an improvement on the Lou ma crane in that they were more rigid, and that their movement could be more precisely controlled, which made diem more suitable for use with electronic motion control,, which was being used more and more for special effects on films as the years went 'by. In 1999 even bigger cranes for use with cameras on hoi heads appeared having an even greater reach. These were die Super Aero crane which could extend to 40 ft carrying a hot head, and the Swissjib which went out to 43 ft.
Elaborate methods of getting aerial travelling shots continued to be devised, with the camera suspended on a moving platform on cables between pylons, as in the Skyman and Cablecam systems invented at the beginning of the decade. Helicopter mounts like thc Wescam and the very similar Spacecam continued to be frequently used; particularly in the United States, and in 1994 Cine-Hove ream came out with a small Pegasus remote-controlled helicopter to do the same kind of job.
70mm, and Special Formats
Inhere was very little use of shooting on 6S/70 mm. film for ordinary feature film-makino during the 'nineties. The only examples were, firstly, for and Away (1992), which was
ElhMSTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
not completely shot on 65 mm. negative, but incorporated sections shot on 3 S mm. an amorphic negative which were ihon blown up to 70mm. for thc prime show prints. There u'crc some complaints about the quality of this, and even more so about the quality of the 6-track sound for the film. The second example was Kenneth Branagh's Hamht (1996), which was shot completely on 6S mmŕ, and which was much more satisfactory. Despite using a certain amount of long take moving camera, Branagh kept the Average Shot Length down to 6 seconds by pretty fast cutting in many of the dialogue scenes.
The main use Tor 70 mm. film was in film-making for what were called the special format venues, These cinemas had one form or another of very large screens, were often part of museums or theme parks, and had films made exclusively for them. The most numerous of them used the I MAX format, established in 1970, which shot on 65 mm. negative moving sideways through thc special cameras for the process, which had 15 perforation pull-down. The resulting size of the film frame is 50 mm by 70 mm., and die finished film was projected by an entirely novel form of projector which used a rolling loop system without pulldown claws or sprockets. This type of movement greatly reduced the wear and scratching on the film prints, which would have been very serious with the ordinary type of projector mechanism when images are being shown with such large viewing angle to the audiences in the special theatres used for the process. Thc IMAX company also bad another process called OMNI M AX, which used the same large film, but was filmed with a 130 degree fish-cyc lens, and then the image was projected onto a hemispherical domed screen in a special auditorium. Other processes included Shows can, which used 70 mm. film shot at 60 frames per second rather than 24 fps., and various forms of 360 degree projection. These latter either used multiple cameras photographing adjoining sectors of the full circle, or a special lens taking a single image ring shaped image of the surrounding scene within a square frame on 70 mm. film with 10 perforation pull down, Thc image was projected back onto a circular screen by a special lens pointing straight down into the centre of the circle, but only emitting the image around the edge of thc lens. Although invented by Ernst Hciniger as 'Swissorama', this process was manufactured and marketed by the Iwcrks company in the United States as Imagine 360.
Most films made for these special formats were nonaction, just like the original Cinerama, and the few that were action films were only about 30 minutes in length. Unlike í he special format films that appeared at the Montreal Expo in 1567, these more rccĽnt special formats had no effect on ordinary film-making
35]
Motion Control
The increased use of elaborate composite shots, done cither the old way in the optical printer, or in a computer as was happening more and more, meant that motion control of camera movements became more and more important. A desire to show ofr this technique, and also the virtuosity of actor Michael Keaton, resulted in Multiplicity in 1996. At the peak of this, Michael Keaton acted with three copies of himself within the one frame, in shots that included a fair amount of camera movement. The technology had advanced to the point that, by recording the images from the video assist on the camera, a composite showing the potential final result from the combined takes could be played back almost immediately. This indicated whether further attempts would be needed to get perfect interplay within the shot between thc versions of KeatWs character. Or course, the final composite shot actually used for the film was created afterwards in the usual way from the separate film negatives that had been shot. This technique did have production costs, as about 60 technicians were on set to run the motion control lor all oFtliis. Gut on thc other hand, in this particular case you were getting four actors for the price of one.
By 1999, in Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, motion control was used on almost all the shots, regardless of whether particular special effects were planned for them or not. Thc idea was that if it seemed appropriate to add unplanned special effects afterwards, it could be done. This total motion control was based On features of the Arri 535 and 435 cameras that have been mentioned above. That is, the camera speed in fps, thc shutter-angle, time-code and footage information, and this data was output through the camera's serial data port. The Arri Controlled Lens Motors used already had encoders in them to note their positions, and simple encoders were attached to the -tripod head and the dolly, along the lines already used for motion control of these devices. All this data was fed into a centra) Universal Data Capture fUDC) box. Inside the UDCt the separate pieces of information were combined and correlated to thc camera shutter pulse. For each frame exposed by the camera, the UDC sends out a message which includes the following information: frame number, time code number, userbits dumber, feet-per-second, Gutter angle, tripod pan, tripod tilt, tripod roll, dolly track, doily height, and dolk spar*. This data was translated then into a lormat that'Industrial Light and Magic computers could deal with when the special effects, including the CGI characters in the
scene, were created.
A*) the footage of Star Wars Episode One: The Fhumo*
Menace was digitized.
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Computer Digital Effects
At the beginning of the 'nineties, special effects compositing was still being done almost entirely in the traditional manner in optical printers. In 1990, a successful film that absolutely depended on special effects, like Ghost} could still be entirely done with the old methods, and very well, at that. The leading edge of the use of computer graphics in film in this year was The Abyss, which had a few shots including a computer generated creature that consisted of a fairly simple moving watery amoeboid form with simulated reflections in it. The very small number of other examples in this year also consisted of dropping a three dimensional computer graphic into an ordinary scene. Otherwise, there was a small amount of wire removal from shots of suspended models and the like, which had already been done wTith computer methods for a year or so.
F ui ■ thcr developm e n t of com pu tcr man i pu ] a t i on. ol seen e s shot on film had to wait for the development of devices to sequentially scan and digitize the images on motion picture film' at a high enough resolution to capture most of the visual information in them. This happened in 1993, with the introduction of Kodak's Cincon scanner, which scanned at 4,000 lines per inch, and Quantel's Domino system, which included a scanner and1 recorder working at 2,900 lines per inch. However the compositing in the Domino system worked at 28SG by 2048 pixels.
The scanning speed1 of libe Kodak device was about 2 seconds per frame. It should :be pointed out tihat there -is information involving very fine detail in the image on film, that even scanning at 4,000 lines per inch does not pick up, but it was judged that this was not essential to the entertainment version of reality used; in fiction films. There was also a problem in handling the immense amounts of computer data generated by scanning at even 4;0G0 lines per inch, flilp to 9.4 Megabytes per film frame.) In fact as things developed over the next several years, there was a general tendency to only work at 2;QD0 lines per inch for film purposes, the film recorder (dubbed-the Lightning) for the Cincon system took 10-seconds to record one frame back to film-There were already other high resolution film recorders available to lake the results 6f computer generation and manipulation of imagery back onto film, so from 1993 onwards the use of GGi (Computer Generated: Imagery,) in feature film increased fairly quickly, even though the priee-of these systems was in the region of V to 2 million dollars, and the chafes lor using them correspondingly high. As other makes of film scanners and recorders,became available over themext several years, and as the cost of faster and. laster computers to. <lo the digital work dropped the amount of computer graphics work done on feature fil
ms
FILM STYLE AND TECFINOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
increased. By 199S, the first telecine working in real time at a resolution of 2000 lines per inch (the Philips Spirit) became available, and it was possible to digitize the entire footage of a film ftkasantvilh) for computer treatment and then record it back to film, which was certainly not practical five years before.
Time Stands Still
These new methods for the computer treatment of film images made another development possible. This was the simultaneous photography of a scene with a linear array of closely spaced still cameras, and then the turning of these images into a sequence of frames on film. With about 100 still cameras, which was common for this technique, one obtains 4 seconds of screen time, which shows a fairly fa si track along or around what appears as a frozen moment in time. If the scene includes what would be fast moving objects in real time, such as people running, or pigeons taking off, the effect is extremely striking. The duration of the effect can be extended and manipulated by making a computer graphics interpolation of more intermediate frames between the actual frames Trom the still cameras. The possibility of doing this was created by the recent advances in computer digital graphics. The technique was dubbed 'time slice', and was used in many commercials and pop videos from 1995 onwards by people who worked in this area, such as Tim McMillan, Emmanuel Carlier, and Michel Gondry. A refinement of this technique was to have a motion picture camera at the beginning and end of the array, so that normal motion in the scene could be made to lead seamlessly into the effect. For feature films, the first significant outing for these methods wasin The Matrix (\ 999). This film also used an extension of the technique, which was to have the still cameras fired in very rapid sequence, rather than simultaneously. If a row of 96 cameras are fired successively at 1 thousandth of a second intervals, the resulting sequence ol frames at 24 frames per second runs 4 seconds, and is the same as if it had been filmed by a camera running at 1000 frames per second while it travelled down the length of the array of cameras. This effect is exactly the same as an extreme slow motion shot with a very rapidly moving camera, though actually doing it that way would hi extremely impractical.
A further refinement m this particular film was to shoot these effects with a circular array of cameras shooting the action at going on at their centre, through holes in a surrounding circular green screen, rather than filming with a linear array of cameras on a real location or set. The film resulting from the shoot was combined with the image of a synthetic set created with three dimensional computer graphics, and which matched1 the movement of the apparent
fUMSTYLE AND TECFINOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
camera filming the scene. More of the details of this can be read in the article TeehnoBaber on pages 46 to 55 in African Cinematographer (April 1999, Vol. 80, Mo. 4)
Motion Capture
Motion capture, as a means ofgetting realistic movement into computer generated and animated figures, was only just starting in 1990. As a guide to the computer animators, this technique uses actual humans to perform the movements that 3rC going to be done by the figures to be created by three-dimensional computer animation. In the early development of this technique, the actors wore black tights with white ping-pong balls attached to them at key points such as their joints and extremities, and their movements were recorded on video from several angles, From these recordings, the co-ordinates of their key points could be transferred into the three-dimensional computer animation program as a guide to the animation of synthetic figures. One could view it as the equivalent of the rotoscoping process which has long been used as a guide for animators working in two-dimensional drawn animation. A primitive version of this technique was used in Total Recall for the only scene in the film involving computer graphics, but it was rapidly refined, and used more and more as the decade went on.
Straight Out of the Funny Pages
Live-action films based on comic strips date way back, at least to the nincteen-twenties, but it was only during the 'nineties that a conscious attempt was made to base the design of films on the design of the images in the comic books which provided their source material. The important year was I9S9, when Batman was an immense commercial success. Less successful was the lower budget Captain Mcrica, directed by Albert Pyun, though it also did its best to reproduce the look of its source comic strip, The next major entry, Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) was less close to its inspiration. The original Dick Tracy comic strip was a poor model for pictorial design, since its frames were packed with dialogue balloons which over powered the composition. The only significant visual feature that stood out was that Dick Tracy himself was frequently drawn in profile in foreground Close Up, In fact, back in the early clays of the strip, he was only drawn in profile. Much more recently, Chester Gould still drawing Tracy in profile Close Up about once every six frames, and the speech balloons were still fairly dense. But in contrast, the film only manages six profile Close Ups of Dick Tracy in approximately 1,500 shots, and this .is an index of how little it owes to the comic strip as m as design is concerned. Of course, Warren Beatty does n*t really have the right nose (a broken hawk-nose) for the P^t, and would hardly want to spend all his time side-on to
3S3
the camera anyway. The impossibly grotesque heads of the various villains, which tended to be geometricallv aligned with the frame in the comic strip, lose some of that quality in the film. Actually the design of the film Dick T^cjismore about the idea of comic strip design. The film compositions rely on large simply shaped areas of primary colour applied to the sets and costumes, either directly, or with coloured lighting, in a way that does not occur in the source strip.
When Tim Burton came to make Batman Returns (1992), he inevitably used his new production power to turn h away from the original comic strip towards his own visual stvlc as much as possible. The production design for the sections dealing with the world of The Penguin' arc very visibly based on Burtnn's own illustrative style, and indeed the component of his own personal monochrome drawing style deriving from the ait of Edward Corey comes through very strongly in these parts of the film.
Younger directors were more concerned to get the real look of 'graphic novels', as comic books with pretensions arc called in recent times. Alex Proyas with his 1992 film based on The Crow comic book series, and Danny Cannon, with the \99S Judge Dradd, were obviously concerned to get a close reproduction of the look of their original sources, and Proyas later produced Dark City in 1998, which managed to look like a graphic novel that had not yet been written and drawn,
Then there were the live-action movies derived from the cheap TV animation of the 'fifties and 'sixties such as Roris and Natasha (1992) and The Flimstones (1994), of which the less said, the better.
Film Sound
During the ninetoen-nineties digital methods took over the treatment of sound in films even more completely than on the visual side. This was inevitable, as the amount of information in the sound track is vastly less than that in the film, or even video, picture, Hence it is far easier to store sound and manipulate it in digital form in a computer.
In ihe 'nineties the situation in the film dubbing theatres completely changed. Computer industry developments meant that the latest hard disks and magneto-optica I disks had sufficient storage capacity to hold a workable amuunt of digital sound. This meant that proprietary systems using a computer-controlled disk recorder, used in conjunction with a mixing desk, began to replace working from sprocketed magnetic film on multiple replay machines when mixing film sound tracks. As In most of these areas in the last couple of decades, television practice- led film practice. The first company in the field was AM 5 with their Audiofile system, but others such $ Fairlight and the DAK SoundStation M joined in qukkly at the end of the VightieS.
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES \     WM ST)U AND TECHNOL0OYIN THE NINETIES
ghg SoundStation incorporated the 'WordnV program for automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) mentioned in the previous chapter. This computer program could mould specially recorded replacement dialogue or dialogue from alternative takes to exactly fit with the unsatisfactory sync, dialogue originally recorded with the picture. This was much faster than the traditional trial and error method of having an actor record the replacement dialogue over and over again, till it approximately fitted the Hp movements in the picture.
Diaital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like those mentioned basically comprised a computer controlling their functions, a hard disk or magneto-optica I disk carrying the digital sound recording, and extra electronics to provide the processing power to handle operations on the digital sound files. These were essentially printed circuit boards with extra microchips; in particular digital signal processing chips (DSPs). In the 'nineties, the processor in the computer was not powerful enough to carry out signal processing in realtime as well'as control functions. DAWs were being extensively.used in Hollywood and elsewhere lor sound mixing and editing by 1993. These DAWs were sold as complete turnkey systems by their manufacturers, but computer developments meant that the circuit boards and dedicated software could be sold separately to be fitted into standard PCs and Macintoshes, so turning them into digital audio workstations that were completely equivalent to the turnkey systems, and much cheaper. The company that was most successful'at this in the 'nineties was Digidesign with their ProTools board and software packages, and indeed their system became the film industry standard for laying and editing sound tracks by the end of the decade.
Mixing des ks a I so sh i f ted I to b ecomc co mpletcly d igi t a I i n operation during the 'nineties, to go with the developments in the ancillary equipment just mentioned.
Microphones
The major producers of microphones for film sound recording, namely Sennhcisor and AKG, introduced now versions of their capacitor microphones in the eighties. This was necessary because their best microphones had also'bcen used for music recording, andthe adoption df digital music recording, with its anility to capture a greater dynamic range of sound, required: microphones that likewise could5capture a greater dynamic range. A KG,, with its CMS Svstem of microphones in 19S3, was first off the mark, Wicseiollowcd the established AKG .practice of having separate capsules containing the diaphragm units with different directional responses, which could be screwed on to the base tube that contained the pre-amplifier.  SehmWr also followed its own practice of keeping its,tppquality models with integral
construction, with the preamplifier inside a single tube below the capsule, though they did copy the AKG approach for a cheaper range as well. Their new cardioid response pattern microphone, the MKH-40, came out in 198$ followed by the MK11-20 cmni-directional and MKM-3Q figure-of-eight, through to the MKH-50 supercardioid in I9S9. These microphones all had the same frequency range as before, but had lower self-noise generated internally, and could handle a greater sound pressure level (-SPL), so extending the dynamic range of sound with which they could effectively cope. In the 'nineties, AKG introduced a new modular system of microphones, the Blue Line, and then a replacement for their top CMS system mentioned above in 1997, which was made upoftheC480B body and the CK6I, CK62, CK63 and CK69 capsules, which had respectively cardioid, omni-directional, hyper cardioid, and ultra-directional (shotgun) responses.
Lapel or lavalier microphones for concealing about the person of actors when it was impossible, to get a microphone on a boom in close were also improved. These continued to be exclusively operate with the electret type of capacitor diaphragm unit. The radio transmitters which were nearly always needed for use with these microphones were also improved, with a switch to diversity or multiple channel operation, and eventually to using UH'F rather than VHP transmission, The main driving force in this area was television and stage work. By the 'nineties all stage musicals used amplification with radio mikes on all their singers, and this produced smaller and smaller units, down to the Sennheiscr MKE 102 and 104, which were oniy 5 mm. in diameter and 10 mm. long in 1998. The other major manufacturers also produced similar microphones for these purposes, but film recordists did not necessarily go lor the smallest possible size. For instance, the TRAM TB-SO lavalier was quite often used, which was a flat unit about 7 mm. by 13 mm. and 4 mm. thick, The extra size of its diaphragm gave it a slightly greater frequency range than the others, from 40 Hz to 16 KHz.
Stereophonic and Multi-channel Sound
The standard practice for the creation of stereophonic and multi-channel sound Tor motion pictures continued to be to record dialogue as monophonic tracks, and then to place them with respect to the position of the actors on the screen by panning them electrically during the sound track mixing for the Finished film. However, music and background sound atmospheres were recorded stereophonic ally, as these could not be given a satisfactory i m i t ation of ste re o p bony duri ng d u bbi ng. Tr u e s terc 0 pho n ic recording of music was ordinarily done with a crowed stereophonic pair of microphones - usually two identical
3SS
microphones with a cardioid response pattern set at 90 decrees (X-Y stereo) to each other to give the left and right stereo channels. However, there were other possibilities, and a lmid-side' (MS) arrangement was sometimes used, particularly for field recording of atmospheres. This method used a cardioid microphone pointing straight forward, and a figure-of-eight response pattern aligned so that its two response lobes pointed straight out to each side, The output of the two microphones could be combined electrically to recreate the simple left and right channel stereo effect. This arrangement was particularly favoured for television, even for single voice recording, as it fitted well with the way the ftlCAM stereo sound system used for television worked. However, it did not work well with the Dolby matrix (the base of the Dolby encoding system), so was not taken up for film purposes, which stayed with the X-Y microphone arrangement.
Recording Machines
At the beginning of the 'nineties film sound was still being recorded with the existing analogue recorders, principally the Nagra IV, but a new small form of digital audio recorder had appeared at the end of the 'eighties using the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) standard. DAT recorders are like a miniature version of a video cassette recorder, with special1 metal particle coated tape 3,31 mm. wide carried in a very small cassette. The tape runs past two rotating heads on a small drum of 30 mm. diameter which is inclined at a small angle to the tape travel, like a helical scan video recorder, However, unlike video recorders, the tape is only in contact with the scanning heads and drum through an angle of 90 degrees. The analogue audio signal coming into the recorder was sampled and quantized in the usual way, with sampling rates of 32k IP/,, 44,1kHz, and 48 kHz, These DAT recorders were not suitable for film synchronised recording, as they lacked any built-in form of time code.
The most important DAT recorder .suitable for film recording was the Fostex PD-2, which was used for feature film recording from 1993. This was a version of the Fostex D-20 made by the Japanese Fostex company, which had appeared in 1990, but with added provision for recording film-typo time code with the sound signal. The PD-2 had dimensions 96 x 307 x 216 mm. (3.75 x 12 x 8-5 inches), weighed 10 lbs. and cost a bit under 510,000. At the same lime, another DAT recorder suitable for film recording was deducedhy the Swiss company Stellavox, which had a long history of making quality sound recorders. Their Stelladat smaller, but more expensive, at S 12,000-15,000, spending on how many extra modules were installed. The Swiss Nagra company, makers of the analogue Nagra IV machine, which had dominated film recording up to this
Fostex PD-4 DA T recorder
point, more or less simultaneously came out with their own unique digital recorder, the Nagra-D. This was heavier, larger, and more expensive, weighing 20 lbs,, and costing $29,000. It did not follow the DAT standard and tape drive mechanism, hut one devised by the Nagra company itself, using 1/4 inch tape, and it had a large head drum with ISO degree wrap of the tape, it weighed 20 lbs, which was heavier than the Nagra IV, and since it was also a hit bigger than the older machine, it could not be used slung on the shoulder in the traditional way, It recorded 4 tracks o! sound, unlike the other portable DAT recorders, which could only record two tracks, and it used a 20 bit word lengthr also unlike the DAT recorders, which had 16 bit sound. This meant that it could record a larger dynamic range of sound levels than the DAT recorders, although these in their turn could record a larger dynamic range than the older analogue recorders,
A new portable DAT recorder was introduced ill the end of 1993 by the English HHB company, which specialised in digital recording equipment for the music industry. This was called the Portadat, and was a bit smaller and lighter than the Fostex PD-2, In fact, it was 240 mm- by 177 mm. by 86 mm., and weighing 2.5 Kg. The Portadat model with time-code built in, the PDR J000TC, was substantially cheaper than the Fostex machine, and immediately made a big impression on the lower end of the film and TV market. In response to this, in 1995 the FosUx DAT recorder was upgraded to the PD-4 model, which was basically the same as the PD-2, bul had slightly less features, and was cheaper at 14,295,
Problems with DAT recorders were the Jragihty ol the tape, and tape and bead misalignment, which meant mat recordings made on one machine could often not be played back on another. Nevertheless, the digital machines Look over ihough film sound recordists all used a back-up analogue machine as well § a year or two, liH the new medium had proved Stsdi.
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In. the latter end of the 'nineties, many big films were recorded on non-portable S~ trade digital recorders of the kind long used in music recording, such as the Tascam
Having lost their dominant position in the industry to Fostcx, Nagra tried: again in 1997 with a completely new Approach, die Nagra ARES-C recorder. This used 64 Mb !>CMCJA computer flash memory cards as recording medium, instead of tape., and thc recording was digitally compressed1 to get a sufficient a mount onto a memory card. It could give 2 hrs. of monophonic recording. It was modelled after earlier Nagras in general physical layout, but the cost of the memory cards and the digital compression meant that it was not generally used for feature film production.
Cinema Digital Sound Systems
The CDS (Cinema Digital Sound) sound system that was introduced in 1990 has already been described in the previous chapter This system required separate distribution prints with the digital track replacing the standard analogue sound track, and so film distribution organisations would need to stock a double inventory of prints for each film title, as most cinemas did: not have their projection converted to the special digital playback system required, This was fatal, as predicted, and it was displaced1 when Dolby Laboratories introduced their own system of digital sound recording on film prints, which they already had under development. This system, called Dolby Digital, recorded the digital information for S separate full frequency sound channels plus a channel for very low frequency sound information as a series of blocks made up of a matrix of microscopic dots between each sprocket hole on 35 mm. film. This meant that the film print could retain the ordinary soundtrack for theatres not equipped to play digital sounds The first film using this system was Batman Returns, released in 1992. The Sony company immediately joined'in with their own digital sound system for cinemas, tailed SDDS. This carried the digital information on the film print in two-new tracks lying between the outer edge of the sprocket holts and the edge of the film, on both-sides. If desired by the production company, film prints could carry these tracks as well as that for the Dolby digital system, and films using the SDDS system started with The Lust Action Hero in 1993. The final con> petitor so far in this area was'DTS (Digital Theatre Sound), which carried the digital sound, tracks on a compact disc (a CD)V which was;playcd in a special1 CD player in synchronism with the picture. Tlie synchronism was maintained by * very narrow synchronizing track squeezed into a small part Of the area of the film print containing the standard .analogue sound track. As the CD sound was read a couple of seconds ahead of the corresponding frame on the film, and
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
stored briefly in digital memory, any missing frames result, ing from print damage could be compensated for. This was an improvement on the original 1926 Warner Bros, sound-on-disc system, which this new system resembled in a very general sort of way. The first film using this system was Jurassic Fork in 1994. Obviously prints used for this system could also carry the other two systems if desired' and this is what has happened subsequently, though the Dolby Digital system is probably the most used.
Editing
During the ninelecn-nineties, digital video methods also took over in film editing Horn the traditional editing machines. These new machines were called in general 'Non-Linear Editors' or NLEs. Since 19S5, a small number of feature films had been edited on systems like Lasereditand Editdroid, which worked with tclccine record in gs of the film rushes transferred to laser video discs, which were put in video disc players controlled by a computer program. These systems were an improvement on the even earlier systems that used multiple video recorders carrying the rushes, but were still not handy enough to displace traditional editing methods. They were also much more costly to buy and to run, as the laser video discs had to be specially made, and the rushes for a complete film needed multiple laser players running simultaneously to contain them all.
Alternatives which recorded the video stream onlo hard discs controlled by a standard computer, had appeared in television production. The leader here was Avid Technologies, whose machines, called Media Composers, were introduced in 1989. They comprised purpose-built boxes for digitizing the input video, and for playing it tack on a computer screen, which was attached to an ordinary Apple Macintosh computer, and controlled by a special program running on the computer. This program used the Macintosh computer's graphic Interface to represent the sections or 'clips' of video being edited, and where they were with respect to each other in the sequence of the edit. Operations on them used the kind of 'cut and paste1 and fdrag and drop' operations controlled by a mouse which had become standard in computer word processing programs running on computers using graphical interfaces like the Macintosh. The Avid system was initially limited by the amount of video running time that could be stored, but this was solved, up to a point, by the company's development in 1991 of a standard method ofcompressing digital video, called Quicktime. The problem with using thc Avid system for film editing, rather than the video editing for winch it was designed, was that it intrinsically worked with 30 frames per second video on the American television standard, and would not work at thc 24 frames per second
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY JN THE NINETIES
need for film editing. In 1993 a 24 fps film option on the system was introduced, and Avid entered the film editing machine competition, with one or two feature films edited using the system in that year.
The general problem of storing reasonable amounts of video or film footage as digital data was solved with die development by the computer industry of improved methods of recording large quantities oMnia with effectively instantaneous random access. Computer hard discs had been rapidly increasing in capacity and speed, and a new NLE system called Lightworks was introduced in 1991 to take advantage of this. Thc Lightworks system would hold 100 minutes of digitized footage on internal hard discs in a computer, and was set up to work in a fairly analogous way to the procedures used by film editors working on traditional flat-bed editing machines, down to having a manual jog-sliuttJe control like that on a Steenbeck. This recommended it lo many film editors, and it was the major competitor to Avid till the end of the decade, when it rather faded.
For a short time at the beginning of the 'nineties, it seemed that magneto-optical fiVl-O) disc recorders might be a solution, as this was a bricTperiod when they had a greater capacity than removable hard drives, and Pioneer and others introduced M-0 drives with a capacity of around 6 Gb in 1992. This was large enough to hold about 30 minutes of uncompressed standard video footage, A company called Editing Machines Corporation used them in their EMC* system which came out the next year. Other companies such as Montage and D-Vision had similar systems that had some success too, but by the end of the decade the Avid system had practically swept the board. There were some , film editors and directors who Insisted on staying with film, hut producers preferred NLE systems, as they opened the possibility of not printing the rushes, but just taking the processed negative straight through teiecine to the NTLEt and so saving money, ft was also possible to cut down on the assistant editors who did much of the film handling in the traditional method of film editing.
Once editors hod mastered the non-linear editing systems, it was evident that one could edit faster with them, though many older editors were never happy with them.
Time Code
Non-linear editing systems need time code incorporated in the picture and sound to function in the fid I est way, and this was available from the beginning of the decade. The current models of all the major cameras used in the film industry generated time-code which was imprinted onto the ^gative inside the camera as the picture was being taken. TV code was generated by microchip oscillator circuits, and .Printed onto the negative between the sprocket holes by very
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small LED (light emitting diode) arrays. II multiple cameras were being used on a shoot, their time-code generators, and that of thc sound recorder, were synchronized to a master clock (a small electronic unit) at thc beginning of the day by taking it around thc cameras and plugging it in to them for a short period. This synchronization process, known as 'jamming1, would hold for about four hours, after which it had to be done again. The importance of time code can be illustrated by Panavision's purchase of half of the French Aaton camera company so that they could use their time code in Pan avis ion cameras.
The next stage in the process was thc transfer or thc picture rushes to video in a teiecine machine. Here the time code on the film was read by an extra sensor which was added to the standard teiecine machines, such as the Rank Cintel, from the end of thc "eighties. A sensor to read the Kodak barcodes printed onto the edge of the film was also added to the major makes of telecines around the beginning of the decade.
Editing Style
The main trend in film editing was towards ever shorter shot lengths, as it had been over previous decades. This process was led from the top, and wTas now definitely a>matter of conscious choice by many film directors. The cameraman Bill Pope, who had begun his career photographing pop music videos and television commercials, said to American Cinematcflrapher in February 1992 on page řítí (Music Video Cinematography; A New Film Grammari "When I did my first feature, Darkman i \ 990), the director said, 'I want one cut for every three seconds nf film/ Compared to what I was used to, that was kind of luxurious. Hut that was three times more than most movies hud up to that point." As ft happens, the ASL of Darkman is only S.5 seconds, so the director Sam Raimi got nowhere near his aim. And mis figure is in its turn quite close to the mean ASL of 5-85 seconds for American films of the 198Í1-93 period, so Bill Pope's notion that the movies preceding DatUtnán had an ASL of ahout 9 seconds was also quite wrong. This mistake is by no means unusual, and there are many other examples of the subjective judgements of those professionally involved in film-making being wrong in sxiói areas,
The cutting rate in American films has been increasing fairly continuously since about 1950, The figures, which you can read on the next page, are derived from about 5,400 American films, give mean Average Shot Length* in seconds for a succession of six year periods You om that although the culling rate continuously increase* over the SO vear period, the B* of increaM* in the cutting rate through the same period varies. In particular, mere was a rapid increase in the cutting rale during the Vixtie*,
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FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES fILM STY EE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
ft
Period	Mean ASL
1946-51	10.47
1952-57	10, T 3
195S-63	8.SO
1964-69	8.80
1970-75	6.63
1976-SI	6.55
1982-87	6.12
1988-93	5.35
1994-99	4.92
Inspecting the actual list of Ghc films involved suggests that this was the result of thc exit of older directors like Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger who had been devoted to long takes, and their replacement by younger directors who had their training in the 'fifties or later. In a .sound-bite, you could characterise the change as that from John Ford to Andrew V, McLagen, who had a cutting rate two-thirds of that of the master, while working in the same genres. There was also a slowdown in the ^seventies, as many directors took to using shots that'followed characters around witjj simultaneous zooming and:panning. There wasn't enough of this to actually reverse thc trend towards faster cutting, just enough to almost halt the increase. Thenln the latter part öf die 'nineties there was another sudden increase,
'In the general matter of thc decrease in ASLs over the last two decades, it has been suggested that this is due to the introduction of non-linear editing systems in the middle of the 'eighties. The first thing to.be said! about tnjs ^ js that directors an<L editors have been able to use very fast cutting long -before these devices were invented, Broncnosets Poryomkirihte an ASL of 3 seconds, for instance (at 16 frames per second; which is she speed at which it was shot). And in the 'seventies, iftuss Meyer's films have ASLs under 3 seconds, ]n the 'eighties, there was an appreciable increase in the number of American films with ASLs less than 3 seconds, with Sylvester Stallone action subjects like I\ambo; Hm B food Fan //(ASL = 2.7 sec.) and Rocky IV {ASL = 2.5 sec.) leading the way in 1985, These were still being cut in the traditional manner, as the first use of a true nondinear editing system to cut a feature was for The tew. (Frank Harris), which came out in 1986, and this had an ASL of only 5.2 seconds, löut it is possible that the sudden large increase in the numbers of festem films around 1995 was facilitatedhy diefairly general use of NLHs which began at that time. However, die feire ofmany directors to cut as
fast as possible existed before that, as indicated by the qu0rc about Sam Raimi's attitude to cutting rates at the beginning of this section. Incidentally, at the last count, Sam Raimi has still not got down to an ASL of 3 seconds. The best he has done to my knowledge is Army of Darkness in ] 993, which has an ASL of 3,8 seconds. And his Thc Gift of 2000 has an ASL of 4,7 seconds, which is still only a bit below the mean for American films of the late 'nineties. Raimi is a director with a good visual sense, as can be seen in Darkman^ and making individual shots look good takes time, which conflicts with getting a lot of set-ups per day. Also, once you have created a good-looking shot, there is a natural tendency to want to give the audience time to appreciate it.
Another possible influence on cutting rates are television commercials and pop music videos, as referred to by Bill Pope in the quotation. It is true that commercials tend to be cut faster than feature films, and also that some narrative commercials get down to one cut a second nowadays. Hut such commercials are either completely free of dialogue, or close to it. Commercials containing real dialogue exchanges have an ASL in thc 2 to 3 second range, at any rate in England,
A 100 minute film with an ASL of 2 seconds is a film with 3^000 shots in it, and creating one like that involves a decision to do so by the director and producer beforehand. It is not possible for an editor to satisfactorily create more and more shots by cutting the ones supplied into smaller and smaller bits, and scattering them about a film scene, (This is called 'double cutting1/) Thc number of shots in a Him is usually greater than the number of set-ups — that isr shuts taken from different camera positions — but not more than about 50 percent greater. As ( have remarked before, there is also a restriction to the amount that lines of dialogue can be sensibly cut up into separate shots, which has probably been reached in some films. The increase over thc last couple of decades in the number of reaction shots (shots showing someone else listening to the speaker) in scenes involving j group of more than two people should be quite obvious to any one who has been looking carefully at American films for a long time. And filming those reaction shots has to be decided on by the director. Action scenes give the greatest opportunity for increasing the cutting rate, as breaking an action down into a number of separate shots taken with good continuity is not particularly obtrusive. The fastest cut American film up to die end of the 'nineties is The End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999), with an ASL of L74 seconds, and looking at it carefully suggested to me that it is possible to go further in this direction. In one respect, faster cutting is necessary for some present-day action films, although 1 da not think this is what has been powering the increase in cutting rate. Films that involve a lot of acrobatics, of the
fcind only possible with die actors suspended on wires, have to be broken down into a series of shots showing separate parts of a particular move, as otherwise the movement would not be convincing as something apparently done by lhe performer without any extra help. This is particularly tnueof a film The Matrix, and you can see what happens when the principals do a complete sequence of movement without cuts in the rehearsals which arc included in the ancillary material on DVD copies of the film. Nobody would pay money to see a film with that sort of ragged beginning and ending to the movements left in thc shot. (In many of lhe N'ong Kong movies that inspired this American interest in action acrobatics, such as Jing wuying xiong (Fist of Legend) (Gordon Chan, 1994), thc movements are more complete within the shots, as the actors performing them, such as Jet Li, are trained acrobats, unlike Keanu Reeves, ct al.)
As was already thc case twenty years ago, most films use a mixture of jump cuts, dissolves and fades for time lapses both between scenes and within scenes. But there is a tendency for action films and comedies to advance the story largely with jump cuts. On the other hand, the use of lades, particularly slow ones, tends to occur in films with anistic pretensions. The use of one of thc hardest (i.e. most conspicuous) forms of jump cut has finally become a cliche thirty years after it was introduced by Jean-Luc Godard. This involves shooting a scene with a camera fixed in front of it while one or more characters bustle about doing
359
something, say getting ready to go out, and then cutting out chunks of thc action, so that thc actor repeatedly jumps trom one pan of the scene to another.
In ordinary films nowadays one occasionally finds all sorts of nourishes that would have only appeared in art films in thc past, such as lines of dialogue carried across series of jump cut scenes set in different places in X-Mcn.
American Styde
The norms for American film-making in 1999 are demonstrated in thc article, The Shape of 19991 included in my Moving Into Pictures (2006). I believe thai although there has been some change over the decade, l he re is no reason to think that similar results for 1990 would be utterly dilferent, though obviously the cutting rates would be slightly slower. It remains to make some comments on the departures from these norms in other American films of the 'nineties.
To give an idea of what one finds for Anierican films with much longer Average Shot Lengths than the norm, I list those with ASLs longer than IS seconds amongst the 1,728 films I have looked at from the years 1990-99. just 2S of them.
A film with an ASLof 15 seconds will have about 10% of its shoLs longer than 30 seconds. As we approach an ASL ol 1 minute, the films concerned are close io having one shot per scene, or to use the industry tcrminologvt the scenes are only
TITLE
Sweet and Lowdown Everyone Says I Love You Mighty Aphrodite Shadows and Fog Bullets Over Broadway Alice
Manhattan Murder Mystery Husbands and Wives Thc Living Fnd Without You I'm Nothing The Addiction Dangerous Game Miami Rhapsody Mother Night ftyihm Thief
All the Vermeers in New York
In the Company ol Men
Slacker
Small Time
Vanya on 42nd Street
The Hours and Times
Director
Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Allen, Woody Araki, Greg Boskovich, John Ferrara, Abel Ferrara, Abel Frankel, David Gordon, Keith Harrison, Matthew Jost, Jon La Bute, Neil LinkJater, Richard Loftis, Norman Malic, Louis Münch, Christopher
Year	ASL
3 999	L6J
1996	33J
1995	34.5
1991	30,9
199+	Sl.9
1990	33,9
1993	34,5
1992	28.0
1992	m
1990	16.0
1994	20.0
1993	24.1
1995	21.8
1996	17.2
J 994	|.7,I
1990	42.S
1997	17.4
1991	34.5
1990	J5,S
1991	15,2
3 992	22
36&
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
TITLE
-
The Blair Witch ■Project, The Jerry and Tom
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle Light Sleeper Sling Blade Smoke
Blue in the Face
covered" with a master shot. This is particularly the case with most of the Woody Allen films from this period, though as you might expect, Sweet and Lowdown has a small amount of scene dissection. As a corollary of this, the shots are in general back a bit from the actors, and in the case of Bullets Qrer ftroadtvay^ mostly in Medium Long Shot and Long Shot, I hope you will agree that nearly all' the films listed above could reasonably be described as art films, with the obvious exception of The Blair Witch Project, Which comes into the 'exploitation film" category.
Widening the net to Ameriean fi 1 ms with an ASL gi eatcr than 10 seconds, which. I have half- seriously suggested forms a dividing line between art and commerce for films made in the last twenty years, still only collects another forty titles, some of which are also by the directors listed above, some of Which arc by other art film makers like Edward Bums and Hal Hartley, but which also include several that arc not art films, but arc made fey older directors like Mike Nieholls and Sidney Lumet, who date back to the period when it was not so exceptional to make long-take films. It also includes the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, the new Hollywood autcur of the period1. These have developed an increasingly idiosyncratic style, as exemplified in Magnolia (1999), which has an ASL of 12 J1 seconds. This film contains more tracks straight in onto quasUstatic scenes than [have ever seen anywhere c|sc, and these tracks m are in general neither functional: nor dramatically motivated: There is also a just hint inthis film of the choice of the wrong closeness of shot with respect to what Is going on dramatically from time to time - for instance going further back from an actor When the intensity of the scene is holding up, or even increasing,
The other bng-take films I have been discussing'keep the takes going in. general- cither by following the action around witlrarnovingcamera {Manhattan Murder Mystery), or W using long static takes tfmhc Company of Men), or by doing nothing special, just not cutting around as much as usual. The Citron Kane option, which involves long takes staged in. depth with a wide-angle lens, is not used in a thorouth-gomg way. Many of the movies 1 have mentioned have some ■shots w,th a certain amount of staging in depth, but it is done with ordinary lenses, and without stopping down for
Director	Year	ASL
Mvrick, D. k Sanchez, E,	1999	I5.S
Rubinek, Saul	1998	17,0
Rudolph, Alan	1994	16.5
Schräder, Paul	1992	15.2
Thornton, Billy Öob	1995	23,7
Wang, Wayne	I99S	22.6
Wang, Wayne & Auster, R	1995	25.5
extreme depth of field. Those films that do use a lot of very wide-angle lens filming don't use it to keep the shots going, but just as a visual flourish. Some of the moving camera films tend to use a slightly wide-angle lens, but otherwise the use of really wide-angle lenses in the 'nineties is as a shock effect when put in amongst more normal focal length shots.
As described in "The Shape of 1999" in Moving Into Pictures, there was an influence from television on the type of camera movements used in film-making. The small panning and tilting movements used in the American NYPD Blue television series inspired film-makers to use wobbly camera moves to create extra 'excitement'. Examples include The Rack 0996), GI jane (1997) and Any Given Sunday (1999), and the combination of hand-held tracking combined with mis-matched cuts used in Homicide — Life on the Street was adopted by Lars von Trier for his cinema feature Breaking the Waves (1996). Bcrtoluccis Besieged (1998) also shows traces of influence from this source, though all this may prove to be a passing fancy.
Steven Spielberg is by far the most commercially successful director of the last two decades, but he is not quite a typical American<director. Fie has nearly always been a little on the longer side of the mean ASL for American films. This corresponds to his evident desire to keep the scene dissection interesting, and in particular in doing interesting camera moves that are relevant to the narrative. Thcreis one exception to this, and that is his 'Indiana Jones' films, which are right on the ASL norms for when they were made. This seems to be the result of a decision to make pure mindless entertainment with these movies, which after all arc part of George Lucas' project, not Spielberg's, So vihf are Jurassic Park (1993} and The lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) cut markedly slower than the norm for American movies (ASL 6.1' and 7.6), and even more so than the norm lor American action movies? Presumably because the director considered there were one or two serious points being made in their stories. On the other hand, Jurassic Pork 111 (2001), directed by joe Johnston, is conventional in every way including the cutting rate of 3.6 seconds.
Indeed, Spielberg is one of those directors who appears
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
French films 1988-93
361
JO
30
ÜÖ1
(Mean ASL= 11.2 sec.)
Q 0
40
so
30
10-
2 2
Q
_rz!_
-J—■
3
_□
French films 1994-99
(Mean ASL = 11,4 sec.}
10
5   1 "
_______
3 H
I £3 J  & 6 7  & 9 TO H 12 13 U IS 1$ 17 IB 10 25 S1
n ü§ca . n a, n
1   2 3 4  B  $ t % 9 1^ II 12 13 U lA 1$ 17 1fl 19 £0 21 22 23 W 25
40 i
30
10
British films 19S8-93
(Mean ASL = 7A sec.)
12
?1
13
JO
30
20
10 ■
British films 1994-99
.___I '
......
21
11
(Mean ASL = G,8 sec)
_2
TL; i
_■-_..____---_-■
1 2 3 J  5 6 7 *      10 II 12 J3 14 15 IC 17 18 10 20 2T __. 23 2-5 2S
1  2 3 4 S 6 7 fl 3 10 11 12 13 M IE Ifi 17 IB J3 £0 21 _2 23 _J Hi
Number of films with Average Shot Length (ASL) in the given ranges
to adapt his scene dissection to the task in hand, and there was a major change in his slyrle when he made Schindlcr's List (1993). Here many of the scenes are covered with long takes by a moving camera, sometimes with a wide-angle lens. This pushes the overall ASL of the film up to 9.1 second*. I would guess the inspiration for this style change comes from Andrzej Wajda's Pokolenie (1954), which is about the Polish resistance, and goes much further then Schindkr's List in using moving master shots with a wide-angle fens, as do Wajda's other films in his World War II trilogy.
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■
European Style
The major distinction between American film style and European film style that is made over and over in previous chapters of this book has persisted into the nineteen-nineties. This is that European films are shot from further back on the average, and their shots go on longer, On this last point, 1 have sufficient data to again fairly conclusively demonstrate it with distributions of Average Shot Lengths for samples of French and British films for the six year periods I98S-93 and 1994-99,
The startling difference between the French and British samples pretty certainly exaggerates the contrast, as the British sample constitutes a large part of British production for the period, whereas the French selection is only a small P^t (43 and 74 films respectively) of the industry's output highly skewed towards the more serious and artistic
productions that are considered most suitable for English exhibition.
Although at first sight, it might si-fcm that French cinema has been unaffected by the speed up in cutting rate in American cinema, there are French films from the 'nineties in these samples with an ASL shorter than 5 seconds, whereas I have found none from the nineteen-eighti
are:
Mon pcref cc hew (Gerard Lauxier, 1991) its Vishetirf (Jean-Marie Pd_rfc$ 1993) Leon (Luc Besson. 1994) The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997} Jeanne d'Arc (Luc Besson, 1999) Dobermann (Jan Kouilen, 1997) lc Diner dei cons (Francofs Veber. 1998)
4.7 seconds 2,9 seconds 4.6 seconds 2,9 seconds i.5 seconds 3,5 seconds 4,4 seconds
and all "'ere big box office in France. Lcs ¥Wt$m is peculiar
in thai it is not shol B*rlv as dos,; in 10 lhe aclorS *n American film uith the same culling rale would be, so a lot of cuts are between shots in the middle range of closeness, which gives it an awkward fee) to the connoisseur of Illm direction, but that does not seem toha.e bothered the French audience. Dobtrmann w a conscious attempt to put even more 0f die 'amusing' violence and viciousncs* of Nmml Horn Killers into its own source material, and obviously succeeds fnribose prepared to ignore the mindlcssnessof It. Hov.cver.
362
}
60 SO
30 20 -j
10
0
British Films 1964-69
2t
n
56
i
(Mean ASL = 7.5 sec.)
50
60-50 10 ■ 30
20 -10
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
British Filmíi 1970-75
D. m
(Mean ASL = 7.2 sec.)
27
11
1 I
1    i-1    [ i
1 ! 3 4 J.f 7 ( B 1Ö1I I! 13-H IS 16 17 1U 19Í0 2i 22 33-21 2ä
1  2 3 4 S £ 7 Ä 9 10 H 12 10 14 15 l£ 17 10 19 20 21 £3 S32i 25
British films 1976-3
60 i SO
40
- . 30
20
10 O
(Mean ASL = 6.9 sec.)
60 50 H 40
British Films 1979-84
1í U J7 1*
30 i
20
10
i  i  i  i i
1  i   ■ 1
(Mean ASL = 7.5 sec.)
id
1 2 3 4 S 6 7 6 9 10 H 12 13 H 15 15 IT ifi 19 202i 22 23 24 25
	12	14			tj	1e
C						
3	4	5		7		9
0=1
-t—i— ' i
_i_i_i_*
Number of films with Average Shot Length (ASL) in the given ranges
melange of memories. At t'hc opposite pole of content, there have appeared a number of French exercises in miserabilism treated in cinema vcrjte style with long takes and zoom lens or handheld camera. This approach seems to be partly inspired by the films of Ken Loach, who is highly regarded in Europe, as well as by a real concern for the lives of those at the bottom of the pile. The extreme so far has been reached by Jean-Paul and Luc Dardcnnc's Roseuo (1999) (ASL = sec), whidh continuously follows hand-held aJonglMjAuWthe protagonist for minutes at a time as she drags herself round from one demeaning low of her existence to the next.
As for British films of the 'nineties, although En the 'sixties they were pretty much up with American contemporary cinema in terms of cutting rates, in the interim they have almost remained where they were.
The slowing down in the cutting rate in British lilms in the 'eighties is probably a real effect, as the number of films in the sample for 19S2-87 is large enough, at IN films, against a total British production for the six years ol about 200 films, to give a pretty accurate figure* But just what might have caused I cannot say. Moving on to the 'nineties, we do gel a speeding up in the 1994-99 period corresponding to the marked speed up in the United States al the same time, though the cutting rate is still well behind chat obtaining in the United States. At least we got the first
it is noticeable that despite the relatively fast cutting rate, the action within most of the scenes does not move along as quickly as in the contemporary American style, and many shots are occupied solely by the actors.doing some desultory "acting tough1 in a posy way. It is not the only example from outside the United: States which shows that a fast cutting rate docs not necessarily imply a fast moving narrative. As for Francis Vcbcr, he had been over in Hollywood, and directed two films there at the beginning.of the decide, and had picked up the current American style. Beyond this, if one looks carefully at the French films with rather longer ASLs, one often finds that the first ten or fifteen minutes of them has much faster cutting than the rest of the film, and it definitely looks to-me like the director attempting to go faster iiv the current American manner, before collapsing under the strain1.
There are more interesting things at the other end of the. spectrum, where director work with very long takes. Raul Ruiz had another of his truly new ideas when helilmed Proust's fa Temps ferrous (1999). Taking his cue from Prous^s description of the way the church steeple m eombray seemed to change its position with respect to other parts of the landscape, Ruiz has the furniture and waJJs of the rooms subtly slide around witlv respect to each other during moving camera shots at some key points in this
HLM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
British Films 1990-99
363
60 £0 JO-
3Ö-
i
2D-
10
0
J?
13
40
(Mean ASL = 7.0 sec.)
3?
1f
1f
11
S    1    I 2
-i-1 _■ '
í 2 3 J  5  0 7  S 9 tO 1112 10 14 IS 1C 17 l£ 19 30 21 22 23 24 25
60 50-40 30-20-10 0
Australian Films 1990-99
(Mean ASL = 6.5 sec.)
13
10
1?
> I 1
'    r—1—!—1— r-i^-J_i_:_•    ■ ^
1  2 3 4 5 6 7 * 9 Iflll tg ]* k 1$ 16 17 10 is ft 21
£2 23 24 35
CO 50
» SO
o
Canadian Films 1990-99
(Mean ASL = 7.1 sec.)
íl it
IT
$o
SO 40
20 -\ 10
i      ■ i
i    ŕ    I i
Indian Films 1990-99
(Mean ASL = 6.7 sec.)
IO
í 5 2
-J-1-1-......._i_Lb_i
1 1 I 4 5 6 7 Ä 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 IB 17 15 Ifl 20 21 22 £3 24 £5
I  2 3 4  5 fl  7 a 9 K) H 12 13 14 15 1b 17 14 10 20 21 22 23 24 2&
Number of films with Average Shot Length (ASL) in the given ranges
British film ever to get down under 3 seconds, which was Spice World (Bob Spiers, 1997), a tribute to the artistry of lhe Spice Girls pop group. The sole British big action film of the decade, Golclcneyc {! 995), only managed an ASL of 3.1 seconds. At the other end of the spectrum we find the usual suspects, Terence Davies and Peter Green away, doing their usual thing. Terence Davits was working for the first time with someone else's material in The Neon Bible (199S) (ASL ?23,9 sec), hut he treated it much the same way he had memories of his own youth in his films made earlier, such as The Long Day Closes (1992) (ASL = 15.3 sec,}. That is, mostly long static takes varied with slow simple camera moves, not a lot happening, and old popular musical numbers on the sound track. Peter Greenaway had began to use funding from across Europe for his films during the 'eighties, but his centre of operations was still England, and some of his films had a British co-production element, so I will mention them tare. In 1991, he added a new component to bis repertoire of ih eat ricid-style settings and long takes. In Prosperous Rookst extra images were inset within the frame of the shot using high definition video compositing, and this continued more extensively in The Pillow Rook (1995). In both a large proportion of the set-ups were, as usual for Greenaway, fl^wi to the walls of the sets, with a strong tendency to symmetrical composition, and Lhe succession of static shots
was relieved with occasional sideways tracks.
The local t rem I-setter in hymning fecklo&? youth was Danny Boyle. Mis Trainspotting was a determined effort to make heroin addiction stylish. Apart from the unrealistic colourful set design applied to the interiors o f the Edinburgh slums, and the application of coloured light to them ns well, his basic approach was continuous wide-angle lens photography from extreme angles. What variation there was in this was whether the lens was very short focaJ length (10 mm.), or just short focal length (say, IS mm.) for a hit of a change.
Dominion over Palm and Pino
-
The former pink bits on the map still went along with the home country in the nineties, as the ASL distributions for Australia, Canada, and India illustrate. Here I have changed the period covered to 1990-99, to get better-sized samples. Apart from the 20S British films from the decade, there are 62 Australian films, 55 Canadian ones, and 40 from India.
As you can sec, after allowing for the larger size of the British colJection, the shapes of the distributions are very similar. When actually looked al, rather than juil counted, the Australian fiJms are more distinctive for thdr content than their form. The only long-Xakc movies in this sample are due to Australia's original art movie director, Paul Cox. and
■
364
■
his films continue to apply fairly ordinary scene dissection, though with the shots kept going longer than usual, to his characteristic very muted and recessive stories.
Canada has its own art movie stars, and one ol them shows up on the long-take radar here. Atom Egoyan specializes in just slightly less than believable character psychology and situation treated in a restrained way, but there is again nothing special about his scene dissection, though his compositions are interesting, in this collection, The Adjuster (1991), Exotica (I994),and The Sweet Hereafter (1997) have Average Shot Lengths or 16.7 seconds, 12.9 and 13 seconds respectively. The other Canadian who has to be mentioned is Guy Maddin, who has made a success out of far-fetched stories done in an amateurish way in a style that is supposed to be inspired by silent movies. We has apparently seen a few well-known 'twenties films in tenth-generation 16 mm. dupes, and manages to approximate that high contrast, fuzzed-om look fairly welt What the point of this is, other than being Canadian, I don't know.
The Indian film industry is often said to be the largest in the world. As the figure usually quoted for a year s Indian production is about SOOTilms., this appears to be yet another myth. As mentioned In The Shape of 1999' in Moving Jmo Pictures, andasyou can check yourself by using the advanced search facility at IMDb.com, the American production of fictional feature films, excluding made-for-television features and straight-to -video features, is over 1000 films a year.
Apart from the well-known distinctive feature of ordinary Indian films, which is the regular insertion of musical numbers down the length of the story, they use exactly the same structures, both- filmic and; dramatic, as Western films. This has always been-the case* and the only difference is the competence of the craftsmanship in following these norms. One aspect of this is that the pace of the story tends to be slow, as quite often too little .plot is stretched; to cover too much time, by Western standards, fhc acting is also a bit broader in general than in Western films. Another recent noticeable .peculiarity of some directors' work is sudden short bursts of extremely fast cutting at peak moments, ina way that would not happen in a Westermfilm, where the faster bits of cutting are prepared by moving into them in a graded way. The cutting rates of Indian films have increased over ;past decades in the same sort of way as in other countries, and1 at present they are pretty much exactly the same as tlie other 'dominion' film in this respect. Although there is a very smail Indian art fil sector, none of its film-makers go in for really Ibng^take filming. And the in-your-faee ultra wide-angle lens shock stuff has not reached. India yet, as far as 1 know.
As for the notorious Indian musical numbers, the weakness of these from a Western point of view is that in
s
m
FILM STYLE A ND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
recent times the songs they feature are always about love, cither requited, about to be requited, or unrequited. This was not always quite as true of Indian films, and it is quite different to the Western tradition of musicals, where the songs frequently stem from other aspects of the developing story of the film, and hence can keep the drama moving fo r ward \ vh i Ic th ey a r e goi ng on. S om e you n g I nd ia n d i recto is are well aware of this, but whether there will be any change is another matter. In former times, the dancing that went on in these musical numbers was mostly straighiforwardlv folk-dance based, but in recent decades a style that is a new
ill
hybrid of folk dance steps and Western disco <lancing has almost completely taken hold. The stage patterns used have got less subtle as well, with mostly massed lines of dancers dancing in unison, with the stars in the centre of the lines. Once upon a time the musical numbers in a film would occasionally be varied by having a skilled professional dancer, such as the famous Helen, featured in some of the dance numbers, but now the dancing is entirely simplified to what the big stars can do. The filming of these song and dance numbers now relies almost entirely on jump cuts from one background to another every eight bars in an attempt to keep the interest going in the minimal proceedings, though shock zooms are still used as well once in a while.
Other Places, Other Ideas
In Denmark, the man with ideas was Lars Trier, or Lars von Trier, as he styled himself. I-Tc attracted international attention with his first film The Tooth of Crime (1989), and moved on to more unconventional territory with Europa (1991). Not only Is the vision oTthis film peculiarly personal, but, as in his other films, Lars von Trier exploits a whole hag of technical tricks to produce a very distinctive product, in the case of Europa, the main device is the extensive use ol front projection, but employed in a way that draws attention to itself at key moments. The film begins with black and white photography, and most of the time, the front projection is used in the standard way to produce a seamless combination of actors and background. However, at various points people and objects in full colour appear in front of a black and white scone, while at other key moments, during what was apparently a simple shot showing a person standing within a room, the background starts rotating behind them. This film was followed by Breaking the Waves (1996), which has already been mentioned in connection with its use of the discontinuous cutting of hand-held camera moves. As well as this feature, the lighting of the interiors in the film by Robby Müller was quite close to using available light, even though the interiors were shot on sets. That is, most of the light on the sets came from practical lights integral to the sets, and the S29S stock was pushed two stops to 2Ü00 El to
flLMSTYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
get an exposure. These features of Breaking the Waves were endorsed by a film-making manifesto issued in 1995 by Lars ton Trier and Thomas Vintcrberg as Dogrne 95. This "Vow of Chastity' stated:
1 swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95:
■ ■
]: Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being; shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters arc forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
-
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.
Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain I rom personal taste! I am no longer an artist, I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
365
Nobody took much notice of this manifesto at the time, but eventually, after Breaking the Waves was commercially successful (for an art movie), Vintcrberg and von Trier made films that were publicised under the Dogrne label, These were Festen (I99S) and idmerno (1993). These films conformed to the principles of the movement in most respects, but most importantly, they were shot and edited on video, not film, to save money, and only when finished were they transferred to 3S mm. film. There was also a little bit or cheating with respect to lighting in Idiaterr,*, and some of the subsequent films allegedly made in conformity with the Dogma principles also do not fully conform to the principles in one way or another. Alter Fcsren was also well received, a number of people outside the Lars von Trier circle, such as Harmony Korine, wanted to join in, and altogether 35 films were licensed to use the Dogmc designation, the last of these being released in 2003. Bui well before this, the instigators, having got a lot of publicity for themselves out of the enterprise, lost interest in the whole thing. Indeed Lars von Trier s subsequent films were not billed as Dogmc 95 productions. However, I think the Dogrne films did encourage others to shoot hand-held in video, though this is something that only really took hold in the 21st. Century,
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Acting
There has been a marked change in acting style in American films, and this has inevitably moved through into acting in Britain and to some extent elsewhere, The amount ol superfluous gesturing by film actors has vastly increased in the last decade or two, in both dramas and comedies-. When this acting style is forced into Close Up wc get director Tony Scott's speciality, the twisting of the head to one side, during the one second the shot lasts, even though there is no good reason for the actor to change his direction of look. For extra emphasis the head can be twisted to both sides quickly in succession. This cliche can be studied in exunso in Crimson 7^(4995), but it goes back at least to his Tap Gun (1986). An even more annoying trick that is special to quite a lot of not-terribJy-good young actors is a sharp and loud exhalation between sentences for extra emphasis. This is usual!v brought up more in the sound mix, but tin-actors are doing it in the first place. Of course, if one is always in a shot that only lasts a couple of seconds, that gives barely enough time to assume even one expression, and the classic 'double take', the delayed recognition that the situation is not what the character thought it was, becomes quite impossible. Is il any wonder that the best and most dedicated actors are willing to work for Woody Alien, for
>eanuts^
Indeed, some of these best film actors are now capable
366
of subtlety in performance IV beyond the reach of those of former days. And some stars have on occasion got so far into a part that their normal persona has completely vanished—I am thinking of cases like Bruce Willis in Death Becomes Her (1992) and Cameron Diaz in Being John Malhovitch (1999).
The use oi' improvisation to develop all or part of a film increased in European films, and the 'nineties were the period in which Mike Leigh, who used this method exclusively, was most successful. In his case, his films were developed by improvisation over a long period of rehearsal, with strong guidance givenby Leigh to the direction i n which the story was going. However, once this was complete, and a final script had been arrived at, this was filmed in the standard way. This meant that the scene dissection could follow the standard.patterns if desired, and hence after Life is Sweet (1990), which had an ASL of 15.3, the Average Shot Lengths of his films went down towards the British norm: Career Girls (1997) is 5,2 seconds, and Topsy-Turvy (1999) is 6 seconds. But this is strictly more a matter of production than of acting style. Mike Leigh's method of script construction tends to produce some deviations from the conventional form, without the usual" alternation and variation of mood and content of the scenes down the length of the film, but the other interesting qualities of his films make up for that. True improvisation while shooting is of course yet another major distinctive feature of The Blair Witch Project.
■
S cri pt Co n stru ctiou
There was an increase in the number of films containing multiple stories happening in the same .place at the same time in the 'nineties. Robert Alt man, who was the only filmmaker specialising in this approach to script construction, continued! the line with The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993), which seem to have encouraged others to join in. These included Quenliin Tai-antino with Palp Fiction (1994) and Paul Thomas Anderson with Magnolia ^999). With this form, the major variable is how interconnected! the stories turn out to be. It is easy to have most of them unconnected1, but give the appearance of connection by having a character from one strand merely walk though a scene from another strand; as in Altmatfs Nashville (1975). and^ this is more or less the caseiiv^WrCrjwioo. Or one canhave the connection
■ .
...
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE NINETIES
between the stories revealed gradually, as in Pulp fiction and Magnolia.
Lola renm (I99S), the German entry in the scries of flashy filmic presentations of the lives of young criminals that started with Natural Born Killers, uses another approach, with three variations on the same story, with different outcomes for each, presented in succession. It is further decorated with brief montage sequences showing what subsequently happens to by-standers along the path of Lola's run.
The opposite extreme, which is to have no story at all, also continued in a mild way, for Henry and June (1990) was succeeded by Harmony Korine's Gumma (1997) and Terry Gllliams Fear and Loarhing in Las Vegas (199S). Gumma is the most completely unmotivated series of incidents so far put together into a film that has had commercial distribution. Another golden oldie, the film in which its makers discuss the possible plot, interleaved with a representation of their alternative suggestions, made a reappearance, IVes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) took this to a new level of cheek, as the director Wes Craven used his own appearances in the framing action to argue his justifications for the illogical and implausible events occurring in the narrative of the film being made, and which we see on the screen.
In the middle, the so-called 'character based1 film continued. In these, there is no causal link between the series of things that happen to the protagonist: they are just things that might conceivably happen to someone like him or her. Such films arc by their very nature art films, and the principal perpetrator of them continued to be Lasse Mallstrom, as in Who's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), Others notable workers in this area included Richard Link later, with Slacker (1991).
The use of voice-over narration to power the story has become more common in the last couple of decades, and some films even have multiple voices giving their way of looking at what is going on, as in Election (Alexander Payne, 1999). Another notable feature of recent films is the large number of them that use shots and sequences representing mental images in the minds of tiheir characters cut into the narrative, in a way that was last common in the nineteen-twenties.
■
24. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 4
The stylistic changes in American cinema over the forty yearsfrom 1959 to 1999 can be illustrated by comparing my sample of 20 films from 1959 with a sample of another 20■ films from 1999. Actually, this 1999 sample was studied first, seven years ago, and obtained in a somewhat di fie rent way to the 1 959 sample. In 1999, not all the American fiction feature films released in the cinemas, totalling about 1000, were made available for purchase on VMS video cassettes or DVD discs. Only about 700 of them were. My first approach io getting a sample was to take a random selection from all the American films listed on the Internet Movie Database (liMDb) at www.tmdb.com which were given ratings by at least 10 people. This total was 671 films. Using a random number generator to make the selection of 20 films, I got die following list:
The Underground Comedy Movie
The Storytellers
Music of the Heart
Heart to Fleartxom
Money Buys Happiness
The Curse
The Treasure of Pirate•s Point
Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels
Point Doom
Poimc/s Pick Up
Playthings
Coming Soon
Outside Providence
Cremaster 2
Storm
An Invited Guest-Scar City jesas1 Son Bow Nerve The Distraction
Hardly any of these were available in Britain on DVD or tape, and I felt that most people seriously interested in cinema would not have seen most of them, nor would they hat'e been interested in most, of them. So I selected from amongst those films given a rating by at least 500 people, This population totalled 179 films, and also happened to roughly coincide with those American films released in 1999 dial were shown in Britain in the cinema or on television. A random sampFe of 20 films from this group produced the following list:
Film
lOThings I Plate About You
Angela's Ashes
The Blair Witch Project
Brokedown Palace
Crazy in Alabama
Deep Blue Sea
Detroit Rock City
EDtv
The Insider Jakob the Liar Life
Love Stinks
Man on the Moon
Mating Habits of Earthbound Humans The Minus Man The Sixth Sense SLCPunk!
Director
Gil Junger
Alan Parker
D. Myríck & E, Sanchez
Jonathan Kaplan
Antonio Banderas
Rcnny Harlin
Adam Rifldn
Ron Howard
Michael Mann
Peter K ass o vi f/
Ted Dem me
Jeff Franklin
Mil os Forman
JefiAbugov
Hampton Faneber
M, Night Shyamalam
James Merendino
Photographer Editor
Mark Irwin O. Nicholas Brown
Michael Scresin Gerry Hambling
Ncal Fredericks D. Myrick & F. Sanchez Newton Thomas Sigc) Clayton & Zimmerman
Studio
Touchstone
Julio Macat Stephen Win don John R. Leone Ui John Schwart/man Dante Spinotti Elerner Ragalyi Geoffrey Simpson Uta Briesewitz Anastas Miches Michael flucher ßohbv ßuJcowski Tak Fujimoio Greg Li tile wood
M. Floy & R. Jones Urioste & ßrechlin Mark Goldblatt M, Hill & D: Hanley Goldenberg & Rubefl CI aire Simpson IclTrey Wolf Richard Candib Tellefesen & Kiingman Stephen R- Myers Todd Ramsay Andrew M on dsn ein Esther P. Ruwfcíl
Tri-Star Warner New Line Universal Touchstone
Universal
imagine
Universal
Spyglass
■vir/
36S film
Snow Palling on Cedars The Talented Mr. Ripley Three to Tango
Director
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART4 Photographer Editor
Scott Hicks Antony Minghella Damon Santo Stefano
Robert Richardson John Scale Walt Lloyd
Hank Corwin Walter Murch Stephen Semel
Studio
Universal
Paramount
Warner
You will notice that 1 have included films in die selection process that are American co-productions with European producers, just as 1 did with the 1959 sample, and the result of this is dial two of these co-productions have come through into die final selection, namely AngdosAshcs and Jakob the Liar. The mix of genres and studios has some accord1 with that in die total population of films from 1999, though the quality is a bit higher tlian the average, which was inevitable, given the method of selection. Nevertheless, there are some low
budget films included, with The Mating Habits ojEanhhcund Humans, SLC PttnkI and 77»c Blair Witch Project apparently below the million dollar mark.
Basic Style Variables
The Average Shot Lengths, and percentages of reverse angles, POV shots, and Insert shots for these films are as follows:
FiJm	Director	ASL	RA	POV	INS
■ Detroit Rock Git)1	Adam 'Rifkin	2.2	25	5	1 1
Deep filuc Sea	Renny Harlin	2,6	24	10	23
Hiree to Tango	Damon Santostefano	3+7	61	5	6
Man on the Moon	Mi lbs Forman	3,9	46	IS	4
An£claTs Ashes	Alan Parker	3.9	31	4	10
SLC Punk!	James Merendino	4.2	38	3	7
Life	Ted Dcmme	4.5	55	6	2
Love Stinks	Jeff Franklin	4.6	49	7	6
The Talented Mi \ Ripley	Anthony Minghella	5.0	45	6	6
Snow Falling on Cedars	Scottt Flicks	S3	23	e	13
Cnaftv in Alabama	Antonio Rand eras	5+4	45	&	S
The Insider	Michael Mann	5.4	33	6	6
EDit	Ron Howard	5.5	3:1	s	12
The Minus Man ■	Hampton iFanehcr	5.5	50	10	15
1999 Averages;		S.S	40	8	11
The Mating Habits of Earthbound Humans	je IT Abu gov	S.6	35	6	9
Jakob the Liar	Peter Kasirovitz	5,7	37	HO	4
Brokedbwn Palace	Jonathan Kaplan	5.8	SO	6	
10 Things I Hate About You	Gil Jungcr	6.7	SS	4	2
The Sixth Sense	"M. Night Shyamalam	8.6	57	21	15
"Fhc Blair Witch Project	D. Myrick & E, Sanchez	] S.S	I	2	44
1959 Averages
9.3
40
10
7
The distribution of ASL values Ve )ms afajr resemblance to dial for the larger sample of 108 Amenwn films from 1999 for which I'have valutas you can see inthe combined plot
for both distrilmtions on the next page,
■
However, the mean value of the ASLs for my 20 film sample given above is 5.5 seconds, which is appreciably larger than the mean value of die ASL for my large 108 film samp1-
I ---■--------- mm ■ mm.-*-, J  I Jlj   IUI    j 4 * j j c,^    1  v ***   in---   — r--j;
which is 4.8 seconds. This suggests that my 20 film samp
lc,
le
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES -PART 4
ASLs for US film* of 199S
369
Si 3C
1
25 1ů
4S.
13
24
□ f-irgi: Sample O 20 nim Sample
i?
ti
I   2   3   4   £   6   7   Q   0   IQ 11 12 13 14 IS 18 I? |0 19 30
ASL values
is not entirely ideal, diotigh a good part of the difference between the two figures is due to the 20 film sample picking up The Bhir Witch Project., which is one of only 3 films in the large sample which has an ASL greater than 10 seconds. The other two very long take films in the large sample are Woody Allen's Sweet and Loivdown, and Paul Thomas Anderson s Magnolia*
If we compare die above table with the same for die year 19S9 found on page 2SO of this book, the only significant difference is in die Average Shot Lengdis, which have halved over the 40 years separating the two samples. The range and averages for Reverse Angles^ POV shots, and Inserts are pretty much the same forty years apart.There is some more detailed discussion of die way the different directors of these films use these stylistic variables in "The Shape of 1999", first published in TTie New Review oj Film and Television Studies (Vol 2, No. 1, May 2004), and republished in my Moving Into Pictures. Here I will just remark the absolute distinctiveness df TTiir IsIairWirch Project in these respects, as well as just about every other. And I also have to note the sorry lack of POV shots in The Talented Mr. Ripley, compared with die I S percent of POV cuts diat Alfred Hitchcock put to such good work in his treatment of another Patricia Highsmitli story featuring a predecessor to her hero Ripley, Strangers on a Twin.
Scale of Shot
Turning to the Scale of Shot distributions for mv 20 film sample, I show their histograms below, preceded bv a histogram representing the average distribution of shot scales for the whole sample taken together. The following histograms for each film are arranged in order of their closeness of resemblance to d^e average distribution. Til is closeness was estimated by getting the statistical correlation coefficient (R) between each film's distribution and the average distribution. The nearer unity die value, die greater the resemblance.
Film	R
SLC Punk!	0.973
Three to Tango	0.971
The Talented Mr, Ripley	0.971
The Sixth Sense	0.971
lOThingsl Nate About You	0.965
Love Stinks	0.961
Detroit Rock City	0.9S6
EDtv	0.949
Crazy in Alabama	0.947
Man on the Moon	0.937
3rokcdown Palace	0.926
Angela's Ashes	0,925
The Mating Habits of Earth bound Humans	0.924
The Minus Man	0.921
Jakob the Liar	0.S63
Life	0.743
The Insider	0,73
Deep Blue Sea	0.627
Snow Falling on Cedars-	0.5S2
The Blair Witch Project	0.481
:-so no
so o
Average Scale of Shot for 1999
SLC lJunii[
152
77		67				
						
