The (Missing) Sunday Intertitle: Hanky-Panicky

THE SEALED ROOM (1909) comes from that phase of American cinema where nearly every scene opens with a spoiler, and intertitle helpfully explaining what we’re about to see.

This always seemed like a real false step in film history, as movies started aspiring to tell more elaborate stories but didn’t know how. Adaptations of famous books allowed for plottier yarns and could, in theory, rely on the audience being somewhat familiar with the tale, so maybe you didn’t have to explain everything? But critics complained that these movies were getting pretty obscure, and foreign imports were often based on books more familiar in their native lands than to US audiences.

But maybe this admittedly dumb and frustrating development isn’t so much a false path as a necessary stage on the journey out of what Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions” and into the kind of moviemaking where the filmmaker undertakes the telling of a story, using not just performances and title cards but shot choices. It could be argued that it’s a small step from using title cards to signal plot developments to using closeups, POV shots, intercutting, coda-shots (a Griffith nicety Gunning identifies as one of his underrated inventions) for essentially the same purpose.

The cinema of attractions never went away, of course. The individual startling moment is still a key thing in movies, especially the most commercial ones. I think narrative cinema today strikes a balance whereby it’s hard to be sure whether the story is an excuse for the big sensational moments, or the moments are an excuse for the story.

Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett are both in this scene as extras, apparently. Maybe on the right of frame there?

This quasi-horror period pic shows Griffith pushing into the action, cutting his stars off below the shins — to allow subtler performances? But these do not eventuate. There are still people framed full-figure in the background, perhaps to silence the “Show us their feet!” crowd, if such a crowd really existed. So we get to see at least somebody’s feet. A sop to the shrimpers.

Early scenes suffer from film warping (or maybe paper warping, if this is from a paper copy?) so that the supposedly impregnable room feels instead rickety and subject to wobble. Not quite clear WHY this room has been constructed but everybody seems happy about it, so definitely not for walling-up-alive purposes. Some kind of early panic room, I suppose.

Funny bit at 4.25 where a melodramatic messenger rushes in and everybody starts waving their arms in a frenzy. Either an intertitle has gone AWOL or Griffith just decided we didn’t need to be let in on what all the fuss is about.

There’s a lateish instance of the explicatory mime at this point as the troubadour, far right, mouths some enthusiastic realisation — I *think* I can lip-read the words “She’s mine!” This kind of thing would happily be rendered redundant by the interpolated closeup which could emphasise a silent moment of emotion without the need for thespian telegraphy.

As soon as hubby has run off to wherever everybody’s been waving their arms about — perhaps on a crusade, perhaps just seeing to a sick cow, we don’t know — wifey’s waving arms turn from (faked) alarm to joy at being alone with the lusty troubadour.

While wifey is showing trouby her Single-Entrance Room, hubby, a sort of hot Karloff figure, returns unexpectedly having presumably won his crusade in record time or healed his ailing livestock, whatever. Contiguity editing allows him to peep in on and react to the innocuous/incriminating goings-on in the S-ER, and he does a big dramatic cringe. This shot exchange allows Griffith to depart from the one-room-one-shot technique: the S-ER is framed closer than the big room, and when he cuts back to get hubby’s reaction he’s taken the opportunity to punch in closer. The big cringe is ridiculous enough to make us kind of wish he hadn’t, but it’s good film technique in principle.

We now get a huge bit of explicatory pantomime as hubby plots his Terrible Revenge via the medium of hand-wringing. His acting is so big he has to actually draw his sword to put the point across with the force he wants, even though he doesn’t use it. Instead he’s able to get a whole construction team to show up on the spur of the moment (it’s good to be the king) and silently transform his Single-Entrance Room into the titular Sealed Room, with wifey and trouby still inside.

The bowl-cutted bricklayers look like they’re all set to perform some proto-Stooges comic relief slapstick with the mortar, but this is avoided.

Wifey and Trouby’s illicit activity in the now-Sealed Room mainly seems to consist of triumphant laughing and zieg-heiling at how clever they’re being, which kind of makes us eagerly anticipate the moment when they try to pass through the curtain and bash their foreheads on the brick wall noiselessly assembled behind it.

Do construction teams charge extra for working in dead silence? If so, it’s money I’d be happy to pay.

Hubby does some more enormous acting, directed at the curtain and the brick wall behind it and I suppose at the man and woman behind that. Again he picks up his sword, just so he can act even bigglier.

