D. W. Griffith and Albert Capellani
Albert Capellani and D. W. Griffith
1) came to filmmaking in the early years of the nickelodeon boom,
2) when films were one reel long and relatively simple in form and style.
3) Both were drawn to melodrama and historical epics,
but their approaches varied.
4)Griffith’s reliance on editing typified a style developing among American directors.
5)Like most Europeans, however, Capellani largely avoided cutting.
6)He relied on prolonged, fairly distant shots with actions precisely staged in depth.
D.W. Griffith
1) After working as a minor stage and film actor,
2) Griffith started directing films at AM&B in 1908.
3) He soon began crosscutting scenes and framing his actors more closely in original ways.
4) Despite the fact that filmmakers were not credited,
5) viewers soon recognized that films from American Biograph
(the name the company assumed in 1909) were consistently among the best coming
from the US studios.
6)is the early director most often associated with the development of crosscutting.
7)He was undoubtedly influenced by earlier films, including The Runaway Horse,
but of all directors of the period, he explored the possibilities of crosscutting most daringly.
The Lonely Villa
1) An extended and suspenseful early use of this technique came in The Lonely Villa (1909),
2) where thieves lure a man away from his isolated country home by sending a false message.
3)To maximize suspense, Griffith cuts among three story elements:
a)the man,
b) the thieves, and
c)the family inside the house.
4)Having car trouble, the man calls home and learns that the thieves are breaking into a room
where his wife and daughters are barricaded.
5) He hires a wagon, and
6) the shots continue to connect
a) the husband’s rescue group,
b) the thieves, and
c) the terrified family.
7) In fewer than fifteen minutes, The Lonely Villa presents over fifty shots,
8) most of which are linked by crosscutting.
The Lonely Villa (D. W. Griffith, 1909)
Film Clip
Griffith techniques
1)Griffith also explored the possibilities of framing his actors more closely than the standard 9-foot
line had permitted.
2) He wanted to replace the typical pantomimic gestures of the era with a more subtle acting style.
3) In early 1912, Griffith began training his talented group of young actresses,
including Lillian Gish, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, and Mary Pickford,
to register a lengthy series of emotions using only slight gestures and facial changes.
Painted Ladies
1) One result of these experiments was The Painted Lady (1912),
2) a tragic story of a demure young woman who is courted by a man who turns out to be a thief.
3) After she shoots him during a robbery attempt,
she goes mad and relives their romance in fantasy.
4)Throughout much of The Painted Lady,
Griffith places the camera relatively close to the heroine,
framing her from the waist up so that her slightest expressions and movements are visible.
5) Griffith also employed analytical editing within scenes, including still closer views of actors’
faces.
The Painted Lady (D. W. Griffith, 1912)
Film Clip
Capellani was hired by Pathé around 1905,
1)and his earliest identified films were made that year.
2) He continued making short films in various genres until 1908,
3) when Pathé formed its prestige unit, SCAGL, and appointed Capellani to run it.
4) Increasingly, his own projects were adaptations of respected French literary works
by Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas, as well as subject matter
drawn from French history.
His first great film, L’Assommoir (1909),
1)was an adaptation of Zola’s naturalistic novel about poverty and alcoholism
in working-class Paris. (The title is an untranslatable pun on, roughly, “knocked-out”
and “cheap tavern.”)
2) It is full of lengthy takes with complex choreography.
3) In all his films, Capellani gave exact movements and business to each actor present,
no matter how insignificant.
4)Their faces, stances, and gestures, often fairly broad,
make up for the almost entire lack of closer shots.
5)Take the scene in which the heroine Gervaise and her new fiancé Copeau
celebrate their engagement in an open-air café.
6)The proceedings are interrupted at intervals by Gervaise’s former lover Lantier
and the vengeful Virginie, with whom Lantier has taken up.
7)The entire scene consists of a single two-minute shot,
with the fluid action moving forward and back, in and out.
The scene
1) begins with the arrival of Gervaise, Copeau, and their guests in the far distance,
with Virginie and Gervaise’s jealous ex-lover Lantier awaiting them in the foreground.
2) The guests come forward, and Virginie speaks to Gervaise.
3) An organ-grinder appears, and the guests begin to dance.
4) The scene continues as the dancers move off left and Virginie gets Copeau to dance with her.
5) They and the organ-grinder also go out left, leaving Gervaise alone.
6) In a comic touch, a friend of hers who is always eating comes in and says something to her.
7) When he leaves, Lantier enters from the right and berates Gervaise until another
guest drives him away.
8) The dancers return, and the scene ends with Gervaise sitting disconsolately while Virginie and
Lantier stand at the far right of the frame, watching her menacingly.
9) As this and other lengthy scenes in L’Assommoir show,
10) Capellani instructed all of his actors, even minor ones milling about in the backgrounds,
on facial expressions and gestures.
11)The resulting action is livelier and often more comprehensible than in many films of the day.
L’Assommoir (Albert Capellani, 1909)
Film Clip
1)are also notable for their realistic settings,
2) whether filmed in the studio or on location.
3) These prestige films warranted higher budgets for building interiors,
4) he was able to work in historic buildings in Paris and environs for his films set
during the French Revolution and other eras.
5) He sought equal naturalism for the settings needed for his Zola adaptations,
as with his treatment of the mine and its surroundings in Germinal (1913).
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