						
ecu	cu	wcu	ms	mls	ls	vls
2S0
ISO ■ 1«
M
1*9
10t
41
2fe 1
mm
1»
4
Three to T;jngo
its
**     J? ii
'Sví
lco so i 5
The TaIcnied Mr. Ripley
EH
aCU    CU    UCU    Itó    WLS     LS VLS
The Sixth Sciui-
1 i5-	51	54	
1 1			
SCO    CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS '/LS
Number of shots w
1W 1		m				: i . to	
rW <			fsj				
				Of			
							2
ü ■	ecu	cu	řiíCLř				VLS
Mi
ßCU    CM    říCU MVS     LS ''LS
I í; 'filings I Halt- Abo tri You
Mt
"J
SCU    CU    "CU    WS    ,Jl-5    LS YLJ
hn flims named
Ufläjc Sn'nks
So
o
					
i					
!					3Í
1 -					1
BCU GU
f/CU    MS    MĽ£     LS VLS
ICO Q
Crazy in Alabama
	21P					
i						
						
				f?		
						
BCU	CU	MGU	MS	MS	LS	VLS
				■		
250 2tt>
1Ď0
it
Angela's Ashes
ku
52
S&
	tí	
		
hs	mls	ls
230 SM
aH o
jakob tlie Liar
Jt4
30
*   ä «
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS    LŠ VLS
2£D Sir
1
-Deep-Blue Sea
						
						
						
	i					
						! ?
BCU	CO	MOU	MS	MIS	LS	VLS
£50
aw
Average Scale of Šhoťťor 1959
ní
	T		41		B4
35	i	ľ'			
■2
WmMtm STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES r ŕW4
EDiv
2ÍŮ i»
Detroit Kock City
	it*					
				fit		
			S3			
■			__—			
ecu	GO	Lieu	MS	MLS	LS	VLS
JSB
1M-1G0 50 0
Man úil tilt Moún
ní
sa s*
ECU    CÜ    MGU    MS    1.1 LS     LS VLS
HO
i&H
m 0
Muting Hahils of tht Earihbquntl Human
ltO
33
1
BCU     CU    MCU     MS    MLS     LS VLS
Life
250
iw ^ i»
so
0
1»
139
-			Bl	C5		
						2
ecu	cu	HCU	MS		LS	VLS
ISO 103-fiO
0
Snnw Hailing on Cedars
12b
45
63
50 33		
		
2» 200
150 H 1W
BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
?4J   MclrosĽ Place
so
105
25 33
£10
t&o too
-	L&5					
		105				
			M			
						
						í
BCU	CU	MCU	ms	MLS	LS	VLS
MO 200 ISO LOO H c
Brokcdoivii Palace
						
-		IM				
			01	a	ft	
■ 33						
						1
BCJ	CU	MCJ	MS	MLS.	LS	VLS
Tht Minus Man
2SŮ
tin
100 50 0
177
1»
	-10
	
MS	MLS
Í50 i
150 ; I«
m ■ O
Thc Insider
1B7
L
im
79
49	■EO	31	
			^
BGU     CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
£50
200 ISO 1W 50 0
The Blair Witch Project
2» 100
N	ft	7D			n	
						0
BCU	CU	'MCU	MS	MLS	LS	VLS
		Dark Citv				
i$a						
	112				ŮT	
						
