Continuity/contiguity editing often depended on where the set designer put the doors. Since each set was, in the early early days, a single wall, camera position was dictated by the construction. The above scatological nonsense, which I’m afraid I find hilarious and you may do too, shows proper directional matching in 1904, but if one of the doors had been placed on the other side it couldn’t have.
The shitting comedian is a music gall singer or boulevardier called Dranem, appropriately enough. Dranem and weep.
How does Alice Guy come down on the whole continuity editing thing? The first human to direct wearing a bustle, she seems like a progressive thinker. Here, in 1906, she seems to have absorbed it perfectly. But in the unusual and amusing MADAME’S CRAVINGS, the same year, in which a heavily pregnant women filches candy from children, absinthe from boozers etc the entrances and exits are randomly misaligned, as they are also in THE HIERARCHIES OF LOVE. In AN OBSTACLE COURSE the racers persistently charge up to the camera from the distance and pass it on either side.
Alice did good, vigorous knockabout. THE DRUNKEN MATTRESS (LA MATELAS EPILEPTIQUE) features a tramp bedding down inside a mattress, getting sewn up inside it, and having a rough old time. There are some odd semi-reversals but continuity editing seems to be followed for the most part — it doesn’t feel like chance.
What about earlier? I can’t find many Guy films that are more than a single shot long in the preceding years.
The following 1902 film is a bit like the Dranem shitting picture — the position of the doors leads to correct directional movement. Although, to make sure we don’t get confused, everybody traipses through the door TWICE (at 2.08), closing it neatly behind them both times. Maybe there are TWO doors? I don’t think so, I think it’s helpful repetition of action to keep us situated in place if not in time.
So it seems like maybe AG was happily shooting random stuff without a care in the world until some time in 1906 when she noticed what someone else was doing, or a collaborator informed her, or something like that. Because there were other filmmakers in France who knew their left from their right…
THE RACE FOR THE SAUSAGE, 1907, abandons all contiguity cutting, or most of it. It’s basically the same film as Ferdinand Zecca’s THE POLICEMEN’S LITTLE RUN made the same year, which had perfect linear continuity and trick shots. This one has zero contiguity, is not particularly the worse for it, and has a good deal of anarchic spirit. When a baby’s pram is merrily smashed beneath the wheels of a locomotive, it’s easy to miss the nurse rescuing the baby — a rigid dollie — before the calamity.
This directionally chaotic sausage chase makes me wonder how sure we are about the years of production, or if Guy had one cameraman who took screen direction seriously and another who was more comme ci, comme ça.
Alice’s other 1907 films, like THE BARRICADE (tragedy) and A FOUR-YEAR-OLD HERO show pretty consistent good screen direction practice where it matters, and a laissez-faire attitude when the auteuse senses it won’t make any difference, She likes to have characters advance or recede rather than merely crossing the frame, and this often obviates the need for them to get clean out of shot.
This one is well worth watching — the central performer is a lot of fun (who is he?) — performances in Guy films are apt to be amateurish or over-theatrical but this guy strikes a congenial note, and the plot is very satisfyingly played out. A kind of Edwardian version of THE MILLION POUND NOTE with a dash of BOUDOU.
Some of these films are on my Gaumont Treasures collection, which also has a disc of Louis Feuillades. They start in 1907, however, by which time you’d expect Louis to be picking up where others have got to, but he seems to want to avoid left-to-right business as much as he can. It’s not that he blunders, he just doesn’t change shots around entrances and exits very much. But he does, in THE DEFECT from 1911, jump in to a closer angle, which seems bold (but wait until we compare with British practice ten years before…). Cutting within scenes is a whole new thing. What’s surprising is that, from this limited evidence, it doesn’t look like Feuillade is adding this technique to a mastery of state-of-the-art continuity cutting.
The third filmmaker represented in this set is Leonce Perret, of whom I know little. The disc only has two longer films, from 1912 and 1913.
THE MYSTERY OF THE ROCKS OF KADOR begins with quite a bit of wonky continuity, with people wandering off screen left and meandering back in from screen left. Sometimes the photographic contortions are for recognizable scenic values — he wanted the rocks in the bg, now he wants the sea. And sometimes eyelines are used to construct single scenes out of discrete shots, so we’re already moving away from the tableau approach. And sometimes the continuity cutting is spot-on.
Directors today have to know about continuity editing, even if they want to break the rules sometimes, just as they have to know about eyelines, the 45 degree rule, etc. What seems to be emerging from my examination of 1906 – 1914 filmmaking is that the only cutting rule anyone had thought of was not being consistently applied by everybody, yet.
A CHILD OF PARIS features about an equal number of matches and non-matches. Perret doesn’t seem to notice that some of his cuts are more comfortable than others. Dramaturgically, the movies are good, and they use the epistolary approach quite a lot, so wide shots are broken up with inserts of letters, and sometimes these cue flashbacks…
When you watch these films as I’m doing, every scene becomes alive with suspense — how are they going to leave the frame, and which direction will they come back from?
In Germany, about to be embargoed by the war, it would take longer than in most countries for directional matching to catch on — thus, Ernst Lubitsch would become an absolute master of it, often constructing his scenes from multiple miniature areas never tied together by an establishing shot, but until the end of WWI he’s apparently never heard of the left-to-right rule, so he shoots a tennis match as a spatial free-for-all in which the ball is batted back the same direction it came from.
And yet Melies was getting this stuff right in 1902! Lubitsch must have seen that… Incredible to think he wouldn’t have absorbed the lesson. But his chase scenes are a mash-up of random screen directions. In America, he becomes a master of constructive editing, as sophisticated as anyone alive.
Melies, being a graphic artist, may have been more naturally inclined to think about this stuff. Which means I ought to check out his fellow illustrator Emile Cohl, and his biggest and most gifted imitator, Segundo de Chomon….
shadowplay 