Contiguity, European Style

What has been established:

There are intermittent samples of what looks like contiguity cutting (characters exiting left of frame and entering the net shot from the right, exhibiting a continuous direction of movement through two contiguous shots) in a couple of James Williamson shorts made in Britain in 1900 and 1901.

In OUR NEW ERRAND BOY from 1905, Williamson uses contiguity cutting consistently, but in THE ? MOTORIST by Walter R. Booth, made in London the same year, contiguity is only applied to the trick shots, where it comes in handy to connect the life-sized car and occupants with the miniature version.

Meanwhile, in America, Edwin S. Porter doesn’t seem to use this form of staging and cutting until 1906, applying it almost consistently in THE DREAM OF THE RAREBIT FIEND (especially the trick shots) and the following year’s THE “TEDDY” BEARS.

But what of “the continent”?

Here’s THE POLICEMEN’S LITTLE RUN, directed by Ferdinand Zecca in 1907. In anticipation of COPS, an absurd number of gendarmes chase a sausage-stealing dog. Zecca keeps it simple: the chase goes consistently from left to right for the first minute, then goes from right to left (with a credible change of direction in between), all done with nice matching of direction from shot to shot. Zecca is a trick-film guy even more than a slapstick one, so soon we have innovations like chasing up the side of a building, the cops turning into worrying Dracula/Spiderman wallclimbers, which emphasises their insectoid black multiplicity. The trick is a variation on the familiar Batman TV show abseiling gag, but actually more ambitious as it involves filming from above. It looks as if the camera is moving but I think it’s likelier that the side of the building is being dragged through frame…

At 3.40 there’s a single mistake in screen direction, but it doesn’t spoil the fun. Zecca is obviously following (mostly) an accepted rule of grammar, but how long had it existed in France, Italy, Germany, and the UK?

All the scene changes in L’ECLIPSE DU SOLEIL EN PLEINE LUNE are done with vertical movement — going up a ladder or falling out a window — except for one transition to a POV shot — until the end, where there’s a sort-of left to right match. Top film, though.

Filmmakers never had any trouble matching characters moving vertically, it just makes sense that if a character exits out the top of one shot he should enter via the bottom of the next. But this was not immediately applied to sideways exits and entrances.

A DESPERATE CRIME AKA LES INCENDIAIRES from 1906 is an unusually serious melodrama from Georges Melies, but one that shows contiguity editing applied skillfully where it matters.

I was intrigued to find something very much like a contiguity cut in A TRIP TO THE MOON from 1902, but since any pairing of lateral exits and entrances has a fifty-fifty chance of matching screen direction it’s hard to be sure this was deliberate. Time to see more, which with Melies is always a pleasure.

Alas, while TRIP is something of a superproduction involving multiple scenes on multiple worlds, most of GM’s films of that year are performed in front of a single backcloth or painted flat, and even when more settings are involved, as in L’EQUILIBRE IMPOSSIBLE or AN IMPOSSIBLE BALANCING FEAT, the scene change is effected by Melies himself waving his arms and magicking a new setting into existence. No use for our purposes, but a good trick if you can do it.

FAUST IN HELL from 1904 behaves like it’s not interested in contiguity, since every exit is followed by stuff exploding, and Melies takes his time transitioning with dissolves and with moving pieces of scenery (the belt and braces approach). But every time Faust and Mephistopheles race out of shot screen left, they re-enter screen right. It just takes a while.

Melies is maybe the most formally inventive filmmaker of the era, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s also quick to catch on to the pleasing quality of continuity cutting.

Incidentally, I’d never seen this one before and it’s really fantastic. Sort of Dante’s Inferno but with the guys from Faust. Two great tastes that taste great together. Plus flames, superimposition, cardboard caverns, cardboard monsters, showgirls, men in nappies. Maximalism on a budget.

THE KINGDOM OF THE FAIRIES (1903 — an entry in the short-lived and beautiful fairy film genre) is equally wondrous, with particularly gorgeous art direction and lots of scenes linked by linear movement, which helps make several different fake ships constructed at different scales seem like the same vessel. Melies always seems to prefer going right to left, interestingly enough, apart from when he’s doing vertical stuff which he does A LOT.