			39	-12		
						
BCU	CU	MCU	MS	MLS	LS	ULS
0CU; . CO   -MCU-   MS    Ml.5     L£     VIS BCU    CU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
Number of shots with, the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the. films named
■
■
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 4
371
for comparison, I have included at the end thc average Scale of Shot distribution for the 1959 films I analysed in Chapter 19; There is not that much resemblance to the 1999 average, and the most conspicuous difference is the lar^e Increase in Big Close Lips and Close Ups. In fact, almost a doubling of the amount of both kinds of close up shot taken together. To balance that, there is thc less obvious decrease in the numbers of shots From Medium Shot out to Lon^ Shot. So the average or typical 19S9 film would be a fairly deviant film in this respect in 1999, as say the Thc insider is. I have also put in the Scale of Shot distribution for an episode of the American television scries Melrose Place from 1999. This has a much better resemblance to most of the films from 1999 (R = 0.92S), so one could say that in this respect, American films and television are now fairly similar. (However, in other respects, such as Average Shot
Length and percentage of Reverse Angle cuts, they are not.) If you want to make the comparison with television drama in more detail, you can see a lot or style data for television in Moving fmo Pictures, To Fill out thc last row of histograms, I have put in a distribution for Dark Qiy, from 199S, which you can see is very similar to Beep Blue Sea, another science fiction spectacular,
Camera Movement
The camera movement quantities per 500 shots for my 1999 sample arc tabulated below, with their order arranged in decreasing amounts of total camera movement. The average for the 20 films is inserted at the appropriate place in the middle of the table, rounded to the nearest integer. And at tlie bottom of the table is thc average for the 20 films from 1959 dealt with in Chapter 19.
The Blair Witch Project Jakob the Liar Snow Falling on Cedars Brokedown Palace IQThings 1 Hate AboutYou The Sixth Sense Detroit Rock City The Insider
l999Average
SLC Punk! EDtv
ThcTalcnted Mr. Ripley The Minus Man Love Stinks Deep Blue Sea Life
Crazy in Alabama
Angela's Ashes
■
Man on tlie Moon Three to Tango
Mating Habits of Earthbound Humans ^959 Average
Pan
12
15 21 20 12
S
14 23
16
Track w. Total Tilt Pan w.Tilt     Track Pan S: Tilt     Crane    Zoom Moves
7
2
3 1
8 3
79	24	153	0	31	311
17	24-	47	3	0	m
30	22	19	S	0	104
23	19	30	10	0	102
6	20	49	9	1	100
11	46	27	S	Ö	98 ■
15	27	23	2	- 1	96
11	21	33	2	2.	95
16
20
II	6	13	31
15	3	U	29
12	5	15	19
14	S	2)	13
19	5	7	14
14	7	S	27
14	2	3	19
16	6	n	0 ■■■<
21	3	14	o •
25 c	2 1	7.	6 15
Ö 24	-4	6	9
30
2t 20 26 20 2S
4
93
e
3
"5
3 +
15 1 23 G 28
5
9
0
0 4
79 78 73 71
	0	68
o	; 1	53
2		52
2	0	49
1	0	48
38
21
27
■
374
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 4
The averages for the 1959 sample and the 1999 sample arc entered below the appropriate column. There arc no values for because the DVD 1 was working with
was "panned and scanned77 from die original CinemaScope frame into the Academy frame by eliminating the sides of the original picture. This means that it is impossible to be certain which actors appeared in the lost part of the frame, and; hence what the continuity (as I define it), is between successive shots.
As yon can see, for die 1959 films the continuity measure is slightly higher, at 34 percent, than for the 1999 films {30 percent). However, what I was originally noticing about con tin uity in older films is not exactly die same as the criterion I am now using to get these figures. So I did the experiment again, using a criterion for continuity that requires the actor present across the cut to be instantly rccogn i zab I e. Th i s re qui res th a t tli e :parti cu lar acto r's head b e visible, and approximately in focus, and fairly we I Hit,, on both sides of the cut.Tins disallows die second case represented in the second pair of diagrams on the previous page,
The .percentage of shots falling within this tighter (or more restricted) form of continuity is tabulated in the third column under the heading "Tighter Continuity". The figures obtained are a bit fewer for the 1959 films, ibut a Iot;l0wer for die 3>999 films. One might think that the general decrease in continuity from shot to shot using this measure h partly due to the fact that 1999 films arc shot from closer in to the actors tlian I'959 fiIms,. but this is not the whole explanation. If you look at the "Tight Continuity" figures for individual films released in l!999 In comparison with the proportion of close shots in. them in the graphs for Scale of Shot above, there is no correlation at all. Adding the BCUls and CUs together, and getting the correlation coefficient of this value with the value of "Tight Continuity" Tor the respective 1999 films gives a value close to zero: So something else is going on here, namely stylistic choices by the ifilrn,makers about how much of the actors' bodies they want to have in successive shots. This is particularly clear in the case
Film
Edito i
Insider, which is the most extreme in its use of out of focus bits of actors within the frame.
Another important clement in die impression of filmic continuity is the presence or absence of "jump cuts", These are cuts in which some of the characters in the film are shown at what is clearly a later time in the shot that comes after the cut. Although the distinction is not definitely made by film-makers on the rare occasions when they are forced to discuss these sorts of cuts, it is obvious that there are two major classes of jump cuts; those in which people appear in a different location across the cut, and those in which they appear elsewhere in the same space after the cut. [ will call these respectively "jump cuts between scenes", and "jump cuts inside scenes".
Before the 'fifties jump cuts were pretty close to nonexistent in American films, but by 1959 diey were just starting to appear In the work of a Tew film-makers, presumably influenced by increasing numbers of European examples, In my sample of 20 films from I 959, The Nun's. Story has the most jump cuts, in fact 38 of the 9S scenes in the film arc joined by jump cuts, with increasing frequency as the film goes on. This film also contains one jump cut within a scene, though tins is fairly well concealed by the way it fits into the action. Odds AgainstTomor row is the runner-up, with 5 jump cuts between scenes, and one inside a scene. They all occur in the build-up to the climactic robbery And finally, On the Reach manages to get in two jumps between scenes, again towards the end of the 11 Im when things are getting really bad for the survivors oTthe atomic holocaust, The other seventeen films contain no jump cuts, with all the transitions between scenes done with the traditional fades, dissolves, and wipes.
In 1999, on the other hand, all the films contain jump cuts, but there is a quite large variation between them.This latter point means that film-makers in 1999 arc making a stylistic choice about how much to use jump cutting.
Here is a table showing the statistics for this feature in mj1 20 films,from 1999:
Jumps within Scenes   Jumps between Scenes
10 Things 'I'.hlate A bout You Angela's Ashes
Blair Witch-Project, The Brokedown Palace Cra/.y in Alabama Deep Blue Sea Detroit frock City lidtv
Brown, O. Nicholas Mambling, Gcrrv Myrick, D, & Sanchez Clayton & Zimmerman Hoy, M & Jones, R. Urloste & Breehlin Gdldblatt, Mark M, Hill & Hanlcy
25
225
41
■13 6
7
STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES - PART 4
17
Edit
or
Jumps within Scenes   Jumps between Scenes
Insider, The kob the Liar
love Stinks
Man on die Moon
Mating Habits of Ear th bound Humans, The Minus Man,The Sixth Sense,The SLCPunk!
Snow Falling on Cedars Talented Mr. Ripley,The Three to Tango
Goldenberg & Rubell Simpson, Claire Jeffrey Wolf Candib, Richard Tellcfesen & Klingman Myers, Stephen R, Ramsay, Todd Mondshein, Andrew Russell, Esther P. Corwin, Hank Murch, Walter Semel, Stephen
7 16
67
+2
IÍ
36 44 10
76 51
jump cuts between scenes arc less disruptive, because they are just a simple replacement for the dissolve that would have been used in former times, whereas jump cuts inside scenes are much more visible in the way they instantaneously move the actors across a fixed and visible space within the shot. So Beep Blue Sea is the most conventional of these films in this respect, while at the odicr extreme, SLC Punk! ispunkily flashing its jump cuts, some of them very extreme, as well as its other distinctive stylistic features, such as pixillation. And Snoiy Faliina on Cedars is earnestly striving for post-Resnais art with its very complex structure of flash-backs, which accounts for most of the 294 jump cuts between scenes.
In between these two films, there is a large group that uses jump cuts mostly to get from one scene to-the next, and hence the number of jump cuts is about die same as the total number ofscencs in die film. And then there is a smaller group that uses a mixture of jump cuts and traditional transitional fleviccs to go from one scene to the next. An example of this
173
23 92 294 109 40
is The Sixth Sense, which makes its time transitions with fades and dissolves, as well as with jump cuts.
David Bordwell wants to create a new style category for recent American commercial movies, called "Intensive Continuity", flu's obvfotisly doesn't make any sense, since as you can sec above, if any tiling has intensified, it is discontinuity, not continuity. Not to mention die I act that this is typical literary intellectual upigeon4io)c" dunking, in winch there are just words, which only relate to discrete tilings. The continuously varying aspects of the real world cannot be dealt with by that kind of dunking.
As you have seen extensively demonstrated above, and indeed throughout this book, must aspects of film style nearly always change gradually and continuously.The nearest ill ere has been to a real discontinuity in the evolution of film style is the transition from silent films to .sound films, and even til at change represents no discontinuity in some aspects oi film style.
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25. FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21st. CENTURY
In the 2P centurv, film will die. This is no profound prediction, as die medium is visibly on its last legs already. Even in the film capitals of die Western world, it is now becoming difficult to get 35 mm. rush prints made for viewing the next day. And if you want black and white rush prints, forget it. The group of people who see 35 mm. film rushes at all nowadays is very small and select, and 1 am one or them, And nearly all the final show prints of feature films are now made from a digital intermediate (Dl), and the'bulk of these are recorded back to film from the digital realm at only 2,000 lines. It is possible to make a film recording from a digital intermediate at 470QQ lines, but it is more expensive, so if left to themselves, producers will not do it. They know that most of the audience can31 tell the difference, so here we have Grcsham's Law in action once again. (This law is very busy nowadays everywhere,) The only thing keeping film going as an exhibition medium is the cost to die exhibitors orinstalbog digital video projection. This is a problem that will be overcome one way or anodier before very long.
This is the moment to remind everyone that the resolution of 35 mm. cinema film is greater than 4,000 lines, andthe difference is quite perceptible to at least some people. For die present (andlbreseeable iuture) -digital video projection in cinemas is at 1,080 lines vertically. Although this is apparently enough to satisfy people who don't know any better, you can see what the difference really is for yourself, by taking a picture of your living room with your digital camera, at say L60Ox 1200 resolution. If you compare the reproduced image with the original, you will: sec diat in the digital image all the little roughnesses, wear marks, etc., that youean see with the eye, have vanished. The room looks more fake the dream of an estate agent than it does to you in real life. This may he just fine for fantasy subjects like animated films and science fiction^ hut it is not a lot of help if you want to convey some feeling of the grit and quiddity of real life.
The real world at the human level works in analogue fashion, not in digital style. The sense data comes -to the hare human being in continuously varying sound1 pressures, wavelengths and: brightnesses, and for a hundred1 years the reproducing media worked in die same way.The only reasons for the switch to digital reproduction was that this became possible and convenient. There is a general illusion that the
copying of digital records of any kind produces an identical reproduction of the original digital file. This is certainly not true in the case of digital sound recording and film or video recordingsH The reproduction is only accurate to the point where the errors are not usually perceptible.
This level of accuracy in reproducing digital information for audio and film purposes is only achieved by multiple layers of error correction in both the encoding and decoding of analogue information into digital information, and the reverse. And the error correction is only near enough to fool the eye and ear, as mentioned above.The people using digital film and audio equipment have no idea whatsoever about how these necessary error correction programmes work in the microchips and the software that runs on them.This is an extreme instance of the general nature of digital electronics, in that its users don't understand what is going on in those * black boxes' of microchips.
Contrast this with real film, where the cameramen had at least a rough understanding of what was going on in the photographic process, and with the mechanics and optics of the motion picture camera, and the more able of them could adjust the equipment and die film process to get what they wanted.
The basic adjustments available when images arc transported into the digital realm (Le into a digital computer of some kind) are dead1 easy to do with the standard computer programmes, or 'applications' as they are called nowadays. So you can go for days now without seeing a film in which the Colours of things have any resemblance to their colour as seen in the real world. This means that all the photo chemical tricks that had been evolving in cinematography in the search by cameramen for a unique Mook1 for their films from the beginning of the nineteen-eighties, as described in previous chapters, are now redundant.The principals and techniques of film lighting are still relevant, though the need for finesse in their use has perhaps decreased a little, given dial any finesse in the handling of die image on its path onto the film is a waste of time, since it is going to be at least partially covered up by die subsequent digital manipulation.
However, the basics of film form itself are not much a fleeted by diese developments, so I have some final brie I words about what else has changed since the year 2000, and the endof the previous chapter.
fJLM STYLE ANT) TECHNOLOGY IN THE 2ht. CENTURY
Stylistics Stop Press
One particular aspect of the departure from reality of the film image alluded to above, is that as well as colour changes introduced while filming (or more likely now in dieital post-production), there has also been a continuing move towards darkness. For many science fiction and horror films the image is now so shrouded in areas of black and near-black that it is very difficult to see exactly what is going on in the action. In the sorts of films most affected, liiis is not an absolute problem, since what is going on is simple-minded and /or stupid to a great degree. However, this dark, extreme low-key style of film lighting can have a deleterious effect on more ordinary dramas. Mystk River (2003), a story of murder and revenge in the real world, is lit in an extremely low key diroughout, without variation. In a key early scene, when the character Dave Boyle come home late at night, with his clothes wet and torn, and his hands bloody, as is conveyed to the film audience by what his wife says about his condition, we cannot actually see this, as the detail of his clothes and hands is covered by a chiaroscuro of
377
shadows. So the impact or die incident is largely lost.There are other such examples in the rest of this film, and such things also occur in other films outside the realms of horror/ science fiction these days.
Other established trends continue, with the camera bcin£ waved around at! libitum in a number of films in an attempt to increase die impact of what is going oh, Paul Crceograss has imported the technique of waving the camera around from his television drama-documentaries of the 'nineties, where its purpose was to make fiction appear more "real" and immediate, into fiction features, through UnhcA 93 (2006) on to The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and has scored some attention from not very perceptive people by adding fast cutting to his style composite.
The cutting rate has continued to increase into the new century, as has been conveyed in the previous chapters, and some film critics have finally registered this, after not noticing what had been going on for decades. Average Shot Lengd.s have fallen below 2 seconds, but the number of films concerned is small, and here is die most up-to-date list:
Title
Director
Year
ASL
Dark City	Alex Proyas	1993	1.95
End of Days	Peter Hvarus	1999	1.74
Exit Wounds	Andr/ej Bartkowiak	2001	1.97
Moulin Rouge!	Baz Lührmann	2001	1.90
MVP2: Most Vertical Primate	Robert Vince	2001	1.92
Derailed	Bob Misiorowski	2002	1.63
Spun	Jonas Akerlund	2002	1.90
The Rundown (aka. Welcome to the Jungle)	Peter Berg	2003	1.97
You Got Served	Chris Stokes	2004	1.95
Banlieue 1 3	Pierre Morel	' 2004	1.67
Catwroman	Pitof	2004	1.76
Resident Evil: Apocalypse	Alexander Witt	2004	1.64
Domino	Tony Scott	2005	1.72 -1.S6 1.77
■ ■ ; Transporter 2 Storm breaker	Louis Leterrier, Corey Yuen Geoffrey Sax	2005 2006	
Highlander -The Source	Brett Leonard -	2007 -	1,95 ■
■ 4
These are all American films, with the eruption of Baniicue 13 and Stormbteohr, and the winner so far is still Bob Misiorow ski's Derai/ed. It is important to note that some people, particularly David fjordwcll, have named other films as having an ASL of less than 2 seconds, but when I have checked, their shot counts have proved seriously wrong, Itis undoubtedly possible to cut a feature film faster than
the fastest ofthese, particularly zu is all action, and hasa very simple plot whose twists do not need explaining in dialogue scenes Domino was set to lake the crown from Derailed^ I h,d counted the shots in its first hour, which admitted])- does not amount to much more lhan the characters going around posing tough', but for some reason Tony Scott weakened ui the second half, will) the Tmal result you see above.
37 S
■
Although I have qiven a clear picture of the way the cutting rate has continuously decreased since the Tillies, with the graphs showing the distribution of ASU over six vear periods for various filmmaking countries, I will sum
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21st. CENTURY
up die progress of the cutting rate in American films taken year by year, from 1930 to 2006, using the ASLs for 7,792 films. The graph below plots die mean ASL for each year, and a 6* degree polynomial line of best fit has been added.
Mean ASL year by year for US feature films
12
e
• w -
1 ;■•
* *
V*
- 4
»    -Mean ASL for year
■ * —Polynomial curve fit to Mean ASL for year
•V,
6 -
5 ■
■4 *
J - i r~
<*}    id m
S   S g
g
Í8
Oj
O) Cfl
g.
cn cj
T- OJ
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Unfortunately, my coverage of these years is somewhat uneven, and ranges from lows of about 50--films a year in the 'thirties and 'sixties to around 200 films a \Tcar in the 'nineties.The most jagged: sections of the graph correspond to the years for which my yearly sample is smaller, and I think these sections wouklbe a bit smoother i!" the samples for die years in question were over Mi)0 films. However, the samples are sufficiently large to suggest that the mean ASL for ail the American films released does indeed lluctuated a bit from one year to the next, This is mostly due to the influence of the fluctuations in the number of very fettw take films made in each particular year. For instance, the deviant value of mean ASL Tor 2004, which is much larger than for the surrounding years, is because there were 3 films with ASLs longer than 20 seconds in that, year, whereas in 2003 there was only one, and in 20QS, none. The peak of slow cuttings_c. long-take filming) from 1:947 to 1955 is clearly quite real, and holds up into 1>9S5 as a result of the way GnemaScope filming was usually done with long takes for the first couple of years it existed, before it was generally realized tJiat last cutting in CinemaScope was acceptable to audienees/ITlieiv tl>e fall1 in the ASL begins from 1956, and goes on continuously to ahout 1=975. You can also see the way that ASLs pretty well stopped' falling between 197S andi then resumed their decrease through to 2003. The
sample sizes for the years from 2000 to 2006 arc sufficiently large (between 100 and 200 films per year) to support die idea that we may have reached anod.er plateau,
In other dimensions of the medium, such as camera movement, I have not noticed any significant change or development, except (or the use of high speed and intricate virtual camera moves on scenes diat arc essentially CGI creations, rather than made with live-action filming on sets.
The most notable new genre in this period has been tlie appearance of 'mumblecorc' amongst 'art films' (or 'independent films', as no doubt the makers of these films would prefer).These are made extremely cheaply, usually on video, though some are shot on 16 mm. film, and deal with the stumblings and bumblings and mumblings of twenty-something university educated people, often friends of the film-maker, who are not doing anything much of significance in their lives. Their obvious predecessor was Richard Liriklatcr's Slacker {I99ll)} though his subsequent films have a bit more point to them. These films are naturally almost completely devoid of the standard dramatic structure, though The Puffy Chair (Jay Duplass, 2005) does manage a bit
of a climax when the eponymous chair is destroyed.
-
In tins area, as elsewhere, my interest has weakened seriously, so it is time to end the journey,
-<-r
26. STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
lhe analytic tools and ideas that I have put forward can now be applied to the discussion of the work of one individual film-maker, and even extended further in the process. In a way, this is an attempt to bridge the gap bet ween the work in the earlier part of this book and something like ordinary film criticism. As always, the analysis is to be conducted in terms of how the films concerned were put together, which is an approach that has been neglected in ordinary critical writing in favour of treating films in terms of how a particular member of the audience sees them. There is also usually the further assumption that everyone sees the films in the same way as the critic. The advantage of making an analysis in terms of how a film was constructed is that if one gets it right, the analysis will always be correct, since the relation of a film to its makers is fixed for all time, whereas the way members of an audience perceive a film varies from one person to another, and even more from one period of time to another, depending on both subjective factors and also on passing intellectual fashions. If you need to be convinced of this, think about how little you value most of the comment written about films a few decades ago. And this process is even more apparent in the older arts, f am not saying here that critical comment which is shot through with subjectivity in the usual way does not have its uses, either as entertainment, or even in giving a hint as to which films mij?ht be worth seeing, given that we have some experience of how the subjective responses of a particular critic chime with our own. And it can sometimes, but not always, turn out that subjective criticism is correct by more objective standards. At this point 1 must say once more that objectivity is not an absolute quantity, but something lhat one can have more or less of, and when dealing with subjects of great complexity such as art there is no point in pursuing it beyond reason. Since few have even set out on this hunt, it is something just to have begun it.
In my discussion a number of aspects of Max Ophuls films will be analysed more carefully than they have been before, and they will be related to their context in a way that has also been neglected. Amongst other things that will emerge is that Ophuls' style varied more than is usually supposed. Only after this analysis, which has been kept as free of value judgements as possible, will the question of the excellence of Ophuls1 films be considered, using the results of the analysis in combination with a set of criteria
that are the most objective possible. I will also make some comments on the interpretation of Max Ophuls' films usin^ what we know of their maker as a check for validity
The basic information about Ophuls and his films contained in Max Ophuls ~ An index by Richard Roud (British Rim Institute, 1958) is complementary to my analysis.
Beginnings
Max Ophuls* first films derive their style dircctlv from leatures already common in German filmsoi the years 1930-32, and most particularly from the now almost forgotten musicals of those years. Indeed, Ophuls' first work in film was as dialogue director on one of those German musicals made in 1930, Nie wieder Lithe, and although in that year the Germans, unlike the Americans, had not got their cameras moving again, the position was radically changed by 1931. This is very apparent from the figures for camera movement in Kamwadschaji (Pabst, 1931), Der Kongress tanzt (Erik Charell, 1931), and kh hei Tag und F)u bei Nacht (Ludwig Uerger, 1932) which are quoted in the table on the next page. Ophuls' first films do not have such extensive camera movement, and in fact it only begins to appear in his lilms with Die verkauju &raut (1932) and Liehelei (1933), and even then it does not surpass its source, as can be seen from the figures quoted. The massive success of Der Kongress tanzt, even on the international scale, proved a shining example, and Ophuls' early films are attempts to convert the material he had in hand to something as much like it as possible. The camera movement in Der Kongress tana was used to follow people about at a ball, on staircases, and travelling in a carriage in a way that has come to be regarded as uniquely Ophuls, though Ophuls' way was not fully established until after World War 2, as the tabulation of camera movement clearly ahows. Besides this major source for the style of Ophuls' films, one can also recognise specific individual features that derive from the work of other film-makers, in particular from Rene Clair's A nous la libera (1931), and von Sternberg's Diehlaue        (1930) and Morocco (1930). '
We can also sec from the histograms of Scale of Shot distributions on the next page that Kameradschaji has a Scale of Shot distribution almost identical with one that was to be characteristic of Liebelei and some subsequent Ophuls' films, though this is not particularly remarkable, since such distributions with emphasis on the use of Medium Shots and
SSO
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
TITLE	Pan	Till	PanwitbTilt Track		Track	Track with	Crane	Total Moves
■    1   J    Li W -4..-			■		with Pan	Pan &Tilt		
die lachenden Erben	17	1	3	IS	6	1	0	43
die verliebte Firma	27	.1	6	s	4	4	0	+7
. die verkaufte Braut	41	2	5	14	7	5	1	75
Liebelei	100	0	15	17	17		0	152
Ja Sienora di tutti	42	4	7	SS	31	14	1	158
Komedie om Geld	17	1	10	25	15	1=6	1	85
la tendre ennemie	22	6	1	32	22	3	0	86
Yoshiwara	28	6	6	27	jus	4	2	
Werther	68	0	5	17	ffi	s	0	126
Sans lendemam	39	0		12	30	5	1	92
De Mayer!mg a Sarajevo	48	4	4	18	15	4	2	95
The Exile	29	1	17	1'9	37	22	17	142
Leiter from an Unknown-Woman .....	67	2	14 ■	22	59	10	10	184
Caught	23	2	12	30	65	25	0	157
■ The Reckless Moment	92	—■	21	24	62	1 1	3	215
la Ronde	49	5	9	26	39	24	5	157
■ le Plaisir	87	4	28	17	72	42	31	281
Madame de ... ■	64	4	IS	13	77	39	3	218
Lola Morites	52	8	19	19 -	62	54	9	223
Kameradschaft -	■ S3	7	• 13	23	42	3	7	148
der Kongress tanzt	50	3	13	59	55	20	S	208
Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht	34	9	28	33	49	29	1	fS3
Bäck Street (1941)	H3	0	6	12	19	5	2	57
Madame Bovary (1949)	49	2	s	50:	37	12	4	159
■7
more distant shots commonly occur in long take filming of all periods, mough most markedly so at the beginning of the 'thirties. And thc films we are concerned with here are long take films, containing many takes, minutes long, as is indicated by the Average Shot Lengths, which for both Lkbclei and Bcr Kongrcss tanzt arc 17 seeondss and for iiameradscboji 12 seconds.
What was. unusual and innovative in Max Q.phuls1 approach from LieWonwards was to apply features which were characteristic of early German musicals to films that w„re not musicals. At this point in his career, as later, die use of underscore music was important^ Ophuls' strategy, though m most other dramatic -films madebefore 1933 only ■source" music {i;e, music whose source is visible in the
i.
filmed: scene) is used. In one instance in Liebelei source music from the opera-house orchestra is turned into underscore by carrying it on beneath succeeding scenes.
Die lachenden Erben
It might seem at first sight that Ophuls1 first long film, Die lachenden Erben (193.1:), is an exception to what I have said in a previous chapter about thc difficulties of mixing underscore with dialogue at that date, since it is underscored almost continuously through whole sequences. But in fact this film was not released till 1933, and it seems that the producers took advantage of the improvement that had then taken place in sound re-recording to lay in the music track to salvage a work of doubtful commercial potential. Given
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
1SI
Kamiirüdidi aft (1931)
KM
ion ft
125
32
42
	2w .
	ISO ■
	100 ;
	»-
	
ls	•-—■      o -t vls
ßcr Kongress tanxi- (1931)
i*a
12
1Z U
I5i
115
50
Jie verliebte Firma (1512)
■
m
50-
bcu    gu    mcu    ms    mls ls
die verkaufte ßrnut (1932)
to i
ISO ■
1» so
0
Ich bei Tag und Du bei N'sclu (1932)
I«
33
Hi
1«
72
VLS
14fi
Gl
29
132			
			
			
			
200 ISO
100 -so -
103      I OS
113
01
31
53
bcu    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
cfiO
iso -t
i« ■
o
ecu    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
die hebende Erben (1933)
Iii
1U
■15
14
123
8CU    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
Liebelei (1933)
2M IM ■ 100 ■
soft
1H
112
10
123
At
2» 100 a
la Signora di luiti (1934)
no
ai
■10
^ H
200 ISO 100
50 0
bcj    cu    mcu    ms    mls    ls vls
Komiiditoni Geld (1936)
EG
51
Si
bcu    cu    mcu    ms    mls     ls vls
bcu    cu    mcu    ms    mls    ls vls
eCU    cu    mcu    ms    mls    ls vls
Number of shots with thc given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the films named
■
this modification of the film, it is not surprising that the music has no relation to the movement within die scenes, except in one instance- In a sequence on a pleasure steamer on the Rhine the source music from an orchestra and chorus accompanies a short section of film containing rhythmical rnovements by waiters, crew, and passengers, but this is in no way superior to similar things in previous musicals from German directors. The same sequence indicates a real weakness in Ophuls1 technique, for scenic shots of the passing Rhine landscape are cut bang on the first beat of every eight bars of the song. The same defect is apparent in his later filming of Brailowsky playing Chopins c Gran de Valse Brillante3 in the film of that name (1937), and it indicates that Ophuls took the right course in relying on a loose combination between the music and movement within die frame to get his effects in later films, rather than on matching musical rhythms to the visual rhythms created by cutting.
The static nature of Die lachenden Erben is sufficiently indicated by the figures for camera movement, though after a. very stiff opening indeed there.is a slight increase in this through the course of the film,
■•; 1 , -
ßie verliebte Firma
Die verliebte Firma (1931) is the first of Ophuls' films, as
lie himself remarked, in which he succeeded in imposing a rhythm throughout, and' this is not very surprising, since unlike Die lachenden Erben, it is a true musical. It is also heavily indebted to its musical predecessorsby Lubitsch (The Love Parade, 1929, Monte Carlo 1930), and Wilhelm Thiele (Die Privatsekm'drin, 1931). This is noticeable in particular in the comedy business with people on either side ol doors, and in thc way songs are worked into the conduct of longdistance communication and office routine. There are also a number of specific references to von Sternberg's Die blaue Engel and Morocco, though most of these can be taken to be satire and parody - thc soubrctte lead does a Dietrich chair pose, and is later shown in a shot reproducing (very crudely) a Dietrich dressing room with tat on the walls and a net curtain before. These sorts of things are <Mv\y placed, and even though the acting is broad to the edge of acceptability, the overall effect is altogether the best comedy Ophuls ever put on film. However, this film also contains the first sign of Che weakness in plot construction that was to plague most of his European films. The point, which is admittedly of small importance in this particular case, is that the ingenue lead is not presented in a way that justifies and makes plausible the fact that the film company who are the subject of this film should see any talent in her and sign her on, so setting the plot in motion. The momentum of events
3s2
■
and the accompanying music just manage to override this consideration, as they do similar plot short-comings in Die vcrkaufte Brant, but when Ophuls turned away making musicals this was no longer the case.
As one can see from the tabulation, the quantitative amount of camera movement is no greater than in Die behenden titim, though with more emphasis on pans than on tracks, but the impression of movement in Die vcrlicbte Firma is much greater, in part because in Die lachenden Erhen a number of the tracks arc on quasi-static scenes, ami in part because in Die vcrlicbte Firma the characters do more rushing around while they are followed by the panning shots I have recorded. The way the tracking shots are handled in relation to the actors and decor, particularly in the scene of the company's departure from the railway station, suggests very stronplv the influence of Sternberg's use of tracks in Morocco.
The Closeness of Shot throughout this film is not too dissimilar to that in Ophuls' previous film, and for that matter to other German films from the early 'thirties, but it is even closer to that of a number of subsequent films by Ophuls which have the same relative avoidance of the use of Medium Long Shot: to be specific la Tcndxc ennemie, Sarajevo, Cavjfhi, and The Reckless Moment. It is in fact one of the two main characteristic patterns in this dimension in Ophuls' films prior to 19S0;
Towards the end of Die vcrlicbte Firma+ Ophuls for the first time achieves a powerful effect that he wTas to repeat in some of his other films, by cutting or pulling the camera back to Long Shot or further at a point ,of emotional intensity, and keeping it there. In this particular case, the heroine is returning home by train miserable and defeated in her hopes. The camera cuts back to outside the windows of the compartment, leaving her crouched in the corner and small in the frame, and the shot is held, and held. Of course something like this had been a standard tactic for a long time in films, applied particularly to burial scenes, lor instance, and as a matter of fact In Dcr Kon^ress tan/.t in a somewhat similar context to Die vcrlicbte Firma, but the originality in Ophuls' use of it is to hold1 the shot long after anyone else would have cut. This device can only be used effectively if the camera is not being set far back most of the time, and so it wasone of the things Ophuls" denied himself in his last films.
As far as cutting rate is concerned', ilhis film, like Die laehnnden Frben, is very close to the norm for the .period1, since both have an Average Shot Lcngch of TO seconds, and hence no really long takes. In this Die vcrlicbte firm*!.differs from other contemporary musicals, which nearly all have an: ASL appreciably longer than the norm for films of all types taken together. This cutting rate may well result from
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
a pursuit of greater speed of movement at any cost, which is certainly the case in Ophuls' next film.
Die vcrkaufte Bra tit
Only some of the best known numbers from Smetana's opera were used in Ophuls' film of Die vcrkaufte Brant (1932), and in fact the handling of the subject was such as to make it as much like the previous German film musicals as possible, with spoken dialogue and reprises of the most popular music, The 'ducats* duet, which happens to have a trotting rhythm in the refrain, was cleverly adapted to a horse and coach drive after the now standard Der Kongress tomt pattern, and the marriage broker's big number, which has a near-p or/on Jo line in the original opera, was simply spoken over the music. The plot was slightly reduced and altered, though only in favour of incidental filmic elaborations that mostly involve the characters rushing hither and yon in a way that was to be better integrated into the narrative in later Ophuls films. The stuttering brother-in-law who was the hero's rival was handled more sympathetically in the film, which is not surprising, since his infatuation with a show and its performers against the wishes of his parents almost exactly matched Ophuls' own initial involvement with the theatre.
When he made Die vcrkaufte ft rant, Ophuls had still not fully found his own style, and this is apparent in a number of different ways. For one thing, there are still scenes taken oyer intact from other directors' films, which was something Ophuls was never to do again. The most obvious instance is that in which the heroine, crossed in love, hurls herself around her room, from one wall to another, in a way that exactly copies the behaviour of the heroine of Dovshenkos Zemiya (1930), when she was bereft of her lover. The ballad-singer character from Pabst's Die Drcigroschenoper (1931) was also inserted bodily into Ok vcrkaufte Brautr and given a specially written song to sing in the same style. Another Russian-derived feature in this iilm is the relatively fast cutting throughout, but especially in the dance scenes, and this fast cutting is reflected in the shorter Average Shot length of S seconds. Although the Scale of Shot distribution is already very close to that of many subsequent Ophuls films, from Lhbelei onwards, the amount of camera movement is not, being quite small compared to that oi later films. Ophuls had quite clearly not yet decided to make camera movement a major feature of his style. There are a few tracking shots following people about in what was to become his usual way, but quite a number of the other tracking shots are on quasi-static scenes done in a way that he was quickly to abandon in later films.
Another visual feature that is present to an even greater degree tiian in most subsequent Ophuls films is the often
1
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
gratuitous interposition of foreground objects between die camera and the action: foliage particularly, but also window frames and other things, usually out of focus. This foreground detail which provides a 'natural* decorative frame for some of the images is nearly always well lit in Ophuls' films, unlike say von Sternberg's use oi foreground nets and tracery to fill dead space fas he put it), in which case the objects arc always in focus and silhouette, so contributing to the overall chiaroscuro, in 1932, as later, there is some use of chiaroscuro in Ophuls' films, but only in situations in which it would occur in anybody's films.
An early prcfigu ration of that favourite Ophuls scene which shows a pair of lovers 'travelling' through an artificial world of one kind or another occurs in this film when the hero and heroine visit a fairground side-show containing a miniature reconstruction of a famous battle, and their shadows slide over the terrain in a way that chimes in with the showman's spiel. This device has a theatrical history, going at least as Tar back as the well-known fantasy journey that Peer Gynt takes his mother on in the Ibsen play.
The presence of Karl Valentin and Liesl Kallstadt in this Munich-made film signals a possible connection with their silent short Karl Valentin und Liesl Karhtadt das München ÖHoberfcst which includes, amongst other fairground fooling, a feature in common with Die, verkaufte Braut. This is a comic scene involving a photographer's booth, though the Ophuls version is more elaborate, and in fact contains one of his rare truly funny gags.
Another formal feature of Die verkaufte Braut that was part of a passing fashion at the time is the use of whip pans amongst the relatively limited number of camera movements.
It is very noticeable that a large proportion of the numerous cuts in this film have poor position-matching of the actors across them, and also that the continuity is in general rough in a way that was never again to be the case in later films by Ophuls; indeed his mastery of this technical matter quickly came to be excellent- It seems likely to me that the choppy continuity from shot to shot within scenes in Die verkaufte Braut resulted from the problems of fudging the shots involving singing on to a pre-recorded music track "'Ith inadequate facilities, perhaps because the film was shot without proper synchronization to music pi ay-back on the location sets. (Previous German musical films which do not suffer from this largely avoided location shooting.)
■
Ucbclei
Like many auteumxed directors, Max Ophuls seems to have stumbled on to what are now regarded as some of n's characteristic themes, for not ail of these arc evident ir» his films before Liebele) (1933), the subject of which was
38]
suggested to.him by a producer who was not finaliv involved fn the production, Ophuls' description of Schooler's n|„ a* a brt dusty" seems strange Until one reali.es that he g referring to the detail in the dialogue and the action that vory specifically belong to the Vienna of 1S9S, Although a let of this detail, particularly the dialect, would be out of place ,n a German commercial film of 1933, the fact is that despite setting many of his films in pre-World War 1 Vienna Ophuls had not the slightest interest in, or knowledge of[ that actual time and place, but merely found that it gave I convenient and tenuous background to his interests, D^pite the changes and additional scenes already commented on bv Richard Roud in his book, the film retains a very simple structure, and the dialogue is severely pared down from the original.
For my detailed analysis, the action of iiebelei can he broken down into 38 consecutive sections of equal length, each corresponding to 200 feet of 35 mm. film, or 2 minutes 13 seconds running time. By chance, these sections happen to roughly correspond to scenes in the following way:
1. Fritz and Theo attend die opera, as do the Raron and his wife, who is Fritzs mistress.
2. The Emperor arrives, Christine and Mtzi drop their opera glasses from the gallery, and the overture begins.
3. Fritz: and the Baroness leave independently to meet secretly at her house.
4. The Baron returns home early and Fritz hides from him.
5. Fritz manages to evade the suspicious Baron, while back at the opera Theo, who lias picked up the opera glasses, meets Christine and Mizi.
6. Theo invites the girls to a cafe, and Chris one s lather, who ]>lays in die orchestra, leaves the op era-house separately widi a colleague,
7. Theo and the girls talk in a cafe. S.  Fritz arrives at the cafe and makes arrangements with Theo.
9. Fritz is introduced to Christine, and all four leave die cafe.
10. Christine's faUier talks with his colleague at home. Theo smuggles Mizi into Jus Hat,
1 ]. Fritz and Christine walk through the snowy night streets*
12. Fritz and Christine arrive at her home, where she talks to her father inside.
13 At the barracks Frit/ is found to have left his officer's cap with Christine. Fie and Theo gu out on manoeuvres.
14, Christine visits Mizi at the glove shop where she works.
3S4
15. Back at the barracks, Fritz receives a letter from the Baroness,
16. The Junior officers arc inspected, and in the Officer's Mess insinuations are made about Fritzs aftair with the Baron's wife in the Baron's presence, 1.7, The two young couples meet at a cafe and dance together.
IS. Fritz and Christine continue dancing not noticing that Theo and Mi™ have slipped away.
19. Fritz dances at a ball with the Baroness,
20. The Baron's suspicions are further aroused.
21. Fritz and Christine go for a sleigh ride through the snowv woods.
22. Fritz visits the Baroness at home and breaks off his relationship with her. A friend of the Baron tells him of his wife's affair.
23. The Baron accuses his wife of infidelity. Mizi and Theo put up Christmas decorations at the men's fiat.
24. Fritz returns to the flat, and everyone fools around.
25. The Baron appears at the flat and accuses Fritz,
26. The Baron challenges Fritz to a duel. The arrangements for it are discussed.
27. In the flat, not'knowing of the duel, Christine tells Theo that she lias gained' an audition for the opera. At the station, the Baron sends his wife away to the country.
28. Alone together, Christine tells Fritz of her dreams for their future together,
29. Arrangements for the duel are made according.to the army duelling code:
31:. When he is refused1, Theo resigns his commission.
32. Christine's father discusses her future with his colleague, and then with her at home:
33. Christine's successful audition for the opera.
34. Fritz is killed in the duel.
35. Theo and Mizj bring the news to Christines father who is rehearsing at the opera.
36. All return to Christine who is waiting at the men's flat.
37. Christine is told that Fritz is dead,
38. Christine jumps to her death from the window.
The empty forest where the sleigh ride had taken place.
The tabulation of the shot distributions for these 38 equal sections enables one readily to see the variations in cutting rate throughout the length of the film,, and also, the in flections in Scale of Shot from scene to scene. To make these
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS Of THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
changes clear, the numbers of shots of each kind which might be expected in a 200 foot section, if the scenes were shot in just the same way as the average for the whole film inside each section, are given at the beginning and end of the tabulation. That is, there would be eight shots in each section since the Average Shot Length is 2 S feet (17 seconds), and these shots would be expected to be very nearly one Medium Close Ups, two Medium .Shots, two Medium Long Shots, and one Very Long Shot. There would also be an expectation ofthc fractional presence of a Close Up or Big Close Upj so this means that the presence of zero or one Close Lfp in a section is nor a significant deviation from the overall norm, but the presence of two or more Close Up* is a significant inflection.
Expressive Variations
Keeping the above information in mind, and looking at the sectional tabulation for the film, one can see that the overall large-scale formal movement of Lkbelci falls into several fairly wreEI defined segments. The first of these comprises Sections I to S in which the cutting is faster than average, and in which there are on the whole more very close shots and very distant shots than there are overall. This corresponds to the excitement surrounding the opera performance, the necessity to introduce the principal characters, and also to the fact that rather more plot Is got through in this 1000 feet of film than elsewhere in the same length. Then in Sections 6 to 19 the cutting slows down to the average rate or less as the scenes here involve less emotional tension. The deviations from the overall Scale of Shot distribution are not so marked as in the previous segment, though there are smaller significant fluctuations from scene to scene. (The Big Close Lip in Section 15 is a letter Insert). From Section 20 onwards the cutting rate increases again as the Baron becomes more suspicious, the challenge is issued, the preparations for the duel are made, and Theo tries toprevent it. There is also a general movement towards using closer and closer shots as the tension rises to Section 31, which roughly corresponds to the scene of the military committee arranging the duel. In context the handling of this scene through a series of relatively fast-cui Medium Close Ups might be considered excessive, a case of technical overkill, as what takes place in the scene is a predetermined ritual, and not inherently tense. The general formal movement from Section 20 to Section 31 that has just been described is briefly interrupted by a slowing down of the cutting for the relaxed scene with Mizi and Theo in the flat in Section 24, and also by the unknowingly final scene together oi Fritz and Christine in Section 29. At this point the method of dissection I am using partially conceals a very slow track from Long Shot into Medium Close Shot on Fritz
-
j
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
■
Norm
Section 4*
10
II
12
13
14
15
16
17
IS
19
20
21
22
23
24
!3
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
3S
Nor
rn
BCU
Ctl
MCU
MS
0
MLS
3
6
3
6
1
2
2
2
3
2
I
0
1
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot within a s .He, oi '200 foorscci shots expected in a 200 foot section, on the average, given the Scale o >s shown at the top and bottom of the table.
3S6
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STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
Kumctlic um Gdd
127
			99	61		
		S3				
						61
£5	36					
						
BCU	CU	MCU	MS	MLS	LS	VLS
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the films named
and Christine that lasts about two minutes. This device was used a couple of times elsewhere in this Rim, but not in Ophuls' later films. From SccLion 32 onwards to the end the cutting rate again slows down very markedly, and also the scenes arc shot further hack as the end is approached, but there is a small speed-up in the cutting rate from below normal to near normal for the scene of Christine's frenzy on hearing of the death of Fritz in Section 36.
There is more that could be said along these lines about individual sections, but 1 hope that the usefulness of this approach for showing how the large scale movements in the formal treatment relate to the. content is now clear, A more obvious var iant of this method will ■beuscd later for analysing Letter from an Unknown Woman, incidentally, it should be remarked that very large scale formal patterns that are as clear cut as those in Licbclci will not necessarily be found in all films. If such patterns exist, some care is necessary in choosing the best equal-section intervals lo show them off+ At the mo merit the indications arc that it is best to start with something like one minute or 100 foot intervals with 3S mm. film, and1 if appropriate condense them into larger sections, which is what I did in this particular case,
i did not judge it worthwhile to include the types of camera movement in the sectional breakdown, but this might yield insights in some cases. In Lichtiki the work of following the characters around the scenes is mostly done with panning shots, and: it was only later in Ophuls' career that this fund ion was transferred to track ijftg shots. The wav that these panning shots are used in one particular scene, that of die dance in the cafe (Sections 17 and IS) needs discussion, but this is rather difficult to carry out in written form. Suffice it to say that the striking quality of this scene does not reside in using a series of panning shots to follow a dancing couple, which was quite hanaMby 1933. but in the rhythmic way the couple is lost'behind a wall, etc, from "one shot, and picked up by acut to the next pan following them. Detailed points like this arc most easily brought out on an editing table by pointing to exactly what happens, andideally in:Gompaj]son with another director's treatment of the same sort ol scene to lend greater objectivity to the demonstration.
La signora di tutti
By the time Max Ophuls had shot Licbelei the stakes in the German musical camera movement game had been raised. Ludwig Berger's Ich bej Tag ami Da bci Nadu (1932) contains far more fast camera movement shot from close in to the actors than ever before, and this was the lead Gphuta followed wfhen a producer commissioned him to make La signora di tutti in Italy in 1934. For this film Ophuls had the use of a camera crane for the first time, and the result of all this can be seen in the tabulation of camera movement. This is the first time that crane shots up and down staircases make their appearance in Max Ophuls" films, though their use does not go much beyond their model in Der Kongress taint, but the general technical flashiness extends to a 360 degree pan that then retraces its course in the reverse direction as a whip pan. (Der Kongress iotv/t only contains pans covering most of the circle.) The justification for this device at this point in the film is 'expression* of the characters dimness, and indeed most of the obvious technique is integrated into La signora di tistti in this sort of way, though a few very striking effects do exist indej^endently of obvious meaning. I am thinking here of such things as a pair of intercut tracking shots, both moving with the Point of View of two characters, one of whom is in a motor car driving through a series of arbours, and the other paddling a boat parallel to the road in a lake alongside.
The Scale of Shot distribution exaggerates the impression of the actual closeness of the camera with respect to the actors, since most of the Big Close Ups arc in fact Inserts of objects and letters, a lot of them in montage sequences. This is not usually the case in Ophuls' films, though it does happen again in Dc Mayer ling a Sarajevo and Caught. The really heavy emphasis is on Medium Shot, and from this film onwards this emphasis on Medium Shot in many of Ophuls1 films seems to correspond to a wish to build up a particular actress because that was where the money was in the film, to the extent of the leading ladv being married to the producer. Though Ophuls pronounced himself satisfied with the films he made in which this was the case, perhaps deep down it rankled a little, and the resentment finally peeped through in Lola Month.
i
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
3S
VosliKvara (19 37)
1»
lfO 50
133
BO
67
3J
to
(50
iúo ■ so -
0
Ic Roman \V\:rtiier(l938)
Smí WlcFTuin
7J
51
54
ID
71
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Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the films named
Another major feature appearing in Ophuls' work for the first time in this film was the flashback structure, which even extends at one point to a flashback inside a flashback. Such-things were uncommon in the early 'thirties. A less satisfactory aspect of the film is the acting, which is all of a remarkably bad broadness. Nour it is possible, though rare, to have exaggerated acting that is not bad because it shows original thought in the invention of its detail, hut the acting in La signora di tutti merely consists of the most ancient cliches of melodrama.
As far as the story is concerned, this shows the beginning of that absence of rational causality which later increased in Ophuls' films. Wc arc not shown any reasonable wray in which the financier lover of the female lead could have lost all his money through his infatuation with her, nor how she suddenly becomes a film star, though these points are to some extent concealed in the speed of the movement, the confusionc, and the incessant surging underscore. The important point for future reference is that she chooses to become an actress, and the indications (riven early in the film are that this is because of her vanity, and her love of glamour and luxurious living.
Divine
The eponymous heroine of Divine (193 5) also chooses to become an actress without the slightest necessity to do so, ihough she is unusual amongst Ophuls1 heroines in rejecting the profession after having tried it The story of this film is an unskilful cobbling together of bits and pieces of Colette's music-hall anecdotes, and in general ihe way it is shot represents the beginning of Ophuls' retreat to conventional film-making in the later part of the ninetecn-thírtíes. There isa sharp reduction in the amount of camera movement, as is partly indicated by the reduction of the Average Shot length from the 13 seconds of La signora di tutti to 10 seconds.
m Tcndrc enncmie
Id Tendre ennemie also conforms to the trend away irom the long take that was taking place everywhere, and though It contains a fair number of tracking and panning shots, ^ost of these are fairlv limited in extent, and ivould not be
Out of place in an American film of the .same date. The Scale of Shot distribution is close to that of Ophuls' post-war American films, particularly The HecUesi Moment, but also Letter from an Unknown Woman and Caught. The lar^e number of Very Long Shots is due to the recurring presence of an aeroplane in the story.
An interesting feature of la Tend re ennemieh the striking way the flashbacks are handled. The scenes set in the past arc distinguished by having very stylized sets, consisting of not much more than furniture and props in front of a blank background onto which is projected a dappled pattern of ah-stract light and shade continuously streaming from one side to another. These flashbacks were also marked off from the rest of the film by being tinted pink and lavender.
Much more importantly, la Tsndre enncmie introduced the O pint Is woman in the extreme form: vain, spoils and selfish, and directly responsible Tor the death of one lover and another admirer also. She is the enemy of the films title, and it seems likely lo me that Ophuls regarded her tenderly, though the author of the original play did not, just because she is pretty and charming. We shall meet her again, particularly in Madame de    but also elsewhere.
Koitiedic om Geld
This film is more distinctive than most of the films Ophuls made in I his period, and is the only one with a fully original screenplay, in which he himself had a large hand. Not surprisingly it is the worst constructed from the narrative point of view, with a quite pointless idyh1 for a pair of totally unnecessary young lovers shoved into the middle of the film, and a total and very apparent lack of logic in the resolution of the diflTicuhies of the hero in the second half. The pacing in the later stages is also noticeably sluggish. These faults are not in the least overcome by the bWhtian presentation of the story by a down compere in a circus set who comments in song at the beginning, middle, and end. The Brechtian elements, which are included more baldly than i£i any prior film, are nevertheless partly anticipated and ivhnJJv inspired by Die Dmgrosehtnvpct and Rene Clair's A nous la I,W (IV32>. Apart from the sung commentary thai plays a minor part in both earlier films, Komedie am C*1d
3ss
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
r>t Mayerliiiga Sarajevo-(-1940)
MO
100 o
134
71
S3
		111
	15	
		
