Early Moves Toward Classical Storytelling
Beginning in 1904,
1) American commercial filmmaking became increasingly oriented toward storytelling.
2)Moreover, with the new emphasis on one-reel films, narratives became longer and
necessitated a series of shots.
3)Filmmakers faced the challenge of making story films that would be comprehensible to
audiences.
4) How could techniques of editing,
camerawork,
acting,
and lighting be combined so as to clarify what was happening in a film?
5) How could the spectator grasp where and when the action was occurring?
1) Over the span of several years, filmmakers solved such problems.
2) Sometimes they influenced each other, while at other times two filmmakers might happen on
the same technique.
3) Some devices were tried and abandoned.
By 1917,
1)filmmakers had worked out a system of formal principles that were standard in American
filmmaking.
2)That system has come to be called the classical Hollywood cinema.
3)Despite this name, many of the basic principles of the system
were being worked out before filmmaking was centered in Hollywood, and, indeed,
4)many of those principles were first tried in other countries.
5)In the years before World War I, film style was still largely international,
since films circulated widely outside their countries of origin.
The basic problem that confronted filmmakers
1) early in the nickelodeon era was that audiences
could not understand the causal, spatial, and temporal relations in many films.
2) If the editing abruptly changed locales, the spectator might not grasp
where the new action was occurring.
3) An actor’s elaborate pantomime might fail to convey the meaning of a crucial action.
4) In a few theaters, a lecturer might explain the plot as the film unrolled,
but producers could not rely on such aids.
Every aspect of silent film style came to be used to enhance narrative clarity.
1) Staging in depth could show the spatial relationships among elements.
2) Intertitles could add narrative information beyond what the images conveyed.
3) Closer views of the actors could suggest their emotions more precisely.
4) Color,
set design,
and lighting could imply the time of day and the milieu of the action.
Some of the most important innovations of this period
1)involved the ways in which shots were put together to create a story.
2) In one sense, editing was a boon to the filmmaker,
permitting instant movement from one space to another or cuts to closer views to reveal details.
3)But if the spectator could not keep track of the temporal and spatial relations between one shot
and the next, editing might lead to confusion.
4)In some cases, intertitles could help establish new locations.
5)Editing also came to emphasize continuity among shots.
6)Certain cues indicated that time was flowing uninterruptedly across cuts.
7)Between scenes, other cues might suggest how much time had been skipped over.
8)When a cut moved from one space to another,
the director found ways to orient the viewer.
Filmmakers had been framing action in depth since the earliest years.
1) Particularly in scenes staged outdoors, an important plot development might be emphasized by
having the actor step toward the viewer.
2)The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station (Auguste & Louis Lumière, 1895): the Lumière
cameraman has chosen a vantage point that emphasizes many planes of activity.
The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station (Auguste & Louis Lumière, 1895)
Film Clip
From 1906 or so onward,
1)
3) In Urban Gad’s Afgrunden (“Downfall,” Denmark, 1910), the hefilmmakers began giving more depth to indoor scenes as well.
and to highlight an actor’s gesture or facial expression.roine’s effort to reunite
with her fiancé is blocked by her past involvement with a thug.
Gad presents the thug’s arrival so as to emphasize the fiancé’s helpless response.
4)In such ways, as the drama unfolded moment by moment, depth staging could guide the
viewer’s eye to the most important parts of the action.
Afgrunden (Urban Gad, 1910)
Before 1905,
1) most films had no intertitles.
2)Their main titles often gave information concerning the basic situations in the simple narratives
to come.
The longer film length standardized
1)during the nickelodeon era led to an increasing number of intertitles.
2)There were two types of intertitles.
a) Expository titles were initially more common.
Their texts were written in the third person, summarizing the upcoming action or simply
setting up the situation.
b)Filmmakers also sought a type of intertitle that could convey narrative information
less baldly. Information presented in dialogue titles came from within the story action.
Moreover, because films increasingly focused on character psychology,
1) dialogue titles could suggest characters’ thoughts more precisely than gestures could.
2) At first filmmakers were not quite sure where to insert dialogue titles.
3) Some put the title before the shot in which the character delivered the line.
4) Other filmmakers placed the dialogue title in the middle of the shot, just after the character
had begun to speak.
5) The latter placement became the norm by 1914, as filmmakers realized that the spectator
could better understand the scene if the title closely coincided with the speech in the
image.
Decisions about where to place the camera
1) were important for ensuring that the action would be comprehensible to the viewer.
2) The edges of the image created a frame around the events depicted.
3) Objects or figures at the center tended to be more noticeable.
Methods of framing the action changed after 1908.
1) In order to convey the psychology of the characters,
2) for example, filmmakers began to put the camera slightly closer to the actors
so that their facial expressions would be more visible.
3)This trend seems to have started about 1909,
4)when the 9-foot line was introduced.
5)This meant that the camera, instead of being 12 or 16 feet back
and showing the actors from head to toe, was placed only 9 feet away, cutting off the actors
just below the hips.
6)Some reviewers complained that this looked unnatural and inartistic, but others praised the
acting in films by Vitagraph, which pioneered this technique.
Another technique of framing that changed during this period
1) was the use of high and low camera angles.
2) In early fiction films, the camera usually viewed the action at a level angle,
about chest- or waist-high.
3) By about 1911, however, filmmakers began occasionally to frame the action from slightly
above or below when doing so provided a more effective vantage point on the scene.
4)A camera framing from a slightly high angle enhances the drama of the final guillotine scene
in Vitagraph’s 1911 three-reel feature A Tale of Two Cities.
5) During these same years, camera tripods with swiveling heads were introduced.
6) With such tripods, the camera could be turned from side to side to make pan shots
7) or swiveled up and down to create tilts.
8) Tilts and pans were often used to make slight adjustments, or reframings, when the
figures moved about.
9)This ability to keep the action centered enhanced the comprehensibility of scenes.
A Tale of Two Cities (William Humphrey, 1911)
Although most of the prints of silent films
1) that we see today are black and white,
2)many were colored in some fashion when they first appeared.
3)Two techniques for color release prints became common.
a)Tinting involved dipping an already-developed positive print into a dye bath
that colored the lighter portions of the images while the dark ones remained black.
b)In toning, the already-developed positive print was placed in a different chemical solution
that saturated the dark areas of the frame while the lighter areas remained nearly white.
Between 1905 and 1912,
1) as production companies were making more money from their films,
2) some built larger studio buildings to replace the earlier open-air stages
and cramped interior studios.
3) Most of these had glass walls to admit sunlight but also included some type of electric lighting.
4) As a result, many films used deeper, more three-dimensional settings, and some used artificial
light.
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