Oh, Mister Porter! or, Contiguity Across the Pond

If James Williamson introduced continuity contiguity cutting in Hove, England, in 1902, how long did it take filmmakers elsewhere to pick up on the idea?

I’ve noted that Edwin S. Porter’s famous action western THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY from 1903 features no left-to-right contiguity cutting or staging. And yet that’s thought of as a very sophisticated bit of film language for its era (older film histories make inaccurate claims for it being the first narrative film, the first feature film, or the first western — we can discard all those).

There IS some match cutting in THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN, from the same year, but it doesn’t use left-to-right movement. When the fireman comes in the window, thus satisfying Billy Wilder’s criterion for a dramatic situation (“A guy comes in the door, you got nothing. He comes in the window, you got a situation.”), Porter cuts from an interior view of him assisting the homeowner to the studio window, to a matching reverse angle of him helping the guy, on location this time, out of the window and down the ladder. So it’s a match on movement. But all the rushing about by the firefighters involves no matching direction.

Still in 1903, when Porter makes his UNCLE TOMS CABIN (sic) OR SLAVERY DAYS, he’s taken to inserting rather lovely, funky intertitles between each scene, which prevent any attempt at contiguity cutting since every scene is one shot. But even if you removed the titles and trimmed the entrance and exits (porter typically begins a scene some time before the main character enters and holds on it some time after they leave) the directions of movement wouldn’t match up. Same goes for 1905’s THE KLEPTOMANIAC, an interesting piece of work with a non-diegetic end image like TRAIN ROBBERY’S pistol-shot into the lens, but this time an allegory rather than a bit of exciting sensationalism.

1904’s wonderfully-titled MANIAC CHASE features a hapless lunatic dressed as Napoleon busting out of his poorly-constructed cell with a table leg and being pursued across-country by the men in white coats. As befits its title, the chase ignores continuity of direction, though there is some funny reverse-motion photography propelling the entire cast up a tree, thus fulfilling Neil Simon’s criterion for a dramatic situation (“Act one, get a man up a tree. Act two, throw rocks at him. Act three, get him down.”).

THE WHITE CAPS, 1905, has a number of lateral exits and entrances, some of which match direction but just as many don’t, suggesting that Porter (and his co-director on this one, Wallace McCutcheon), weren’t paying any particular heed to it.

This movie features dudes with pillowcases on their heads acting as vigilantes against a wifebeater. While it stops short of being explicitly a pro-Klan movie, it certainly seems like a pro-vigilante one. When two pillowcase guys move around the miscreant’s house in opposite directions, the ensuing shot swaps their directions, but it feels kind of like they’re continuous since they look identical in their silly headgear.

Things are looking pretty grim when the pillowcases light flaming torches, but they settle for tarring and feathering their victim rather than outright lynching him.

1906’s GETTING EVIDENCE: SHOWING THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF A PRIVATE DETECTIVE plays almost like a Road Runner cartoon, with the intrepid gumshoe suffering a violent setback each time he attempts to snap a presumably adulterous couple in flagrante. Since each scene is effectively a one-shot blackout sketch, no contiguity is required or attempted. But at 5.25 the ‘tec blacks up to impersonate a waiter and follows this imposture with an almost equally offensive violation of cinematic space, exiting foreground right and entering background right in the next shot.

James Williamson, with his two directional matches back in 1900 and 1901, is starting to look like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. And it must be said, Porter’s lack of directional contiguity doesn’t cause him any major confusion or inconvenience — it would if he attempted more frenetic cross-cutting in the later Griffith mode.

By the time Chaplin enters movies in 1914, he can learn the left-to-right rule of entrances and exits from Henry “Pathe” Lehrmann. It’s an established principle accepted by all. So when does this happen, and does it happen at different times in different places?

Well, the famous DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND from 1906 has some suggestive cuts. Some of the edits, as when our staggering protagonist (I don’t think melted cheese is his primary problem) wanders from a regular street into a swaying, double-exposed nightmare, do display smart left-to-right action. When he enters his fake-ass apartment the rule is broken, but this could be simply a mistake or a function of where they put the door on the set (still a mistake, then, just a more complex and forgivable one).

When our man is blown through the air in his bed, contiguity reigns supreme, even as rationality and logic are suspended. Since special effects are involved, and special effects are things you typically have to think about ahead of time, it makes sense that, as in THE ? MOTORIST, direction of movement is kept carefully consistent. So is 1906 the year this kind of contiguity cutting takes hold in the US? Did they originate it or import it? And was Porter an early adopter or late to the party?

(I’m aware that the small number of films I’m sampling can’t prove very much about conditions as a whole.)

COLLEGE CHUMS 1907 appears to be the first screen version of Charlie’s Aunt, or a knock-off of the same. There’s a delicious splitscreen phone conversation with animated text dancing over the city, but no opportunities for matching screen direction appear once the thing settles down to a placid establishing shot of our hero’s rooms.