150 -
1»
0
15
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			37
			
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iso ■ 100 50
Li tier from an Unknown Woman
11& 116
SO
16
10a
ECU     GU    MCU    MS    MLS     LS VLS
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the films named
also takes from Clair's film the explicit and crude parody of the workings of capitalism amongst very similar palatial moderns sets. A feature of the photography was the extensive use of wide-angle lenses of focal length around 25 mm, to exaggerate the grandeur of the interiors. There were far more high and low-angle shots used in this Rim than ever before, or indeed after, in Ophuls' films. Such a stylistic feature is of course incompatible with the extensive use of lon^ takes with mobile camera, and the amount of camera movement in this film is indeed very low Tor Ophuls. The high- and low-angles arc partly used in what had come to be a conventionally 'expressive5 way at the beginning of the 'thirties, with low angles used to increase the awe-inspiring stature of authority figures. Compositions with the authority figures (lllmg the frame and pushing the dominated character into a corner are also used:
Yoshiwara
The only 'thing of any interest in Yoshhvara (1937) is another stylized fantasy journey, in this case to the opera and back again in an imaginary sleigh', but t)his is missing from some prints of this film.
le Roman de Werthcr
The Scale of Shot distribution, for le Roman de Werthcr (193 S) shows el e arly what 1 take to 'be the ua t u ra 1 i ncl i na ti on of Max Ophuls in the handling of this dimension when he has no need to favour the female lead. Both Yoshiwara and Komedk om Geld have a very similar Scale of Shot distribution to Wert her, with the same heavier emphasis going towards the more distant shots, and so do the Exile and k Plaisir after the war. Such a heavy emphasis on Long Shot puts a lot of weight on the design and decor of the Rim sets, and only the very best designers stand1 a chance of carrying so much. What is particularly important here is that Opliuls1 own static pictorial sense was no more than fairly good, and of the kind that would use the good conventional arrangements, provided for him by the designer and:cameraman. However, a succession of conventionally composed Long Shots of this nature possesses no inherent dynamic when the cutting rate is not very fast,      Wenhe, only has an ASL of 12 seconds.
To make the point clearer by comparison, the films of von Sternberg also rely on pictorial composition with slowrish cutting, but in that case there is a continuous change of Scale of Shot from shot to shot, with, a fairly equal distribution from Close Up to Long Shot. It is also just possible to get away with restriction to Long Shot by using a fast cutting rate, as in sections of Eisenstein s Ohyabrt or alternatively by using a good deal of camera movement, as Ophuls himself did in k Plaisir, or yet again by sheer non-filmic dramatic interest, as in some early cinema. It is my judgement that Weriher is on the verge of succeeding in this last way, but really I think that Ophuls was more interested in scoring sonic anti-Nazi points in a version of a German literary classic. However worthy and understandable they were at the time, these points are forced in without regard for plausibility. In one scene Werthcr is told that Rousseau's Control Social is '...subversive literature, forbidden in the Grand Duke's territory.', but the issue is confused by having Werthcr's partner in radicalism suddenly become, for no reason other than sexual jealousy, an extreme conservative condemning Werthcr in the name of society and the family, and effectively executing him by giving him pistols when it is clear that he intends suicide. Though I suppose there may be an audience these days eager to believe that Fascist monsters are created by sexual jealousy.
Sans lcndemain
Sans lendemain (1939) is nothing but a star vehicle for Edwige FeuiHere, and as such is entirely constructed of cliches, from her performance downwards. The percentage of reverse-angle cuts is up to 34% from Ophuls' usual 20-25%, and the ASL is down to S seconds, and there is no way of telling that it was made by Max, apart from his name on the front.
Dc Mayerling a Sarajevo
Another Feu ill ere vehicle, though on this particular occasion there are just three small moments that indicate that someone with talent might have been in charge, and these all derive their force from holding the camera back in Long Shot when the average director would not have been
■
■
i
I
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
able to resist going in closer. I refer to the rendezvous on horseback in the woods, the interior of the carriage of the Royal train rushing through the night to Sarajevo, and the assassination itself. Not a lot.
The Exile
When Ophuls finally returned to film-making in America in 1947, the stylistic context had radically changed. Long takes had become an accepted part ofthc scene again, and extensive camera movement had been used by Minnelli and Preminger and others from 1945 onwards, Skilled grips were on hand to operate cranes and the new crab dollies, and these had not been available to Ophuls before when he was in Europe. The immediate outcome was the increase in take length and in tracking and craning visible in the camera movement figures for The Exile (1947), Despite this, a number of episodes of violent physical action which were done with fast cutting, and without camera movement, keep the Average Shot length down to 11.5 seconds, not so far above Ophuls' old figure for most of the 'thirties. In The Exik the extremely heavy emphasis on more distant camera placement is there to show off Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s imitation of the movement style of his lather; an imitation that is fairly accurate, but unfortunately lacking in force. The excellence of the set design in this film is the only major factor in its favour.
Letter from an Unknown Woman
Uttvr from art Unknown Woman (1948) was conceived as a star vehicle for Joan Fontaine using Stefan Zweig's short story of the same name. In its original form this story, which was wTitten in 1931 and had a contemporary setting, was quite close to the 'mother love* genre popular in Hollywood films of the early 'thirties; those films in which Constance Bennet or Ruth Cbatterton or some other had to prostitute herself to support her child. The best-known example, though rather late in the cycle, is von Sternberg's Blonde Venus <193%, It was not possible to film such a story in Hollywood after 1933, and in any case Ophuls had a fairly free hand to adapt it in the way he preferred, which was to make it as much as possible like his biggest successes so far, Liebelci and Is signora di tuiti. And Letter from an Unknown Il^man does indeed combine important elements from both films; the double death combined with duel set in 1900 s Vienna from Licbeki, and the flashback structure, and also the way events happen independently of any logical relation with society, as in La signara di tutti.
The Scale of Shot distribution for Letter from an Unknown Woman is very close to that for Uebeh), and the Average Shot Length is rather longer at 16 seconds. For comparison with other possible approaches to the romantic melodrama 1 have
3S9
included tabulations of Scale of Shot and camera movement for Hack Street (Robert Stevenson, 1940) and Madame horary (Vincentc Minnelli, 1949). The scene dissection of Back Strut is of a kind that was quite common in the 'High Hollywood' period of the late 'thirties and early 'forties though far from universal even then, and other example of this kind of concentration on closer shots can be seen in Statistics quoted elsewhere in this book. Often the Close Ups in Back Street are used to end a scene, and sometimes to start one as well, ess happens quite frequently in Hollywood films. The idea has got around that the usual way that scenes in Hollywood films arc broken down inio shots is by starting with a general shot of the scene, and then cutting in closer and closer towards the central part of the scene, and finally reversing the process to bring the scene to an end in a more distant shot again. And hence that a director using a different approach is a 'modernist' film-maker, as claimed for Oku by Edward Branigan in Screen Vol.17, NoJ ('The Space of F^ouinoy Flower'). This mistaken idea about scene dissection seems to have been culled from 'How to ..." books, which are never written by feature film-makers, and it has been advanced without bothering lo check it against the. films themselves. In fact in mainstream films made by anyone except the worst hacks, the scenes are broken down in quite varied ways, and one can often ^et films like Michael Cur fix's The Sea Ffawlt, where successive scenes tend to start and end on Close Lips, often of objects. Or does this make Curtiz a 'modernist' film-maker too? Anyway, like most directors who favour the more distant shot, Ophuls very rarely used this form of construction, though The Lxile is an exception to this, where perhaps he engaged in some idle flourishes because his attention was not fully engaged by the subject, or perhaps because he was using Curtiz s films as models of the swashbuckler genre.
Ill a more general way comparison widi Back Street provides a useful check on the over-interpretation of -Utter from an Unknown Woman in particular, and Ophuls' films in tfeneral, Some of the features that Robin Wood in Personal Yiews (1976) supposes to characterize Max Ophuls' films are, to use his itemization: No.2 Staircases, and meetings on them, No.3 Places of transition such as doorways and entrances, No.5 Stations, trains, and scenes ol arrival and departure, No.6 Carriages, No.7 Dances, No. 10 Theatres and places of entertainment, and No. I3 Framing the heroine in mirrors, but in fact these features are all common to virtually every example of the genre of romantic melodrama, and in noway specific to Ophuls. As might be expected, all of these features also occur in Minnelli "'s Madame ftovdty, plus long takes (ASL^JS seconds,) and plenty oi'c^m^ movement. What then is the difference between the style of this film and that of Utterfrom an Unknown Woman! If
look careful I vat the table of camera movements quoted, we notice that Mmnelli has an excess of tracking shots without panning over that in any Opbuls film, including Letter front an Unknot™ Woman. A large number of these are tracks straight into and out from a .scene, and this kind of track does not usually occur in Ophuls work, and it is thus the principal point of formal difference.
A noticeable indication of the better facilities available for dolly shots in Hollywood at this time is that many of the tracking shots in Letter and also in the other films, take place around interior sets that are much smaller and more obstructed with furniture than in Ophuls' pre-war films. Another feature unique to the camera movement in these Hollywood films is the numerous small adjustments in dolly position, usually accompanied by small panning movements to re frame at various points within the duration of a longish take that also contains large scale camera movements with a number of camera holds. (Small'frames and tilts to keep the actors well framed when they move slightly are not counted as camera movements in my analytical tabulations, since they have been made automatically by cameramen from the beginning of the 'twenties.) These frequent extra small dolly movements give the American films an extra *lifcr that is missing from the later, as well as the earlier European films by Max Ophuls,
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Turning to the detailed analysis Of Letter from an Unknown Woman, and^ given that my preferred approach is through the way the film was put together, then the obvious unit of narrative analysis is the script scene, which is determined by its absolute unity of time, place, and location, The looser unit of 'sequence' is only a secondary form, and just renaming sequences 'syntagms' gets one no further forward. So the beginning of Letter is here analysed scene by scene in terms of Scale of Shot, The brief outline of the action in the first 24 scenes is as follows;
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1. Stefan Brand arrives outside his flat in a carriage with a friend. He has just been challenged to a duel.
2. inside his flat, he is given a letter by his mute servants He starts to read it.
3; Flashback The letter tells how the adolescent'Lisa
was intrigued: by the belongings of aipianist which
were being moved into the Hat above that in which
she and her mother lived.
4, The hands of the pianist playing:
|i   Later the  pianist,  Stefan  Brand, practises,
while Lisa listens to him- from; the courtyard and
simultaneously lier girl friend talks coarsely of love.
6. Lisa meets Stefan for the first time at the entrance to the houses
7. Scenes in which Lisa.prepares herself to be worthy
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
of Stefan by studying music, dancing, etc.
g.   Lisa sees Stefan bringing one of many women
home to his flat,
9. On a later night Lisa creeps out from her bed to listen to his playing.
10. Lisa is cleaning carpets in the courtyard and helps carry one into Stefan's flat.
11. She prowls around his flat until found by his servant.
12. Leaving the flat, she comes upon her mother with an admirer on the stairs.
13. In their own flat, her mother tells Lisa that she intends to remarry.
14. At the railway station, as her new step father is taking them to live in Lins, Lisa runs away, back to their former home.
15. She tries to get into Stefar/s flat but no-one is there.
16. From the stairs, she sees Stefan bring a woman into his flat.
17. Present. St elan continues to read the letter.
IS. Flashback It tells how, some years later in LinzT Liza ;promcnadcs to church with her mother and step-fat her.
19. After church Lisa rejects the proposal of a young Lieutenant whom her parents expect her to marry.
20. Profit Stefan continues to read the letter.
21. Flashback It tells now how Lisa returned to Vienna and got a job modelling in a dress shop,
22. She waits, as always, outside Stefan Bra mi's house. This night he appears for the first time, and, ■not recognizing her, picks her up,
23. He takes her to a cafe where he surreptitiously cancels an appointment with another woman.
24. Stefan wines and dines Lisa in a private room in a restaurant.
In the above break-down there a few of what are strictly separate script scenes that I have combined into one scene for convenience, particularly in my Nos.7 and 21, but also in No. 5, in which a series ol shots of Stefan playing are cut into the exterior scene showing Lisa and her girl-friend listening in the courtyard. These condensations are irrelevant to the particular points I want to make.
It can be seen in the table above that in this film there are no very obvious large-scale movements in the Scale of Shot distribution and cutting rate that show up in the scene by scene breakdown, but some idea of the smaller scale fluctuations of the cutting rate can be obtained by noting the deviations from the expected number of shots in each scene that would apply if all the shots in the film were of
L ■I S
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STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
BCU      CU MCU
391
MS
MLS
LS        VLS    Expected no. of
Norm for	10 shots —>	0.5	1	1.5	2	2	2	0.5	10
Scene 4-	Footage -l								
1	127			1		I	1		5
2	349	1	1	1	2	1			9
3	523				1	1			7
4	536		1						3
5	710				6	3	+		7
6	80S		1	1	3		4		4
7	918					2	3		5
S	974	1 2							
9	1145	1                       2 7							
10	1263	1 1							
11	1452			1	2	3	2		1
12	1491					4	1		2
13	1652	13          2 6							
14	1811			]		4			7
IS	1971	1                                   5 7							
16	2GS3					1	1		r-
17	2105			t					1
IS	2236			1			2		s
19	2599		t		3	3	6		13
20	2630	1 1							
21	2790				I	3	2		7
22	2987		1	+	2	1	3	1	$
23	3154				2	6		2	6
24	3 382		5	1	3			-	5
		-							
Norm for 10 shots —>		0.5	1	1.5	2	2	1 ■	0.5	10
Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot in successive scenes of Uuvjm* un </«*™™ IW 1 he * footage at which each scene ends is is noted in the second column, and .he expected number of shot, .n each sccneSgiven the ASL for the whole R.m, is in the right-most column. The expected number of each scale .or every 10 shots is given above._______ __^--——1---
the same length. The magnitude of this quantity has been entered in the tabulation for each scene, and the total of shots actually occurring can easily be added up for the scene in question, and hence one can decide if the cutting rate is faster or slower than the overall normal that point.
For instance, in scene No. I five shuts would be expected if the cutting were uven throughout ewry part of the film, but in faci there arc only 3 shots. Contrariwise, in scene No.S, whik cjnh scven sl,ots wt'ul(1 be* expected, tlu-rc are actually fourteen.
■
Proceeding in thc same way, thc distribution of Scale of Shot which would hold if the film was shot with the average distribution even over thc small length of ten successive shots is also shown at the beginning and end of the tabulation. Thus thc deviations from this can also be secnT liiough with rather more difficulty in calculation. For instance, in scene No.7 it would he expected that only 2 out of 10(or 1 outof 5) of the shots would be Long Shots, but in fact 3 shots out of 5 are Long Shots, whereas the expected 1 out of the 5 shots in this scene which should be a Medium Shot is missing. And so on. Because the number of shots involved is so small at thc scene level, only large deviations from the norm can be considered significant, as is indeed the case for tlie excess of Long Shots in scene No.7, and also for those i shall single out for comment. I am afraid that this may seem a little involved, but the a I te ma Live is a tabulation using positive and negative fractional numbers for Scale of Shot distributions within scenes. In fact it was because of this difficulty in making the results leap to the eye that 1 chose to use regular length sections rather than strict scene divisions in my analysis of Licbclci a few pages back.
Taken scene by scene, thc major deviations from the norm are pretty much what might conventionally be expected. For instance, the cutting rate is a lot faster than normal when Lisa hears Stefan playing, and then meets him for the first time in Scenes 5 and 6, and also when he picks her up and takes her for a meal in Scenes 22 and 24. Thc scene in which Lisa discovers her mother with her mother's new admirer and husband-to ^bc is the only other fast-cut scene in the first 35 minutes of ihe film. On the other hand, Ophuls gets in his longest takes in the most emotionally neutral scenes, such as the promenade 'before church at Linz, which is Scene 18 in my dissection. The scene at the station (NoH14) as Lisas.step-father takes the family off to Linz might be considered anomalous in this respect, as iii is the locus for considerable tension in our heroine, but it is nevertheless shot with long takes from Tar back. Indeed' it could be argued that tin is scene could be presented with more force with cither more cutting, or with different staging to keep Lisas reactions more before us while the
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS Of THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS scene lasts.
As far as Scale of Shot is concerned, the on i y strongly marked deviation from the norm from scene to scene occurs when Stefan picks Lisa up and has dinner with her in Scenes 22 and 241 In fact in this film it is just possible to see beginning to emerge that lack of variation in Scale of Shot which was to be such an important feature of Ophuls" last films.
At the next more detailed level of analysis one deals with thc individual shot in relation to the scene as a whole, and here I do not have any particularly original proposals beyond the kind of thing that has-been done in critical writing in the past, though 1 would insist that such detailed interpretation be compatible with what might have been thc film-maker's likely intention in constructing the shot.
Turning to more general aspects of Letterfrom an Unknown Woman, a comparison with Hack Street, as wrell as with most other previous 'weepies', shows that what is missing from Letter is the external pressures of society, and even most people other than the central couple, In virtually all romantic melodramas ťhc things that keep thc lovers absolutely apart are events like the marriage of one of them, natural disasters, the intentional or unintentional intervention of third parties, wars, and so on, but in Letter nothing prevents the union of Stefan and Lisa except thc shallowness of thc first and the perversity of thc second. These features are fairly certainly the reason Tor thc lack of commercial success o I Letterfrom an Unknown Woman y whereas Back Street and other 'weepies3 remained in distribution without the benefit of financial subsidy organized by a pressure group of film culturists.
The flashback reprise showing a montage of precious moments o f love in Letter from an Unknown Woman is preceded by numerous similar examples in Bach Street and other films, and in fact in this form it was an old cliche already. Whereas in Liebeki Ophuls found a new form for the same device by showing the scene of past happiness, bul with the lovers gone To put it simply, quality mostly resides in the exact way something is done in a film, MinncJlľs crane work in Madame Bovary is banal, and even descends to the use of a
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Number of shots with the given Scale of Shot per 500 shots for the films named
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STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
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393
Caught (1349)
2M 160 IPG SO
156
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35
111
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100
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114
113
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crane down from a chandelier to the dancers below, which was a device with long grey whiskers on it, but on the other hand, he had a truly New Idea for covering a waltzing couple in thc same ball scene. After following them waltzing in one direction with a pan in the ordinary way, he had them reverse, and then he followed them back with a pan in the opposite directiony still in the same shot without cutting. The force of this has to be seen to be appreciated,
Banality of character conception is present in Letterfrom an Unknown Woman, not for the lirst or last time in Ophuls' films, particularly in the presentation of Lisa s mother and step-fat her. Letter from an Unknown Woman a^o contains easily the highest proportion of reverse-angles in any Ophuls film, and this must come under the heading of more star tribute.
Caught
Caught (1948), on the other hand, has a much more typical proportion of re verse-angle cuts for an Ophuls film at 21%, and also a quite typical ASL of 17 seconds. The Scale of Shot distribution resembles that of Sarajevo^ and In particular the relatively large number of Big Close lips again represent Inserts in montage sequences. The amount of camera movement is rather down in general, and there are no crane shots at all, even though one of the sets contains a nice big staircase, There is more depth of Held than is usual in an Ophuls film, and this is done with moderately wide-angle lens shooting, though it does not go a IJ the way to true 'deep focus*, and some use is made of this depth of field in some of the stagings. The photography is also on the low-key side throughout, and this is again unusual for an Ophuls film, so it does look as though aJJ this represents a half-hearted flirtation with the post-Citizen Kane style under the influence of Lee Garrnes, who was on camera for tnt film.
Caught is the first Max Ophuls film in which there is a verv definite reduction in the amount of variation in Scale ol Shot and cutting rate from scene to scene, and this becomes very apparent if a breakdown into 100 foot sections is made an a 35 mm. print. After thc point in die film at which Leonora has married Smith-Ohlrig and been left alone in his mansion, we have for the next half-hour of screen time very
little departure from the average Scale of Shot distribution, and the cutting rate is also very steady for lengths of several minutes at a time, despite the occurrence of scenes of a quite varied dramatic nature. It is only in the last 12 minutes of the lilm, when the most dramatic twitches of the plot lake place, that there arc any strong deviations from the norms.
The satirical presentation of the world of an aspirant model in Caught represents some of the few truly amusing scenes in Max Ophuls' work, for despite his claim that he was celebrated for his handling oi comedy in the theatre, most of his rare filmic attempts in this direction are not very successful, Ophuls has also said that he found die conclusion of the script he had to shoot unsatisfactory, and given his favourite films one can easily imagine another ending fn which Leonora dies in childbirth, and Larry Quinada is condemned lo death for killing Smith-Oh I rig, leaving him with memories of his happiness with Leonora in his last hours. Or something similar. Btit really the flaw in the story is quite fun< fa mental, as the connection between I he world of the possessive tycoon and that of the poor doctor is completely forced and unconvincing. Such is not the case with Ophuls' next film.
The Reckless Moment
In The HccHes* Moment (I9S0) the relation between the small-time criminal world and that of suburban domesticity is of the essence, and the transitions between these two worlds form a major clement of the film. The rushes the mother makes from one to the other T from the house to the city, or from the house to ine boat-house with the blackmailer i nit -are very present visually as well as them ideally. The Reckless Monteni is in fact an original combination ol at least two sub-genres, namely the 'lady in a jam1 type-of thriller, and the 'mother coping in husband's absence' domestic drama which was common during World War 2.
Formally speaking ihe Scale of Shot distribution return* towards the Liebclei type, and the camera movement and Average Shot length (15-5 seconds; are much as before. More importantly, there is a return towards more conventional inflection of the Scale of Shot and of cutting raic from scene to scene. There is more movement of tin: cast about the
i
394
Madame ric... (1953)
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
U,la Motile (1955)
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room sets, which arc realistically sized and cluttered, than there had been in the previous two films, and this is covered with the excess of panning shots present. A fair number of these shots are through doorways and windows, and this had never happened to this extent before in Max Ophuls' films, though it was to reappear in le Plaisir.
One might ask why Ophuls' stylistic approach attracted some comment at the time these films were made, given that other directors were also going in for extensive camera movement. The answer would seem to be that there was a general resistance to this trend, particularly from cameramen who liked to produce a series of static pictures beautifully lit, and producers who Itkcd to have a lot of shots to re-edit, but also because Ophuls went that little bit further, For instance he had tracks laid on a beach front when a minor scene there could have been covered in a series of pans, and a staircase set built with a 'wild' (i.e removable) wall, which complicates set construction, so that!he could follow a scene with a crane in one take, when it could have been covered in more than one shot from the open side of the staircase.
Given the extra complexities of attitudes and behaviour of the principal characters in The Reckless Moment y and also taking into account some of the points dealt with above, not to mention other touches of imaginative detail, such as the way a dead man s lips are drawn back from his teeth like those of a shot rabbit, it is not surprising that this film was the most successful of Ophuls' American productions,
la Ronde
When Max Ophuls returned to France, the .public for his work substantially changed; with an 'art cinema' audience in France and elsewhere now forming a prominent part of it. A subject such, as Schnitzler's play Reigen now became possible, and many of the critics in France were interested in films that were different from the general1 run. As .a result, features that had only appeared in embryo came to dominate Ophuls1 work.
The Scale of Shot distributions for Ophuls" last films are very different to those in most other sound films, thoughonc can notice resemblances to some early sound films and some early silent films. The very strong concentration on a single
camera distance, which happens to be Medium Shot in the case of la Ronde (1950), corresponds to a sharp reduction in the inflection of Scale of Shot from scene to scene, and even more so within scenes, la Rondc starts with 16 script-scenes covering the first seven minutes of the action, and all but one arc 'one shot scenes'. These arc scattered over the Medium to Long Shot range, but with the scene between The Young Man and The Chambermaid we get, after the first II shots, long strings of up to IG shots each with the same camera distance in every shot. Most of these are also in the Medium or Medium Long Shot scale, and the film continues in the same manner after this scene. At one point there is a string of 15 consecutive Close Ups, which is the sort of thing that just did not happen in other people's films in the sound period, as a little checking will show, it should a I so he added that only 19 of the 294 shots in la Rondc contain 'large changes of scale within their length, and none of these occurs amidst the strings of shots mentioned. Incidentally, the scene between The Young Man and The Chambermaid just mentioned is shot throughout with fdutch tilt1 framing, which follows a fashion that had arisen in the late 'forties in Europe. In this particular instance it could fairly be claimed to heighten the erotic tension in the scene.
The take lengths arc only slightly longer than before, with an ASL of IS seconds, and the camera movement has decreased because the original play is a series of static duologues, and hence the amount of movement that could be introduced into it was limited, Indeed the desire to have as much camera movement as possible was probably one of the motives for introducing the 'Master of Ceremonies1 form of presentation into the film adaptation. This presentation, with the Master of Ceremonies' asides to the audience, his intervention in the action, starting a scene by operating a clapperboard, cutting out sex in the editing room, etc, was fairly novel in the *art film" at the lime, though not of course in general il one includes American comedy films such as the 'Road to    series and Hell/.apoppin.
le Plaisir
Emboldened perhaps by the commercial success of la Ronde, with le Plaisir (195-1) Max Ophuls went to new
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r
i
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
extremes in his formal procedures. The takes lengthened even more, with the ASL going up to 21 seconds, the camera movement increased beyond anything he had done before, and the film was shot from very far back indeed. Ophuls had reached the commercially dangerous point of rclymo almost entirely on the visual interest thrown up by camera movement and what was in the filmed scene itself to carry the film.
Strictly speaking, le Plaisir is an omnibus film made up of three separate Maupassant stories, and reflects a fashion for that sort of construction, complete with voice-over narrator to hold the stories together, that had developed in the previous couple of years with Quarter (19+S), etc. There arc some differences in the way the three parts of le Plaisir are filmed.
In The Mask the dancing is covered with camera movement of unprecedented speed, and this generates a lot of excitement, but the remoteness of the camera makes it difficult to see what is happening to the masked dancer who has collapsed, who lie is, and even that he is wearing a mask.
The general treatment of the longest story, La Maison Tellies isofan 'Oohda-la1 Frenchincss fairly exactly indicated by the casting of Madeleine Renaud and Danielle Darricux as the madame and prostitute of a provincial brothel, and this cliched quality was apparent to sophisticated viewers even when the film was made. This story again sutlers in its earlier stages from an unvaryingly remote camera, with the extensive tracking and craning not adding anything becau.se they do not interact with the actor movement, which had not been the case in earlier Ophuls films. In the second hall of the story, with the prostitutes arrived in the country, on the farm, and at the first communion ofthemadame's niece, closer shots are mixed in a little, a number of the images are interesting in themselves, and the relatively reduced amount of camera movement is integrated with the action.
The final story, The Model, has the general characteristics of the film to the greatest degree, with the takes even longer than in the other sections, and the camera consistently lar back. It is here that it is most apparent that a lot of the moves the actors make, even from room to room, hate no motivation, hut only take place so that there can he an accompanying camera movement. The distant camera also throws more weight on to the decor, and Jean dT^bonne s design, which tends to have a sameness of approach anyway, is here at its weakest ever. This is not helped by Agostm. s lighting, which is flatter than that or Christian Matras who
did die rest of the film- ,t ,
A large proportion of the shots in* dutch tilts', more so than in any previous ''     '* seem to be distributed with any expressive intent
I dm, but they do not
393
Madame Dc ..,
In Madame dc „. (USi), Qphuls r^C(] ^ ^ the extreme stylistic position he had reached, as~ is readib
^parent from the camera movement and Scale of Shot distributions. The Average Shot Length is a|*o back near the po^ war Ophulsian norm at 16 seconds. But the Medium Long Shot on which the film concentrates is still rather distant from the actors, and when combined with the attenuated and audience-alienating narrative, commercial failure was assured. The film is just the story of how a spoilt, vain, stupid, and selfish woman is reduced to nothing hy those verv qualities: qualities over which she had no control. Danielle Darricux incarnates \Madame de perfocil\\ but the casting of the husband and lover should have been reversed il Ophuls had wanted the audience to care more for the late of the latter. Again, in this film oik- is given plenty of lime lo contemplate the fact that jean d*I:aiil>unneTs style of set design depends on one gimmick; the splashing of lengths of vastly inllated and simplified Rococo-type moulding here and there on mirrors, walls, etc. There are quite a number ol jump cuts in this film, advancing what was an embryonic fashion in 1953.
Lola Monies
As you can see from the Scale of Shot distribution, which is quite close to that ol k Plains in loin Monies (1955) Ophuls was continuing on his cunimrrcially dangerous cuurse of using very Icing takes (ASL- IS sec j shot I'm in far hack, with just a little emphasis on Medium Shot as a small gesture to his supposed 'star'.
Ophuls and his producers showed a great lack of perception in nol noticing that Marline Carol's fame was solely due to her willingness to appear naked in her previous films, and that she Mtts devoid of any personality and acting abilitv. Ben worse for the portrayal of someone who made her way as a dancer, Marline Carol had absolute*} no dancing ability whatever, is is c|uite evident in this lilm. and lo top the ivhole folly, no effort was made to display Jier body, as the actual [#& had been only lw eager to do in the pursuit aflame and Lbriune. In the lilm no real reason for her career is shown, either in her circumstances or in her personality as depicted, other ibui a desire to spite her mother, wind, is hardlv adequate. There are ionic compositions lor thee lacks, and theV are of course achieved with a combination of the movements of camera, actor,, and even the decor. The opening ei.bl minutes establishing the circL, .ettmg a1-e tuidoubudi; the peak ol Ophuls' adiiev« m th* direction, hut with lb fltt .Wd>^ ;ve get the ^
in I maimer « the duologue i« * IW*fe. *****
39b
Natanson was not Schniulcr, as a quotation demonstrates:
■
Li m:     Do you n e vei ■ dr ea m of a caprice t li at n ever ends?
Lola Month:  Oh ... dreams! Dreams are personal,
you cannot share them with somebody else, but
sometimes ihcy are very embarrassing.
Liszt:       Embarrassing! Why? Because they do not
last?
Lola: Perhaps!
Liszi: Bccause there is a n a wakening? 11 is enough to hold on to them, to live them before it is too late, isn't that so?
Lola:       Life for me is.......a movement.
Lis7X\      You are tired by the journey.
Loia:      No, a little sad... But if the inn is charming
... A nice dinner and it will pass.
These lines receive a performance that matches them in quality - a pair of bad actors' idea of'sophisticated1 acting.
A curious feature of hah Month, particularly given OphuLs' comments on lihe use of Cinema Scope before he started work on it, is how little he used the 'Scope frame in composition. Very nearly all the action in the whole film falls within an Academy aspect ratio frame area, as when a 'Scope print is scanned Tor TdV. transmission. The only exception to this is the scene in a theatre box in which Lola's mother tries to betrothc her to a rich man. In fact Tor an appreciable part of the film Ophuls has the frame physically masked in to Academy proportions, which is a defeatist attitude to composition when the new format had made a whole new approach possible. If the intention was to use the contrast between the sections that have the m asked-in frame, and t)he sections that have the full 'Scope frame, the answer is that this does not work in this film, because the outer edges of the full:1 Scope image are just filled with hits of decoration that arc compositions 11 y connected very weakly, if at all, with the central area, There are just one or two novel ideas for "Scope framing in the inn scene with franz Lisfct, but this is not much for such a long film. Rather beliter use us made of dutch tilts, which stilt crop up occasionally in this film, withlhe tilt slowly developing du r i ng th c cou rs e o f the sii ot.
The second: half of Lola Month is devoted to her liaison with the King of Bavaria, and here all the scenes arc protracted far beyond what iheir substance will bear, mostly without any compensating visual interest whatever being-supplied:, This is also the section where thebadacting in subsidiary parts, usually hovering round the edges of Ophuls* films, becomes most obtrusive. To love actors too much is a doubtful asset in directing them
After the catastrophic failure at the box-office of Lola Month, and when it became clear that Max Ophuls was not going to get any more work because of this, his admirers put forward the claim that Lola Monies was an avant-garde masterpiece, and hence too good for the understanding of the general public. This is clearly untrue of the film in the form in which Ophuls considered it finished, for it contains too much material that is crashingly conventional, as I have briefly indicated above, and it was certainly made with the intention of making a profit, which is never the case with true avant-garde films.
Is there an Ophuls style?
The big question is whether Ophuls has a style that is m a n i les t i n a I ľ h is f í 1 ms, as m a n y co m m e ntat ors have cla t m cd. From the foregoing data í have collected, the answer has to be — no. The films that have extensive camera movement and long takes are Liehclei, lo Signora di tutú, Werther, and all the post-war films. However, the group that have similar Scale of Shot distributions, as can be seen vi.suaJly in the graphs, and as Is endorsed by getting the correlation between the Scale of Shot distribution for each of the films and the mean Scale of Shot distribution for all the films, cuts across this first selection, These are die verlicbte Fir mo, die verhoufie Iirautx Liebeici, lachende Urban, Komedie am Geld, h Tend re ennemie, Yoshiwara, The Exih} Leitcr Jrom an Unknown Woman, The Reckless Moment, le Pla i sir, and Lola Monies Taking the intersection of these two groups, we get the utterly characteristic group, Liehclei, Letterjrom an Unknown Woman, The Reckless Mement, h Ploisir, and Lola Montes. This is only five films out of twenty one, so whichever way you slice it, Max Ophuls did not have a consistent style throughout his whole career, and in particular, as I have noted already, nearly all the films he made in France in the 'thirties are quite distinct formally from the others.
The Evaluation ofMax Ophuls' Films
