They Have Their Entrances and Their Exits

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….

Box (Karl) Brown(ies)

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.

Crumbs Against Humanity