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.

A Manifesto

I’d loaned out to a student my copy of Edward Carrick’s Designing for Moving Pictures, a beautifully illustrated text on the role of the production designer/art director, without any real certainty of getting it back, but I got it back. And was prompted to finally READ a bit of it. Especially as I’d recently enjoyed FIRES WERE STARTED, which Carrick designed, though his credit is a measly “Set Construction.”

In the intro, Carrick quotes a 1924 manifesto by George Pearson. He doesn’t provide any information about where this appeared or why it was written, but it’s stirring stuff:

“I believe in the CINEMA ; in its claim to be an Art, in its power to speak to the people with equal vigour to that claimed by the stage. and in its ability to stand first in the days to come as INSPIRER of the PEOPLE.

“But I equally deplore all those hideous bonds that now strangle its growth–the many passengers and parasites who feed upon it, the charlatans who exploit it, and above all the THINKERS who will not think about it ; THE CONVENTION RIDDEN workers who would leave to others all discovery, content to get a living of sorts by toiling in narrow grooves till the end.

“If you are to help me, you must be with me in my belief. It is a fervent consuming belief.”

Pearson appears, via archive film, in Kevin Brownlow and Michael Springbottom Summerbottom Autumbottom Winterbottom’s Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood series (in episodes 5 and 6 — it’s all on the YouTube). The major work quoted there, REVEILLE (1924), is now, I believe, considered lost, apart from the extracts that were used in the TV profile Pearson was interviewed for.

Per Wikipedia, Pearson wrote to his cast and crew about the film, “There is no story, as such. I hate the well-made Story with its Exposition, Denouement, Crisis, etc., as material for my elusive Screen. I confess I cannot write one.” So it seems likely that this letter was the manifesto Carrick quotes. More here.

I guess all manifestos must have random caps, and an air of slight pomposity. But their saving grace is their enthusiasm.

I don’t know if Pearson’s artistic vision survived into the quota quickies he made in the thirties (eg MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S). It wouldn’t be easy for such passion to thrive in such an environment. But I should watch them and find out.

The Sunday Intertitle: The China/Vinegar Syndrome

It’s a fraught business, speculating on the authenticity of intertitles, as we saw last week. I feel I’m on safer ground this time, but we’ll see.

Lobster pulled off the impossible when they restored the ending of HARD LUCK, a short Buster Keaton referred to as possessing the biggest laugh-getter of his career. Buster dives from a high board, misses the pool, and crashes through the earth, emerging years later with a Chinese family.

Accounts exist of how the stunt was performed, with Buster plunging into a carefully prepared hole, filled with sawdust and covered over with cardboard to simulate the poolside.

But sometimes between the twenties and the forties, the sequence went missing, evidently one of the few shorts not located in the safe James Mason found in the house he’d bought from Natalie Talmadge, Buster’s divorced wife (unless the house had an in-between owner, but I don’t think it did — by the thirties, the house was a white elephant, because nobody could afford it).

The gag was brought back to my attention at HippFest this year, when somebody remembered it as a rare example of Buster using animation (cf the elevator crashing through the roof in THE GOAT and the dinosaur in THREE AGES). This struck me as odd — Buster wouldn’t use special effects for anything he could possibly do physically, and anyway, we had the account in Rudi Blesh’s book.

Ace editor Stephen C. Horne and I pored over the shot, and he concluded that the figure of Buster which leaves the edge of the diving board is real… on its way down, however, it loses much of its form and flexibility. He becomes a sort of rigid brushstroke, arcing through the air. Yet the dusty impact looks detailed and real, if a little blurred.

Our conclusion was that the shot has been rather aggressively restored, to the extent of carving Buster’s outline from a vortex of nitrate decomposition. The immobile figures at poolside seem to have been cut and pasted from the start of the shot: they don’t follow Buster’s descent, which is what they’re supposed to be interested in. If we look at the following shots, showing Buster in Chinese attire, the damage is extreme, with the film warping and weaving like a belly dancer’s torso, so it seems plausible that extensive repairs were done on the dive itself.

