Brighton Early

I was sort of aware that there was a Brighton school of early filmmaking — really a Brighton & Hove school, since James Williamson had relocated from his native Scotland to Hove — but I didn’t know who was who and who did what.

Our subject, as it has been forever, is contiguity editing — when a character passes out of shot on one side of frame, and enters a new shot from the opposite side, preserving their direction of movement and implying that the spaces represented in those two shots are directly or indirectly contiguous.

Well, I can now say that George Albert Smith was an interesting chap. He was involved with the Society for Psychical Research, and may have faked up the results of some hypnotic experiments, a suspicion bolstered by Smith’s experience as a stage magician, and this may have led to the death (by suicide or…?) of his co-experimenter. All very odd.

But Smith’s film MARY JANE’S MISHAP is a remarkable work. Essentially a rather dark joke about a maid who accidentally explodes herself with paraffin, it features vertical contiguity editing — the explosion sends Mary Jane UP AND INTO a new shot. All filmmakers understood contiguity editing when it was vertical — when a character ascends out of top of one shot by climbing a ladder, they enter the next one from the bottom, always. You wouldn’t make a mistake about that. You could even film them from the front in shot one and the back in shot two, and that’d be OK. But few filmmakers before 1906, and not all of them up until the mid-teens, understood that when a character exits left they should enter the net shot from the right. It should be obvious, but because a character’s lateral direction of movement onscreen is a function of where the character sits, it’s very easy to get this wrong.

Apart from the upward move, there’s no sideways contiguity editing, because Mary Jane never leaves the room except in death, but there is another, surprising kind of editing: Smith cuts to a closer view of his character to capture details of performance and design — the smudge she gets on her face needs a closer shot to register, and we want to read what’s printed on the paraffin jug. This is really unusual — films at this time typically assign one static shot per room/environment.

David Bordwell called this kind of thing analytical editing, I expect you do too.

Smith, unlike his lead character, seems to be a smart cookie.

He also seems to try a new experiment with every film. In SANTA CLAUS (1898), the maid turns the light out and the room turns black, not by means of a change of lighting, but by blacking out the walls and furnishings in the space of a jump cut. An innovation which could be revived today, just for the fun of it.

The blackness on one side of the frame then allows Smith to gives us a splitscreen fantasy sequence — or maybe just a 24-style view of what’s happening elsewhere? — with Father Christmas on a rooftop. But there’s no contiguity in it, and this isn’t Christmas. Forget I brought it up.

THE KISS IN THE TUNNEL from 1899 is a kind of thing I’d heard of but maybe not seen. A lot of films dealt with the salacious or amusing things that might occur in a darkened train compartment as a tunnel is passed through. The trains were places of erotic reverie and terror — men and women sharing environments without a chaperone! This one does a thing I’d heard of — maybe in the TV series The Last Machine, presented by Terry Gilliam — but I’m not sure I’d seen this example — it starts as a phantom ride — POV of a moving train going into a tunnel — then cuts to a rather stagey representation of the train interior — darkness is suggested by the way the windows are painted black — and shows us the shenanigans being perpetrated.

Continuity editing, kind of, but not contiguity.

(Another version of the same narrative, but with a stationary exterior shot instead of a phantom ride and a more credible interior set, was made the same year by the Riley Brothers, and can be seen on the BFI Player if you have access to that. A bunch of later knock-offs added various cheap gags — in the darkness, the adventuresome lad accidentally kisses a baby’s bottom or a Black maid, to much hilarity.)

Smith begins 1900’s LET ME DREAM AGAIN with what will turn out, without warning, to have been a dream sequence, the return to reality being signified by everything woozing out of focus on us. The story is just a sexist joke, as in another way AS SEEN THROUGH A TELESCOPE is. The following year Ferdinand Zecca would make a fairly exact remake/knock-off, REVE ET REALITE, showing that Britain really did lead the world in ribbald seaside postcard humour.

Interestingly, in Bordwell & Thompson’s Film History: An Introduction, they call the above contiguity editing too — here, two shots are connected not initially by a character passing from one to the other, but by POV. And then, towards the end, a character seen (partly) in POV walks into the neutral/objective shot showing the character who was looking at her. Contiguous spaces are signfied by the fact that a character standing in one can see someone in another.

