I’m indebted to Kristin Thompson & (the late) David Bordwell’s wonderful blog for the above discovery. I loved it at the time, then forgot what the Griffith short was called, then was reminded of it in my recent researches. Kristin’s original post is here.
Obviously this is a great illustration of what Thompson & Bordwell call “contiguity editing” a phrase I have taken up with pleasure because it’s the only name we have for just this one particular thing — the construction of cinematic space from a series of bits of space that are presented as being next to one another, the connection being formed by the continuous left-right/right-left/up-down/down-up movements of characters from one shot to another.
The film (original version here) also captures Griffith’s boxy technique of the period, which he applied to a lot of his work and which you see in just about everyone else’s work too: one room = one shot.
I found a very nice article by Barry Salt, DW Griffith Shapes Slapstick, in the collection Slapstick Comedy edited by Tom Paulus and Rob King. Saly doesn’t use the term “contiguity” but he talks about how Griffith liked to construct his interiors out of a series of shots all filmed frontally, like the view into a dollhouse or through a theatre proscenium. Since Mack Sennett began in movies as an actor for Griffith, he and others adopted Griffith’s technique when he started directing himself and then hired others to do it for him (and do it better than he could).
One of Sennett’s most talented stars, notes Salt, was Roscoe Arbuckle, who then started directing for himself and trained Buster Keaton. And in Keaton we see the box approach taken to new and unsurpassed heights. The particular example Salt uses, of course, is THE HIGH SIGN, which eventually pulls back to treat its main set exactly as a dollhouse, with no splitscreen techniques required. I’d like to see an experimental film like Aitor Gametxo’s VARIATION ON “A SUNBEAM” which takes the climax of THE HIGH SIGN as its raw material.
When he made THE SUNBEAM, Griffith had only just started playing with closeups and inserts — THE LONEDALE OPERATOR in 1911 features an insert of a wrench, a detail shot we need to see so that we can understand that the wrench has been used as a pretend handgun. Lillian Gish describes Griffith shooting his first closeup on an actor’s face to establish that one thief is beginning to mistrust another. This SOUNDS like a bit of action from the same film, but no such closeup appears. Gish also describes Griffith arguing with his producer about it, so maybe Griffith lost that argument and the footage was also lost, on some cutting room floor in a building that is itself lost to history.. But it seems quite likely that the idea of interpolating big faces into a story came after the idea of featuring a significant prop which the audience needed to recognise.
The criminous closeup may yet turn up in my viewing of other films from this period — hobosploitation was a big part of Griffith’s oeuvre.
In the absence of constructive editing which breaks up a scene into medium and close shots, and in the absence of any expressionistic idea of using artsy camera angles to give scenes an emotional inflection, Griffith’s one room = one shot approach reigned supreme. And the contiguity approach pioneered in Brighton and Paris, which spread to America via Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon at Edison dictated that those rooms HAD to be shot from effectively the same angle so the shots would match up. And so the dollhouse approach can be seen as a result of other forces at play rather than as a deliberate stratagem — until it became one, either in the Keaton or, if you prefer, much earlier (how much did Griffith think about his contiguous box construction?)
A nice thing in Karl Brown’s book Adventures with D.W. Griffith — towards the start of his career, Griffith took to hammering nails into the studio floor to mark the bottom corners of the movie frame. He would then stretch a cord or ribbon between the two, and his actors would thus know exactly where they could walk — cross that line and we won’t see your feet. Venture beyond either of the ribbon’s ends and you’ll be offscreen. This was hailed at the time as a great contribution to cinema — as Kevin Brownlow notes in a tart footnote, it was not an innovation Griffith went on about much later. But it shows him thinking about that boxy frame.
shadowplay 