Summarizing Max Ophuls' stylistic prog r ess ä on, it can be said that he moved from a work, Die verliebte firma, that was solidly within the norms for its kind, time, and place, to Die verkaitfte Braut, in which he attempted to combine features drawn from widely disparate sources, and also showed signs of wanting to outdo the best German musicals of the time in bravura. In this he was partially successful, though at some cost in craftsmanship and coherence. This last objection could not be made against La signora di tutti, in which camera movement was pushed into new regions, and other minor ľlashiness was well integrated. So both Die vcrkaujie Braut and La signaro di tutti score well on my first evaluative criterion, which is that of original it)', but Liebelei is not outstanding in this respect except for such lesser features as the use oi
■
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OFMAX OPHULS
music and the ending, As other directors retreated from the ■Jong take with mobile camera' style as the 'thirties wore on, so did Ophuls, and retreat towards conventionality in this as in other features, reduces the value ofsomc of his late 'thirties films. I consider unvaried repetition of a style once established to lessen the value of any film-maker's work, and my attitude on this point is very different to that of the strict auteur theory, according to which all that matters is the successful expression of the maker's personality, and that all the films in which this happens are equally valuable, no matter how similar they may be.
In any case, amongst the films from the later nineteen-thirties la Tend re ennemie is distinguished by some features previously commented upon, including a fresh way of handling flashbacks, even though it declines into banality in its later stages. Komedie om Geld also has something to be said for it on the score of originality, as it contains the most extreme form of Brechtian presentation recorded on film up to that date, but Max Ophuls' other pre-war films offer little in this respect.
There is some improvement in his American films, with his return to an increased use of camera movement, though since he was entering an established trend, the distinction rests In exactly how that camera movement was used to follow people around, rather than in its amount. The post-1950 films push into new territory from a formal point of view, mostly in terms of unvarying and remote camera distance, and in the case ol le Ploisir and Lola Montes, in terms of camera movement. Obviously the framing presentation of la Rondc and Lola Montes are also extremely important in terms of originality.
The Influence of the Films of Max Ophuls
As far as I can tell, the films Ophuls made before 1950 had no influence whatever on any other film-maker. However the films of his second French period fairly certainly had a considerable effect on the Nouvclie Vague directors, particularly Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy, and this was explicitly acknowledged by the latter. Godards fondness for having the participants in a conversation wandering round the room, or even from room to room for no necessary reason probably comes from Ophuls, as may his use of a consistently remote camera. There is also an inclination towards pointless actor mobility in early ChabroL The use of audience distancing devices in narration was presumably encouraged by la L\onde and loin Mvmes, and Godard's use of artificial colour filtration by the latter Stanley Kubrick has also spoken of his debt to Ophuls with regard to the use of camera movement. Since my influence criterion is weighted more heavily for influence on good films rather than bad films, all Ophuls' posH950 films
397
score heavily in this respect.
Success in Realizing the Maker's Intentions
This criterion is obviously the most complex and difficult to evaluate, but at least the difficult are out in the open where they can be discussed objectively, which n more than can be said for other approaches to aesthetic evaluation. To judge by his autobiography and interviews, Ophuls accepted the conventional attitudes of mainstream directors of his time towards the filmmaking lask, at any rate until his return to France. In Max Ophuh par Max Ophuls he says it was his desire to "... obtain for each scene what seemed to me the ideal expression of the content." and his other relatively few specific comments on aesthetic points chime with conventional attitudes It will be readily apparent that my knowledge of this attitude of his has underlain my analysis of his films earlier in this chapter. Because of Ophuls1 acceptance of die conventional filmmaker's attitudes, features in his films made before 1950 that could be guaranteed lo alienate the general audience can reasonably he considered to be faults. This mostly applies to the pre-war films, and mostly involves irrationality and non-sequiiurs in the narrative construction of some of them, particularly Komedie om Geld and Yashinara, hut also to some extent Divine and Sans kndemain* The American films are largely free from l his failing, except for Letter from an Unknown Woman.
But when Ophuls returned to France there came to he change tn his attitude under the influence of those French crilies who praised Ins work in the most hyperbolic terms. In articles and interviews by Ophuls in Cahiera du Cinemat mostly from after the Lob Monies disaster, this change in attitude is clearly visible. In a dialogue written by Ophuls in Cahiers du Cinema No.81, he Imagines a conversation between himself and a potential hacker which goes in part as follows:
financier:  And who guarantees rne that what gives you pleasure will give lhe spectators pleasure? Director:  Well, one believes that one hay a heart that beats for them, insights tli3t see for ihvm, in short, finally, a nose.
Financier:     Abide   from  that,   there  are other
guarantees? Direct vr: None.
And later in this particular piece OphuU wses himself in company with artists and uoets, and says lhat he will take his time o*er shooting a flhn If he .(wli it appropriate. There are no signs of Mich altitude* In hi* earlier *ta lenient s. TV-quota lirjn above also shows a urruin lack of contact with
39$
reality, since the box-office failure of his last two films dearly indicated thatOphuls did not have the empathy with the audience that he continued to imagine he had.
Other comments in these last interviews suggest that Ophuls was indeed'moving in an inconsistent way towards the truly avant-garde attitude that commercial success did not matter to him. For this reason some of the usual limits that are placed on formal deviations by the necessity of appealing to the general audience can no longer be considered to apply to his postal 950 films, and such things as the continuously distant camera of Madame dc ... cannot be considered a fault. Since Ophuls made no admissions of failure with his last two films, though he did for some or the earlier ones, 1 have to give him the benefit of the doubt and take it that he exactly realised his intentions in this case. This is also the appropriate point to remind the reader that I place the least weight on my intentionality criterion, and the most weight on my originality criterion.
So all in all, using my three criteria for aesthetic evaluation, Max Ophuls' last French fdms must be rated very highly indeed1, followed by the somewhat less valuable beheld and Lo siijnoro di -eijcri, and then some of the American films for the perfection of their craftsmanship. Of these there is no way that Letter from an Unknown Woman can be rated more highly than The Reckless Moment, according to the criteria being used, since the themes and structure are no more original, and it did: badly at the box-office as well'. (This judgement may cause some people to wish to reject the evaluative methods being used he re out of hand. Let them reflect that their strong personal preference for Letter may depend on personality factors which cannot be expected to be the same for everybody else, My purpose is to-el iminate these subjective elements as far as possible, and I believe I have succeeded, since if 1 were .proceeding by my own feelings alone I would rate the last three Ophuls films rather low.) Of the remaining films from the earlier \period there are one or two that are lifted slightly above the level of good craftsmanship iby a few specific features that! have previously mentioned, though some of them such as Divine and Sans Icndcmain do not have even that.
^relations
The general meanings that have been read' from (or into) Max Ophuls' films mostly delive fromFrench critical writing of the nineteen-fifties, and one major source can be studied in Claude tteylies Max Qphuh (Clubdu Livre de Ginema, Brussels, I9SS). The basically Catholic nature of this and other French interpretations can he rejected out of hand as a classic case of the particular spectator seeing what he wants to sec in ^complex object, ^process-as mired in subjectivity a, picking out images of objects from the
STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
cracks and patches on an old wall, and hence of no lasting interest. The justification for my rejection of the religious interpretation is that Ophuls never showed the slightest sign of religious feeling or interest in his autobiography or interviews, and his films contain no explicit signs of religion beyond a few minor features demanded by the works from which they were adapted.
The better-known comments on Max Ophuls in Andrew Sarris' The American Ci nema (IE.P. Dutton, 1968) are largely an ingenious secularization of Claude Bey I it's interpretations. The one aspect of Sarris' interpretations that I find convincing, and then only in relation to the last French films, is a feeling of the hollowncss of life, tinged with despair. This interpretation is convincing because it can be related to the bad heart Ophuls suffered from in the latter part of his life.
In fact Ophuls himselfhas explicitly indicated a central feature of his films, in his expressed preference for people who arc like 'big children' (in Man Experience in Cahicrs da Cinema No,SI, March 19SS), and also in his repeated strong expressions of liking for actors. This excessive fondness for actors must be responsible for the less than ideal performances and casting in a number of his films. In any case, 'big children1 accurately describes the protagonists of what are usually regarded as his most characteristic films, and this interest can be traced all the way back to his first film, a fantasy which has children taking the place of adults in the social world. Such a central preoccupation is no drawback in the light of my criteria for aesthetic evaluation, but it surely raises an obstacle for those who require that a work of art presents or promotes 1 maturity' or other 'finer moral qualities.
The temper of our times forces me mi willingly to write down the connection between the shallowness of many of the heroines of Max OphulsJ films and the philandering side of his personality which is smugly implied in his autobiography and interviews, and made explicit in Howard KocIVs reminiscences in Film Comment Vol.6, No.4. To say it simply, Ophuls believed in, and acted on, the 'double standard'. As the hero of Die vcriiehtc Firma put it to the would-be actress to whom he was proposing marriage and domesticity: the dizzy, amusing film stars were people he could have a good time with during part of the day, but then he would like to come home to a wife and home comforts. There is no sign of Ophuls1 acceptance of the possibility of any kind of inverse situation in his films or his file,
It is important to note that the heroines of most of Ophuls1 films choose to put themselves on display in one way or another; the particular profession is not forced on them, as was also the case for the real actresses who fascinated Ophuls himself. He was also obsessed to an exceptional
STYLISTIC ANA LYSIS OF THE FILMS OF MAX OPHULS
degree with the theatre, and the way this too is directly represented in his films is unique in the medium. Other minor disconnected themes that surface a few times in a few of his movies are oppressive parents and leftish political attitudes, but both of these are, with the exception of Komcdie om Geld, just stuck into the film rather than being an integral part of its structure, in the way that a leftish political attitude was a fundamental part of Renoir s 'thirties films. One of the more amusing sights of the last decade has been the neglect by Marxist film 'theorists' of genuinely left directors like Ophuls and Renoir in favour of less talented directors like Douglas Sirk, who was at best an opportunist liberal, both in his life and in his films.
Isce no way that Ophuls' use of the moving camera can be associated exclusively with the themes of mortality and the loss of lovCj as Andrew Sarris would have it, since his pre-war films are shot much more conventionally, including those films like Sans lendemain which deal specifically with the standard theme of 'weepies'; the loss of love. In fact Ophuls applied the long take with moving camera indiscriminately, as the 'Maison Tel lier1 episode of le Plaint r demonstrates.
The really distinctive thing about Max Ophuls' films is that there is nothing underneath the superficially present concerns already mentioned, which is not the case with some other major directors, where at least some of the deeper interpretations made of their work can lind plausible circumstantial support, One could make an interesting case, if it mattered, that Ophuls' cinema is one ol immaturity rather than the reverse. After all, songs about the loss of love arc at least as much favoured by the young as by the old.
The Ophuls problem is that his few major and mrnor
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themes, his motifs and his forms, do not really connect with each other, and only in some of his films dr/some of them integrate properly with the story. When he was not working from a strongly constructed pre-existing narrative, he was leit with his own major interests in theatre and women, hut these interests had no real causal relation with anything else in the world at large that he wanted to put into his films and so tended to produce an invertebrate lack of structure. He did make attempts to compensate for this with formal repetitions and mirrorings, particularly in Lola Montis, but these were insufficient to hold together films that were deiicient in other respects.
At the end of his career Ophuls claimed that he would have liked to work in the t airy-tale mode, but here he was probably deluding himself, for both real and synthetic fairytales demand we lb established connections he i ween their events if they arc to be compelling, even if those connections are unnatural. One might cite Cocteaus la Belle tit la tiete (1946). Fantasies by Frank Capra and Michael Powell were also successful in the post-war years, hut this Retire demands a belief by its creators in powerful forces below appearances. All the indications are that Ophuls was not equipped to handle cither of these modes. However there is a fascinating indication in his radio script Gedanhn tiber den Film of 1956 that he could have taken part in the Ntiuvollc Vague developments [I he had Jived, This radio feature keeps changing freely between sections that arc straightforward dramatizations, or are readings of quotations from literary classics, or first-person reflections by the author, or musical quotations, or interjections, and so on, in a way that fairly closely anticipates what Jean-Luc Godard was to do in films after I960. But as things stand Ophuls did nothing [ike it himself in the cinema.
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27. AFTERWORD
-
jre 1 conclude my demonstration that, with thc right sort of approach, a good deal of progress can be made in dealino with some aspects of film analysis and film history. Although the kind of methods I use have already been succcsful in musicology and art history, they arc particularly suitable to the analysis of mainstream cinema because films are in general synthetic group creations resulting from thc not quite completely co-ordinated efforts of a number of people. Virtually all ordinary commercial films arc inherently superficial if semi from lihe standpoint of high literature, and one of the reasons for this is that there are hardly any movies whose every aspect and detail lias been controlled and considered at length by one person, in die way thatwc suppose that the interrelationships of every word and sound have been considered at length by a poet in the composition of a>good poem. (Though the extent to which this is really true is something that I suspect literary types do not really want to investigate),
lh my approach, the films themselves form thc basic-material for research and reference, with other contextual material being subsidiary to thc inspection of os large a □umber of the films as possible. With more work it would be possible to expand each of the preceding chapters into a whole hook, andi in thc process one would do the work that neither I (nor anyone else), has done, such as inspecting the records of film equipment manufacturing companies and film studios for exact information on the introduction of film technology. Frequently all'that can be found in thc trade and technical journals is the announcement that a particular piece of equipment is about to become available, and there is subsequently no indication in such places when it was first actually used'.
Worse than that, what information there is in die trade journals is very often incomplete, and it is impossible to
understand.its significance withouLagrcatdealof background knowledge. For instance, there is very little significant information on the mechanical details of thc early versions of the Mitchell camera that was published at the time. F tlie first of these dcscriptioiis,iathe/Iracri^nCinomo/o^rqp^ (Vol.2, no.lS, p,l3), it is impossible to understand exactly how the film transport mechanism worked, unless one familiar with the camera (orits descendants) itself, and this
om
W
ly
is
and subsequent sources car of til ly avoid showing any picture of this mechanism, This is quite typical of the situation, and for this reason nothing is to be gained by giving precise references to the line in a trade journal where I picked up an isolated scrap of information from which I then made a set of deductions about availability and use, by combining this information with other scraps of information, and then taking all this in conjunction with my knowledge of the film equipment of more recent times. Since the first edition of this book there has been a practical demonstration of the pitfalls for the uninformed trying to do this kind of work, in fiord well and Thompsons Classical Hollywood Cinema (Routlcdge, I98S). Here the authors repeatedly miss key points, or get them wrong because of their incompetence in film technique, aided by their conceit that a Ph,D. in Film Studies, combined with as many footnotes as possible, is all you need to produce useful knowledge. In any case, written sources alone should not be trusted, as I have illustrated at one or two points along the way.
The book you have just read also conclusively demonstrates at various points throughout its length that thc search, so dear to Marxists, for a few simple overarching principles that will explain the development of film technology or film style - whether these principles be ideas like standardization, efficiency, or class advantage - is futile, and only the ignorant and self-deluding could believe they have discovered diem.
Nevertheless, there is much more that can be done in the way of detailed rational explanation for what happened in the development of cinema, and there is lots of room in this field for more work, though only if done by well-informed people. It is work for thc connoisseur at an editing table (or in front of a non-linear editing set-up, which is availabe for free to anyone with a recent computer.), just as serious work in musicolgy is limited to those who can read a score.
Although during recent years there has been an increasing interest in doing research on the early years of the cinema to find out what actually happened, rather than what has been copied from one history book to the next, 1 am afraid most people in film studies are still quite satisfied with creating their own feeble fantasies of interpretation of films, and nothing else.
28. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1945.
TC RSÖ£ - Hone by going through complete runs of The Journal ^
to 970 and l^A^^a^r from 1921 Lo 1992, and then by checking all the other old books on film technique and technology available in England. Apart from what , a|ready ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ j ^ ^ J
forgotten, 1 list below those other books which provided some extra items of information.
AGFA KinehandbucL ca. 1927.
Alton, John Painting with Light. Macmillan, 19+9.
anon. Encyclopedia pat Timage, ie cinema. Fiachette, 1925.
Kennet, Cohn N. The Handbook of Cinematography £.T lleron & Co., 1911.
Cameron, James R. Cameron's Encyclopaedia of Sound Motion Pictures. Cameron Publishing Co+1 1930 & 1945, Cameron, James R. Sound Motion Picture Recording and Reproducing. Cameron Publishing Co,, 1930. Clarke, Charles G. Professional Cinematography. American Society of Cincmalo^raphcrs, 196+, Cornwell-Clync, Adrian Colour Cinematography. Chapman & Hall, 1951,
Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Comittee Investigation of Film Production and Methods at AGFA. FLM.S,0M Cowan, Lester Recording Sound for Motion Pictures. McGraw-FIill, ] 93 I. Du com, Jacques Lc Cincmatographe mtiet, sonore, parlant. 193?. Franklin, Harold Br Sound Motion Pictures, Doubleday & Doran, 1929.
Gregory, Carl Louis (editor) A Condensed Course in Motion Picture Photography. Falk Publishing Co., 1920. Hall, Hal (editor) The Cinematographic Annual.Vol. I, American Society of Cin em atograp hers, 1930; Hall, Hal (editor) The Cinematographic AnnualAhl.2. American Society of Ciriematügraphers, 193 I. Hepworlh, Cecil M, Animated Photography, liaxell, Watson, &Viney, 1899, Flulfish, David S. Cyclopaedia of Motion PictureWork. American Technical Society, 191 L Hulfish, DaWd    Motion Picture Work American School of Correspondence, 191 3 & 19f 5. Jones, Bernard E. The Cinemaiograph Hook. Cassel, 19"19*
Klein, Adrian Bernard Colour Cinematography. (1st. & 2ndr editions) Chapman & HaiJ, 1936 & 1939, Lehmann, H. Die Kinematographie. Teubner, 1911,
.... ■ t
Lescarboura, Austin C. The Cinema Handbook, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1921. Liesegang, F. Paul Handbuch der praktischen Kinematographie, Verlag M. Eger, ] 91S. Lipp, FL and Felix, F. Fuhrer durch dasWescn der Kinematographie. 2nd. Ed, Cuslav Kühn, f 92 I. MacBtan, L.C. Kinematograph Studio Technique, Pitman, 1922.
McKay, Herbert C. Handbook of Motion Pictarc Photography. Falk Publishing Co., 1927. Mascelli, JosephV Ue Five Cs ojCinematography Pathe-Cinema Ufiim vierge Pathc 1 926.
Pfeiffer, H. (ed.) Das Deutsche LichtbiiSacL Deutschen Lichtbild Gesellet, ca. 1925. Kdle, Johannes Kinotechnisches Jahrbuch; Guido Hackebeil A-G., 1924.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
402
Schmidt,       Kochs, A. Brbfilmtechnik. Max Hcsses Verlag, 1943.
Talbot, I.A. Moving Pictures: How they are made and worked. Heinemann, í912.
Thomas, D.B. The First Colour Motion Pictures Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1969.
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Thun, R. Der Film in der technik, VR L Verlag, 1925. Wheeler, Leslie J, The Principles of Cinematography 19S3.
Other boob which provide useful background information for readers of this book, including more pictures of film equipment than 1 can afford, and which in a few cases have also provided one or two pieces of information that I have used, include the following:
Abel, Richard French Cmema.The firstHfrre 1915-1929 Princeton University Press, 1934.
Abel, Richard French Film Theory and Criticism: a history / anthobgj' (l9Q7±f90j} Princeton University Press, 1988
ßalio,Tino (ed.) The American Film Industry University ofWisCOnsin Press, 1976.
Balshofer, Fred J. & Miller, A. One Reel a Week University ol California Press, 1967.
ßarnesjbhn The Beginnings of the Cinema in Englan d Davi d S: Charles, 1976
Barnesjohn The Rise of the Cinema in Great Britain Bishopsgate Press, 19S3
Barnes, John Pioneers öf the British Film ßishopsgate Press, Í9S3
Barnes, John Filming the BoerWar Bishopsgate Press, 1992
Bowser, Eileen The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-i 915 Charles Scribner's Sons, ľ 990
Brewster, Ben & Jacobs, Lea Theatre to Cinema Oxford University Press, 1997
Brown, Karl Adventures wich7):11: Griffith Seeker & Warburg, 1'973.
Brownlow, Kevin 77íe Parades Gone By Seeker & Warburg, 1968,
Bro\vnIow, Ke^n & Kobal, John Hollywood ~ The Pioneers Collins, 1979.
Búxkland, Warren Directed by Steven Spielberg Continuum, 2006
D my try k, Edward On Film Making Počal Press, 1986
Eisner, Lotte H, The Haunted Screen Thames &'Hudso n, 1969.
Elsaesser,T, (cd.) Early Cinema: space ^frame - narrative BF [Publishing, 1990.
Fell, John L. (ed.) Film Before Grißith University of California Press, 1983.
Fell, John L. .Film and the Nar r tive Tradition University of Oklahoma Press, 1974.
Gaudreault, Andre Cinema JÄIÄ du Film, 1982.
Gunning, Tom D. W. Griffith and the Origin of the American Narrative Film University of Illinois Press, 1991 Higham, Charles Hollywood Camera m en Thames & Hudson, Ť97-1'.
HolrnaJi, Roger (ed.) Cinema 19OQ-L906 (Voll Symposi urn) Federation' Internationale des Archives du Film, 1932. MulJ',:D:S. Film in the ThirdReich university of California Press, 1969.
KosKarski, Richard An Evening's Entertainment: the Age of the Silent Feature Piet u rc Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990
Low, Rachel & Man veil, Roger The History of the British Film: lS96-1906VoLl Allen & Unwin, 1'948.
Low, Rachel The History of the British Film: 1907-1913m. 2 Allen & Unwin Í949.
Low, Rachel The History of the British Film; T914-T91S Allen & Unwin, 19 5Q.
Low, Rachel The History of the British Film: 19U~1929 Allen & Unwin, T-97-k
Mayersberg, Pz\il Hollywood* The Haunted House Allen..Lane, 1967.
Musser, Charles fiie^^ Screen to 1901 Charles Scribner's Sons, i 990.
Perkins, Victor F. Film as Film Penguin Books 1972.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pratt, George C, Spellbound in Darkness New York Graphic Society, 1973, iprolo, Maria Adriana Storia del cinema muto halhno. Vol f Poligono, 1951 fteiud, Renzo (ed.) Sperditto nel buio Capelli editore, 1991
hosten, LOO C. Hollywood:The Movie Coionyjhe Movie Makers Harcourt, Brace 1941
Sadöul, Georges Histoire Generale du Cinema (3rd. Ed.) Denoel, 1973,
Šehaefer, Dennis & Salvato, Larry Masters of Light University of California Press, I9S4
Smith, Albert E. Two Reels and a Crank Doublcday, j 952.
Spchr, Paul C. The Movies BeginTht Newark Museum, 1977.
Taylor, R. & Christie, I. (eds.) The Film Factory: Russian und Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1S96-1939 Routledge, l'9SS. Taylor, R. & Christie, I. feds.) Inside thcThe Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema Routledge, 199! Tsivian,Yur-i & Usai, Paolo Cherchi SilemWitncsscs: Russian Films 190S-19! 9 Edition i Bibliotcca delľlmmagine, 1989 Usai, Paolo Cherchi & Codelli, Loreir/o (QÚs.)Beforc Caligari Edizioni Bibliotcca dellTma^nc, 1990 Usai, Paolo Cherchi fed.) Vhagraph Co, of America Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1987 Walker, Alexander The Sh at terc d Silents Elm Tree Books, 197S.
Weis, E. & Belton, J4 (eds.) Theory and Practice of Film Sound Columbia University Press, 19S5 Werner, Gósta /l/aur it;; Stiller och hans Filmer N ousted t Sc Söhn er, 1971.
Another important part of the background to this book is the ideas that film-makers have had about what they were do and a quick round-up of their statements about this can be found in;
Leyda, Jay Voices of Film Experience: IS94io ihe present Collier Ma cmill an, 1977. Koszarski, Richard Hollywood Directors 1914-1940 Oxford University Press, 1976. Koszarski, Richard Hollywood Directors 1941-1976 Oxford University Press, 1977.
To get the most value from the present work the reader should have a fair familiarity with present-day film technology, failing this, some work such as Bernard Lr Flapped Basic Motion Picture Technology (Focal Press, 1978), should be consultet
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29. TECHNICAL GLOSSARY & INDEX
65 mm. camera 230, 330
70 mm, film 230, 272, 275, 296, 297, 295, 320, 330, 33$, 350, 351
Academv aperture Camera and projector gate apertures standardized for 35 mm+ sound film. 230, 233, 275, 276, 333, 365,374,396
Accelerated Motion EITect of people and objects moving unnaturally fast, produced by running the camera faster than normal. 52, 175,348
Acetate disc Metal disc coated with a thick layer of cellulose acetate for making a gramophone recording for instant playback. 233
Action continuity Arranging the action in the shots on either side of a cut so that die actor movement appears seamless across thc cut. 40,41,60,62,64,94, 151, 303
Additive colour process Colour process that creates the colours with the three separate primary colours of light coming from adjoining tiny areas onthe screen. 86, 164, 221
Additive colour printer Film printer that gets thc required colour of printing light by combining different amounts of the three primary colours regulated separately. 269
American foreground (obsolete) Early film-makers' name for Medium Shot (q.v.) 94, 98, 155
Analogue re cording Sound! recording in which the continuous variation of some physical quantity in die recording medium mimics the variation in the sound pressure 335, 355, 356, 376
An a mor phi c 1. Havi ng a n ofciceabl y distorted sha p e. 143,144, 184 2. Th e s pecial case of th i s, mor e u s u a I i n ter m s of fi 1 m practice, of an linage being distorted by compression purely in the horizontal direction, 230, 297, 313, 314, 330, 333
Anamorphie Lens Lens that produces compression of the film image in one direction only, 297, 31 3, 314, 330, 333
Anamorphoser lens Supplementary lens ;put in front of an ordinary lens to produce an anamorphie image. 276, 295
Anti^-halation backing Coating on. the back of photographic film that prevents light reflected from the back surface of the base s carteri n g back i n to die emuls i on. 215
Anti^cfleetivc Coating A coating or scries.of coatings applt^d to the surfaces of the glass elements of lenses to reduce th< loss in thc light passing through them by backwards reflection at each air-glass interface. 257, 316
Apcrture:,(.Film) The rectangular opening cut in the metal, plate immediately in front of the film in thc camera that delimits the area of film receiving the image for each exposure.
erturer (Lens)   The variable opening in the iris diaphragm built into die middle of camera lenses that regulates die amount of light passing through the lens. 3*, 36, 48, 68, 8©, 139,^1,166,177-80,216 nS 219 «6 «9 253 ?57 253. 293, 295,297, 3.11, 313, 316, 317, 326, 339, 348, 349 *■* '
Aperture diaphragm ihe ihm metál leaves that define die openin 330
pening to regulate the passing light inside a camera lens 92,
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TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
40S
Aperture: (Projector)  The rectangular opening cut in the metal nhn> (t\^ ,^ * i
passing through , projector that $*£ the IJ of the ^^^^^ SW * ««* !fe 232 233 275 -----«uauy projeetetl onto the cine ma screen.
Apotheotic shot (neologism) Shot at the end of a film with in a group. 59
no narrative connection to die story presenting the participants
arc. 35,44,46,47,69-77,81-84,99, 111, 124, 126, 129,
Arc Floodlight Floodlight (q.v.) whose source is an electrical 130-135, 166, 168, 180, 200, 221, 258
Arc Light Light whose source is the flame created by the electrical spark between two carbon poles. The earliest form of electrical lighting, and hence sometimes referred to up to tlie early years of this century as "the electric light" See Arc Floodlight and Arc Spotlight. 44,45,46, 65, 70, 71, 72,74, 81, 130,136, 140, 144, 171,220,221
Arc Spotlight   Spotlight (q.v.) whose source is an electrical arc. 167, 169, 223, 225, 224, 258, 308
Art film Film made for limited distribution to more sophisticated audiences. 302, 303, 337, 360, 366, 37S, 394
Aspect Ratio   The ratio of the vertical to horizontal dimensions of tlie screen image. 230, 232, 233, 275. 295, 297, 333
Atmospheric Insert (neologism) Shot without the characters in thc film that shows the surroundings. 144, ] 52, 193
Automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) Electronic method of fitting post-synchronized (q.v.) dialogue onto the lip movements of actors recorded without sound. 3 54
Available light Thc light existing in a real scene, without the addition of extra film lighting. 47, 75, 267, 271, 2S5, 287, 295,309,311, 364
Average Shot Length or ASL.   Thc length or running time of a film, excluding the front and end titles, divided by the number of shots, including intertitles, in it. Also thc quantity arrived at in thc same way for parts of a film. 27, 160-162, 190, 193, 196, 20S, 210, 214, 220, 228, 235,236, 237,238,247, 249,250, 256,257, 263, 266,274,277, 230, 2SI,2S4r 302, 320, 322, 336, 351, 3S7 363 368, 369, 377, 378, 380,3S2, 384, 389, 394, 395
Backlight Light sinning onto actors from the opposite direction to that in which the camera is pointing. 79, SO, 31, 102, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 141, 142, 168-71, 180, 200, 201, 222, 223, 226, 252, 254, 255, 2$9, 269,270, 290, 3II, 327, 343, 344
Background Plate The film that is shot to provide the background image for Background Projection (q.v.) or Travelling Mattes (q.v.) 35, 2 IS, 231, 276, 291
Back Angle Sometimes used for Reverse angle (q.v.).
r
Ballast unit  Electrical device to produce current of special frequency and voltage for film lights 308, 341
Background Projection (or Back Projection} (Abhredadon - 13. P.) The projection of a film image onto the back of a
translucent screen in front of which actors are filmed performing. 215,2 to, 220, 230,231, 232, 34, 297,
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Barn doors Sheets of black metal hinged to the front of a lighting unit to control die light beam coming from it. 288, 308, 341,343
Barney Soft padded covering for a film camera, or part of it. 291
Beaxn-splitting pristn Glass prism with scmi-refiecting surface in « to divide light passing through into two *g beams. 2 IS, 270, 276, 277, 292, 297, 313, 314
;  , ,c/ui i» U9 151 155-1 57,223,258,371, 3S4,386, 393 r
BigClbse tip (BCU)   Shot showing head only (seepage 156) 53, 133, 149, m,
4Q6 TECHNICAL GLOSS A R Y A ND INDEX
Bipack negative  Two negative films sandwiched together face to face in a common roll for exposure in die camera, 213
Bleach bath  The tank in a developing machine after the tank containing the intial developing solution that contains a
chemical solution to dissolve the silver image out of film in colour processing 325, 339
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Bleach bypass A developing process in which the colour film is not passed through the bleach bad,r 325, 344
Blimp Soundproof casing for a film camera 226, 227, 273, 292, 312, 329, 202, 226, 227
Blim p ed Ga m e r a Ca mer a inside s p cci a 1 so u ndproof casing use d for sh o oti n g synchronous sound, 203, 207
Blow-^lip Enlargement made using an optical printer of part of the frame in a film shot so that it fills die whole frame. 137,
287,291 _
Blue screen travelling matte process Travelling matte process (t|.v+) in-which the foreground action is staged in front of a special blue screen 3 22 -t 333
Boom  J t Colloquial term for a Camera Crane (q.v.). 2. See Microphone Boom,
Bounce Lighting Lighting of a scene by reflecting die light from lighting unjts from matt surfaces onto the scene rather than shining it directly inthc usual way. 288, 2S9, 329
:
Broad Colloquial term for a floodlight, 2Q0, 222, 226, 289 Brute arc spotlight Very large arc spotlight 224, 2S9, 307, 32S
Burn-out An area of the photographic image that lias been so over-exposed that all detail is lost in it. 323, 344
Butt splicer Device for joining two film strips together which makes the join with the two Him ends butting against each others rather than overlapping. 301
Cabiria movement   Early name for a tracking shot (q.v.) 89, 3 3S
Camera Booth Large soundproof ibox with a glass window to hold an unblimped camera or- cameras and their operators for the purposes ol synchronous sound filming: 207, 230
Camera Crane Large counterbalanced lever arm, usually mounted' on. a wheeled carriage for support™ a camera and its operators and-moWngtliem stout through the air. See also Boom. 227, 246, 256, 283, MS, 350, 389, 392, 394
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Crane shot Shot taken with a Camera Crane 203,372, 386, 389,39S
Camera hdia. ^epointat which the dolly stop, temporarily during a long tracking shot (q.v.) 27+, 39«: CapacitorMicrophone Present-day term for Condenser Microphone (q.v.). 206, 233, 234, 299, 3S4 •Ctoba^j^-oF^p^cd^^fer beUvcen ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ,.2S> ,27> I29
Cardioidresponse microphone Microphone which .only :pieks up sound in the forward direction. 262, 29S, 299, 313.
-.. :
Catch lights Small point, ott,ight light create*on the eyeball* of an actor from; the film M lights. 288 CGtf Computer Generated Imagery 352
^.Ir 0f:Carly fi'm"n M l,Carly      *** <* or.omeone.eing chased from p,acc to place. 43,
Chest microphone Small microphone attached to ,h<, hody of an a«ou 31S
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I
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
407
Chiaroscuro  The pattern oflight and dark in an image produced by the distribution of shadows within it 47 94 7! #m 252,253,259, 327, 377, 3S3 ^
Chinese lantern Spherical lantern made oi paper internally supported by circular ribs. 342, 344, 345
Cinema Verité Films produced by the synchronized sound filming of a series of unrehearsed actual events See also Direct Cinema, 291, 300
Cinematographic Angle The filming of a scene from a direction not used in the still photography of the period. 36, 92
Close Up (Cti) Shot showing head and shoulders only. (Illus. page 156) 50, 54, 55, 59, 64, 6S, 67 10G 130 140 142 149', 151, 152,154-156, 170, 177, 17S, 180, 184, 187, !S9ř 195,201,204, 207,213,228,243,247,354, 258,259,26s', 266^ 269, 274, 275, 303, 310, 32S, 365, 371, 384, 338, 389
Coated tens   A lens with Anti-reflective Coating (q.v.). 258
Colour analyzer  Device for judging the colour correction or grading (cj.v.) to he applied in printing colour film. 269
Colour cast   Colour produced on a surface by white light reflected from a different coloured surface. 28S
Colour mask   Coloured dye in the emulsion of colour negative to correct its colour response. 26S
Colour reversal film Colour film in which the image is produced in its correct.colours in the originally exposed film by a special development process, rather than by printing a colour negative onto a colour positive film. 22 1, 26S, 236a 340
Colour Reversal Intermediate (CR-f)- film   Special colour reversal film for making copies of negative and positive colour films for the purpose of making a new copy of them, 287, 297, 307, 314
Colour separation intc^positives Black and white intermediate positive films made from a colour negative lor each of the three colour primary images in it. 286
Colour temperature   A measure for the colour of light by comparison with that emitted by a black body heated to various high temperatures specified in degrees Kelvin. 31 1
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Coloured lighting 326,353
Composite images Film images formed by the combination of two separate images 90, 333, 351
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Compositing   Making Composite images 352, 3£3
Condenser Microphone Microphone whose transducing element is a diaphragm forming part of a variable condenser (i.e. capacitor). 234,262, 298, 318
Cone tight, A form oflighting unit used suspend over a set, and producing indirect or V>IF lighting by reflection from the matt wlute internal surface of the unit's conical container. 269
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Conforming   American term for Negative Cutting (q,v.). 208
n,    i r. ];,j],t through it when its emulsion is in contact with that of the
Contact printing    Printing of negative film by passing light through it
positive film stock. 39,287, 333
t of the actors across cuts from one shot to the next, 21, 39, 58,
Continuity   Producing the appearance of seamless movement of tř^acto
60,63, 64, 66, 105, 1S8, 277, 33S, 372, 374, 375
Continuity cinema  The standard form of cinema. 103, 125, 149, I
faulty eut   A cut that maintains Continuity, 42, I'M, 214, 247, 302, 303,372 • ...
v r ^ of a film shot that notes features m th* shot which will Continuity record   A written record made during the taking ol • him determine Continuitv with die shots that will adjoin it. 63
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4ÖS