So, if this is contiguity editing, Smith may be its inventor. I can’t find a telescope POV shot in a Melies film before this, for example. Anyone know any reason why we can’t declare Smith the champ?

I had a quick email exchange with Bryony Dixon in which the topic of recutting came up, Film scholars were for years confounded by a “director’s cut” version of Porter’s LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN which removed the action repeated from different angles and intensified the intercutting, making the film seem more modern than it was. (This is a good argument for Lucasfilm making the original cut of STAR WARS available: we want to see not only the film as envisioned by its maker, but an accurate record of the film 1977 audiences actually SAW — for historical analysis purposes.) Bryony wonders if 1900’s ATTACK ON A CHINA MISSION by James Williamson is perhaps such a re-cut. But even if it were, and Williamson had repeated action, he’s still got the change of angle right — a reverse angle with contiguous framing and continuous direction of movement.

There’s more fun with POV in GRANDMA’S READING GLASS but this time the magnifying glass allows for analytical editing — big close-ups of objects present in the master shot. SICK KITTEN jumps in for a closer view of the title character. Both these ones are from 1903, Smith’s big year for analytical edits. Did audiences roar “Show us their feet!” at the screen? (Or “show us its paws”?) Did that ever happen, really?

Mention should also be made of THE X-RAY FIEND, from 1897, which doesn’t demonstrate analytical or contiguity editing as it is known to us, but definitely demonstrates SOMETHING.

Bordwell & Thompson cite RESCUED BY ROVER (1905) as a good early example of contiguity cutting. Rover runs to the rescue with an admirable fixity of purpose matched by his consistent screen direction. This film was produced by Cecil Hepworth in that London, and directed by maybe Lewin Fitzhamon.

This makes me want to check more and earlier Hepworth joints. Since James Williamson was doing contiguity in Hove and Melies was at in in Paris, Hepworth and co could have started as early as 1902. Or earlier, if they felt like inventing it first.

The 1900 Hepflicks are mostly humorous depictions of automobile fatalities, filmed from single static perspectives. You know the kind of thing, and it need not detain us here, though HOW IT FEELS TO BE RUN OVER, with its final, gnomic animated intertitle (“oh mother will be pleased”) will haunt me to my mausoleum.

So when did the Wizard of Walton-on-Thames discover contiguity?

But ALICE IN WONDERLAND, from 1903, is very interesting. I didn’t use to think so. The series of fancy-dress tableaux doesn’t really communicate any of the stuff done and said in Lewis Carroll’s source novel. But — what seems to be a contiguous cut on left-to-right movement connects the rabbithole to the corridor with the Drink Me bottle, and an analytical edit takes us in close enough to read the label.

There are ambitious special effects when Alice shrinks and enlarges, though for some unaccountable reason the table with the Drink Me bottle vanishes and reappears as she does so. Chunks of the film seem to be missing, or were never shot and patched up with intertitles, so there may conceivably have been more contiguous editing that hasn’t survived.

Another contiguous cut when Alice enters the Duchess’s house. Without meaning to take anything away from Cecil, I merely note that, since he’s more or less reproducing Tenniel’s illustrations, the contiguity of exterior and interior shots here has already been laid down by Tenniel. Graphic artists understand contiguity!

Alice’s arrival at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party is non-contiguous — she exits left and enters left, having perhaps passed through an offscreen looking glass. Does this mean the previous contiguous transitions were just dumb luck, or the result of Tenniel’s careful compositional choices? There are no further contiguities to test the question, although Alice exits the party right-to-left and is next scene, after some dormouse abuse and an intertitle, standing facing screen left, as if she’d just entered contiguously. Which is suggestive of a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing. I still don’t think this film works as a film of Alice, but my respect for it as cinema has shot up.

Photographic Contortions; or, Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre

This is an illuminating talk by the BFI’s Bryony Dixon, for the Hippodrome Silent Film festival, in which you also get to see some magnificently restored “earlies” — Victorian cinema.