I emailed Serge Bromberg at Lobster to ask about this, and he replied promptly, in the sense that he emailed me back without delay, but in another sense he didn’t reply — he didn’t answer my question about the extent of the restoration.

Regardless of how much creative reconstruction was done — and I can agree that making the shot readable had to be a priority — there’s something else that was done that I think was a mistake: the sequence has two rather suspect intertitles:

Since Buster prided himself on using as few titles as he possibly could, it seems inconceivable to me that he would have accepted these clunky and redundant statements. It SEEMS obvious to me that these were written when the film’s ending was lost, in order to make the film feel vaguely complete. Of course, as we’ve seen, judging the authenticity of title cards based on the style of writing is a dicey business. If these titles were also found on the ending Lobster recovered, that would be strong evidence for their authenticity. If they weren’t, why would Serge’s team have included them? Well, assuming the recovered ending came from a foreign print, it might not have had accurate intertitles to use as a basis.

But these lame bits of commentary smack of later authorship to me. One is a self-spoiling announcement preceding the jump, a lumbering kind of approach to screen narration that went out of fashion shortly after the Edison FRANKENSTEIN. You won’t find another example of that elsewhere in Keaton’s oeuvre. And the other, though slightly more credible, is unnecessary and weird, filling in for something visual that Keaton could have shown if he’d wanted. Again, there are no examples of Keaton using title card as a substitute for something too difficult to represent. One can imagine a title used instead of action for humorous purposes, but this one isn’t even trying to be funny.

The “He’s gone so far…” title seems less obnoxious, but I still think it’s doing more harm than good. The phrasing is awkward (a bad translation?) but also it forestalls the obvious inference that Buster is dead. The film starts with Buster trying to commit suicide so raising the possibility of his demise here is structurally useful. And Keaton, who ends COPS with his character’s gravestone, wasn’t someone to shy away from darkness. The transition from “He’s dead” to “He fell through the earth to China” is much funnier — because more sudden — than what we get when a title informs us that “He’s gone so far we can barely see him.” (Also: “we”? That’s rotten dialogue. Why would one member oif the group inform the others of what they can see?)

Couple of bits of info gathered online:

“HARD LUCK has been restored by Lobster Films in collaboration with Film Preservation Associates, from a 35mm safety dupe negative and a 24mm ozaphane Cinelux print in the Lobster films collection. Some short fragments were added from a nitrate print from the Cineteca Italiana, a 35mm safety fine grain from the Cinémathèque Française and a 9.5mm print from a private collector. Intertitles are reconstructed according to the font of the time, based on translation of original French cards.”

Well, “the font of the time” is likely a bit of a porky pie, according to Shadowplayer Alex Kirstukas’ analysis of MOONSHINE’s titles. Lobster seem to use approximately period-looking fonts rather than the real thing. And it seems ALL the source prints were foreign, so we’re not going to get the exact wording.

“First reconstructed in 1987 by Kevin Brownlow & David Gill.”

The 1987 cut.

This could be when the now-redundant titles crept in, I think, as Brownlow & Gill had the impossible task of reconstructing a film whose ending was missing. Adding these lines would make it appear that the film was over, sort of, and would represent the absent jump.

Ah-hah! YouTube holds the answer!

The title “From the Raymond Rohauer Archive” suggests the origin of the offending titles. Although the second now appears as “He is so far away you can hardly see him,” which at least is better than Lobster’s phrasing. It makes sense that Rohauer, who was famous for swapping titles in order to assert copyright, and not for his comic genius as a writer, would be the man responsible. And that Lobster, who seem to be a little unreliable with intertitles, would make the mistake of porting the Rohauer cards over. There would be no reason to mistrust their authenticity apart from the fact that they’re BAD.

What remains unknown is whether the Brownlow and Gill Photoplay restoration used the same titles.

Another weird thing is that the first version I could find on YouTube doesn’t have the first, particularly wrong title, but my Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema does. Somebody else had become suspicious… And here’s a 2001 version, also from Lobster, with more variant intertitles. You’d think, if authenticity had been achieved, it would be more stable.