The discovery of the immurement is where a wider range of camera angles could really help a filmmaker. To make his actors’ responses visible and central, Griffith has them walk to the centre of the shot and perform their horror outwardly at us. But the dramatic shape of the scene would seem to demand that they stay for a bit at the new wall, trying to comprehend it, comprehending it, trying to scrape at the mortar, failing, trying to comfort one another, all that. The need to capture performance while confronted with a blocked doorway is what led Kubrick to shoot Jack Nicholson from below in THE SHINING, a moment William Friedkin thought was horribly gimmicky — surely it’s a very practical solution to an unusual dramatic situation — a man talking to a door.

The troubadour is the first one to go into a mad panic — these fancypants loverboys talk a big game but one spot of immurement and they crumble like chaff. Montresor or whatever his name is gets a case of the galloping cabin fever. He is Henry B. Walthall, an important early Griffith star, and his frantic pounding on the walls, extreme though it is, forms an effective background for Marion Leonard’s stillness.

Recriminations! The lovers blame one another for their entombment. Might be just as well blaming the bloke that bricked them up.

I guess people got asphyxiated faster in the good old days, because soon Walthall and Leonard are gasping for air, while the Count (apparently he’s a count, not a king, per IMDb, played by Arthur V. Johnson, not such an important early Griffith player) crows triumphantly without.

Walthall is evidently one of those actors who likes his props — it’d take a heart of stone not to laugh as the suffocating minstrel attempts to fan himself and his lover with his mandolin. Waft those last particles of oxygen down your windpipe! I shouldn’t laugh, I might do the same in his position.

I was waiting for hubby to have a change of heart, as the film still seemed to have a minute to run, but it stops right there, the lovers die, and the last bit is taken up with a restoration demonstration in which the AFTER image seems to have more dirt on it than the BEFORE. Like, “we digitally added dust motes to the picture to make it look like a proper 1909 film.” There’s an app for that.

One thing I should admit: the intertitle-as-autospoiler arguably has its own dramatic value, one of building anticipation. It’s one thing to see a man escape or a baby get rescued from an eagle’s nest, but if you’re forewarned that it’s going to happen, you can enjoy suspenseful anticipation. This happens in books all the time, when the author inserts a line hinting at more dramatic goings-in to come — be patient, gentle reader, things are calm now but later you’ll get to hear all about “that madman business.”

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.

Acting Vs Storytelling

David Mamet (not pictured above) seems awful, but he’s quite a good essayist. In his book on acting (True and False) he lays out the difference between storytelling (the director and writer’s job) and acting (the actor’s). As an example he chooses a single shot from the TV show Cagney and Lacey, which he says is a good show (debatable — but I guess pretty good for its benighted time) involving Tyne Daly, who he says is a good actor (unquestionably true).

Daly, pursuing a suspect, enters a slaughterhouse or some other insalubrious place, says Mamet, and sniffs, then grimaces, telling us that it smells bad in there. No, says Mamet — somebody (the director) has apparently instructed the actor to tell us a story, that the place smells bad, this luring her from her rightful domain, the actor’s, which is being truthful. Nobody, alone and unobserved, will snort up the malodorous miasma of a slaughterhouse in order to make an expression of distaste about it, for the benefit of nobody but themself, especially while chasing a dangerous criminal. Lured into what the late Dudley Sutton called, in my presence, “telegraphing” — what I have elsewhere called the Keystone explicatory pantomime — Daly has made herself briefly unreal, a plot function rather than a character.

Daly is probably not too happy about having this momentary lapse in a long and distinguished career turned into a teachable moment, so I apologise to her. She’s awesome.

Keystone wasn’t the only place where the explicatory pantomime held illimitable dominion in the 1910s. Biograph also diverted their players from dramaturgy into telegraphy, and we see this in the early work of D.W. Griffith. When he first appeared in movies as an actor, (in RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST, 1908) apparently Billy Bitzer asked him why he was waving his arms about. Griffith said he’d been told that was how you were supposed to act in pictures.

There’s perhaps less Italianate emoting in the films Griffith directed, but the players still talk to themselves as soon as they’re alone, gesture for nobody’s benefit save the audience’s, and strike rhetorical poses that might have come out of numbered illustrations in a book on thespian posturing.

Griffith credited himself with inventing a more modern screen acting, and since Griffith is a detestable figure in many ways I’d love to debunk this, while admitting that in advancing the art of intercutting and constructive editing Griffith is still unassailably important. (Such advances may originate elsewhere, conceivably, but he did a lot to popularize them.)

Theory: Lillian and Dorothy Gish introduced cinematic acting as we know it, and Griffith was the beneficiary.