OK, at 8.47 he gets it wrong. Nobody’s perfect. The rest is consistent. OK, maybe the balsa whale (top) appears only in its left profile aspect just to save painting it on both sides, but the effect is one of graceful continuity. And maybe Melies’ shots match so well because he prefers things to go right to left (although within the frame itself they move in every which direction). But the impression is that he knows the principle of continuity cutting and applies it quite consistently, some years before R.W. Paul in Britain or Edwin S. Porter in America. Time to look at some more Europeans…

Melies’ THE ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE is sadly incomplete — scenes are truncated with dreamlike abruption and there are rather more jump cuts than even Melies intended, reducing entire sections of plot to disorienting blipverts. But in the remaining chunks characters do sometimes exit left and enter right, maintaining their right-to-left movement, just the way Georges likes it. And this is 1902.

Maybe in a mythical complete version we’d see more evidence of contiguity, or else more contiguity errors?

Man Friday is rarely what you might call a progressive portrayal, but the blackface minstrel version here may be the worst Friday in human history, worse even than FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH PART THREE.

Blurry figure bottom left (left), blurry figure bottom right (right).

Looking for clues in Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar’s The Technique of Film Editing, I found nothing about the development of contiguity cutting, but a passing reference to Melies’ 1899 CINDERELLA prompted me to check it out. SURELY Melies couldn’t have been contiguous at such an early time?

Reisz & Millar, whose book is very good but who are not really historians and aren’t really trying to lay out an entire timeline of innovations, rather unjustly describe Melies as presenting separate tableaux divided by intertitles (he seems to use those only very rarely) and miss out his use of continuous movement from shot to shot.

CINDERELLA is mostly devoid of contiguity. Exits and entrances are often separated by quite a bit of time, and by dissolves, and Cinders enters several times from the direction she exited in, including her all-important going to the ball bit, and her flight from same. But at 3.49 Prince Charming leads her out to the left, we dissolve to the palace exterior, and after quite a long time the happy couple reenter from the right at 4.12, obeying the Prime Directive of Contiguity.

Probably just happenstance. (Remember always James Bond’s rule of thumb: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.) But could Melies have noticed how nice it looked? Now I need a deep dive into his other 1899 and 1900 and 1901 films.

But A CHRISTMAS DREAM (1900) muffs its one chance of a contiguous match. JOAN OF ARC, the same year, has a delayed contiguous transition right after the opening angelic vision, but then the next one is uncontiguous or anticontiguous, the one after is correct, as is the next, I can’t tell WHAT is happening in the next… At 7.27 there’s a match of screen direction as Joan is led from her cell, which seems to matter, but Melies still likes to begin each scene with a lot of business from the supporting cast before the main character gets there, so the sense of directional energy carried from one scene into another is rather lost. But again, Joan is taken out to the right and arrives at the stake from the left, which feels really good (deliberately?). And when she’s incinerated, she arrives in Heaven from the bottom of the screen, but everybody’s always understood THAT.

So 1900 is a year of mystery — perhaps there’s a film which can clinch the deal, but looking at 1901 Melies films should be able to at least DISprove his mastery of contiguity — if he’s still getting it regularly wrong, that would suggest he hadn’t figured it out the year before, unless he’s got retrograde amnesia or something.

BLUEBEARD of 1901 features a contiguous join when Mrs. B. enters the bloody chamber, surely the most spacial movement in the film. Another vague suggestion of contiguity is when, earlier, Bluebeard telegraphs his intention to go away for a bit, he gestures to a landscape visible through a window on the left. When he gets back from his travels, he enters FROM THE LEFT.

“Wendy, I’m home.”

A theatre production would likely do the same thing, and Melies certainly has one foot in pantomime and magic shows. And, since his dramas happen in front of painted backdrops and flats, and he apparently sketched his scenes beforehand, thinking about film as a graphic medium plus movement would be natural to him. He also doesn’t have the bother of trying to match an exit filmed on location with an entrance in a studio shot days later on a set built by someone who wasn’t present at the location and never saw the footage.

The trouble is, Melies really didn’t make a lot of longer films during these years. If your film is a single shot of a single set, contiguity doesn’t arise. So just where it’d be nice to know if he’s the first filmmaker doing it on purpose, we don’t have enough consistent examples to confirm it. So James Williamson, Scotsman, has just about as good a claim to the title of First Contiguity Girl.

OK, Europe being big and varied I think we can get several entries out of this (if the topic repels you, this blog may become a place of desolation in the coming days), and we should also look at American filmmakers besides Edwin S. Porter who may have been slow to catch on to the beauty of directional matching. Who else is worth checking in the pre-Griffith period?