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX Contrast  The degree of difference between the tones in die film image. 215,217, 252, 276, 286, 2S7, 307, 3US 340 Con trustiness Synonym for Contrast 220, 232, 253, 344
Contrast)' Having a high degree of difference between die lighter and darker tones in the image. 197, 220, 25 1, 253, 287, 306, 325, 33S> 339
Contre-jour (Against the daylight.)   A picture taken towards the direction of the sun. 7S, 258
Coopcr-Hewilt Manufacturer of mercury vapour tube lighting units whose name was colloquially used to describe all such units. Sec Mercury Yap our Tube Lights,
Cordless Synchronization   Now usually referred to as Crystal Synchronization (q.v.). 291,312
Cou nter- Matte A Ma tte (q. v.) wh ich reveal s exact] y vtfett i ts complem c n ta ry m atte obscures o f th e image; an d v i ce - ve rsa t 53,90,277
Core lighting Lighting of the actors solely with two lights straight out to each side of them. 170, 171, 179 Crabbing  Tracking movement with respect to a fixed scene at right angles to the camera lens axis.
Crab Dolly A Dolly, all- four of whose wheels may be instantaneously rotated through 90 degrees to change its motion from a forwards to a sideways Grabbing movement. 228, 256, 257, 293, 331, 389
Cross-cutting (between parallel actions) Use of shots alternately showing parts of two actions which are understood to be raking place simultaneously. 11.21, 38, 62,65, 92, 1:06, l'QB, 109, 111, 149, 153, 154, 190, 195, 239, 247, 297, 303
Cross processing   Developing reversal film stock as diough it were negative film. 340
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Crossing the eye-line Taking-two successivc shots from different sides of the Eyeline (q>i\) 24, 336
Crystal synchronization Synchronization of the camera and sound recorder by controlling the speed of both of them by electronic signals generated by crystal-controlled oscillators. 318, 330
Cut The direct transition from one film shot to the next film shot without use of a fade, dissolve, or wipe. Cut-back   D;W. Griffith's term for cutting to a parallel action. 59, I OS Cutting copy  The version of a film created in the editing process from the rushes. 138
Cutting in-the Camera Method of shooting a Him that produces only those shots thatthe director knows he will use in the finished film, with no alternative angles shot of the same action in any scene. 208
Cutting on action Making a cut from one angle on a scene to another in the middle of an actor's movement. 56, 65, 106, 150 J 51
CylindricaMens A lens that has some lens elements with cylindrical surfaces 184, 273, 295, 296
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DAT (Digital AudioTape) Tape recording in which-the regions of magnet!nations represent binary distal numbers rather than sound amplitudes. 3S5 J &
Day for Night Cinematography The filming of a scene in the daytime with special exposure and filtration to give the impression that it is taking plaee at night. 163, 1'64 r t
Im^Ti ,317,7«,' j9T    dnCmatog^ wilh.g.catOcpth of Field (q.v.) , 79, flfe 204, 223, 226, 229, 230, 257,
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Definition T^-A»t^^i>x^a^t^t^^ U%m
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109
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Depth of Field The distance along the lens axis in front of the camera over which Rimed objects appear to be in sharp focus when the film is projected on the cinema screen. 1 38 J 39, 140,179,180,200,207,216 212 m%* m >ts « Ä 295, 297, 298, 317, 318, 325, 333, 349, 360, 393 ^f 1 27+1
Dcsaturation The reduction of the intensity of colours. 236, 307, 310, 323, 325, 340 344
Development process The production of a silver image in the film, or a colour image in the case of colour film 34 235 305 ^ 1
Developing bath The tanks of chemicals that produce the development. 2S5, 305, 325, 334 Developing machines 69, 269, 306
Dialogue cutting The editing or shots that have dialogue recorded with them. 239, 240, 320
Dialogue Titles Inter titles which reproduce words understood to be spoken by a character in the adjoining shot. 64, I ] 0, NT, 117, 118, 147, 148, 149, 304
Diffused Blurred image, or light made softer. 43, 126, 142 Diffuse daylight 45,84,96, 126, 140
Diffuse lighting  Light with its straight rays scattered in some way. 72, 73, 82, 130, I 33, I 34, 309
Diffusing Screen A sheet of translucent material, for instancetl ripple" glass, placed in front of the opening of a lighting unit to soften the light that it emits. 35, 123, 129, 131, 132, 166, 168, 342
Diffusion HJter Filter placed in front of a camera lens to reduce or soften die definition of the image that die lens produces. See also Lens Diffusion. 127, 178, 204, 308, 343
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Digital Things represented by integral numbers in computers and odier electronic devices 376
Digital compression  Reduction in the quantity of numbers representing sound or picture in digital recordings 356
Digital control   Control of devices by digital signals. 350
Digital effects  Effects created in a digital computer. 352
r
Digital post-production The editing and application ofeffects to a film entirely in digital computers. 377 Digital sound recording 334, 335, 353, 3S4, 356, 376
Digital sound track 356
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Digital video 356 Digital video projection 376
Digitizing  Converting analogue quantities into numbers. 351,356
c   n       *.Au/-tul Tw tht svncltronizcd sound filming of a series of unrehearsed Direct Cinema   Original American term for films produte<J    me s}nenrewe *
actual events. 290, 291,300
j r ~. *L» to the subieci without scattering and diiiusion.
Direct lighting   Lighting in which the light m proceed lrom *° * j
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288,290,310,311,344
Direct sound   Sound recorded at the same time as the picture is filmed. 234
,    ■     ■    I    • ™,<tv «i'th the fading in of i second shot which replace* it on the
Dissolve ffeg^ tm |5, 173, IS3JS4. 194,198,215.220,22s, 252,
film. 8. 11,37,40,49,53, 57,53,60,61.63,65,88,91.92, 111.   - —
262, 277, 303, 336, 359, 374, 375
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Dolly Wheeled vehicle specially made to carry a camera for making Tracking Shots. 203, 226, 227, 256, 284, 3IS, 332, 351,372,390
Double cross back lighting Lighting directed onto the actors from behind them and from bo di sides. 171 Double cutting  The cutting of a single film shot into two or more pieces then used separately in a film. 3SS Double exposure A second exposure on an already exposed piece of film. 53,61, IS 6,332
Dubbing The replacement of sounds From die original film recordings, and also the combination of the same. 2 1 5, 335 Dubbing mixer  The person who carries out thc dubbing. 335
Dubbing theatre Special die a tie where dubbing or Mixing (q.v.) is carried out. 3-t9, 335, 3S3 Double-take A second, and different, reaction by an actor to some event. 365
Duplicating Negative IS4, 198, 2 15, 232, 2S7 and Duplicating Positive IS4, 197, 198 Special film stocks intended to produce copies of negative and positive film with the minimum possible loss oT quality.
Dutch Tilt Shot in which the top and bottom of die frame are at an angle to die horizontal lines in tlie image. 177, 228, 261, 327,395, 396
Duplitizcd print stock Special print stock with emulsion on both sides of the base. 218
Dye formers Colourless chemicals that arc turned into coloured dyes in the development of colour film. 305
Dye imbibition printing or Dye transfer printing The process used to produceTechnicolr prints. 198, 199, 199,
217,220,268,286,340
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Dye-loning Attaching colour to the developed silver grains iii the emulsion with dyes, rather than altcrinu their colour by ch emical transformation, as in ordtnarv toning. L64, 253
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Edge numbers Numbers down die edge of die film strip indicating distance down it from the beginning. 324
Editing viewer and editing machine Devices to produce a moving film image that can be stopped and run back and forth for die purposes of film editing. 188, 300, 301
Effect lighting Special film lighting to simulate things like flames, moving lanterns, lightning, and odier things not creating steadylight, 46,47 ■■ *
Electret microphone Variety ofcapacitor microphone (q. v) Whose diaphragm has a permanent electric cW, 318,
354 *
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Emblematic Shot (neologism) Extrashot attached to the Beginnings etui of a Rim which docs not contain any of the action of the narrative, but indicates by its contents the general nature of the ttl m. S9, 96
Emulsipf. layer of gelatine containing the silver halides and, other photographic chemicals coated onto the film base or support. 39,49, 68, 165, <m, 207,217, 219, 2S2, 267, 286, 2S7, SOS, 338, 339
Equalization Modification of the frequencies and other variables making up a sound recordino.320
fixture ). Light falling onto the.fih,v,to produce m image. 2. Determination ol" the amount of light required to correctly reproduce the tones and colours in the subject on the film, 39, 43, 80, 90, 91,139, 165. ISO, 200, 235, 252, 297, 340
Exposure meter IDevice for determining the correct exposure of the film. 200 217 251
Expressive program   A set of association., of meaning with, particular features olfilm photography. 343, 3*S
1
:
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX ^ ;
Expressivism (Neologism)  The standard artistic association of formal features with meaning. 27, 2SS 77, 79 | £5
Extension tube Special tube fitted between the camera and die lens to reduce thc closest distance at which it can focus 349
Eyeline The notional line (and its extensions) joining thc eyes of a person in a film scene to what they arc looking at. 103 Extreme Long Shot Another name for Very Long Shot (q.v.) 94
Eyeline Match A cut to another camera position within a scene which stays on thc same side of thc Eyeline as it had been established in die previous shot, (Also referred to as "not crossing die eyeline".) 16, 21, 188,189,190
et to. 139
. r
Frnumbers (or F-stops) The numbers on a lens indicating the size of opening its aperture is s
Fade Gradual darkening of the film image to complete blackness £ Fade-out), or comersely gradual appearance of the film image at correct density from complete blackness (Fade-in), 57,61,73, 88, 91, 110, 111, 141, 152, 153, I62h 173, 183, 184, 194,220,252,277,336,359,374
Fill Light Light producing the subsidiary lighting of the actors which has been applied from a frontal direction other than that of die Key Light (q. v.), 46, 72,79,81,84,96, 127, 12S, 132, 134, 140, 168,169, 170, 171,200,201,223,224,226, 260,270,289,290,307,310,326,32S
film noir French term for American crime thrillers of the nineteenrforties, 327 Film recorder Device for recording images back onto motion picture film from digital video files. 352 Film Splicers  Device for joining two pieces of movie film together. 188
Filter  Glass or plastic plate coloured or coated with dye, or with irregular surface, which is placed in front of, or behind; lens to produce some change in the image-forming light passing through it. 277, 32S, 327, 365
Film Stock Motion picture film of any kind. 35, 68, 163, 197, 215, 226, 2S1, 267, 285, 305,308, 323, 33S
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Fish-eye Lens Lens which includes the full I SO degree field in front of die camera. 22, 29$, 351
Fixed foeal-length lens Ordinary camera lens, as distinguished from a *coni lens. 316, 317, 330, 34S, 349
i
Flag Large opaque black sheet used to control where film light falls on the scene. 30S
Flare Area of random light from a very bright source in the imag*, produced by imperfections in an optica, system. 230,239. 257, 294, 317, 343, 344
Ffeshback A scene taking place earlier inserted amongst scenes taking place in the present time oFthc film story 7m 89,91, 108,109, 110, HI, 112, 152, 153, 183, 190, 239, 329, 3S7, 39
Flashforward A scene taking place later inserted amongst scene, taking place in d,e present ume of th, film stor, 329 Flashing Extra exposure of film negative to uniform weak light to chang, its response. 307, 310, 340 Flat-bed editing Machines Editing machines that handle large rolls of film on rotating pb«. 300, 320, 3=7
•    e i!„l>t mvr 90 degrees or more in the horizontal and Floodlight Type of lighting unit which emits a fairly even inten,ty of,gh    - deg vertical dLc L, 7?, 12S, 129, 217, 219. 224. 226, 254, 259, 269, 289, 308
j ■ ^ r-tr \ in ivhich irregularities in the camera Fluid Head   Pivot sptem placed between the camera and its support (tnpod, et.., g
rotations are smoothed out by hydraulic damping. . ,
, mlim3 excited bv the li|?ht coming from ionised
Fluorescent Hghts  Tubular lights '
■   a   u %s4 ?70 311 3^4-327,338,340
mercury vapour inside them. 45, l^-f, ^/v, jm ■. ■
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
412 ^
Focal Length   The MM » | M^S^ SrS^ ^ ^
produces th^ sharp,,■ po«blo image. 91, 139, 172, 177, 22S, 22% 259, 294, 295, 297, 32,, 32.9, 331, 349
Focus-Pull (or MI-FOCUS)   A change in the focus of 3 lens during the course of a shot, 61, 226, 223
Fog niter Filter giving very heavy diffusion to die light passing through it, 26S, 2S6, 305, 30S, 309
Fogging The result of accidental exposure of the film to weak light before development, 251
Forced Development The development of film stock for an appreciably greater length of time titan diat recommended by its manufacturer, 2S6, 309
Four-point lighting (Neologism)  Lighting of figures from four directions. 169
Frame  Refers to both an individual image on die film strip and to the edge of the film image.
Framing Movement A small pan or tilt (approximately, less than 30 degrees) made by the camera operator upon the movement of an actor to keep him or her well framed, 36, 49, 50, SS, 13S, 174, 205
Freeze Frame The image in a single film frame rendered stationär)' on die screen through the reproduction of many copies of tt do™ the length of the film by means of Optical Printing 1S7, 304
French foreground Early name for Medium Shot (q.v.) 98, 155
.......... _. & .
Fre£nel Lens  Large diameter lens without excessive thickness at its centre, which is effectively made up of a series of
concentric thin annular lenses, 254, 341 Used to produce an efficient lens for Frcsnel Lens Spotlights. 223, 224, 255, 2S9, 305,341-43
Front Projection Method of combining studio -staged action in the foreground widi separately shot film for die background using projection of the latter onto a special highly reflective screen placed behind die actors. 293, 334, 364
Full Shot (FS) Shot showing the full height of the actor, (Ulus. on page 156). 97, 104, 1 55, 156, 204
Gaffer tape Broad doth-backed sticky tape, similar to duet tape or carpet tape, used.to fix lights and cables to surfaces. 2S9
Gate Guides in a camera or projector behind the lens that hokLthc film steadv as liaht is shone onto it or through it. 39, S7, 147,165,173,202, 239
Gauzing The placing of screens of gauze, usually darli in colour, in front of the camera lens to reduce the definition of the image. 180-82, 230
i
Geared Hea* Mechanical arrangement fastened to the top of a tripod involving gears turned by crank handles diat rotates the camera fastened to it in various directions, 173, 203, 227, 228, 292, 293
Glass Matte Shot Technique for combining action confined to nn^,mrt wf rk„ r_       »£    -     ,, ■,    .,. , .,
. r .   „.   e g^uujiLonnnLUto.onCipart ol the-frame with.painted backgrounds which occupy
the rest of the film frame, 146,1+7,164 fa Go-motion, Method of single frame model animation in which the object moves while the exposure U'being made. 334 Grading (US "Timing") Determination of the correct exposure to give the film in printing it. 269 Grain Uneven specks in the film image. 285, 323, 327 338 340
Graining (or Granularity) The amount of grain visible in the film image. .93,199, 215, 2,7, 2SS, 287, 366
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Handed camera ,44, 270, 288, 290, 292, 296. 3„2, 3,3, 316, 329, 343, 360, 362, 364, 365, 372
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Hard Cut A cut which produces a marked discontinuity in actor position across itself. 195- 327 Hard light Light that approximates to that from a point source. 344, 34S rTelic°Pter shots Shots taken from a moving helicopter. 293, 31 S, 316
High-Angle Shot or High Angle A shot in which the camera is pointed markedly downwards from the 92-94, V01, 1:04, 137, 176, 177, 186, 227, 240
413
cental, SS,
High-key Lighting Form of lighting of a film shot which produces an image which h made up ofmostly light cones. (N.B. This effect is impossible to produce if the sets and costumes arc predominately dark in tone.) 13S, 182, 225, 226, 2S2, 290, 309, 327,339
HAW (Hydra rgum Medium arc Iodide) lights  Lamps that emit light from an arc discharge in an a into sphere of ionized mercury vavour and iodine contained in a silica envelope, 307, 308, 325, 338, 340, 341
Hot heads Camera supports whose rotation in two or three planes is powered by electric motors under remote control 331,350
lens, or by Gauzing (q.v„), or by use
Illustrated titles Inter titles (q. v.) with illustrations accompanying their text. 144
Image Diffusion Reduction of the definition of the film image by the use of a special 1 of a Diffusion Filter (q.v.), or by throwing the lens out of focus, or some other means.
Incandescent Lights Light source whose light is produced by incandescent tungsten wire enclosed in a glass envelope. See Tungsten Lights also. 200,201,254, 277
Improvisation The creation of dramatic scenes by actors without using a script. 304, 319, 366 Inkies  Colloquial term for all kinds of Incandescent Lights (q.v.). 200
Insert A shot of an object or part of a person other than the face. (Before World War 1 this term was also^used to describe anything cut into the main scene such as internes and close shots effaces. 21,54,55, 56, 59, 65, 93, 99, 119, 144, l+J, 154, V93, 195,213,235,273,280, 368,369, 3S6
Inset Scene or Inset Image A -ail image its own frame or boundary included widiin the ^occupying the fuU film frame. 61,62, 152
i c   i     filin with iWr I avers of emulsion which each respond scpa-
1-ntegral tripack colour film Present-day type of colour Him, with three la)Lrs or
rately to each of the diree primary colours of light. 221
inte.ntedi.te Positive or Intuitive ***** ^ * ^ ^ ^ "
the duplication of a negative film. See also Duplicating Stock. 186, 267, 28/,
■ i      .■„„ n:.„ wlrii fine urain and low contrast used as the first stage in Intermediate Negative or Inter negative Specnl wg*.™ Otau**** grain
the duplication of a positive film. 186,252,268,285, 307,338
Intermediate Duplicating Stocks. Either of the above. tf 7. 18S, 198, 307, 338, 339
intermittent mechanic The (MM, that M M # — F+~ « ^       £ '~
3S, 36, 39,43,49, 165, 207, 314
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Intermittent printers 69
hnatorv tcxt ,or dialogue, In the si lent period iniqrtitle* were called Intertitle The modern term for a shot inching explan lor) to*, o g sub.title.or just title, 56, 60, 64, 9L, 106,110, 1 -17. M«, 122. I** ^ 1 '
IH;
place
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
414
h mmmm ém   ^ *nm *&e mm by  movable   4m # m] ^r^9 mm* ,m>'bc
#Í in irom oi' tlíc len, to create Win," and ' iris W or static circular vignette masking* ol die Idm image. A similar arrangement (the "lens aperture iris diaphragm") exists inside virtually all camera lenses, where its adjustment controls the amount o flight passing through dxc lens. 91,92.182,223
Iri^in Reduction ol the iris diaphragm near the end of the shot to take the image from full-frame to extinction. 141, 149,
183 >
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Iris-out Opening of the iris diaphragm from the beginning of the shot to take the image Irom black to full-frame. 140, 149,
183 •
■rising Use of an iris diaphragm in front of the lens to create a black mask (usually circular) whose edge moves to gradually obscure or reveal the film image within the frame, 92, 141, 166, 213
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Iris Mask See Iris. 140, 17S
«
Jamming   Initial synchronization of die time-code signals being put on die film by the camera or cameras to dtat put on the sound recording. 357
Jib arm The beam of a crane of dolly diat supports the camera and moves it up and down. 350
Jump Cut Cut which moves directly from one shot to another taking place at a later time. 106, 116, 23S, 239, 261, 277, 278,303,321,336, 359,364, 374, 375, 39S
Key  The overall tonality of the film image, whether dark, average, or light. See Low-key, Mid-key and High —key, 127,
129,201
Keycode Barcodes printed along the edge of the film- when it is exposed giving the distance from the start of the camera. 324,330,346
Key Light The light producing the principal and most conspicuous illumination of set and/or actors, and which usually determines the photographic exposure of the shot. 79, 84, 132, 133, I6S, H69, 170, 200, 201, 222-24, 226, 252, 259, 289, 290,326   . " '
Kicker See Backlight.
Lantern slide show Projection of images on a series of glass slides to an audience with accompanying commentary. 37, 38, 62, 66,92
Lapelmicrophones Very small microphones attached to the clothing of an aetor. 3 IS
_
Lavalier microphones Early name for Chest Microphones (c^v,). 299, 319, 354 Intensification Early name for Plashing (q.v,) fjlrn. 25 1, 286
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latitude The range of intensity d'light for which film will produce images of correct dfensity. 324, 338 tens 27, 36, 200, 201. 264, 21S, 228. 229, 257, 368,346, 330
Lens ©iffurfoir tewn-use* in tto bedk to coveralllthe meansofreducing the definition of the dim image when it
^photographed,.«4..,43, 170, 174, 178, 479,M0V,98, 204, 205, 222, 223, 224, 2SS, 294, 308, 340., 326, 328 344. 345,
Letter Insert Close shot showing only a letter and' the text on it+ 9S
T
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i
41
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Lighting balloon White hclium-fillcd balloon with a powerful light inside it. 342
Lighting m^3m M | fifrifg between the brightness of the Key Light together with the Fill Light and the brightness oi the ml Light alone, 343 s
Liquid gate printing Printing in . special printer which M the negative and positive film in the printing -ate in a bqucl ol refract.vc mdax equal to fa of the fita base, so as to climinatc lhe iraage ^ ^ £ || ^
Location Place where a film is shot outside the film studio. 75, 97 f 106 Lognormal distribution 247, 249
Long Focal Length Lens 140, 142, 173,207, 219, 275, 292, 293,294, 317
Long Shot (LS) Shot showing more than the whole height of the actor, (see lllus. page 1 56) 27, SO S3 56 S7 61 S9 97 9S,99, 101, 102, 104, 108, 149, 152, 155, 156, 178, HS7, 222, 223, 228, 243, 255, 256, 282, 25S, 299, V 334 360 W 382,3SS,392,394
Long Take A film shot that is appreciably longer than the longest shots which arc usually found in die films of the period in question. 227, 236, 237, 240, 256, 25*61, 263, 266, 274, 275, 277, 288, 302, 320, 351, 358, 361-364, 37S, 387, 3S3, 3S9, 392, 396, 397
Low-angle Shot or Up A<iiglc A shot in which the camera is pointed markedly upwards from the horizontal. 27, 92-94, 137,176,177,204,213,227,258,259,261,327,388
Low-key Lighting Form of lighting of a film shot that produces an image which is mostly dark. 75,77, 83, 84, 125, 130, 131, 133> 134, 182,223,309,32S,339,344, 377, 393
Magnetic Film A plastic base of the usual film dimensions coated with a magnetizable medium radier than the usual photosensitive emulsion. 273, 299, 3Q0, 319, 335, 353
Magnetic Recording Sound recording by variable magnetization of a metallic or metallic oxide coating on a flexible film base. 262,271,272
Married print Film print with the sound track printed on it as well the picture made after the film is finished. 314
Mask Opaque sheet of material placed in front of, or behind, a lens to obscure part of the image it forms. Sec Matte 47, 53,54, 140, 141, 143, 147, 184, 206
Masking Obscuring part of the film image with a Mask of some kind. 54,61, 90,275 Master shot Shot covering the whole lengdi of a scene. 360
Matte Opaque black sheet sr material (usually fhm metal) placed in-front of, of behind, a lens to to-obscure par.tof^e image it forms. See Mask, Counter-Matte, and Travelling Matte. S3, 90, 1*7, 173, 186, 276, 29S, 334 Matte box  Pyramidal black box supported in front & the lens to act as a light shade, and to hold fibers and mattes in place if necessary. 166, 173, 181
Medium Close Up (MCU) Shot showing the actor down to their mist (See lllus. page 156) S6, 59, S3, 89,99, I OS, 141, ISS. 156, 171, 256,384
Medium Long Shot (MLS) Shot showing the actor down to their shin, (see lllus. page 156) 54,99, 102, 149, .55-57, 204,360,382,384,394,395
Medium Shot Shot showing the actor down to bclmv their hips (See.U.s page ,56, 57. 61, 94, 96, 98, L03. .39, ,4,, 155, 156, H68, 20,1, 207, 223, 243, 245, 282. 371, 379, 384,386, 392, 394, 395 ■
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
416
Mercury VapourTubc Light Form of lighting unit whose monochromatic blue light was produced by an electrical discharge through mercury vapour inside it. See also Cooper-Hewitt. 44, 45, 69, 72-74, 129, 1>G6, 200
Microphone Device for converting sound pressure waves into eleetricaJ current that varies in exactly the same way, 2GQ, 206, 207, 227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 262, 291, 298, 3IS, 334,3S4
Microphone Boom An extensible tube carrying a microphone in a rotatable harness at its end, which can be pivoted from a supporting stand to get the microphone into the optimum position for sound recording. 233, 234, 3 15
Mid-key Lighting Form of lighting of a film shot which produces an image which has approximately equal total areas of light and dark distributed over it. 222, 252, 309, 328, 339
Mini-brute Powerful spotlight made up of a cluster of PAR tungsten-halogen spot bulbs. 239, 310
Mirror^reflex shutter Film camera shutter whose front surface has been given a mirror finish to intermittently divert the li sht from the scene into the view-finding system, 255, 269, 291, 292, 296, 312, 313, 330, 347
Mixing The combination of sound recordings to put them into synchronism with the film picture. 233-35, 3(DG, 334, 354
Mixing desk A desk in a Dubbing theatre (q.v.) covered with controls to regulate the combined sounds being re-recorded for the film. 335, 353,354
Mono pack colour film Present-day type of colour film, with three layers of emulsion which each respond separately to each of the direc primary colours of light, 252, 268, 276
Montage Sequence Sequence of relatively short shots without action continuity running through diem. 92, 11'9, 152, 177, l'S3, 194, 195, 198,228,229, 231, 261, 366, 3S
Motion Capture Recording the movements of actors to use as a basis for the movements of computer animated figures. 353
i
Moving Coil Microphone Microphone whose transducing element is a diaphragm attached to a coil which generates current by its motion in a magnetic field. 234, 262, 298
Narrated flashback A Flashback (qtv.) which is accompanied by a narration of the story it represents conveyed in inter titles, or on the soundtrack, 109
Narrative Title An Inter title whose text relates objectively part of the action of the film. 61, 109, 1 16, 113, 147-49, 152 Naturalism The attempt to make art like reality 113, I 16, 145, 213, 269, 304 Naturalistic Like reality. 64, 115, 311, 329
jative ('film) Motion picture film that produces tones and colours the opposite to those in the scene filmed. 35, SO, 51 i 53,68, 92,93,125, 163-1165,166, 187, 197, 198, 206, 217, 233, 251-53, 253, 259, 267, 268, 276, 285, 286 ?97, 305, 306,307,309,329,333, 339
Negative Cutting Gutting and joiningthe film negative to match the Cutting Copy after that has been edited- See also Conforming. 20S
• m-    " i 1
Nickelodeon Old generic tcrfn for a small motion-picture theatre. 67
Nine-foot line ^^f#^^^^p^ with^e camera nine feel from the actors. 82, 96, 97, 98 Non-actors Ordinary .people untrained in.acting who act in a film. 213
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TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
417
North Light 1. (ArtisUc) The light coming into a room through a large northTadng window. 2S9 2. (Filmic) A liahtin* unit to produce an imperlect simulation of the previous. See Soft Light 28, 4S, 223, 269, 30S 3?S 341 *
Object animation   Filming an object frame by frame with changes to its position between exposures, so that die it appears to move in the finished shot. 52, 334
Objective shot An ordinary shot in a film that is not the Point of View (POV) 0f any of the characters 42, 54, S5, 93, 22S, 316
OiT-angle Another name for a Dutch tilt (q,v+) 228, 261
One reel of Film A standard quantity in 35 mm. film. Approximately 1000 feet of film. 119 One-reel film A film one reel long, approximately V06, 10S, 116, 122
Optical Effects or Opticals Alterations to the ordinary filmed image such as Fades, Wipes, Blow-tips, and Freeze Frames which can be produced by Optical Printing. 194, 198, 261, 292
Optical Hat A small sheet of glass whose surfaces are absolutely parallel. 310, 325
Optical printer A printer in which the negative is held in a projector, and image of the frame is iocusod on die positive film in the gate of a camera to make a print. 164, 166, 198,220,231,2611,275, 276, 297,333, 351, 352
Optical Printing Printing of a film positive from a film negative in a special printer winch forms the image from one film onto another by a lens system between them. See Projection Printer also. 51,186, IS7, 215, 230, 231, 232, 287, 365
Optical sound track A narrow band down one side of a film inside the perforations which represents the sound recorded on it by varying photographic densities or varying widths of a black band widiin it. 272, 273, 319
Orthochromatic Film Film whose emulsion responds strongly only to blue and. green light, slightly to yellow light, and not at all to red and orange light. 34, 68, 86, 163, 164, 197, 200, 215, 2 IS
Over-exposed Film receiving too much light to correctly reproduce die scene in front of the camera. 80, 216, 286, 310, 327,343,344
Ov
,'ercranking Running the camera faster than normal to produce an effect of Slow Motion (q. v,). Overlapping dialogue 319
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Pack shot The final shot of a television or cinema commercial which shows the product being sold. 294
Pan and tilt heads    Device to ..low camera to rotate in horizon*! and vertical direction, during Panning and Tilting
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(q.v.) movements. S7, 227, 315
i   i     i «**M* tn ^11 wavelengths of visible light. 163, 164T17S, 197, Panchromatic Film   Film whose emulsion responds almost equally to all waieicngtra o g
198,200,206,215,217,2113,219,221,233
*     \       iVrtrti i-Li- 'taoi>e frame for television and Panned and scanned   The selection of an Academy Aperture (q.v.) area Iron, tin. Scope
videotape exhibition. 374
Panning, Pan A rotation of the camera about a £gj g gffi
172-74, 189, 203, 204, 20S, 226, 227, 228, 246, 256, 2S9, 260, 271, 283,292, », 382,383,386,387, 390,393,394
Panorama The original name for what is now called a panning       W .
, > i l    ,„:th , mraholic mirror coated internally onto the back PAR type reflector bulbs Tungsten bulbs made of moulded gb* mjh a parabol.c
surface 289. 308. 341
41S
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
ParallelTracking Shot A Tracking Shot in which the camera move, at j roughly fixed distance from moving actors, but separately from them. 51 ? 89, 138, 174, 204
Periscope lens Orientable lens at the end of a tube attached to the camera lens port, 349
Perforations  The regularly spaced holes down the edge of motion picture Him that allow the sprockets and claws in the camera and projector to move the film forwards. Also called Sprocket holes. SO, 63, 88, 199, 233, 291, 297
Phantom ride  Early name for a shot taken from a moving vehicle. 36, 41,42, SO Photollood bulbs Incandescent light bulbs with high light output Tor their size, 2S4
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Photoflood reflector bulbs Photoflootl bulbs with a mirror internally coated on the back surface of their envelope, 2S7-2S9
■pin registration Holding the film precisely in place during exposure in the camera gate with a pin that enters the perforations. SS,90, 165, 173, 174, 202, 227, 231, 255, 292, 295, 296, 3*4, 316, 347
Pixillation jerky motion in a film shot resulting from applying time-lapse cinematography to human movement. 375 Plan amerkairt French name for a Medium Long Shot (q.v.). 98
Pole-cat Extensible tube that can be wedged across a location room to carry film lights. 288
Point of.View Shot or P0V Shot A shot taken with the tens pointing along the direction of view of a character shown in the previous or subsequent shot. 51,53,54,55,65, 66, 93, 102-105, 137, 150, 151, 152, 162, 17S, 176, IS4, 213, 223, 263, 280, 28-3:, 303, 36S, 369, 386
Positive film Film on which a Positive print is made from negative film (q.v.). 35, 39, 51, 86, 165, 167, 187, 138, 197, 199,297
Positive print 50, 69, 85, 163, 206s 220, 252, 267, 268, 276, 325, 339 Post^fliashing Flashing--(q.v.) motion picture negative after exposing it. 324
Post^Syndironization Process or recording sound after the film has been shot in such a manner as to give the illusion that the sound was taken synchronously with the picture. 20S, 233, 235, 238, 254, 304, 319, 335
Practical lights Lights that are part of the decor of a set or location, and arc working on during a shot. 77, 364
Pre-llashing Flashing (tpv+) motion picture negative before exposing it. 286, 306
projection Printing See Qptical1 Printing. 51, VS6
lection speed 174, 17$, 196, 233
l^Focus Sec Focus-Pull. 294
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Pushed Given extended!development. 285, 286
Quartz crystal oscillator iEleetronic device .that generates a very steady and regular pulse for timing purposes. 299, 31 2
Quartz crystal sync, pulse generator The above 319
ilied to creating a pulse for synchronizing cameras and recorders.
Quar iodine Lights tigging,™* whose source is a form or small' Incwdo^^t bulb with tungsten filament in i Silica envelope conuimng ,odinc vapour. Oltcn relWedMo asTungstcn^Halogcn Lights. 2S8, 289, 30S, 341
Quasi-static seene (neologism). Scene in which the actors do not move around much. j. 174, 293, 360, 382
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TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
419
Radio Microphone or Radio Mike A small microphone whose signal is transmitted to the sound recorder hv a verv small radio transmitter attached to it and concealed in an actor's clothes. 3!S 319
Ramping  Changing the speed of die camera during the shot. 3+S
Reaction shot  Shot showing the reaction of one character to what another is saying or doing. 358 Reduction printing Printing a film of larger gauge to a smaller gauge. 1S6 Reel A standard quantity of 35 mm. film - about 1000 feet. 67, 116, 125, 160
Reflector 1. Old American for any light. 2. In this book, solely a white or metallic-surface sheet Tor reflecting liaht onto actors. 35,81, 124,201, 326, 342 *
Reflector fill-lighting Fill light put onto the scene with a Reflector (q.v.) 79, 102, 142
Reflex view-finding system View-finder that allows die camera operator to see the image goin^ onto the film durino the shot. 255,293,295,296, 316
Registration Ensuring successive frames arc in exactly the same place when the film is shot + 50, St, SB, 146, 165, 199
Registration-pin system Technique of holding the film precisely in place during exposure in the camera gate with a pin that enters the perforations. 174, 219, 256, 270
Resolution Degree to which the film emulsion can produce separate images of very fine lines close together. 334, J52, 376
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Reversal film Film in which the image is produced in its correct tones in the film originally exposed in the camera by a special development process, rather than by printing a negative onto a positive film. 251, 267, 268, 2S6, 307
Reverse printing  Printing the frames in a shot in reverse order, so that the action runs backwards when the film Is projected. 39, 5 1
Reverse scene The original name for a Reverse shot or Reverse angle (q.v.). 100, 102, 112 Reversing action Action appearing to run backwards, 39, Si, 1S7
Retarded stylistic features Stylistic features that have already been dropped in odter films made at the same time. 85, 98,101,150
Reverse Angle Shot made of the same scene for which the lens axis has been moved through more dian 90 degrees from that in the previous shot. 42, 61,93, 100, 101,102-5, 112,149, 150, IS4, .62, 175, 188^.90, 210, 211, 238. 241,249, 250, 262,263,265,281,338,365,369,371,372, 388,393,395
Ribbon microphones Microphones whose diaphragm is a very thin metal ribbon suspended ^^g^*^ fe* natural response that picks up sound mainly in the straight forward and straight backwards directions. 234, HH
Rillc Microphone Colloquial name for one form of Ultra-directions Microphone (q.v,)..
. ■      ~\,* tli-ii nr. run backwards as well as forwards in
Rock and roll dubbing Sound mixing that uses sound on magneuc tracks that can run b*k«ar»
synchronism widi the projector. 300
Roll-back mixing Another name for the above. 300
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i   ■ *fe.tmnhrv nrotcction of a single frame of movie film.
Rotoscoping   Making a tracing by hand from the image dur.Og the afrUMir, proj,c g
188,298,353
Rubber Numbers
picture track and soun 236
Serially increasing numbers printed m "W«> Jg ^Jnesrcfcrm| l0 „ Code Number*, id track for each shot of a sound film before editing takes pla^mcU
TECHNlO\L GLOSSARY AND INDEX
420
Rush ptmt* rushes R)m prints made as soon as possible alter shooting, to be dewed for errors, and dien used in editing the film. Called Dailies in die U.S. 175, 356, 357, 376
Saturation The intensity and purity ot colours. 267, 2S5, 236, 305, 309, 338
Scale of Shot (iwoWsm) Tlie size of die actor with respect to the film frame, (see -[litis, on page I 56). 2 1, 1:05, I 55, 159, 161, 2G9, 2+2, 243, 245, 2+6, 247, 249, 250, 263, 281, 2S2, 369, 371, 379, 3S2, 3S4, 386, 3S7, 3SS, 3S9, 390, 392, 393,394,395,396
Scanner Device for producing digital images from film frames. 352
Scene A scries of shots representing continuous action. 9, 10,25, 39,40,42, 106, 140, 149, 196
Scene Dissection (neologism) Manner in winch a scene is broken down into a series of film shots. 53, 54, 105, 149, 150, 154, 182, 1S9, 209, 261, 266, 277, 302, 336, 360, 364, 366. 3S9
Scoop A Floodlight (q.v.) specially made for suspending over a set while pointing more or less downwards. 124, 222, 226
'Scope Generic name for all anamorphic filming processes identical to CincmaScope {q.v.) 230, 274, 297, 314, 3 IS, 333, 396
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Self-blimped camera A camera that is silent witiiout having to be enclosed in a Blimp (q.v.). 296, 330
Semi-reflecting pellicle mirror A very thin sheet of transparent material with a semi-reflective coating, used to split light toys into two identical beams. 292, 296
Sequence   ,A series of film scenes whose content is closely connected, but without having time continuity. 9,      II, 25,
140, 141, !90, 390
... >
Set-up A camera position used to get one or more shots, 358, 363
S ho c fc Cut C ut accom pani ed by a very m ar ked ch ange i n the so un d track. A S h o ck Cut i s often, bu t no t ah vays, a I s o a Jump Cut (q.v.): 138,239, 261: 262, 277, 278, 303
Shot transition The way of joining one shot to the next; whether cut, dissolve, wipe, fade, etc. 11, 58, 60, 61, 141, 149, 150, 1 S3, 336, 374
Shutter angle The angle between the blades of a film camera, which determines how long the exposure of each frame is. 308,348,351
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Silent aperture Tlie area of thc film within the rectangular mask in thc gate of a camera or projector in the silent film period 233, 332
Silver retention process Special film development.process for colour film which does not remove the silver image produced by the initial development, 339, 340 &
Single-frame animation the standard process for producing the illusion- of movement in Objects and drawings by filming them one frame at a lime in changing position-;. 52,53,90
Single system sound cameras Film cameras that r.rord the sound directly onto .the edge of the film at thc same time thc pi cture i s bei ng fi Irri ed. 3 GO
CI
Slow emulsion  Photographic emulsion that is relatively insensitive to light. 215
Slow Motion HfectproWiby arming the camera faster than normal, scthat the-image :proj,c ted on the screen at the normal speed appears to move unnaturally slowly, 52, t74> 347, 348, 35?
Smoke R** pr^tt^ly tj^^i^^.^^^ ^mtm^mt^^m f<* Or pa. lo make the image look more attractive in recent times. 308, 327, 328, 3*5
421
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TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX Snoot Wide tube fixed to the front of a spotlight to restrict the beam of light. 343
Soft Focus Common expression for Image Diffusion    v \ .^rL^i t
I L/uni&iori ^\.) produced by some means or other. 35, 141, J42, 173 25S