Porter collaborated with McCutcheon again for THE “TEDDY” BEARS, a 1907 version of Goldilocks which throws in a nice bit of stop motion animation at the 3.23 point —

— which is another kind of contiguity editing, according to Bordwell & Thompson’s Film History. The space where Goldilock peeks from (shot 1) and the space where the animated bears do their zouave routine (shot 2) are rendered contiguous by the actor’s gaze and the framing of shot 2 as a POV.

The film;s interiors alternate between acceptably directional cutting and cuts which ignore screen direction entirely. So it’s not really clear if they’re trying to be consistent and occasionally getting it wrong, or if it’s dumb luck that they sometimes get it right. We do see some of that weird doubling-up, where a character goes through a doorway and we cut to the room they’re entering and they come through the doorway AGAIN. A timewarp or maybe it’s an airlock? This kind of repetition, borne of a fear that the audience will get confused by too rapid a change, was picked up by Griffith, and I’ve seen film somewhere of Kevin Brownlow complaining that Griffith kept doing it after most of his contemporaries have moved on to more confident matches on action.

At the eight min mark there’s an interesting bit where the three bears go through a doorway nude and emerge in the next shot in their nightdresses, having changed costume between shots, like the characters in THE COOK THE THIEF HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER, whose outfits change in order to colour-coordinate with whatever set they’re walking into. This edit is presumably NOT meant to show continuous action, but it feels like it does because of the door and the approximately matching screen direction.

The thrillingly laborious chase at the ten-minute mark does seem to be keeping its eye on directional contiguity — even when Goldilocks “bananas” through frame, entering background left, approaching in a curve and exiting foreground left, and the bears do likewise, the next shot MATCHES: everybody enters right, keeping up the right-to-left motion from the last half of the previous shot. Fancy footwork!

This all plays like a Keystone version of the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot film.

The ending, with a friendly huntsman murdering papa bear and mama bear, is not the way I remember it.

Putting that aside, if we can — Porter SEEMS to discover/adopt contiguity editing around 1906/7, with occasional lapses. I’ll be very interested to see how this stacks up against rival American filmmakers and those in Europe. Finding sufficient films from any other continents to judge by may be challenging… and even finding other fiction filmmakers in America isn’t simple…

The Sunday Intertitle: “It’s just your basic slashed wrists love scene.”

James Kirkwood, photographed off my laptop, in CIRCE THE ENCHANTRESS, directed by Robert Z. Leonard and screened at Pordenone. A short, glossy, incredibly trite morality tale with mythic undertones, or overtones, or maybe monotones.

The title of this piece comes from Billy Wilder’s instructions to his cameraman on SUNSET BLVD, following on from “It’s just your basic monkey funeral.” He’s also said to have said, “Leave it out of focus, I want to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.” A cheap crack, and I’m not even sure which blurry foreign films it was targeted at. ROME: OPEN CITY?

But the reference seems apt because CIRCE does include a scene where Kirkwood treats Mae Murray’s cuts, and because Mae herself reportedly said of SUNSET BLVD, “None of us broads was that crazy.”

I was impressed by MM in CIRCE, until she has to do the big “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!” number, and serves it up with a Frankensteinian lumber that’s… well, it’s detailed.

No index

Mauritz Stiller’s EROTIKON is on Netflix in the UK, oddly enough. They have a bunch of fairly obscure Swedish classics, of which this is the best-known.

I’m watching it right now (taking a coffee break) and it seems nifty.

There’s a sad moment in Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations with Wilder, where Crowe gets hold of a copy of the film for Billy Wilder, who has never seen it but knows it was a great influence on his idol Lubitsch. Wilder looks at it and has no interest, says something like “Well, I guess Lubitch was smarter than me because I can’t see anything in it.” But I can’t check this because Crowe’s book is all out of sequence and THERE’S NO INDEX.

It’s a good book, but jeez.

I was slightly depressed to read that Wilder really liked FORREST GUMP, but I guess Wilder was smarter than me. I’d forgotten, though, until I leafed through it searching in vain for the EROTIKON line, that he’d seen so many modern films and was pretty enthusiastic about some of them. But I also like that he wrote to Volker Schloendorff calling THE TIN DRUM “the best German film since THE BLUE ANGEL.” (Schloendorff’s Wilder interview documentary, available from Masters of Cinema on I think the DOUBLE INDEMNITY disc, is even better than Crowe’s. Wilder’s one-line review of the doc was: “Never film an interview with a man in a swivel chair.”)

I also seem to recall Crowe being somewhat homophobic about Mitchell Leisen — false claim that his films are full of gratuitous floral arrangements — and Wilder, despite his dislike of Leisen personally, admitting for the first time ever, “He was a good director.” Can’t find any of that, causing me to suspect that Crowe has inadvertently written Borges’ mythical Book of Sand, in which you can never find the same page twice.