As of 1911, Griffith’s performers still resort to telegraphy and rhetorical posing. You can see this clearly in the above film, which deals with an innocent girl seduced by a sleazy actor (think THE WHITE SHEIK, and our pastyface creep here is a good Sordi type). Blanche Sweet is a good actor with a lot of star quality, but she still labours under the widespread misapprehension that conveying facts to the audience is more important than being truthful. In this film about the difference between theatrical artifice and real emotions, the behaviour of the barnstormers on stage (in a hilariously condensed melodrama — masher annoys girl, chunky hero sees him off, embrace and CURTAIN) is in no real way different from the behaviour of the “real” people in the “real” (sometimes actually REAL) world.

In 1912, the Gish sisters find themselves in a Griffith picture, having rocked up at his studio with their mom, looking for work. “We thought we were in a madhouse,” recalled Gish, describing how Griffith chased them around the set while firing a pistol into the ceiling. Ah, the old Billy Friedkin – Sam Fuller pistol-shot technique, this is where it begins! Or maybe in the circus, with the big cats.

In AN UNSEEN ENEMY, nobody lapses into telegraphy except the “slattern.” She seems to be acting in a whole different register from everyone else. True, Elmer Booth as their brother is a hilarious ball of energy, but he’s nevertheless “in the moment,” truthful if not exactly real (the Wellesian distinction best illustrated by Jimmy Cagney — unreal but true).

Lillian, in her memoir The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, recalls the kind of direction the sisters received in rehearsal, after Griffith had supplied colour-coded ribbons so he could tell them apart: “Now, Red, you hear a strange noise. Run to your sister. Blue, you’re scared too. Look toward me, where the camera is. Show your fear. You hear something. What is it? You’re two frightened children, trapped in a lonely house by these brutes…”

We can’t expect Gish to have 100% recall of every word Griffith used, but if we assume this is accurate as to the kind of direction Griffith imparted, it’s a mixed bag. The scene-setting (“You’re two frightened children”) would pass as modern direction, and the straight cues (“You hear something”) are fine too. But “show your fear” would seem to trespass into telegraphy.

However. It’s the kind of line that can be interpreted in different ways — as a command to trump up some kind of performance, or as an invitation to reach into one’s memories or imagination and dredge up the appropriate emotion and its outward signifiers. Lillian was the kind of actor who would always do the latter — she doesn’t have an untrue moment in all her seventy-five years of screen acting, and I doubt she had many in the years she spent beforehand on the stage. The point is, Griffith’s lousier notes could be transmuted into useful, playable ones with sufficient skill and intelligence on the part of the player.

The Gish sisters came from the theatre — Katherine Cornell had bribed Dorothy into not looking at the audience by placing jelly beans on the set table and telling her she could have them later if she was good. So they’d been trained in not acknowledging the Great Eye of audience or camera. But several other Griffith players had legit training too — Lionel Barrymore was already with the company when the Gishes joined, for instance.

I’ve just seen Barrymore in THE WHITE CAPS, that 1905 vigilante melodrama by Edwin S. Porter & Wallace McCutcheon, but I didn’t even recognize him in that film’s perpetual wide shots. He’s not egregiously overacting, allowing for the fact that he’s playing an abusive drunk. But Barrymore was a big ole hambone, capable at times of being both unreal AND untrue, if not properly controlled.

Barrymore is somewhere in THE BATTLE (driving a wagon, seemingly), a pre-Gish Civil War pic. There’s a fair bit of poor acting in this, but it’s not as old-fashioned as in THE MAKING OF A MAN. The young beau, one minute in, seems distracted by something behind the camera — probably Griffith, barking directions at him. A reminder that filmmakers were like ringmasters of lion tamers (hence the firearms — what about a nice bullwhip while you’re at it, Dave?). But telegraphy is largely absent — at 10:27 Miss Sweet is seen talking to herself, but this is hysterical anxiety and probably a silent prayer, an acceptable melodramatic version of naturalism.

Acting is osmotic — put one good actor in your cast and they may pick up bad habits from the others but are just as likely to transmit some of their authenticity and force. The more good actors you assemble, the better everything gets, almost exponentially. The Gish sisters would have constituted a huge gust of youthful truthiness, and it certainly seems that Griffith, never more than a bum actor himself, noticed. So it’s evolution rather than revolution, the performances were already improving… but it’s quite a rapid evolution: in one year, the show-and-tell school seemingly goes from majority to bare minority.

(Incidentally, Lillian recalls appearing as an extra for Griffith, along with Dorothy and their mother Mary, before the sisters’ official debut in AN UNSEEN MENACE, playing members of a theatre audience. So she MAY be in the top clip, but I can’t see her. Maybe it was a different theatre scene in a different movie. Bonus points if you can find it!

JUST MAYBE —

2.42 into the film — woman with two young girls at the top of frame? I suck at identifying people, but if anyone has an edition sharper than YouTube and less facial blindness than I…