I got very excited at the 42 minute mark when we learnt that continuity editing may have been the invention of a Scotsman, James Williamson.

Big if true.

Williamson is best-known for THE BIG SWALLOW: A PHOTOGRAPHIC CONTORTION (1901), which is included too. But it’s FIRE!, from the same year, which shows a police constable exiting frame right (and 45.47) and entering the next shot frame left, creating a smooth continuity of movement. I have questions.

Firstly: with the majority of films from this era lost, how sure can we be that this instance was the first? I assume the answer is “not very.” But I’m (very) happy for WIlliamson to get the provisional credit unless an earlier early turns up displaying this technique.

Bryony will know the answer to this one — did matching on movement, exits and entrances, continue immediately after this film and become the popular mode right away? Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY features none of this — the only time we watch the raiders rush out of one shot into another, they reverse direction. But in Melies A TRIP TO THE MOON the Selenites escort the lunar explorers out frame left and they all troop into the lunar court from the right, even though the action is not meant to be continuous in time…

That’s another thing about the Williamson cut — he’s not trying to suggest that the fire and the fire station are conveniently next door. The match cut may have actually confused viewers into believing this. But later, when a bunch of fire engines (horses and carts rather than engines, really) rush to the rescue, they pass through a whole other shot, and they change screen direction as they do so. So even Williamson isn’t applying his discovery consistently.

And in STOP, THIEF!, his chase film from the same year which rips the lid off the whole homeless man sausage-stealing racket, none of the entrances and exits match direction.

It seems possible to me that the preferred practice was for characters exiting left to enter the succeeding shot from the same side, and the same if they exited right. It would seem to make a kind of pseudo-sense. If they went off left, then they should still be there when we cut to a new angle, and so that’s where they should come from…

Without knowing Williamson’s mind, it seems possible that his continuity cut is an accident, maybe even a blunder he regretted. But did he then notice, perhaps after thinking about it a bit, that the flow of the action was nicer when the direction of travel was continuous? Again, we can’t know except by reference to the work.

(remember, this pleasing flow of action has nothing to do with the direction the actors are moving in: it’s created solely by the camera’s relation to them, which side it’s filming from.)

Unfortunately, Williamson’s best-known later film, THE LITTLE MATCH SELLER, has no continuity editing because it’s all one shot with a few discontinuous superimpositions. Useless for our purposes! Must try harder.

AN INTERESTING STORY, from 1904, by which time I would assume continuity ought to be catching on properly, has a mixture of continuity editing and rather exciting discontinuity. As the distracted reader walks across town he tends to be shot from the front or back, advancing or receding. It turns out that when you cut on the camera-right exit of an advancing character, he can pass into the next shot from either left or right and it still looks fine. But a lot of the cuts happen with the reader still in frame, and he’s all-of-a-sudden elsewhere. This nouvelle vague disjunction dispenses with smooth continuity completely in favour of slightly startling energy. A half-century ahead of its time.

Returning to THE BIG SWALLOW we can see that Williamson IS a man who likes to think about the connection of shots, since the movie depends on an optical illusion which sort-of-seamlessly interpolates a studio shot into a location one: as our reluctant subject walks into the camera, his big blurry gob blacks out the frame and Williamson takes us into a perfectly matching black space, where a cameraman stumbles forward and is “devoured”, before the subject, happily replete, backs out of the lens, smacking his lips. Delicious and crunchy!

This is excitingly different from the kind of trick film in which edits are disguised, as in AN INTERESTING STORY where an actor is replaced, by jump cut, with a rigid dummy, so he can be run over by a steamroller, and then the stiff dummy is replaced by a limp one representing the flattened reader, and then this is replaced again with the original actor when two helpful cyclists reinflate him. (He then merrily walks off, still reading, no doubt to get temporarily flattened AGAIN.)

Oh, here’s a good one: the year before his “first” continuity cut, Williamson delivers a “pre-first” edition in ATTACK ON A CHINA MISSION. It’s also a reverse-angle cut, like some of those in AN INTERESTING STORY. So this may be the first continuity cut, unless the following year’s FIRE! was somehow shot first. (I’m YouTube-researching this as I write it, so this draft is adjusting itself as it goes along, exactly like history does.)

