Here’s the first Segundo de Chomon film I found that has contiguous editing — our vacuuming hooligans pass consistently from left to right, from shot to shot. The great Melies imitator (but Chomon is so much more!) has picked up on Melies’ staging practice in 1908 but here reverses his usual right-to-left flow. Holding a mirror up to art.
But in 1906’s THE BEWITCHED SHEPHERD he hasn’t got the message yet. Since Chomon was definitely definitely seeing Melies’ films and studying them closely (over in Hove, James Williamson was only definitely doing that), it’s interesting that it took him five or six years to notice the contiguous staging and cutting. Because, I guess, when a cut matches, it is less noticeable than one which clashes. And it’s harder to notice something that’s less noticeable.
Here’s a 1907 film, THE YAWNER which shows that, while yawning is contagious (a kind of physiological meme), contiguity editing isn’t, or at least the idea travels more slowly.
Emile Cohl, another of the great fantasists, was a graphic artist and so one might expect him to grasp this stuff, as Melies had done, early on. But he didn’t get started until 1907, when contiguity editing was already a thing in Britain, France and America, though not applied by everyone.
We saw one Ferdinand Zecca film in an earlier post. An exciting chase, with very good contiguous editing. And here’s a 1901 film with that variation on contiguity, where the shots are connected not by an exit-entrance, but by a look:
The concept of the POV seems to be, on the whole, accepted faster and grasped more easily than the straight match on movement. Which is odd, since POV seems a more abstract concept. The same year’s SCENES FROM MY BALCONY, again by Zecca, pulls a variation on the same voyeuristic conceit.
But, As Tom Gunning points out in his excellent D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, POVs got used in the earlies ONLY when some device like a telescope or keyhole was involved, providing a novelty matte effect. Gunning calls this the era of the cinema of attractions, and in such films the novelty vignette IS the attraction. It would be interesting to pinpoint when the plain-old optical POV becomes an accepted thing. At this point anyhow, without such context-dependant framing, the audience would be presumed to descend into helpless perplexity, and besides, what would be the attraction?
(I don’t FULLY buy into the cinema of attractions hypothesis, but that’s another story for another day.)
Some of Zecca’s bigger films from the following years, like his DON QUIXOTE and JESUS films, play like a series of tableaux separated by intertitles and sometimes decades of screen time, so there’s never any contiguity to be had. In 1905’s VENDETTA!! there are slightly more contiguous than uncontiguous edits, as if Zecca wasn’t quite sure he wanted to bother with all this newfangled stuff, but was prepared to try it out a bit. And it obviously caught his fancy because he became a vigorous proponent in later shows.
Complicating matters, here’s a 1901 film, THE SEVEN CASTLES OF THE DEVIL, which has a couple of suggestive contiguities. Of the transitions that DON’T match movements, most of them are magical, as when we dissolve to a new backdrop but with the character still in place, SHERLOCK JR style, or when people teleport in puffs of red-painted smoke or emerge from the mouth of a giant gargoyle puppet. Rules do not apply to people in love.
I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is going on in that film but I admire all the effort.
It seems that matching movement was done more in the studio than on location. In studios at that time the camera was likely always facing the same direction (point the other way and you get lights, rigging, an enthusiastic Spanish gentleman). Go outside and everything’s confusing, as it still is today. Your eye could be drawn to all sorts of boulders, mountains, oceans, trees or ladies, causing you to point your lens at them, and then you send the actors over there and what happens happens.
shadowplay 