Sound Camera I .Special camera that records sound photographically down die edge of the sound negative > Am used for filming the picture in synchronism with a sound recording, 207, 208 s 23+
V camera
Sound effects Sounds other than dialogue, usually recorded separately and then put on the Soundtrack MM 335
Sound-on-disc recording Sound recorded on a gramophone disc synchronized mechanically or electrically to the film picture. 207, 208, 209, 235, 236
Sound Moviola Viewing device for editing the film picture in synchronism with its sound-track, 235, 236
Sound negative The negative that has had an optical sound track recorded onto it in die Sound camera (q.v) 200 ?0S 234,235,335
Sound negative developing bath Special developing bath to produce high contrast development of tlie sound negative or positive. 307
Sound-on-film recording Sound recorded as a varying photographic trace onto motion picture film. 207, 209, 234, 235, 262
Sound recorder Device for recording soundH 318
Sound-track The part of the film strip diat contains the photographic trace representing sound oscillations. 197, 199, 2OS, 230, 233, 236, 240, 256, 272, 273, 300, 301, 314, 320, 332, 333, 335, 353, 363
Source lighting Film lighting that comes from thc direction, more or less, of some apparent light source within the scene. 309,326
Source music Music that appears to come from some source within the film scene. 380
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Special effects Anything in a film that requires special measures to make j t Kap peň in a film. 297, 298, 322, 333, 33S, 339 Spherical lens Ordinary lens whose elements have surfaces that are segments of a sphere, 296> 297, 31:2, 330, 332, 333
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Split-field dioptre Supplementary lens that is spit in 'half across its radius, and put in front.of the prime Camera lens, It changes the focus across half of the lens field, and liencclhe image. 229, 258, 3=1-S
Split-screen effects Illusions created by filming two portions of the screen separately on wo,passes of the film through the camera. 62, 1:08, 173, 332 ...
Spotlight A lighting unit which produces a beam of light restriscedi.ih angle by a fens and/or mirror, and so illuminating a fairly sharply reacted area of the scene, *2S, 127. 128.129, 200, «| 222-24, 254. 2©Ä 3W. 3*2, 344 •
Sprocket holes The reguly spaced holes down ti* ^^^iUntttó^ sprockets M#*tä cLcra and projector to move ihe film forwards. Also called Perforation (q.v.) M » 207, 230, 272. 273. 276, 299, 30.1,335, 3S6, 357
Sq.Uee,e ratio The ^portion by which the film .image* combed laterally ft *P Ana^hic proce.ss (,s*) 233, 274,295,296
r ^ftäi m tkát ionie arc performing much further from the camera, than
Staging in depth The arrangement of actors m a scene *o that some arc pvt o c
others, 9S, 114, J79, 226, 238,259, 260. 274, 276, 311, 360,
SteneiMinting process Applying colours to selected areas
of the film frame'by using stencils. 85, 165
VílEriCÍA ■
422
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
^printing   Printing multiple copies of some of th, Ml flf I ^ i« ™sion down a duplicate print, to product slower motion of objects than in the original film. 214
Stepping motor Electric motor that rotates its shaft in small angular increments, rather than continuously. 3 15
Stereophonic Sound Sound which is reproduced from multiple sound tracks through multiple speakers in the cinema auditorium, to give the illusion of spatial placement of the sound sources. 262, 272, 273, 275, 3 IS, 3 19, 354
Stereo magnetic'film track and Stereo optical film track. Separate sound tracks on a iilm print to produce Stereophonic sound (q.v.) 319
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Stereoscopic cinematography Taking two Mms of the same scene with cameras slightly separated, so that the two images can be fed separately to the left and right 'eyes of the audience, to give the illusion of real depth in the scene, 272, 273, 314,
333.
Stock shot An already filmed shot taken from a store of such shots held by a studio or film library, and: used in a new film.
S.5
Stop-Camera Eflcct Trick effect achieved by stopping the camera, removing a person or object from the scene (or vice-versa)^ restarting the camera, and later joining the two shots together, so that die object in question appears or disappears instantaneously from the tilmically reproduced scene. Sometimes unfortunately referred to as a "stop-motion effect", but not in this book. 38,42,51,77,90
Story hoard A set of small drawings representing a frame in each shot in a -Dim prepared before shooting as a guide for the production. 322
Stretch-printing See Step .printing. 329
Strobes Cop ic eflcct Unnatural movement in. a filmed scene produced by objects or lighting in the real scene flickering at a different frequency to that at which the frames of motion picture film are exposed. Colloquially referred to as Strobing, when it can include other unnatural elfcctsthat do not result from the real stroboscope effect. 3OS, 325, 340, 341
Studio Buildings specially constructed for films to he shot in them. 34, 35, 42, 43, 44, 50, 97, *24, 12S, 126, 129, 140, 147
Subjective eiTect Alteration of the normal! film image to indicate that it is the view of a character in the film distorted by emotion or some other cause. 11-9, 144, 184,239,296
Super-16 A filming process that uses more of the width of 16 mm, film than norma]. 314, 3 30, 332, 349 Super 35> A filming process that uses more of the widtii of 35 mm. film than normal. 332, 333
Supcrimposition The images in two film frames combined into one over the whole area of the frame by double printing or double exposure 3S, 3&, 51, 53,62,65, I 19, I4S> 194, 213,231, 232, 273, 333
lementary viewfinder Avicwfmder attached' to the side of a film .camera that shows as accurately as possible the image actually being recorded on film. 48, 49, B6, 87, SS, 2*9, 227
Swinging Lens mount Special lens mount that enables the camera lens to be set at an angle to the true forward direction. 229 5
Swing/shift lens Modern name for a lens in the above arrangement. 349
Symbolic sequence A shot oT:art object or independent scene put into an ordinary scene, 152
Synchronisation to music play-back Recording a sound performance to provide a sound track that appears to be synchronous after die film pienurelias been shot without sound, 209, 383
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Synchronise!, sound Recorded; sound i,v synchronism widvthe moments &fr objects that produced it in
the him picture. 20S^ 235, 256, 2901
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423
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Synchronizer Device for maintaining synchronism of || sound-tracks with the picture track when editing sound film. 20* T.grain emulsion Film emulsion containing special tabular shaped grain, ol silver halides. 324
Tank Large permanent hole containing water in a mm studio used which is used for shooti water, 43
ooting scenes that take place on, or in,
Tape recorder 270,271,291,298,299
tape Splicer Device for joining film *f| butt splices secured by transparent plastic tape rather than d.c older lap splice, using film cement. 301 [ J
Tcleeine Device for converting motion picture film images into a video signal. 336 338 352 356 357
Telcphoto Lens Although strictly speaking this describes a lens using, special Form of optical construction, it has colloquially been used since the beginning or the century to refer to any long focal length lens. 36, 293-296
Temps mart ('Dead time/) A scene in which nothing happens to advance the standard dramatic progression expected in an ordinary film, 303-04
three-point lighting Film lighting directed onto the subject from three directions. 79, H3, 169
Three-quarters back light Light directed'onto die subject from approximately I 35° to the line from the camera to the subject. Nowadays usually called cross-back lighting in the US, 31, S3, 126
—
T hr e e-str i p Tec h nico 1 or ca mcra S pecia 1 cam era exposing three i mages si m u I taneous I y o n three b lack an d whi te negatives. 26S, 276
rough-the-lens viewfinding system A view-finding system that shows the exact image being taken th rough the camera lens. 202,219, 255,256, 29J
Tilting,™ Rotating the camera about a horizontal axis. 89, 1 13, 119, 13S, 172, 173, 203, 204, 227, 246, 293, 315, 316, 331, 351, 360
Time lapse Omission of what happens between two adjoining shots. 37, 57, 91,92, 152, I S3,231, 262, 359
Time slice A special effect that gives the effect of a camera moving around during an instant in time, 352
Time code Impression on the film when it is shot of markings at fixed intervals which contain precise information of the absolute time at which each frame was shot, 320, 330, 335, 346, 351, 355, 357
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Timing American term for Grading (q.vT) 269
Tinting The colouring of a shot in a film by the dyeing of the entire emulsion, in one colour. 47,69, 85, 167,. 199, 221, 311
Toning The partial colouring of the film image by chemical treatment of die silver forming the dark parts of die image so as to change its colour to something other than black. 47, 35, 167, 2IS, 221
Tracking Shot Movement of the camera on some son of carriage «údv reject to its surroundings. 50. 64, 89,133, 54, 174, 193 203, 20S, 226, 227, 232, 246, 256, 260, 261, 271, 283, 293, 332, 372, 386, 387, 389, 390. 395
pi -„ifar, *Ul(\io in the foreground of a scene «ith a background Travelling Matte Method of combining moving actors filmed in me stunio m me ro g
■ i. ru,/mitrn^ ihiTev.actv conform to the actors move men to. IS/, 206,
filmed elsewhere separately, using black silhouettes on film (matlls) thai txacuy
2:5,230,231,261,276,297,293,334
f   .n^n^WentmuIbs providing the light sou rte- See also Inkies. 23 3t Tungsten lighting Lighting units with tungsten (or mcanascent)uums p S S
340
TECHNICAL GLOSS A R Y AND INDEX Tungsten-Halogen Lights See Quartz-Iodine Lights. 28$, 3+1
Ultra-direedonal Microphone Microphone which responds mainly to sounds originating within +S degrees or the forward direction from it. 233, 299, 31S,354
Umbrella light A form of soft light produced by shining a small floodlight into the cove of a white umbrella, and using the reflected light from this. 289, 310
Undcreranking Running the camera slower than normal to produce an effect of Accelerated Motion (q.v.). 52, 90, 175
Underdeveloping Giving the film less than the recommended time in the developing bath. 310
Underexposing Giving the film less than the recommended exposure. 80, 144, 253, 309, 310, 32S
Underscore Music on the film sound .track that does not come from some .source visible in the film. Previously called Mood music or Background music. 235, 380, 387
«
, ■
Variable area sound track system A narrow hand down one side of a film inside the perforations which represents the sound recorded on it by varying widths of a black band within it. 209, 234
Variable density systems A narrow band down one side of a film inside the perforations which represents the sound recorded on it by varying photographic densities. 209, 234, 235
Very Long Shot (VLS) A shot showing the actor very small in the frame. (See Hlus, page 156). 57, 61, 89, 99, 102, I 14, 155,156,282,384,387
Video assist or Video monitoring or Video Viewfinder, The use of a video tube in the through the lens viewfinder system of a movie camera to .produce an image of the filmed scene on a remote video monitor. 314, 3 15, 323, 326, 331, 347, 350
Video cameras 308
-
Video cassettes 336, 340, 367 Video cassette recorder 355
■
Video editing system 336 Video recordings 376
View-finding system' Camera system for seeing what will appear in the film image. 35, 139, 173, 291, 296, 312, 346,
■
Vignette feme of a shape other than rectangular included within the full film frame. 38, 53, 61, 104, 140, 142 143 149, 152,184, 182, 205,206, 295
Vignetting .Restriction.of the image to occupy less than the full film frame.
Voice-over Spec eh heard* on< the soundtrack that is not the synchronized speech of anyone in the film scene. 366
I
Y-
i    ■ 4
I
t
TECHNICAL GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Wide Film Processes Film shot and exhibited using film wider than 35 mm. 229, 230, 231
Wide-Screen Projection The term as used in this book refers to systems of ;es, which produce an image with Aspect Ratio (q.v.) of vertical
311
425
projection, other than those usino anarnornhic enses, which produce an image widi Aspect Ratio (n v \ r>r v^;^i    k  ■      i i< * ^morpmc
i, *mu *auo      ) ol vertical to horizontal dimens ons greater than I ■ I 35 276 296
Wipe Form ol trans: fon from one shot to the next in which the first shot gradually disappears behind a boundarv li, over it which simultaneously gradually reveals the shot which succeeds it. 11, 56^7 61 91  141 VS3 184 lU 770 252,262,277,321,374 '    '    '     1     ' '^13,220,231,
ine movint
Work print, Work copy American name for the film print that is being edited out of shots from the rush prints 306
prints ISS,
Xenon arc Light source produced by a small electrical arc struck inside a quartz envelope containing xenon gas under pressure 307
4
Zoom Lens Lens whose focal length can be changed during die course of a shot. 204, 228, 2S7, 27!, 2S3, 292-94, 296, 312, 316, 317, 329, 330, 331, 34S, 349, 36
Zooming, Zoom shot The use of a zoom lens, or other means other than camera movement, to enlarge part of the frame to fill the whole frame, or the reverse process. 26, 141, 189, 283, 318, 319, 3SS, 364, 372
Whip pan A panning shot in which the camera * rotated So fast that me image is reduced to undifferentiated horizontal streaks of black ami white. 2 2 S, 3 8 3, 3 8 6
gfSfe™* 'r;:f " f10rt FOGa' ^g* "hose vertical acceptance angle j, more man 25 degrees. 139, I6S,
1 f B 1" ' ^ ^ ll% 2"' ™' m> 26i< 268' 2?l' 274' "S> m 290, 296, 3,7, 328§329, 343 360t 361,363, 364,388 '      ' '
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30. INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Aaton 357
Aäton 314, 329, 330, 335, 347 Abugov, Jeff 367, 36S
Academy of Motion Picture Ans and Sciences 232, 233 Acmade 301 Acme-Dunn 261 Adlon, Percy 327 Adolfijack 149
Agfa 68, 197, 198, 215, 2165 221, 253, 305, 306, 323,
324, 338 Agfa-Ansco 215 Agfa-Gevaert 306, 323 Agfacolor 221, 252, 253, 267, 26S Agostini 395
Afcclcy 136, 171, 172, 17 3 Äkerlund, Jonas 377 A KG 29S, 299, 31S, 354 Aldrieh, Robert 274, 277, 293 Alexandrov, G rigor j 2 3 8 Allen, Dede 279
Allen, Woody 311, 329, 359, 360, 365, 369
Almcndros, Nestor 309, 310, 326
Airman, Robert 285, 318, 319, 322, 332, 366
Ambrosio 79, 96, 99; US
Am c r ican Film. Manu fa ctu ring 105
American Film Manufacturing Company 105, 124
American Mutoscope and: Biograph 35 ^ 50, 62, 65
American Society of Cinematographers 233
A MS 353
Amy, George 237
Anderson, G.W. 105.
Anderson, Lindsay 294
Anderson, Paul1 Thomas 360, 366, 369
Andrcani 111
Angenieux 271, 291, 294, 313, 317, 330, 349' Ankerstjerne, Johan 133 Ansco 267, 2S7 Anseoehrome 267, 2S6 Antoine, Andre 210, 2M
Antonioni 295, 304, 316
■ ■
Antonioni, Michelangelo 294, 303 Aplcl, Oscar S9, HO Apple Computer 3S6 Aquda 78
,4"i
Araki, Greg 359 Aristo 71
Arling, Arthur E. 279 Arnold, John 169
Arnold & Richter 255, 312, 330, 346
Am 30S, 325, 340, 346, 347, 348, 351
Arriflcx 173, 255, 269, 270, 273, 291, 292, 294, 296,
300, 3.12, 313, 314, 315, 330, 332, 333, 346, 347 Arrivision 333 Ashby, Hal 320 Askania 255 A sou it h, Anthony 261 Astaire, Fred 239 Astra 132 Astro 228
Auricon 256, 270, 290, 291, 292, 293, 313 Auster, Paul 360 Autochromc 325 Avid Technologies 356
Badger, Clarence 138, 140, ISO, 154, 160, t61, 204, 243
Bailey, John 328
Baker, George D. 210- 2\l
Baky, Karel von 252
Ball ha us, Michael 327
Ball in, Hugo 145
Bam forth, James 41
Bamforth & Co. 41, 42, 57, 61
Banderas, Antonio 367, 36S
Bardcm, Juan Antonio 277, 278
Bargy, Cairnettes & le 95
Barker, Reginald 126, 138, 150, 152, 161, 210, 211
Barnes, George 133, 17S
Barnet, Boris 192, 212, 214, 231
Barcmcelli, Jacques dc 210, 211
Bartkowia'k, Andrzej. 377
Barton, Charles 280
Bauer, Emma 148
Bauer, Frit'/G. 313, 338, 346
'Bauer, Yevgeni 94, 136, 138, 144, 145, 148, 152
Bausch and Lomb 177, 296
BBC 306
Scatty, Warren 353 'Beaumont, Harry 205
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Beauviala, J~P. 314 Beckmann and Whitley 292 Behrendt, Hans 191 Bell, Monta 204, 209
Bell & Howell 165, 166, 173, 174, 186, 1SS, 200, 201,
202, 203, 207, 217, 218, 227, 255, 269, 313 Bennet, Constance 389 Benoit, Georges 130 Berg, Peter 377 Berger, Ludwig 379, 386 ßergerson 349 B erggren, P. J o h n 230 Berkeley, Busby 232 Berkcy Colortran 308 Berlanga, Luis 277, 278 Bernard, Raymond 210, 211, 228 Berndt-Maurer 256 Bcrnier, Colonel Robert 314 Bertolucci, Bernardo 303, 309, 326, 336, 360 Bertram, Wm. 143 Besson, Luc 361
Biograph 44, 45, 47, 52, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 73, 75, SI, 83, 84, 88, 92, 96, 99, 100; 109, 113, 1)5
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Biroc, Joseph 279 Bison 106
■Bitter, G.W. 47, 66, 74, 75 , 79, 81, S3, 129, 135, 140,
141, 143 Blache, Herbert 210, 211
Blackton, James Stuart 53, 72, 79, 90, 112, 164, 202 Black wrap 343 Blair 3S, 6S
Blasetti, A'lcssandro 239
Blom, August 79, 112, 134
Boese, Carl 191
Boetticher, Uudd 280
Bogdanovitch, Peter ill
Boleslawski, Richard 219, 228
Bolcx 291, 292
Bondarchuk, Sergei 306
Boorman, John 295, 307, 319
Borage, Frank 127, 150, 152, 154, 158, 161, 189
Boskovich, John 3S9
Bowman, William J. 138
Boyle, Danny 363
Boyle, Robert 279
Bragaglia, Anton 145
Brakhage, Stan 350
Bra n agh, K en neth 351
Brando, Marlon 322
Brechin, Derek G. 367, 36S, 374
427
Brenon, Herbert 191 Bredicrton, Howard 209 Briesewitz, Uta 367, 36S Brook, Peter 285, 289, 304 Brooke, Van Dyke 154 Brooks, Richard 294 Bros., Warner 230, 236
Brown, Clarence 135, 159, 160, 190, !92, 195,204, 210,
211,243 Brown, Garrett 3IS, 332 Brown, Karl 63, 10S, 129 Brown, Nicholas O. 367, 368, 374 Browning, Ted 167, 190, 191,195, 231 Biwnlow, Kevin 90, 132, 172, 200 Brun, Joseph 279 Brunton, Robert 145 Bucher, Michael 367, 3 68 Buchowetzki, Dmitri 191 Bukowski, Bobby 367, 368 Bunuel, Luis 265 Burch, Noel 66, 297 Burns, Edward 360 Burton, Tim 353 Burum, Stephen H. 323 Busch, Niven 13, 91 Butler, Bill 310 Byrne, David 327
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CJ.R. 301
Cabanne, W. Christy ISO Cablecam 350 Cahn,'Edward :L. 280 Calm, Philip 279
Cameflcx 255, 256, 271, 273, 237, 291, 292
Cannon, Danny 353
Canon 3i!4, 316, 331
Capellani, Albert 135
Capra, Frank 187,239,264,399
CardiiTJack 2S6
Carlicr, Emmanuel 352
Carnc, Marcel' 261
Carol, Martine 395
Carpenter, John 316, 337
Carre, Ben 146
Carru th, Milton 279
Caserini, Mario ! J9 Cassavetes, John 230, 283, 304
Cavalcanti, Alberto 240
C entu r y P reds ion O pries 349 CDS (Cinema Digital Sound 356
Chabrol, Claude 397
42S
ChalVev, Don 280
Chan, Gordon 359
Chaplin, Charles 123, US, 190, 266
Chapman 331
Charell, Erik 379
Chatteno, Ruth 389
Chautard, Emile 135
Chimera 342
CHomon, Scgundo de 90
Chretien. Henri 230
Christensen, Benjamin 77, 79, 106, 133, 145, 153 Cihachrome 221 Cimino, Michael 322 Cinecolor 220, 253
CinemaScopc 27, 143, 232, 233, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276,
295, 296, 297, 320, 335, 37S, 396 Cinema Digital Sound 333 Cinema Products 313, 315, 317, 330 Cin erne tries 2S2 Cineon 352
Cinerama 272, 273, 275, 295, 351 Ones 67,69, 7S, 106? 109, U5, 119, 153 Cinesaddle 350
Clair, René 17S, 1S7, 192, 246, 379, 3S7, 3SS
CI air mom Camera Company 347, 349, 350
Clark, Shirley 304
Clayton, Curtiss 367, 36S, 374
Coen, Joel and Ethan 328, 332
Coliins, Alf 43, 51, 55, 56, 59, 61
Colortran 254, 255, 2SS, 239, 293
Columbia 253, 275
Consolidated Film Laboratories 267
Continental Camera 330
Convergence Corporation 336
Cooke Optics Ltd. 316, 348
Cooper-Hewitt 44, 45, 69, 72, 73, 74, 82, S3, 84, 126,
129, 130/140, 168, 200, 289 Coppola, Francis 286, 322, 329, 331', 336 Corwin, Hank 367, 368, 375 Coutant, Michel 291 Cóutard, Raoul 287, 288, 309 Cox, Paul 363 Craven, Wcs 366 Crisp, Donald 191 Cromwell, John 227, 245 Cronenweth, Jordan 327, 342
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Cr on jager, Henry 170
Crosland, Alan 191,200,239
Cruze, James !87
Cukor, George 227, 236, 256, 259, 260, 261, 264, 266, 274
INDEX Of FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES Cunningham 255
Curtiz, Michael 24, 27, 228, 236, 237, 238, 263, 264, 3S9
Cutis, Graham 210, 211 Czumer, Paul 24, 191, 245
D-Vision 357 d'Eaubonnc, Jean 395 Dallmcyer 91
Daniel/, William 204, 222, 253, 254, 255, 259, 260 Dante, Joe 326
Dardcunc, Jean-Pau 1 aud Luc 362
Darricux, Danielle 395
Daves, Delmer 255, 265, 274, 277
Davies, Terence 363
D av is, D es m ond 279
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Dawley, J. Sea He 131 Dawn, Norman O, 147
Debrie 50, 86, 87, 173, 202, 226, 227, 255, 292, 314
Dedolight 341, 342
Delannoy, Jean 225
Delluc, Louis 151, 174, 193, 210, 211
DcLuxc Color 269, 339
Demeny 35
DeMille, Cecils 122, 125, 131, 132, 135, 136, 151, 154, 157, 15S, 160, I61, 187, ISS, 1S9, 202, 209, 210, 211
Demme, Jonathan 327 Demmc,Ted 367, 368 Demy\ Jacques 397 De Palma, Brian 294, 322 Depix 333 DePue 231 Deren, Mava 9 ßeschanel, Caleb 332 De Vry 201, 202,255 Diaz, Cameron 366 Dicker son, Ernest 327 Dickinson, Thor old 261 Dickson, Jim 333 Dickson, W.K.-L. 50 Dieterle, Wilhem 203 Dietrich, Marlene 38.1 Digidesign 354 DiGiuglio, Edmund: 313 Dinesen, iRobert 94
Disney Studio 262, 280, 2S7, 297, 328, 333, 3S5 Dobson, F.A. 44, 47 Doig, Lee 279
Dolby Laboratories 319, 320, 335, 355, 35fr bomino 352
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Doublicr, Francis 39 Douglas, Gordon 265 Douglas Trumbull 330 Dovzhcnko, Alexander 240, 382 Drew, Sidney 144, 161 Dreycr, Car! 31, 133, 179 DTS (Digital Theatre Sound 356 Du fay 221
Dulac, Germaine 177, 184, 191 Dunning 206, 230, 231 Duplass, Jay 378
Dupontde Nemours 197, 198, 215, 218, 251, 267 Dupont, E.A. 160, 191, 210, 211 Durholz 22S
Duvivier, Julien 24, 177, 210, 211, 228
Dwan, Allan 89, 105, 127, 130, 13S, 154, 161, 263, 264
Dyaliscope 296
Dyke, W.S. Van 153,201
Dynalens 293
Eastman 34, 35, 268
Eastman Color 253, 267, 268, 269, 276, 28S, 286, 287,
305, 306, 307, 309, 314, 317, 323, 332, 33S Eastman Kodak 68, 125, 163, 164, 167, 197, 198,200,
2:15, 216, 233, 2S2, 253, 267, 285, 2S6, 287, 305,
306, 307, 319, 323, 324, 338, 339 Eastwood, Clint 336
Eclair 255, 2S6, 291, 292, 294, 300, 312, 314 iEdiflex 336
Edison 34, 38, 40, 42, 44, 50, 52, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67,
68, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 110, 113, 138, 140, 233 Editdrokl 336, 356 Editing Machine Corporation 357 Egoyan, Atom 364 Egripment 331
Eisenstein, Sergei 63, 154, 177, 183, 1'95, L96, 212,213,
214, 239, 271, 388 Ektachrome 268, 285, 306, 340 lElectrovoicc 29S, 299 Elemack 256, 293, 331 Eimes, Frederick 344 Elvey, Maurice 143, 152, 190 England, Bryan 344 Enright, Ray 238
Epstein, jean 174, 176, 177, ITS, IBS, 192, 194, 195,
210,211 Ericsson, Rune 3i34, 332, 333 Ermler, Friedrich 1 SS Er-moliev 144
Essanay 88, 97, 9S, 103, 105 Etra, Jack 279
429
European Broadcasting Union (EBU) 320, 335
Fairbanks, Douglas 123 Fa i rba n ks J r., D ou □ las 389 Fairlight 353
Famous Players-Lasky 127 Fanchcr, Hampton 367, 368 Fantasound 262 Fapp, Daniel L. 279 FcJDs,Paul 193,203 Ferrara, Abel 359 Feuillade, Louis 75, 210, 211 FeuiHere, Edwige 3S8
Feyder, Jacques I S3, 184, 191, 192, 194, 203, 215 Film d'Art 67, 85, 112 Fine Arts 150 First National 200 Fitzhamon, Lew in 46
Fitzmauriee, George 132, 159, 191, 210, 211
Flaherty, Robert 173
Fleischer, Max 186
Fleischer, Richard 280, 297
Fleming, Victor 143, 160, 191, 195, 210, 211, 264
Florey, Robert 228
Fontaine, Joan 389
Forbes, Br van 303
Ford, Francis 79
Ford, John 4, IS, 16, 24, 196, 210, 211, 220, 245, 258, 265358
Forman, Milos 304, 367, 368
Fostex 355, 356 Fox 207, 230,232 Fraker, William 305, 311 Frankel, David 359 Fra n ken he i mer, Job n 296 Franklin, Chester 136, 154 Franklin, Jeff 367, 36S Franklin, Sidney 136, 154, 202 Frazier, Jim 349, 350 Fredericks, Neal 367, 368 Freund, Karl" 222
Fuji Film 267, 305,: 306, 323, 324, 33S, 339
Fujicolor 323,324 Fujimoto,Tak 327, 367, 368
Fuller, Samuel 280 Gad, Urban 75, 116
Galcen, Henrik 185 . Gance, Abel 23, 112, 136, 137, 143, 154, 158, .74, 195.
204, 211,? 12, 214 Garmes, Lee 393
430
Gar nett, Tay 4 G a silier, Louis 100 Ga spar colour 220 Gaudio, Tony 224
Gaumont 45, 46, 57, 61, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 84, 106, 103
General Aniline and Film (Anseo) 267
Genera) Camera Corporation 347
General-Electric 2! 7 254
Gerassimov, Sergei 212
Gcrlach, Arthur von 176, 210, 2] 1
Gcrlach, Ludwig 191
Gertsman, Maury 279
Gevachrome 306
Gevaert 197, 267, 323
Giblyn, Charles 1S6
Gilliam, Terry 366
Glide-Cam 350
Godard, Jeau-Lue 28, 240, 249, 287, 238s 302, 303, 329,
304, 359; 397, 399 Goldblatt, Mark 367, 368, 374 Goldwyn 226, 257 Gondrv, Michel 352 Gordon, Keith 359 Gordon, Michael 280
Goulding, Edmund 159, 179, 210^ 211, 238, 245, 256
Graatkjacr, Axel 77
Grasse, J.De 14$, 190
Grauvhenko, Galma 212
Grcenaway, 'Peter 332, 363
Greene, Graham 15
Greene, WT Howard 220
GrcengrasSj Paul 377
Gregg Toland' 216,217
Gremillon, Jean 204,210^2111
Griffith, D.W. 59; 67, 68, 72^75, 78-83, 88, S9, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97-99, 100-109, II2-11*7,119, 138, V40-=K42, 144,147,149, ISO-154, 156, 159-162, 179; , 190, 195, 210, 214,245, 263, 265, 266
Grune, -Karl 177, 180v 191, 194
Guaxzoni, Enrico 84, M4
Gufley, Burnett 279
Guissart, Rerie 133:
Guitry, Sacha 240
Haggar, William 59-61 Hail, Conrad 286*310 Ha 11 st röm, La sse 36 6 Hambling,'Gerry 367, 36B, 374 Hanley, Daniel P: 367, 368, 374 , Hannemann, Walter 279 Harlan, Veit 253
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INDEX OF FILM PEOVLE AND COMPANIES
Harlin, Renny 367, 36S
Harris, Frank 358
Marriscolor 21S
Harrison, Matthew 359
Hart, Neal 210, 211
Hart, William S. 152
Hartley, Hal 360
Haskin, Byron 200, 277
Hathaway, Henry 27, 220, 264, 274
Hawk Lenses 349
Hawks, Howard II, 27, 191, 222, 236, 237, 238, 246,
256, 263, 264 Hazeltine 269 Hecht, Ben 13 Hcer, Johanna 327 Helen 364
Helios 110 Helivision 315 Henderson, Dell 109 Henley, Hobart 264 Henri Chretien 273 ■Hcpwix 89
Hepworth, Cecil 47, 51, 52, 57, 59, 64t 72, 89, 91, 92
Hcsslcr, Gordon 265
BHJ3 355
Hicks, Scott 279
Higgins, Ken 290
llildyard, jack 279
Hill, Mike 367, 368, 374
Hill, Walter 322
Hirschfeld, Gerald 311
Hitchcock, Alfred 17, 210, 211, 235, 238, 239, 242, 243,
257, 262, 263, 266, 273, 28G, 281, 282, 288, 369 Hoch, Winton 279
Holmes, William 237
Hopper, E. Mason 210; 211
Hopper, Dennis 295
Mora, John 326
Hornbeck, William 279
Houston 256
Howard, Ron 367, 368
Howard, William K. 222, 223, 22S, 239
Mowe, James Wong 164, 222, 269
Howell. Bell & 68, 69, 87, 88, 95, 136, 141, 147
Hoy, Maysie 367, 368, 374
Humphrey, William 152
Huston, John 259, 264, 268
Myams, Peter 345, 358, 377
1- G. Farben 267 laniro 30S, 325
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
llford 287, 339 hMAX 351
Ince, Ralph 94, 102, 103, 104, 130, 131, 138, 149, 150, 263
Ince, Thomas 92, 104, 126, 150
Industrial Light and Magic 331, 351
Ingraham, Lloyd ISO, 210, 211
Ingram, Rex 135, 168, 171, 179, 190, 191
Ireland, F. J+ 152
Irola, Judith 327
Irwin, Mark 367, 363
Istec Corporation 316
Itala 119
jaenzon, Julius 134
Jancso, Miklos 293
Janowitz, Flans 185
Jasset, Victorin 61, 64, 106, 116, 119
Johnson, Stanley 279
Johnston, Joe 360
Jones, Robert C. 367, 368, 374
Jost, Jon 359
jugert, Rudolf 261
Julian, Rupert 191, 264
Junger, Gil 367, 368
K.B.-Broncho 92
Kalatozov, Mikhail 271
Kalem 97, 105, 106
Kaminski, Janusz 348
Kaplan, Jonathan 367, 368
Karlstad, Licsl 383
Kassovits, Peter 367, 368
Kaufman, Boris 269, 270
Kaufman, Fritz 210, 211
Kautner, Flelmul 260
Kay-Bee Triangle 154
Kays Laboratories 325
Kazan, Elia 263, 265, 274
Keaton, Michael 351
Keighley, William 228, 238
Keller, Frank R 279
Kelsch, Ken 343
K£M 319,320
Keycode 324
Keystone 98, 109, 150
Khanzhokov 144
Khoklova, Olga 212
Kinemacolor 85, 86, 87, 164, 165
King, Henry 135, 159, 162, 169, 190, 191, 210, 2H, 256,
260, 265, 274
431
Kino Flo 325, 340, 341, 342 Kirkwood, James 109,150 Kirsanoff, Dmitri 195 Klcrker, Georg af 16 V Klicgl Brothers 125, 129 Klingman, Lynzec 367, 36S, 375 Kncchtal, Irving 186 Knowlcs, Bernard 261 Knudsen, Frederic 279 Kobe, Hans 185 Koch, Howard 398 Kodachrome 221, 251, 252, 268
Kodak 34, 204, 218, 286, 2S7, 330, 334, 335, 346, 352 KOHBAC 271 Kollmar, Eric 279 Kom a ro% S ergei 212 Korda, Alexander 191, 210, 211 Korine, hlarmony 365, 366 Kouncn, Jan 361 Kovacs, Laszlo 310 Kozintsev, Grigori 192,212 Kramer, Stanley 278, 280, 231 Krauss, Charles 144 Krauss, Werner ISS Kubrick, Stanley 286, 310, 317, 397 Kudclski 299, 3IS
Kuleshov, Lev 32, 192, 212, 213
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L'Hcrbicr, Marcel 143, 145, IS2, 177, 17S, 182, 183, 191,
193,203, 204,210,211 La Bute, Neil 337, 359 La Cava, Gregory 24, 174, 1S7, 228, 264 Lach man, Ed 327 Lamorisse, Albert 315 Lamon'sse, Pierre 278 Lamprecht, Gerhard 191 Land, Owen 2S Land, Robert 210^ 211 Landrcs, Paul 280 Lang, Jr., Charles 279
Lang, Fritz 155, 160, 186, 18$, 191,210,211,214,219,
239,242,264,276 Larsen, Viggo 88, 100, 102 Lascrcdit 356 Lasky 148: Lassaly, Walter 290 Laudier, Gerard 36 J Lawrence, Florence MS Lawton, jr., Charles 279 Le Roy, Mervy« 4, 27, 236, 235, 262, 264 L^cock, Richard 270,290,291,313
Lean, David 261 tec, Spike 340 Lcc Electric 303, 325, 342 Leger, Fernand 195, 214 Leí^h, Mike 366 Leisen, Mitchell 264 Lcitz 330
Lclouch, Claude 265, 294, 306 Leni, Paul 176, 135 Leonard, Brett 377 Leone, Sergio 297 Leonetti, John R.367, 368 Leonetti, Matthew 323 Leterrier, Louis 377 Levin, Henry 274 Levin son, Barry 329 Lewis, Joseph M. 265 Li, Jet 359 Llghtílcx 311, 325 Light works 357 Liguoro, Giuseppe di 114 Lind, Alfred 77, 94 Linder, Max 99, 106 Linklater, Richard 359, 366, 37S Lion, Roger 2IQ, 241 Littlewood, Greg 367, 363 Lloyd, Harold 203 Lloyds Walt 367, 368 Loaeh, Ken 304, 362 Loftis, Norman 359 Losey, Joseph 302 Louma 315, 331,350 Low, Warren' 279 Lowel.Ross 288, 289, 308 Lowellighcing 239, 342 Lourie, Eugene 280 OG 339
LTM 308, 325, 340, 342  '      . .
Lubitsch, Ernst 134-, 136, 143,145, 146, 143, 161, 181,
l!82; !l89, *90,1-95, 2*0; 211, 239, 381 Lucas, George 336, 360 Lucasftlm 335 Luhrmann, I3az 377 Lumet, Sidney 286
Lumiere Freres 24, 35, 36, 39, +2, 48, 49, 65, 233, 325 Lumiere, Louis 36 Lux 76
Lynet Adrian 323, 328 Lyon, William A. 279
..1
MX.M. 207, 216, 235, 237, 253, 262, 275
INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
M.J- Wohland Co. 71 Macat, Julio 367, 36S Machaty, Gustav 235 Macintosh 356 Mack ley, Arthur 102, 103 Maddin, Guy 364 Madsen, Holger 138 Maggi, Luigi 79, 110 Magnacolor 218 Magnasync Moviola 320 Malic, Louis 359
Mamoulian, Rouben 228, 239, 252, 264
Mankiewicz, Joseph 260, 263, 265, 280
Mann, Anthony 263, 265
Mann, Edward 279
Mann, Michael 367, 368
Marker, Chris 291
Marsh, Mae 81, 122
Marshall, George 256, 260, 274
Martin, E.A. 158
Martin, Karl-Heinz 185, 191
Marvin, Arthur 74, 81
Mate, Rudolph 222, 258
Matras, Christian 395
Maybury, John 350
Mayo, Archie 227, 23S
Maysles, David and Albert 291
McCutcheon, Wallace 108
McEndree, Maurice 279
McKay, Winsor 65
McLagcn, Andrew V, 358
McMillan, Tim 352
Mekas, Add!fas 304
Mclies, Georges 9, 35-33, 40-43, 45, 48, 51, 52, 56-59,
60, 63^66, 70, 90 Mellor, William C, 279 Mcngcs, Chris 323 Menzel, jiri 304 Mcnzies, William Cameron 220 Mercanton, Louis 190 Merendino, James 367, 368 Metrocolor 267 Meyer, Russ 237, 302, 320, 358 MGM 204, 295 Michos, Anastas 367, 368 Milano 78, 110
Milestone, Lewis 227, 2+6, 247, 264 Miller, Arthur 132, 292 Mills, Alec 326 Milhcr, Victor 221, 222 Minghella, Antony 367, 368
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Minnelli, Vincente 20, 256, 265, 274, 389, 390, 392 Misiorowski, Bob 377
Mitchell 173, 202, 207, 21S, 219, 220, 226, 227, 22S,
230, 271, 273, 292, 293, 296, 312, 317, 330, 347, 400
Mitchell Camera Corporation 292, 313
Mitry, Jean 92, 93
Moholy-Nagy, Lazio 214
Mohr, Hal 223, 229
Mole-Richardson 226, 233, 308, 325
Mondshein, Andrew 367, 363, 375
Montage 336, 357
Morel, Pierre 377
Morgan, Sidney 210, 211
Morin, Edgar 291
Moskva 271
Mottershaw 58
Moviecam 313, 330, 346, 347
Movietone 207, 234
Moviola 138, 235, 236, 293, 300, 320
Moy-ßastie 86
Mozukhin 148
MPAA 337
Müller, Pobby 340, 364
Multicolor 218
Murch, Walter 367, 363, 37S
Murnau, F.W. 167, 174, 175, 131, 182, 191, 194, 205
Murphy, Dudley 195
Musco 325
Musser, Charles 63
Mutoscope 35
Münch, Christopher 359
Myers, Stephen PL 367, 368, 375
Myrick, Daniel 360, 367, 36S
Nagra 299, 300, 3IS, 319, 355, 356
Natanson,Jacques 396
Negulesco, Jean 280
Ncilan, Marshall 138, 161, 170
Nelson, Ralph 297
Nettman 331
Newman-Sinclair 174, 255 Nibta, Fred 190 Nichols, Mike 294, 360 Nielsen, Asia 116 Nikon 331, 349 Nordisk 71, 75,77, 84, 104 Norwood 251 Nykvist, Sven 309
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O'Connor 292
433
0JSullivan, Tony 109 Ob efon, Merle 25S Oboler, Arch 314 Olcott, Sidney 89, 161 OMiNlMAX 26, 351
Ophuls, Max 16, 196, 221, 239, 242T 258, 261, 379, 380-
382, 386, 38S-390, 392 399 Optex 349 Optica 349
Optical Radiation Corporation 335
Oshima , Nagisha 24
Osram 307
Osten, Franz 191
Otsep, Fyodor 214
Ozu, Yasujiro 2S, 389
Pabst, GAV. ISO, 201, 227, 379, 3S2 Palmer, Ernest I6S
Panavision 273, 275, 292, 295, 297, 312, 313, 324, 323,
3295 330, 333, 335, 346, 347, 349, 357 Panavision Corporation 295, 296 Panther 331, 350
Paramount 204, 207, 22Ö, 227, 2S3, 275, 276, 2S2 Parker, Alan 367, 368 Parrish, Robert 277 Pasquali 114, 119 Passer, Ivan 304 Pastrone, Giovanni 89, I!4, 138, 144 Pathé Fréres 33, 39, 43-5!. 54-61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70-72,
7S, 85, 88, 90-92, 94, 96, 99, !04, 106-108, 113,
165, 167, 173, 197, I9S, 215, 233 Pathé, Charles 100 Patroni^GriíTi 304
Paul, Robert W. 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 47, 52, 53, 56, 53,
61,64,90,14t Payne, Alexander 366 Pcerce, Larry 294
Pennebakcr, Donn Alan 270, 290, 291, 31 3 Perfectone 299, 300
Perret, Léonce 76, 77, 79, 92,111,112,135,190,210,
Perry, Fred 317
Peter man, Don 326
Philips 3S2
Photopbone 207, 208
Photosonics 313, 347
Pick, Lupu 174, |91
Picked, Mary 83, 123, 127, 141
Pitof 377
Planer, Fran* 259, 279 Poe, Amos 327
Pogocam 3SO
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Poire, Jean-Marie 361 Poiricr, Leon 210, 211' Polaroid 314,333 Pollack, Sydney 293 Pope, Bill 343, 357, 358
Porter Edwin 5. 46, SO, 52, S3, S4f 57, 59-66, 73, 90
Powell, Frank 109, 144
Powell, Michael 262, 277, 399
Preminge, Otto 256, 274, 303, 358, 389
P rest wich 35
Prcvost 300, 301
Pri/macolbr 164, 218
Promio, Alexandre 36
Protazanov, Yakov 136, 144, 153, 192, 214, 235 Proyas, Alex 353, 377 Publux 342
Pudbvkin, V.l. 212, 213, 239 Pv.un, Albert 353
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Qu ante! 352
Qu inn, Anthony 283
RX.A. 207, 208, 233, 234, 235, 262, 299, 319
R.K.O. 207, 216, 230; 253
Radford, Michael 325
Ragalyi, Elemer 367, 368
Raimi, Sam 357, 358
Ramsay, Todd 367, 368, 375
Rank 357
iRankTavlor-Mobson 313, 317, 330 Ranous, William V. 94, 105 Rav, Man 214 Ray, Nicholas 265, 274 Rebikov, Aleksandra 148
Reed, Carol 261
. ..
Reeves, Keanu 359 Reichert, Mark 327 Reinert, Robert 144 Reinhardt, Max 75. Reiniger, Lottü 90 Renaud, Madeleine 395 Rennah an, Ray 252
Renoir, Jean 92, 155, 203, 226, 241, 246, 247, 399 ftesnais, Alain 295, 303' Rex 106
Reynolds, William 279
Riccio, Loreiv/o del 230
Richardson. Mple 227
Richardson, Robert 343, 344, 367, 368
Richardson, Tony 304
Richmond, Anthony 344 Rifkin, Adam 367, 368 Ritter, Karl 239 Robert Redford 337 Robings 347 Rodcnstock 349 Rogers, Ginger 239 Roger*, Will 174 Ror/rnan, Owen 309 Romero, George A. 320 Romm, Mikhail 261 Ronford 292 Room, Ah ram 214 Rosen b a urn, Carl 94
Rosher, Charles 127, 128, 132, 170, 173,201,204
Rosi, Francesco 307
Rossellini, Roberto 251, 257, 271
Rossen, Robert 264
Rosson, Harold 130
:Rotunno, Giuseppe 279
Rouch, Jean 291
Rouscll, Henri 2IG, 211
Rousselot, Philippe 344, 345, 346
Rubinck,Saul 360
Rudolph, Alan 319, 360
Rur/, Raul 362
Rubinck, Saul 360
Russell, Esther P. 367, 368, 375
Russell, Ken 304
Russell, Ward 327
Ruth, Roy del 209
Ruttman, Walter 198
Rye, Stellan 77
SjlEJj; 217
Saehtler and Wolf 292
Salter, Marry 115
Samuel son Film Services 315, 317
Sanchez, Eduardo 360, 367, 368
Sand rich, Mark 239
Santostefano, Damon 367, 36S
Sartov, Hendrik 140, 142, 143
Sax, Geoffrey 377
Schcrrzinger, Victor 154, 161, 199
S ch les i nger, J oh n 294
Schmidt, Arthur P. 279
Schncdler-Sorenscn, Edouard 71, 77, 79, 94 Schoeps 318
Schoonmaker, Thelma 336 Schräder, Paul 320, 360 Sch uff tan, Eugen '225
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Schwart^man, John 367, 368 Scorsese, Martin 329, 343 Scotch!ite 297, 29S Scott, Ridley 323, 327 Scott, Tony 327, 365, 377 SDDS 3
Scale, John 367, 36S Sciter, William 191 Seit-/, George B. 210, 2! 1 Seitz, John 167, 169, 171, 179 Sekonic 251 Selander, Lesley 265 Sclig SS, 104, 105, 152, 153 Sclznick 256
Semel, Stephen 367, 368, 375
Sen nett, Mack 109
Sennheiser 298, 318, 354
Seresín, Michael 367, 368
Shavclson, Melville 280
Sheffield Photographic Co* 5S
Sherman, Vincent 263, 264
Shipman-Mueller, Marc 346
Showscan 330, 351
Shuftan, Eugen 223
Shyamalan, M. Night 367, 368
Sidney, George 4
Sidney, Scott 150
Siegel, Don 303, 3[7
Sicrck, Detlef 225
Sígel, Newton Thomas 367, 368
Simpson, Claire 367, 36S, 37S
Simpson, Geoffrey 367, 368
Simpson, Robert 279
Sinden, Hall and 23
Siodmak, Robert 239
Sirk, Douglas 27, 273, 276, 399
Sjöström,Victor 77, 98, 133, 136, 161, 171, 184
Skycam 332
Sky man 350
Sloanc,Paul 204
Smith, Albert Edward 70, 72, 107 Smith, David 177
Smith, G.A. 38-42, 46, S3, 54, 56-50, 61, 66, 86, 99, 141
SM PTE 330, 335, 346
Societě Cinematographique des Artistes el Gens de Lil-
tcrature(SkC.A,G.L,) 67 Society of Motion Picture Engineers 232, 233 Solondz, Todd 337 SOM-Berthiot 257, 271 Sonnenfeld, Barry 32S
_r
411
Sony 319, 334, 356 Sovcolor 253 Spaccvision 314 Specht, Georges 76 Spectra 251
Spielberg, Steven 348,360 Spiers, Boh 363 Spinotti, Dante 367, 368 Spoor, George K. 230 Stanford, Thomas G. 279 Stahl, John 27, 151, 166, 227, 236, 263, 264 Stallone, Sylvester 358 Staudte, Wolfgang 261 Steadicam 315, 316, 332, 350 Steenbcck 301, 320 Steiger, Lleli 345 Steinhoff, Hans 210, 211 Stellavox 318, 355 Stern, Frnst 146
Sternberg, Josef von 16, 29, 135, 160, 203, 242, 245v
264, 379, 38L 3S2, 383, 3S9 Stevens, George 231, 295 Stevenson, Robert 245, 280, 389 Stiller, Mauris 98, 133, 134, ! 38, ISS Stokes, Chris 377 Stone:, Oliver 343 Storaro, Vittorio 309, 325, 326 Stow, Percy 62
Stradling, Walter 127, 132, 133 Stroheim, fcVieh von 29, 135, 138, 174, 179, ISO, 190 Stull, William 257 Sturgeon, Rollin S. 103, 105 Sturges, John 280, 283 Sundance Institute 337 Super scope 275 Surtees, Robert 3M Sutherland, Gddie 204 S veti sk a Blog ra f tea tern 13 4
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Talinndye, Norma 79 Tarantino, Qutntin 366 Tarkovsky. Andrei 17, 306
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Tascam 356
Tati, Jacques 297
Taylor, Sam 2E0, 211
Taylor, Taylor, and f lobson 177
Taylor-Hobs^ LuL 91. 201, 219, 228, 257, 271, 3.6. 317,
Technics 85, 164, .65, 198, 199, 216-219, 220, 226, 251-253, 261, 267-269, 286, 287, 297, 2.93, m> 339, 340
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Technirania 276
Techniscope 275,297, 314, 333
Technovision 313, 317, 330, 331, 348, 350
Telle.sen, Christopher 367, 368, 375
ThanhouscrCo, 103, 106, 111, 126, 135, 154
ThielcRolf 271
Thiele, Wilholm 191,381
Thompson, Waller 279
Thoms, Jerome 279
Thomson, Fred 91
Thorn 307, 30S
Thorpe, Richard
Thornton, Biltv Boh 360
Tohis 234
Todd-AO 275, 317, 330
Toland, Gregg 222, 226, 230, 257, 258, 330, 349^ Tomasini, George 279 Torre-Nilsson, L. 261 Tourjansky, Victor 210, 211
Toumcur, Maurice 123, 134-136, 138, 143, 146, 148,
152, 154, 163 TRAM 354
Trauberg, Ilya 192, 212, 214 Trencker, Luis 238 Tri-IErgon 207, 235
triangle Distributing Corporation 125, ISO Trier; Lars von 360, 364, 365 Trimble, Larry 67, 104, 210; 211 Trueolor 267, 269
t^uflaut, Francois 273, 28fl, 288, 293, 304 Turpin, Gerald' 310 TVC Laboratories 306
Twentieth Century-Fox 216, 217, 226, 233- 253,, 273 Tyler 293, 315
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UFA 163,167, 180 Hirer 300' Ultimatte 331 . □ltraPanavision 273, 295
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United Artists m% 253
Universal Studios 27, 125,, 167, 199, 207, 227, 275, 319 Urioste, Frank 367, 368, 374
Valentin, iKařl 383:
VanDykc, W,S, 19,1, 264
Vančura, Vladislav 239
VariCon 325;
Ve ber, Francií 361, 362
VeidvConrad. 185
Vertov, Dstina 240
Vidálí, Gíóvanni Gnrico 114, 119
INDEX Of FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Vidor, King 191, 247, 263, 264, 265, 276 Vince, Robert 377 Vintcn 227
Vinterberg, Thomas 365 VistaVision 276, 282, 330^ 347
Vitagraph 43, 47, 55, 61, 62, 67-77, 79-35, 90-93, 95-103, 105-103, MO, 112, 113, 115-119, 131, 140, 144, 150, 152
Vito, Danny Dc 328
Voigtländer 91
Vol koff, Alexandre 210, 211
WadJcigh, Michael 297 Wajda, Andrzej 361 Walsh, David M. 318
Walsh, Raoul 29, 130, 195, 203, 257, 263, 264, 266 Wang, Wayne 360 Warnereolor 269
Warner Bros. 200, 207, 226, 231, 233, 237, 238, 253, 262, 356
Warwick Trading Company 41, 42, S3
Watkin, David 289, 308, 323, 325, 344, 348
Weber, Lois 144
Wegener, Paul 185
Weigert, Dedo 338, 341
Welles, Orson 29, 261, 311
Wellman, William 219, 220, 236, 246, 247, 274
Wenders, Wim 28, 329
Wendkos, Paul 280