Williamson, who grew up in Edinburgh but who I have somehow avoided knowing about (though I’d seen THE BIG SWALLOW), made lots of other films but they aren’t as readily available and I don’t know which survive. But I managed to find two more and put them up on the YouTubes.

ARE YOU THERE? A TELEPHONE ROMANCE (1901) features a real continuity cut, quite a bold one. It opens with what is meant to suggest a splitscreen effect but is just a single shot with a curtain hanging in the middle. Two realistically unglamorous lovers (this is a British picture, after all: think INTIMACY) natter away in medium shot. As an evocation of phone sex it falls short of GET CARTER’s by a distance of one entire Britt Ekland. But then the woman’s husband, or father, takes over her end of the call and lipflaps furiously — what’s strange is that the male lover keeps talking too, apparently not noticing that his sweetheart’s tones have become gruffer and less accommodating.

Then, the miraculous cut — to get the young Lochinvar from phone to chair, Williamson jumps to a view that’s wider and more to his left, but which overlaps with much of the previous frame. The chap hangs up and sits down mostly but not entirely out of frame at which point the cut happens, framing him more comfortably alongside his table with its photograph of his amour.

When the angry husband or father (or uncle or brother or whatever) shows up to spank him, he comes in from the opposite side, which is perfectly fine though not, perhaps, as pseudo-logical has having him come from the right, where we last saw him. It would have been funny if he’d torn aside the curtain and come through the wall at his enemy, but this isn’t that kind of movie.

Still, that SEEMS like a really bold and radical cut for the period.

OUR NEW ERRAND BOY is from 1905 and features Williamson’s son Tom as the title character and Williamson himself, reportedly, as the grocer. And it’s a chase film! Running all about Hove. Which makes me think, what kind of continuity matches do R.W. Paul’s films show at this time?

Anyway, this one uses continuity cutting smoothly and consistently (although at the 38 second mark the victim of the first gag can be seen waiting dopily for his cue) by which we can assume that it was the norm by then. He also continues with his non-continuous cuts in which the errand boy, having walked out of frame, is abruptly elsewhere, and in new company. This isn’t confusing at all, whereas the second continuity cut is mildly confusing — the disgruntled victim pursues the e. boy out of one shot but never arrives in the next, his place being taken by a police constable, who had presumably been patrolling the space between shots.

Lots of great bad acting in this: reviewers tend to pick on young Tom’s thigh-slapping, but the dowsed workman at 2.51 is truly admirable in his ineptitude. Tommy Wisseau could use him today.

Cinema in the early days was a relentless celebration of anarchy and anti-social behaviour — we’re invited to laugh along as Tom plays a kind of Whack-a-mole using a garden hose and a fence, spraying his pursuers in turn as they pop up, lame ducks in a gallery. Instead of ending on the trope of the well-deserved spanking, trial-runned in the Lumiere’s first laugh-getter, Williamson lets his son cage his pursuers and yock it up in a close-up, which seems to echo the famous non-diegetic bullet to the audience’s collective face from THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, but is a little more connected to the main body of the story (nobody has killed Tom, sad to say).

OK, obviously it’s time to revisit my R.W. Paul collection to see if his chasing London around follows some version of the left-to-right rule used in Hove, and if so, when he begins this…

Nightmare Fool

EARLY Melies — 1896, per YouTube. We immediately see it’s more rough-edged than we’re used to. The camera must have gotten nudged right before shooting, because we can see off the edge of the hand-painted set. Also, why does our main character sleep in what looks like a wheelbarrow?

But Georges M is already having fun with jump-cuts. In anticipation of THE SHINING, the hero dreams up a sexy girl, only to have her transform on him, into something awful — a blackface minstrel. I mean, that WOULD be disturbing, if it happened.

Struggled with, the minstrel becomes a Pierrot — is that better or worse? — and there’s some moon-punching business to elevate the fantastical elements — I presume this is Melies’ first lunar fizzog, a dress rehearsal for LA VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE.

Normality is at last restored and our actor, who sleeps in his false beard, settles down to dream bigger dreams.