Wcscam 316, 350
West, Raymond B. 154
West, Roland 228, 230
Western Electric 206, 207, 233, 234, 235, 262 Wcstinghouse 316 Weston 217
Wexler, HaskelL 289, 317
Whale, James 264
Whitney, James 232
Whitney Jr., j oh n 334
Wiene, Robert 29, 185, 191, 194
Wilcam 347
Wilcox, Herbert 261
Wilder, Billy 4, 5, 29, 260, 2S0, 304, 353 Williams 187, 183, 206, 230, 231 Williamson, James 42,47, 49, 57, 58, 60-64, 66, 101, 314
Willis, Bruce 366 Willis, Gordon 309, 327 Windon, Stephen 367, 368 Winner, Michael 317 Wise, iRobert 277, 230
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INDEX OF FILM PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
Witt, Alexander 377 Wolf, Jeffrey 367, 363, 375 Woo, John 33S Wood, Frank 67 Woods, Arthur 221 Wyckofr, Alvin 125, 132, 133
Wyler, William 29, 222, 236, 237, 233, 256, 258, 259, 261,264,280
Xenotech, Inc. 307
Yankee 101 Young, Freddie 289 Yuen, Corey 377 Yutkevitch, Sergei 212,214
Zeiss 91, 177, 223, 300, 312, 317, 330, 34S Zimmerman, David 367, 36S, 374 Zinnemann, Fred 265, 277, 230 Zoomar Corporation 257, 271 Zsi^mond, Vilmos 311
31.
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? Mot mí si, Tlic 47
10 Things I Hate About You 367-375
1941 305
1984 325
2001: A Space Odyssey 286, 290, 29S
Ablaze on the Rails 141
Abyss, the 352
Accidental Tourist, The 328
Across 110th Street 312
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Addiction, The 359
Adieu Mascotte 191'
Adjuster, The 364
Adventures of Dolly, The I IS
Adventures of Don Juan, The 264
Adventures of Robin Mood, The 227, 22S, 242, 247
Aelita 192, 214
Aerogrod 240
Affaire Dreyfus, 1ř 36, 37, 39, 43, 60 Affaire Dreyfus, i'(IVhe) LOS. Aflairsof Anatole, The 210 Affiche, V 176, 178, li94 Algrunden 11'6
After Dark: The Policeman and Wis Lantern 46
After Many Years 105
After Midnight 72, 204
After Tomorrow 223.
Aleksandr Nevskii 235, 243
Alice 359
Alice in Wonderland1 51, 57 Alien 327, 328
Alí Baba et les qua ran tes vol curs 57, 64
All About Eve 265, 304
AlVThat:)az55 328
Ail the Kings Men 263, 264
A"ll thePresident's Men 30Í7, 348
All the Veřmeers inNew York 359
Alley Gat 2W
Alphavillc 287
A^lte, Geseť/ydas 191
Alsace Í4K
America 180
American Gigob 320, 328
AmericaivTragedy 245
Amitwille 3-D 333 -
A more pedestre, L" 99
Am Rande der Welt 180
Andromeda Strain, The 318
And the Villain Still Pursued Her 61
Angela's Ashes 367-371,373-375
Angelo tutelage, L' 106
Angel Factory, The 141
Angry Mills, The 277
Angst 211
Annce derniere a Marienbad, I' 303
Annelie 243
Anfcro funesto, 1* 79
Any Given Sunday 360
Apache 271, 277
Apfcl ist ab, der 260
Apocalypse Now 313
Appcl du sang, T 190
Applause 204
Arc You There? 62
Argent,lf 203, 204
A r m y o f Da i k ncss 35 S
Ar.faon Bush w hackers 265
Arlesieiinc, V 211
Arrivee d'un train, I' 36
Arroseur arrose, I'* 36
Assassinatdu Due de Guise, V 67,95, 100, 101, 102, 112,
Assunta Spina 135
As Seen Through an Area Window 56, 99 As Seen Through a Telescope 53, 54 Atlantidc, r 191
Attack on a Chinese Mission - Bluejackets to the Rescue
58,60,61 At the Foot of the Scaffold 89 At the Foot of the Stairs 125 Auberge rouge, l" 174,177 Augen der Mumie Ma, die 134 Auld Lang Sync 75 AuId Robin Grey US Austernprinzessm, die 143
Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vita^raph Cup and
How It Was Won, An 117 Aubagne 60 Au pays noir 43, 50
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INDEX OF FILMS Au secours 174
Avenging Conscience, The 122, 144, 151, 156, I57, 160
Avventura, V 303
Awful Moment, An 107
Awkward Sign Painter, The 39
A bout de souffle 2S7, 302, 303
A nous la liberie 379, 387
Baby s Shoe, A 73
Back Street (1941) 227, 243, 245, 264, 3S9, 392 Back to Nature; or, The Best Man Wins 93, 104 Back to the Future - Part II 332 Bad Buck of Santa Vncz 150 Bad Sister 264
Bains de Diane a Milan, tes 39 Ballctprimadonnan 134 Ballet mecanique 195, 196 Ballon rouge, le 278 Bank Burglar's Fate, The 149 Banlieuc 13 377 Barbe-bleuc 57, 58-63 Barberousse 136, 137, 157, 158 Barfly 340
Bargain Fiend, The 70 Barry Lyndon 310, 317 Barque™ 265 Baryshnya i khuligan 144 Bathers, The 51 Batman 353
Batman Returns 35 3, 356
Battle, The 100, 107
Battle Hymn of the Republic, The 92
Bat Whispers, The 228, 230
Becky Sharp 219, 220
Bedraget f Do den (Dr. Gar-El-Mama I) 77
Behemoth, the Sea Monster 281, 279, 282-284
Being John Malkovitch 366
Being There 320
Bellamy Trial, The 209
Belle et la Bete, la 399
Belle Nivernaise, la 211
Bend of the River 265
Ben-Hur 190, 2S3
B erg- Ej vi nd o eh ha ns H u s t r u 136
Bergkatze, die IS 1, 182, 191
Berlin - die Symphonic der Crosstadt 193, 198
Besieged 360
Best of Every th ing\ The 279, 23 3 Best Years of Our Lives, The 259 Betty's Choice 80, 81 Between Men 126, 13S, 1S2
439
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 244
Besch in Lxlo 214
Bicnvcnida Mr. Marshall 277
Big Broadcat of 1936, The 242
Big Sleep, The 223
Big Swallow, The 51
Big Trail, The 230
Billy's Stratagem 97
Billy Liav 294
Billy the Kid 230
Birdy 332
Birth of a Nation 31, 104, 129, 135, 140, 141, 147,
150, 156, 157, 161, 265 Blackmail 235, 245 Black Hole, The 328, 333 Black Pirate, The 165 Blade Runner 327, 32S Blair Witch Project, The 360, 366-375 Blaue Engel, der 379, 381 Blind Husbands I3S Blonde Venus 241, 245, 389 Blood and Sand 252 Blood Ship, The 180, 210 Blood Simple 328
Blowing-up of the 'Maine1 in Havana Harbour 39
Blue Bird, The 13S, 146
Blue Dahlia, The 260
Blue in the Face 360
Blue Lagoon, The 326
Bonfire of the Vanities, The 327
Borderlines 334
Boris and Natasha 353
Born on the Fourth of July 327
Boston St rangier, The 297
Boudu sauve des eaux 22 3, 241, 242, 246, 247
Bound for Glory 315
Bourne Ultimatum, The 377
Bratya Razboinki T11
Breaking the Waves 360, 364, 365
IIrid''Encounter 261
Brigadoon 274
Bringing Out the Dead 344
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Broadway 203 B roadw av Da n ny Rose 329 Brokedown Palace 367-375 Broken Arrow 265
Broken Blossoms 140, 142, I54r I53r 159. 161
Broken Locket, The 107
Bronenosets Potyomkin 159, 177, 214, 227. 358
Brother's Devotion, A $2
Bruder Schellenberg, die 191
149T
440
Brumes d'aiitomne 195 Bubble, The 314 Bullets or Balte 223, 229, 242 Bullets Over Broadway 359, 360
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 2S6, 294, 309, 310 Buv Your Own Cherries 56
C.Q,D^ or: Saved by Wireless 104 Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, das 5, 27, 136, 141, 146, 184, 155
Cabiria $4, 89, 13S Cache-toi dans la mallei 64 Cadaveri eccellenti 307,325 Caduta di Troia, La 114 Calamitous Elopement, A 115 California Split 319 Camille 222 Cahipana, La 67, i 19 Candyman 344 Capriccio 239 Captain America 353 Captain Blood !77 Captain of thc Clouds 252 Captured by Bedouins S9 Cardinal's Conspirary, The SO Cardinal Wolslev 93, 105 Career Girls 366 Carmen 14$, 161 Carmen Jones 274 Garnet de bal, un 24, 22S Casablanca 29, 264 Casanova 160, 211 Casa del angel, la 261 Catch-22 293 Catherine the Great 245 Catwoman 377 Cauchemar du caVd 61 Caught 382, 386, 387, 393 Caught in the Fog 209 ;■ Caught in the Undertow 50 Ca ver ne rti audi te, la 38 Ceiling Zero 237- 264 CendriJloh 37, 4V, 57 . Cenere 135
Center of the Web, The 154 CernyPetr 304
Ce que je vois de mon sixieme 54: Chair, The 291 Champj The 264 Champagne 211, 266
Charge of the Light Brigade, The 236, 348
INDEX OF FILMS
Charley Varrick 317 Charly 297
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Chat el le sour is, le 306 Chaussette, la 57
Cheat, The 131, 136, 148, 157, I6t Cherry, Harry, and Raquel 302 Cheval cmballe, le I OS Chicnne, la 223, 241, 246 Chien Andalou, un 21, 19S Chien de garde 56, 60, 64 Child's Stratagem, A 76 Child Stealers, The 61 Chinatown 311 Chinatown Nights 204 Chronique d'im cte 291 Church and State S9 Cid, le 7S Circle, The 189
Citizen Kane 222, 23S, 253, 2S7, 25S, 259, 261, 311,
360, 393 Civilization 133, 140, 147, 150 Clancy 76
Cloak and Dagger 244 Clock, The 256 Clockers 340
Clockwork Orange, A 310,319
Coal Face 240
Cobweb, The 274
Cocoon 326
Coeur fidele 195, 211
Collision and Shipwreck at Sea 39
C ol o ne Is D a u <;hter, The 10 6
Color of Money, The 326, 336
Comata, the Sioux 114
Come Along, Do! 39, 40, 58
Come and Get -It 222, 258
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy
Dean 332 Coming of Angela, The 106 Coming Soon 365,367 Compulsion 279, 281, 283 Conformists, il 309 C on nec t ion, The 3 0# Conscience 83, 34, 106
Consuming Passions; or, St. Valentine's Day in Greenaway
Land MS Coouille et le Clergyman, la 1S4 Corner in Wheat, A 109 Corona difcrro, la 239 Coronets and' Hearts 75, 77, 81, 84 Corporation andi the Ranch Girl, The 105
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INDEX OF FILMS
Corsica il Brothers, The 38, 53 Cossack Whip, The 141 Cottage to Let 261 Cotton Club, The 331 Counsellor at Law 264 Country 335
Countryman and the Cinematograph, The S2, 53
Country Doctor, The 89, 109, 116
Courricrde Lyon, le 75
Course of True Love, Thc 64
Coward, The 161
Cowboy for Love 106
Cradle Snatchers, The 191, 264
Crainquebille 1S3, 1S4, 194
Craven, The 103
Crazies, Thc 320
Crazy m Alabama 367-371, 373-375
Cremaster 2 365, 367
Cricket on the Hearth, The 73, 74
Crimson Tide 365
Crise est fini, la 239
Critical Care 344
Crow, The 353
Crowd, The 191, 206, 264
Cry of the Banshee 265
Cucaracha, la 219
Cupid's Realm 72
Curse, The 365, 367
Curtain Pole, Tlie 96, 10S
Daddy-Long-Legs 127, 128, 147, 170, 171
Daisies 97, 113
Dancer's Dream^ The 61
Dangerous Game 359
Dangerous Flours 133
Danger Lights 230
Danton 191
Darby O'Gill and the Litrfle People 279, 2S0, 283, 284
Daring Daylight Burglary 58, 59, 92
Darkrnan 357, 358
iDark City 353, 377
Dark Command 264
Dark Mirror, Tlie 1S6
Dark Passage 255
Darling 290, 294
Darling Lili 293
David'Harum 130, 138, 14S, 154, 156, 157, 161 ©awn of the Dead 320 Dawn Patrol (1930) 230, 242 Dawn Patrol (1938) 243, 245 fceak 215
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Daylight Robbery 59
Days of Heaven 309, 311
Days of Thunder 335
Day of the Locust, The 310, 311
Deadly Affair, The 286
Dead Again 345
Dead Ringers 332
Death Becomes Her 366
Death Wish 317
Deception 89
Decpstar Six 329
Deep Blue Sea 367-371,373-375
Deer Hunter, The 31!
Delicatessen 339
Deliverance 307
Dcmcnagcmcnt ä la cloche á bois 64
Demetrius and the Gladiators 274
Derailed 377
Desdcmona 104
Deserter, The 150
Deserto rosso, il 294
Desperately Seeking Susan 327
Desperate Poaching Affray 59, 61
Detroit Rock City 367-375
Deux ou trois choscs one je sais d'eile 283
Deux timides, les 192
Devil: Doll, The 231
Devil is a Woman, The 2+1. 245, 264
Devyat d net od novo goda 261
Dezertir 238, 239
Dc Mayerling a Sarajevo 382, 386, 3SS, 393 Dial M for Murder 273 ■ Dick Tracy 335, 353 Dimanche a la eampagne 325
Diŕiér des cons, le 361
Dinner at Eight 236
Dishonored 241, 245
Distraction, The 365, 367
Di t y a b o I shogo gorod a 138
Divers at Work on the Wreck of the 'Maine'
Dive Bomber 252
Divine 387, 397
Divorce, The 45
Dix -famines pour u n man 60
Dobermann 361
Docks of New York, The 160
Dodge City 236,242
iDodspringct tilHest fra Cirkuskuplen 79, 94 Dodsworth 264 Dollys Scoop I4S Dom na Trubnoi 192
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Domino 37/
D o n't Change You r H u sb and 161 Don Juan 191, 200 Doorwav to Hell 227 Double indemnity 260
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Do It Lip 334 Downhill 211, 244 Dr. Gar-el-Hama II 77
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) 239, 264, 266 Dr. Mabusc der Spieler 191, 193 Dragon slayer 334 Drama pa a. Ma vet 104 Drame a Venisc, un 43 Drame dans les airs, un 43 Drame en trier, un 46, 47 Draughtsman's Contract, The 332 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend 53, 65 Dreigroschenoper, die 3S2, 337 Dress Parade, The 191 Drink and Repentance 62 Drive lor a Life 89, 106, 117, 119 Drums Along the Mohawk 220 Drunkard s Reformation, The 72, 73, 101, 104
Dvnainite 209
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Eagle, The 159, 16G Earthquake 319 Easy Rider 295 Edgar Allen Poe 73 Edtv 367-375 Eiger Sanction, The 31S Ekspeditriecn 79, 106, 112 El 265
Eldorado 173, 182, 133, 191, 194 Election 366
Electric Shock (or The Electric Bell), The 61 Elsas Brother 154 Elusive Pimpernel, The 262, 277 Empire Strikes Back, The 309, 328 End of Days 358 T 377 Enfant de Paris,T 92 En avant |a musique 99 Equinox Flower 389 Era notte a Roma 271 Erotiken 223
Escamotage d'unedame ehez Robert-Moudin 38
Escape from L.A. 337
'Escape Me Never 24
Europa 364
Europa'51 257
£ va nge I»m anden s Li v 138, 15 3
index of mm
■
■
Everyone Says 1 Love You 359 Ex-convict, The 64
Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, The 3S
Exile, The 3SS, 389, 396
Exit Wounds 377
Exodus 295
Exorcist, The 311
Exorcist 11 - The Heretic 311
Exotica 364
Explosion of a Mot or-Car 51 Extase 235 Extremities 99 Eyewitness 323
mm 310
Fahrenheit 451 293
Falsclv Accused 47, 56, 72
Family Plot 263
Family Record, The 152
Fanchon the Cricket 129, 141, 142
Fantasia 262
Far Country, The 265
Far and Away 350
Farmers Wife, The 211
Fatal Hour, The 108
Fate's Turning SI
"Father, Mother wants you11 64
Faust 131, 1*2
Fear 89
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 366 Feel My Pulse 174
Female of the Species, The 136, 145, I4S, 154 Fern me est une fern me, une 2S8 Fernmc Mariee, une 247 Festen 365
Fiabe della nonnc, le 109 Fiddler on the Roof 3ill Fievre 193
Fifth Element, the 361
Fighting Odds 133, 145
Fight Club 339
Fille detain indiscrete, la 55
'Film oline Titel 264
Final Countdown, the 335
■Fire! 47, 58, 63, 64
Firebug 47 "63
Firefox 334
Fire Brigade, The H8S
'Fire Call andiftcscuc by Fire Escapes 42
Fire Djrcvle 93, 94
First Autu, The 2QQ
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i
index of films
Five Pennies, The 279, 281-283
Flaming Arrow 9!
Flashdance 32S
Flash Gordon 334
Flesh and the Devil 159,160,243
Flesh for Frankenstein 314
Flintstones, The 353
Fiona ha de Lys 7S
Florida Enchantment 160
Flyvcnde Cirkus, den 77
Folie du Docteur Tube, la 23, 143
Foolish Wives 167, ISO, 190
Fools of Fate 73, 91
Fool's Gold 210
Fool There Was, A 144
Footlight Pcirade 232
Forbidden Paradise 190
Forbidden Paths 127
Foreign Correspondent 245
Forest Rangers 252
For stadtsprä stc n 157
Fortune Cookie, The 304
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow 72
For Heavens Sake 203
Foul Play 47
Four for Texas 293
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The 20, 167-171, 192 Four Skulls öf Jonathan Drake, The 279, 281, 233 Frances 327
Franceses da Rimini 96, 9S, 106, IT5
Fräulein Else 160
French Con nccti on, T he 309,311
French Dressing 304
Friday 13th -Part 3 333
Friends 32, S3JQ6
From Here To Eternity 265
From Russia With Love S
Frontier Marshall 2'T6
Front Page (1931), The 223, 227, 234, 242, 246, 247 Frustrated Elopement 5:1 Full Metal Jacket 348 iFuooo, il 144, 157, l'SS Fury 244, 264
Gallant Bess 253
G a rden s of Sto ne 3 22
Garden of Allah, The 219
Gardiens de phare 204
Gaslight 261
Gatto nero, 'la 144
Gay Shoe Clerk, The 54
■
Geige von Florcnx, der 191 Gentleman Jim 264 Genuine 185 Ghost 352
Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The 260
Ghost of Rosie Taylor, The 127, 141
Gidgct 279, 283, 374
Girl's Folly, A 14S
Girl and Her Trust, The 89, 133
Girl in Every Port, A !91, 264
Girl in the Taxi, The 210
Girl of the Golden West, The 136, 141
Girl on a Motor-Cycle 236
Girl Without a Soul, The 143
Gljane 360
Glace a trois faces, la 188, 192, 194
Glamour Girl 243
Glorious Adventure, The 164
Go, Johnny, Go! 279, 281, 2S3
GodTather, The 309
Godfather 11, The 321
Going South 310
Going Straight 136, 150, 154
Goldcneye 363
Golden Chance, The 156, 157
Golem, der 1S5
Goluboi Ekspress 214
Gone With The Wind 219
Goodbye Columbus 294
Good for Evil 34
Goose Woman, The 159, 160, 210
Goilter dcBcbe, le 36
Graduate, The 294
Grande Valse Brillante 381
Grandmas Reading Glass 53,.66
Grand Canal a Yen is e 36
Grand Duchess and the Waiter 204
Grand Prix 296
Grapes of Wrath, The 216, 217, 253 Grease 310
Greatest Story Ever Told, The 295 Great Train Hold-Up, The 35 Great train Robbery, The 5% 64 Great Zieefeki, The 235 Green Pastures 229 Greetings 294 Gremlins 326
Gremlins 2 - the New Batch 326 Greyfriars Bobby 2S0 Grcysloke 333 Grczy 152, 153
, 148
■i:. i.V.;     i. -. ——  ' *'
Gribichc 192 Gummo 366
Gunfightcr, The 260, 263, 265 Gun Woman, The 127, 150, 152, 161
K.M. Pul harn, Esq, 264 Habanera, h 224, 225 ■Hsevncns Nat 133, 145, 153 Hako's Sacrifice IIS Hallelujah 223, 238 llalidujah the Hills 304 Halloween 316 Hamlet 351 Haneed Man, The 303 Hangmen Also Die 244 Happiness 337 ■Happy Days 230 Hard Target 338 Harry and Tonto 306 Haunted;House, The 92 Haus am Meer, das 184, 210 Havsgamar 157, 158 Headless Horseman, The 163 Heartburn 326 Hearts in Dixie 204 Heart of Texas Ryan, The 158 Heart to Heart.com 365, 367 Heathers 327
Heimgefunden; oder, Von Stufe zu Stufe - die Leibesbeich
te eines Probiersmamsell 76 Hellzapoppin' 394 Heftin the Pacific 286, 3'1D Hemmeligliedsfulde X 77, 79 Henry and June 366 Herr Arnes Pen gar 138 Her Code of Honour 151 Her First Adventure 108, 1*5 He Who Gets Slapped: 171, 1'84, 188 ' High and the Mighty, The 274 High Sierra 264 Highlander - the Source 377 Hitidenburg, The 311 Hired Man, The 1S4, 158, 161, 223 Histoired'un crime 57,58,61 His Chum the Baron 98 His Girl Friday 223, 246, 247, 256 His Last Fight 102,103
His Phantom Sweetheart 130, 131, 141, ISO, 151 His Picture in the Papers 123 Holiday 236, 264, 266 Hollywood 187
INDEX OP FILMS
Hollywood Revue, The 232
Homicide - Life on the Street 360
Homme-mouche, 1' 39
Homme de tetes, V 38, 39
Homme du large, 1' IS3, 191, 193
Homme et une femme, un 199, 263, 265, 294
Homunculus 133
Hooligan's Christmas Dream 61
Hooligan in Jail 50
Hose, die ]91
Hotel du Nord 261
Hot Spot 327, 345
Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels 365, 367 Hours and the Times, The 359 E louse on 92nd. Street, The 251 House That Jack Built, The 39
How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the Personal
Columns of the New York Herald 60 How It Feels To Be Run Over 51 How Jones Lost His Roll, 52 How the West Was Won 272 How to Marry a Millionaire 273, 274 Human Desire 244 Humorous Phases of Punnv Faces 53 I Hunchback of Notrc-Dame, The 167 Hundrcd-To-Onc Shot, The 43, 62 Hungry Hearts 210 Hurry Sundown 303 Husbands and Wives 3S9 Hvkle Slavehandels sklste Offer, den 77 Hypocrites 144
1 Confess 24S
I Love You Again 264
1, Madman 344
Iceman Cometh, The 318
ice Storm, The 344
lch bei Tag und Du bei Nacht 242, 379, 386 Idioterna 365 ir 294
Imitation of Life 236
Immensee 253
Immoral Mr, Teas, The 2S7
Incident, The 295
Incredible Shrinking Man, The 271
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 334
Indian Chief and the ScidLitz Powder, The 52
Indian Massacre, The 79
In the Company of Men 359
Inferno, 11 78,90,91, 110, 1J4
Ingeborg Holm 77, 98
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INDEX OF FILMS
Ingrate, The 99 Inherited Taint, The 113 Inherit the Wind 281 Inhumaine, 1' 177 lnondation, 1' 174, 193, 211 Insider, The 367-375 Interfering Lovers 61
Interview with the Vampire 344, 345, 346
Intimi Osvestleni 304
Intolerance 143, 149, 151, 154, 195
Invited Guest, An 365, 367
In a Garden 103
In Old San Francisco 208
In the Company of Men 337, 360
In thc Nick of Time 92
Iron Horse, The 158, 196, 210
It 159, 160, 204, 243
It's a Wonderful Life 187
Kalian, The 160
It Happened One Night 264
Ivanhoc 156, 157
Ivan Grozny 271
1 Know Where I'm Going 262
I Love You to Death 32S
1 Walk the Line 318
J "accuse 195
Jack and the Beanstalk 61 Jacques Landau^c 138 Jakob the Liar 367-375 Jaws 3-D 333 Jazz Singer, The 207 Jeanne d'Arc 36, 361 Jean and the Waif 104 Jean Rescues 104, 105, 117 Jerry and Tom 360 Jesus' Son 365, 367 Jet Pilot 241
je vais chercher le pain 108 Jim la houlette 211
Jing wu ying xiong (Fist of Legend) 359 Johnny Guitar 267 John Gilpin's Ride 89 JoHMai, lc 291 jone 79, 114, 119
Jubilo 13S, 139, 140, ISO, 154, ISS, 161 Judgement of Solomon, The 67, 95
Judge Dredd 353 Juggernaut, The 151 Julia and Julia 334 Julius Caesar 92, 117
445
■
Jurassic Park 356, 360 Jurassic Park III 360 Just a Shabby Doll 106, 111 Just Gold 92
Kameradschaft 223, 242, 379, 380
Karl Valentin und Liesl Karlstadt ya\ das München
berfest 383 Keeper of thc Flame, The 259, 260 Key Largo 264 Kidnapped Child, The 65 Kidnappers, The 65 Kid Brother, The 203 Kindling 135 King Kong (1933) 231 King of Jazz 2]7 King of Kings 202 Kismet 230 Kiss, The 203
Kiss in the Tunnel (G,A, Smith), The 40, 41, 42 Kiss in the Tunnel (Bamforth), The 57 Kit Carson 65 Kleptomaniac, The 64 Kocni^smark 158, 211
Komcdie om Geld 239, 3S7, 338, 396, 397, 399 Kongress tanzt, der 242, 379, 3S0, 382, 3S6 Kramer vs, Kramer 326 Kukla s Millionami 212
L Shaped Room, The 303 Lachende £rben 380, 331, 382, 396 Ladies Man 221 Ladvkillcrs, The 276 Lady in a Jam 24 Lady in the Dark 252 Lady of die Dugout, The 153 Lady Vanishes, The 245 Lady Windermere's Fan 210 Lady Widiouta Passport 263, 26;» Lampada della nonna, La 79 Landlord, The 309
Lapis 232
Lash, The 230
Lassie Come 1 Ionic 252
Last Action HerOj The 356
Last Boy Scout, The 327 Last Emperor, The 326 Last Night at die Alamo 329 Last of the Mohicans, The 163 Last Picture Show, The 311 Last Starfighter, The 334
Okto-
446
Last Tango in Paris 309
Last Train from Gun Hill 2S2, 283
Langli, Clown, Laugh 191
Law and the Man, The 116
Leon 361
Less Than the oust 136 Letter, The 237, 256
Letter from an Unknown Woman 25S, 259, 336, 387,
389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 396, 397, 39S Letzte Droschke von Berlin, die 191 Leine Mann, der 174, 177, 132, 191 Let Me Dream Again 6]
Liebelei 379, 330, 382, 333, 384, 33.5, 386, 389, 392,
393, 396, 398 Liebe der Jeanne Ney, die 201 Life 367 37Í, 373-375
Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine, The 73, 91 Life is Sweet 366
Life of an American Fireman, The 57, 61, 62, 63
Life of Moses, The 119:
LiTe Rcscue at Long Branch 57
Ligh t hi ng O vc r Water 329
Light Sleeper 360
Lights of New York, The 207
Light That Came, The 109
Li Mom i 244
Lilliputians in a London Restaurant 90 Unes of White on a Sullen Sea 78, 91, 114 Li q u id. Elec tri city; o r, T he I n ventor's G al van ic FI u id 69, 90
Libtile Doctors, The 54 Little Patriot, Tftie 142, :i:43 Little Prince, The 3:19 Little Soldier of '64, The 105 Living Daylights, The 326 Living End, The 359 iLoäfer, lHhc 102,103,106 Lodger, The 21 lip 244 Lola Montes 386, 395, 396, 397, 399 ■Lola rennt 366
LoncdaleOperator^hc 100, 106, 119 Lonely Villa, The 108 Lonesome 198 L ong D ay Closes, The 36 3 Long Goodbye, The 319, 321 Long Voyage Home, The 258, 259 Lord of the Plies, The 304 Lost Child1, The 50 Lost Freight Car, The 106 Loftt in America 329
INDEX OF FILMS
■
Lost Messenger, The 153
Lost World: Jurassic Park, The 360
Lotion miraculeuse, la 45
Love 179, 204, 205
Lovejagten 104
Love in the Suburbs 50
Love is the Devil 350
Love Me Tonight 228, 239
Love Parade, The 3SI
Love Stinks 367-371, 373, 375
Lucky Boy 239
Ludwig der zweite - König der Bayern 203
Luigi XI, re di Francia 96
Lüne a un metre, la 37
Lure of Gold, The 210
Lust for Life 265
Lycklige Skitar 314
-
M 239, 243 M.A.S.-M. 313 Macao - L*e n fer d e j e u 225 Mac Arthur 311 Mad Genius, The 264 Madame Bovary 389, 392 Madame Butterfly 161 Madame De     387, 395, 398 Madame Dubarry 161 Madchen Rosemaric 271 Mad Genius, The 263 Magician, The 191, 192 Magic Bottles 51
Magnificent Ambersons, The 259 Magn i ficen t Obs e ss i on 2 36 Magnolia 360, 366, 369 Mala pianta, La 119 Maldone 211
Malheur qui n'a pas lieu, le 76 MalOmbra 138, 144 Maltese Falcon, The 259 Man's Genesis 97, 112 Manhattan 329
Man hat ta n M u rder Mystery 359, 360
Manpower 264
Manslaughter 158, 187, 188
Mantrap 160, 191, 195, 201, 210
Manxman, The 266
Man 1 Killed! The 211, 222
Man on the Eiffel Tower, The 267
Man on the Moon 367-371, 373-375
Man That Might Have Been, The 152
Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1935) 245
P
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INDEX OF FILMS
Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1955) 245
Man Without a Star 265
Marat/Sade, The 289
Marathon Man 315
Mare, 11 304
Mare Nostrum 192
Maria Rosa 136
Marice était en noh, la 288
Marriage by Motor-Car 51, 61
Marriage Circle, The 158, 210
Married to the Mob 327
Marthe Richard — au service dc la France 228
Mary Jane's Mishap 55, 56, 57, 6!
Mary Poppins 297
Massacre, The 104, 119
Mat 213
Mater Dolorosa t i 2
Mating Habits of Earthbound Humans, The 367-375
Matrix, The 347, 352, 359
Matter of Life and Death, A 199
Max - Cinematographe 48
McCabeandMrs. Miller 319
Medicine Bottle, The 99
Melrose Place 371
Menilmontant 198
Men in Black 350
Mepris, le 288
Merry Widow, The 174, 175, 190 Message, The 80, 116 Metropolis 185, 191, 243 Miami Rhapsody 35.9 Michel Strogoff 211 Midnight 264 Midway 319
Midwinter Night's Dream, A 61 Mighty Aphrodite 359 Million, le 223, 242, 246, 247, 249 Mill Girl, The 70,71, 85,96, 103, 115 Ministr v of Fear, The 244 Minus Man, The 367-371, 373 375 Miracle des loups, le 211 Missing Legacy, The 43, 56 Moan a 173 Moby Dick 263, 307 Modern Musketeer, A 127, 132, 161 Modern Prodigal - A Story in Symbolism, A 119 Money Buys Happiness 365, 367 Monogrammed Cigarette, The 101,102 Monsieur Verdoux 266 Monte Carlo 381 Mon pere, ce héros 361
■
Mörder sind unter uns, die 261
More American Graffiti 332
Mormon Maid, A 127
Morocco 245, 379, 381, 382
Morte civile, La 106
Mother Night 359
Moulin Rouge (19S2) 265, 263
Moulin Rouge (1928) 160,211
Moulin Rougel 377
Mr. Grcx of Monte Carlo 127, 148
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 360
Müde Tod, der 1S6, 188, 243
Multiplicity 351
Münchhausen 252
Murder 239
Murders in the Rut Morgue, The 222 Muriel 155
Music of the Heart 367
Mysture du Moulin Rouge, le 178
Mystery of Temple Court, The 75
Mystery of the Wax Museum, The 217
Mystic River 377
Mystic Swing, The 44
My Best Girl 16Ö, 171, 200, 201, 210
■
Nadme 326 Naked City 251,254,255 Nanook of the North 173 Napoleon, vu par Abel Gance 204, 211 Napoleon - Man of Destiny 106, 110 Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine Narrow Fscape, A 108 Narrow Trail, The 152 Nashville 319, 366
Natural Born Killers 343, 344, 361, 366
■
Na sluneční straně 240 Necklace, The 74
Nelson; The Story of England^ Immortal Naval IS2
Nene 211
Neobytchainye Prikhoutcnnaía Mistera Vesta V
' Boichevikov 192, 212 Neon Bible.. The 363 Network 307 Never So Few 282,2S3 New Moon 253 New York Idea, The 210 New York, New York 321
Next! 63 Niemandsland 238 Nie wieder Liebe 379
■;i -
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448
North by Northwest 17, 245, 271, 281-283 Nosfcratn 175 Notorious 245 Nötitc, la 29Š
Nouveax Messieurs, les 192 No vy i Vavilon 192 Now and Forever 264 Nozze d'oro 1'10
Nun's Story, The 277, 279, 282, 283, 374 NY-PD Blue 360
■
Objective Burma 264 Oblomok Imperií ISS
Odds Against Tomorrow 277, 279, 282, 283, 374
Of Human Bondage 242, 245, 266
Oktyabr 214, 388
Olaf, an Atom 104
Old Chorister, The 57, 61, 62
Old Soldier, The 89
Old Swimmin' Hole, The 190
Old Wives'For New 1:41, 151, 158, 161'
Oliver Twist 67, 74,75,95
On-The-SquareGirl, The 131, 132, 152, 153
Once Upon a Savage Night 285
One Day in the Lift of Ivan Deniso v itch 309
One From tlie Heart 322, 326, 336
One Hundred Men and a Girl 235
One She Loved, The 91
Only Angels Have Wings 11, 243
Only Yesterday 236
On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus 52
On'Dangerous Ground 265
On the Beach 278, 279, 281, 283, 374
On the WateiTront 265, 269, 270
Opfergang 253
Opium 144
Ordinary People 329
örläcs Rande 191
Ostře Sledované Vláky 304
Our Dancing Daughters 205
Outrage, The 299'
Outside Providence 365, 367
Outside the Law 195
Out of Africa 323
Out of Che Shadows 1Ö3, 105< ■ ,:
Over the Chafing Dish 67, 99
Painted Veil, The 228 Paisa 251
Palmer's Pick tip 365, 367 Panther sPrev 106
INDEX Of FILMS
Pantins de Miss Hold 90
Paris qui dort 137
Parson 's H orse Race, The 13 S
Partie de campagne 223, 241, 242
Par la trou de la scrrurc 45
Passer-by, Thc 89, 110
Passionate Quest, The 202
Patriot, The 358
Patriaia c schiava 78
Pauvre mere 55, 104
Paymaster, The 47
Pecheur d'lslande 211
Peeping Tom 54,55
Perils of Paul, The 195
Personal 60
Per un pugno di dollari 297
Petit soldat, Ic 287, 2SS, 303
Phantom of the Opera, The (1925) 191, 264
Physician of the Castle, The 99, 105, 10S
Pickpocket - A Chase Through London, The 59, 61, 92
Picnic at Hanging Rock 311
Pierrot le fou 288
Pierrot/PiereLte 211
Pikovaya Dama 136, 144
Pilgrimage 24
Pillow Book, The 363
Pillow Talk 279; 283
Pink Floyd - The Wall 326
Pippa Passes 73, 74, 91, 119
Places in the Heart 326
Place of One's Own 261
Plaisir, Ic 338, 394, 395, 396, 397, 399
Platinum Blond 239
Player, The 366
Playing Dead 161
Playthings 365, 367
Playtime 297
Pleasantville 352
Pleasure Garden, The 211, 244
Poet and Peasant 94
Poil de carotte 177, 192
Point Blank 295
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Point Doom 365,367
Pokolenie 361
Poor Cow 304
Poor Little Peppina 141
Poor Little Rich Girl 123,143, 144
'Posle smerti 144, 152, 153
Postman Always Rings Twice, The 336
Poulc aux oeufs d or 50
Power and the Glory, The 223, 239
1
INDEX OF FILMS
Pred maturitou 239 Pride of the Clan, The 152 Primary 291
Prima clella rivoluzione 303 Primrose Path, The 144 Prince Valiant 274
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The 252 Private Worlds 228 Privatsekretarin, die 381
Prividenyie, Kotoroye Ne Vozvrashchayetsya 214 Professionals, The 294 Prosperous Books 363 Prunella 146
Public Enemy, The 223, 236, 242, 246, 247
Puffy Chair, The 378
Pulp Fiction 366
Puppe, die 136, 143, 146, 161
Purity 144
Purple Heart, The 264
Quai des brumes 223, 224, 225 Quality Street 202 Quartet 395
Quaire cent coups, les 304 Quo Vadis? 34, 114
Radio Parade of 1935, The 221 Raging Bull 329, 348 Raid on a Coiner's Den 59 Raintrce County 295 Raising Arizona 328 Rarnbo: First Blood Part II 35S Ramona 75
Rancho Deluxe 306, 317 Rancho Notorious 268 Raskolnikov IS5, 194 Rat, The 211, 244 Raw Nerve 365, 367 Rebecca 234
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 123, 127, 264 Rebel Without a Cause 274
Reckless Moment, The 382, 387, 393, 394, 396, 39S
Re cued by Rover 46
Redskin 199
Red Dance, The 203
Red Dust 264
Reflections in a Golden Eye 2S6 Regeneration 130 Regie du jcu, la 242, 243 Reporter 316
Rescued by Rover 47, 59, 64, 65
449
Rescued in Mid-Air 53, 62 Resident Evil: Apccalypsc 377 Return of Frank James, The 219 Return of the Jed:, The 32S Revesd'agent 91 Reve a la lune 57, 65 Reve et realite 61 Re volu t i onsbr y 11 up 102 Richelieu 113
Ride Lonesome 279, 281, 232, 283
Right Girl, Thc 133, 149, 150, 151
Ring, The 160,211
Riot in Cell block 11 275
River (19S4), The 342
Road to T„1 series 394
Road to Glorv, The 264
Roaring Twenties, The 264
Robbery of thc Mail Coach, The 5 \
Robe, The 273, 274
Rock, The 343, 360
Rocks of Valpre, The 143
Rocky 3IS
Rocky IV 358
Roi du maquillage, lc 52
Roller coaster 3I9
Romance of an Umbrella, Thc 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 116
Romance of a Jewess, The 114
Roman dsun mousse 76, 77, 79, 111, 112
Roman d un tricheur 240
Roman de Werther 221, 388, 396
Roma - cittä aperta 254
Ronde, la 394, 395, 397
Rope 257
Rose-France 143, 145, 152, 173 Rosetta 362
Rose of Monterey, The 200 Rose of the Golden West, The 201 Rosita 171
Roue, la 154, 195, 196, 214
Roverens Brud 88, 100
Roy au me des Ices, Ic 48
Rube and Mandy at Coney Island 59
Rumblefish 322, 329
Runaway Mutch, The 5t, 55, 61, 101
Rundown (aka Welcome to the jungle), Thc 377
Runner Stumbles, The 311
Ryan s Daughter 289
Rythm Thief, The 359
Saboteur 257
■
Sallies Sure Shot 104
S am son unci Deli la 211
Sans lendemain 388, 397, 39S, 399
Santa Claus 3S
Satana 79
Sauna 1 i k uy u sh eh J 144
S aturd ay N igh t Fever 3 2 S
Saturday Night Kid, The 204
Sauvetage en riviere 40
Saving Private Ryan 340, 348, 350
Scar City 365, 367
Scaramouche 171, 179, ISO, 192
Scarlet Empress, The 227, 241, 245
Schastye vechnoi nochi 144
Sehatz, der ISO
Scheden 174, 191, 192, 193
Schindlern List 361
S ch loss Vogelöd 191
Schuhpalast Pinfcus 145
Scipion eta frica no 2 2 S
Scrooge- or, Marlcy's Ghost 56, 57, 64
Sculpture moderne 90
Search for Evidence, A 55, 63
Searchers, The 265
Sea Hawk, The 389
Second-in-Command, The 13S
Secret Beyond the Door, The 244
Secret Game, The 132
Secret Garden, The 199
Secret People 261
Sergeant Madden 245
Servant, The 302
Servant Difficulty, The 40
Seventh Heaven 189
Seven Ages, The 46, 47, 72, 73
Shadows 279, 283, 234, 304
Shadows and Fog 359
Shadow o f a D oUbt 257
Shaggy Dog,,The 280'
Shakespeare's Tragedy, King Lear 96
Shanghai, Express 245
Shel ten n g S ky, The 3 36
Shinel1 212
ShortCuts 366
Shotgun Ranchman, The 103
Showman 291
Show Boat (1936) 26+
Shrimper, The 104
Sick Kitten, The 54
Sick Stockrider, The 111'
Siege de Calais, ie Mr, 112
. -
INDEX OF FILMS
Siegfried 243
Sjgnoraditutti, La 3S6, 3S7, 3S9, 396, 39S
Silks and Satins 131, 132, 153
Silver Wedding, The 44, 47
Simple Charity 119
Singing Fool, The 204, 208
Sixth Sense, The 367-371, 373-375
Six Feet Four 135
Skinner's Dress Suit 191
Slacker 359, 366, 378
Slave, The 73
SLC Punk! 367-375
Sleuth 316
Sling Blade 360
Slipper and the Rose, The 30S
Slugger's Wife, The 332
Small Time 359
Smile 310
Smiling Lieutenant, The 239 Smoke 360
Smouldering Fires 159, 160, 190, 1:95, 210 Snow Falling on Cedars 336-371, 373-375 Sogno patriottico di Cinessino 153 Solaris 306
Soldier's Return, The 64
Somebody Lip There Likes Me 277
Something Wicked This Way Comes 335
Some Like it Hot 279,, 283
Song of Bernadette, The 260
Song of Songs, The 22S
Son of the Sheik, The 159, 190, 197, 210
Sorte Drom, den 75
Soubrette geniale 39
Souriante Madame Bcudet 177, 184, 191
Sowers, The 132
Soy Cuba 27'I
So This is Paris 195
Spice World 363
Spinnen, die (Part 2j) 210
Spione 243
Spione am Werk 242
Spirit of Ghr ist mas > T he 98
Splash 335
Spoilers, ifhe 122, 156, 157, 160 Sjposa del1 Nilo, La 115 Spun 377
Squaw's Love, The V05 Stachka 177, 133, 213, 214 Staerkcstc, den 94 Stage Fright 257 Stage Romance,. A 125
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INDEX OF FILMS
Stalker 306 Stardust 319 Stardust Memories 329 Staroye i Novoye 212, 213 Star Is Born, A (1937) 219, 220 Star is Born, A (1955) 274 Star is Born, A (1976) 320 Star Trek 335 Star Wars 309, 320, 328
Star Wars Episode One; The Phantom Menace 346, 349, 351
Stella Dallas 159, 190, 210 Stella Maris 127, 133, 13S, 139, 143, 161 SteppenwolF 319 Stolen by Gypsies 50, 59, 65 Stolen Guy* The 47 Stolen Jewels, The 115 Stop Thief! 53,59 Storia di Lulu, La 99 Storm, The 365, 367 Stormbrenker 377 Storytellers, The 36S, 367 Story of the Glove, The 144 Story the Biograph Told, The 62 Story the Boots Told, The 99 S era ngers on a Tra in 263 Stranger Than Paradise 329 Strange Days 347
Strasse, die 176, 177, 180, 1SS, 191, 193, 194 Stratégia del ragno, La 309 Strawberry Blonde, The 264 Strength o ľ Men, The 94 Strenuous Life, The 57 Student von Prag, der 77, 185 Subway Riders 327 Suddenly, Last Summer 279, 283 Suez 263, 264 Sugarbaby 327
Sugarland Express, The 311,313 Sühne, die 157 Sum er k i zhenskoi dushi 79 Suniurun 1S2, 191 Sun Up 159, I60, 210 Sunrise 194 Superman 303
Sweet and Lowdown 360, 369 Sweet and Twenty SO Sweet Hereafter, The 364 Sweet Smell of Success, The 269 Swing Time 231 Switchman's Tower, The 100,105
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Sword of Monte Cristo, The 267 Sylvester 174, 193
Sylvia Scarlett 223, 236
S'/.cgcnylegenyek 293
Talented Mr, Ripley, The 367-371, 373-375
Taming of the Shrew, The 236
Tare, la 75
Tartü (T 132, 191
Taxi Driver 311
Taza, Son of Cochise 273
Telephone, The 76, 105, 106, 103, 116
Telephone Girl and the Lady, The 104
Tell Me Lies 285
Tempest, The 205
Temps rctrouve, le 362
Tendre ennemie, la 221, 332, 387, 396, 397
Terror 209
Testament des Dr. Mab use, das 243 Thais 145, 146 That Cold Da)' in the Park 313 Their One Love 126, 135 They Drive by Night 243, 264 The chcz le concierge 103 Thief of Bagdad, The 164, 168, 261 Third Man, The 261 Third Round, The 211 Thirty-Nine Steps, The 238 This Property is Condemned 293 Thomas Crown Affair, The 289, 295 Thomas Graals bästa Film 153, 161, 223 Threads of Destiny 81 Three Cherry Pips 110 Three Musketeers, The 16Ö Three to Tango 367-371, 373-375
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Throw Mama From the Train 32S Thunderbolt 208 Thundcrhead, Son-of Flicka 252 Tiger 91 Tiger Shark 242 Tiger von Esch na pur, der 244 Tiore reale 153 Tigris 119
TiiilCome Back To You 132, 16.1 Till the Clouds Roll By 143 Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy 39 Tire au fjanc 203 Tirol in Waffen 157 Titanic 350 Toilers, The 210
Tol'able David I5S, 169, 170, 190, 210
INDEX Of FILMS
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452
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Toll ofthe Sea, The 164, 165
Tom mi 235
Tommy 320
Tom Jones 304
Toni 92, 223, 242
Tooth of Crime, The 364
Topsy-Turvy 366
Top Gun 32S, 329, 365
Torgus 1S5
Torn Curtain 288
Torrent, The !SS
Tosen fra Stormy r tor pel 161
Total Recall 353
Touch of Evil 21
Tounbillon de Paris, 1c 211
Track of the Cat, The 274
Traffic in Souls 89, 119, 156, 157
Tragic Love 115
Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The 220 Trainspotting 346, 363 Transatlantic 222, 223 Transporter 2 377
Trcas ure of Pi rate 's Pöi nt, The 365,367
Trea sure Trove 10 3
Tre nt '$ Last Case 264
Trial of Viviennc Ware, The 228
Trilby ]'4S
Triumph of the Spirit 329 Tri pesni o Leninye 240 Tron 334
True Hearts are More Than Coronets 72 True Heart Susie 158, VS9, 161 True Stories 327 Tugboat Annie 236 Tumble weeds 173 Tunnel Workers, The 47 Twelve O'clock High 260 Twentieth Century Tramp, The 53 Twin Pawns 14:1., 148, 190 Two Paths - A Symbolism, The 119 loon 138
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Ultimi giorni di Pompei, Gli 119
Una of the Sierras 103
tinbekannte Morgen, das 211
Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show 53.
Uncle Josh m a Spooky Hotel 44
Uncle Richard 113
-Uncle Tom's Cabin 62, 102,103,112 Underground Comedy Movie, The 365, 367 Under Capricorn 2 57
Underworld 159, 241
Unhelichen, die 191
Unfinished Business 264
Union City 327
United 93 377
Unknown, The 191
Unsuspected, The 24
Until They Get (Me 136, 154, 15S
Untouchables, The 328
Upside Down; or, The Human Flies 39
Urstis ctsoataureau lutteur 56
Li Samovo sinyevo morya 231
Vagabond, The 138 Vampyr 179
Vanina, oder die Galgcnhochzeit 176, 191,193
Vanya on 42nd Street 359
Variete 159, 160, 177, ISO, 183, 191, 195, 210
Vecchia guardia 239
Ved Fecngslcts Port 76, 77
Veliki i Uteshitel 213
Venus im Frack 211
Vera Cruz 274, 277
Verboten! 279,281-283
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Verden* Uiidergang 133,134 Verdun, visions d'histoire 211 Verkaufte Braut, die 379, 382, 383, 396 Verliebte Firma, die 381, 382T 396, 398 Verlorene Schuh, der 158 Versunkene Welt, eine 191 Vertige,1e 159, 177, 211 Vertigo 245 Vesyolye rebyata 23.1 Victims of Fate 97
View of the Wreck of the 'Maine' 39
Vie du-Christ, la 45, 46, 57, 61, 64
Villa im Tiergarten, die V91, 195
Violettes imperials 211
Virginian, The 204
Virgin orStamboul, The 167, 190
Visages d'enfants 192
Visiteurs, les 361
Vivaľltalia 271
Vívrcsavie 304
Voice of a Child, The 109
Voice of the Child, The 106
Voinaimir 306
Voisin-voisine 106
Von Morgens bis Mitternacht 184, ISS, 191
Vor Tids Dame 71
Voyage itravers ľimpossiblc, lc 65
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INDEX OF FILMS
Voyage dans la lune, lc 57, 59, 60 Voyous de I'ouest 92
Wachsfigurenkabinett 176, ISO, 185 Waif and the Wizard, The 58 Wall Street 327 Wanters, The 166 War and Peace 265
Washington Llnder the American Flag 72
Washington Under the British Rag 79, SO
Waterloo Bridge 262, 264
Watermelon Patch, The 47, 62, 64
Way of the World, The 119
We're in the Navy Now 230
WeVe No Angels 328
Weary Willie Kidnaps a Child 65
Wedding, A 319
Welcome to L.A- 319
Wenn Vier dassclbe tun 161
West Side Story 295
Wes Craven's New Nightmare 366
What's-His-Name 122
What the Daisy Said 109
When the Clouds Roll By 161
When Tomorrow Comes 236,264
While the City Sleeps 244
Whip, The 136
Whispering Chorus, The 133, 136, 151, 154
White Heat 257, 264
White Shadows in the South Seas 191
White Slave, The 34
Who's Ealing Gilbert Grape? 366
Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, The 52
Why Change Your Wife? 158, 210
Why Jones Couldn't Sleep 113
Why Jones Discharged His Clerks 44
Widow and the Only Man, The 57
Wild Bovs of the Road 236
Wild Party, The 311
Wild Racers, The 302
Wild River 274
Winchester l73 265
Winners of the Wilderness 201
Winning of Barbara Worth, The 191, 197, 198,210
4$3
Wishing Ring, The 160 Without Limit 210 Without You ľni Nothing 359 Wizard of Oz, The 199^264 Woman 154
Woman's Treachery, A 92 Woman handled 187 Woman God Forgot, The !40 Woman in 47, The 152 Woman in a Dressing Gown 278 Woman in the Window, The 244 Woman of Affairs, A 204 Woman of Paris, A 190 Women 236 Women's Rights 41, 42 Wonderful Story, The 211
Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The 272 Woodstock 297 Would-be Juggler, The 99 Wreath in Time, A 104, 107 Wuthcnng Heights 2 5 S
Yaqui Cur, The 78
Yoshiwara 383, 396, 397
You and Me 244
You Got Served 377
You Only Live Once 244
You're a Big Boy Now 286
Young Frankenstein 311
Young Lady-Killer, A 99
Young Mr. Lincoln I5t 16, 242, 245
Young Sherlock Holmes 334
Youne Winston 311
Youth 144
Yuri Nagorni 145, 148
Zander the Great 178 Zelig 329 Zemlya 382 Zcrkalu 17, 306 z ľ soboty na nedeli 235 Zhizn za zhizn 136 Zigcmar, peau d anguille 97 Zur Chronik von Grieshus 210
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