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.

The Sunday Intertitle: Waltzing Crockery and Transmogrifying Pickpockets

THE WALTZ OF PLATES — an intertitle from Segundo de Chomon’s THE SWORD OF SPIRIT (aka NICOLAS EL TONTO), a 1910 Pathe production. The film is on YouTube HERE but is in poor condition. So let’s turn our attention to a slightly better-preserved example of Chomon’s work, albeit one without title cards.

PICKPOCKET NE CRAINT PAS LES ENTRAVES (“Pickpocket Does Not Fear Obstructiuons”) aka SLIPPERY JIM is actually a rattier copy but the transfer is sharper so some viewing pleasure is preserved. And it has plot and character! Slippery Jim has been nabbed by the rozzers — the police uniforms indicate that we’re in Britain, perhaps because Chomon, a Spaniard, felt uncomfortable mocking the constabulary of his adopted land, France, or else because Pathe as an institution was happier poking fun at les rosbifs. No attempt at Keystone Kops pastiche is intended, because Mack Sennett won’t think of “something awful happening to a policeman” (to use Buster Keaton’s phrase) as a key to comedy for another couple of years.

The chief constable has Jim clapped in irons, but the wily con soon extracts himself by the simple ploy of removing his feet, complete with their dapper spats, allowing the leg-irons to slip easily from his attenuated ankles. This is accomplished by stop-motion and with a closeup to the below-knee area. Chomon had long been combining animation with live action, a trick introduced it seems by the British-American J. Stuart Blackton (does Sheffield boast a plaque honouring his birthplace?) and swiftly adopted by Chomon atPathe and Émile Cohl at Gaumont. Melies, the originator of both the trick film and the fantastique genre, whose films always look like cartoons, never used animation at all.

(This potted history is stuff I’ve only gradually pieced together from fragmentary researches, and is very possibly still missing important names and facts…)

Meanwhile, reattaching his extremities, Slippery Jim lights his pipe and strolls about his cell (more of a prison yard type location) until the bobbies intervene and give him the full Houdini treatment: chained wrists and a nice trunk to curl up in. By now we know the film is going to be a running gag, with increasingly elaborate means of restraint defeated by increasingly impossible physical transmogrifications. I was keen to see how he’s manage this one — transform into a thin gravy and seep his way to freedom? No, he simply flattens himself into a paper cut-out, slides through the crack between chest and lid (animation again), and then reinflates into his three-dimensional form. Of course. I might have known.

The elaborately bewhiskered peelers now wrap Jim in chains and slip him in a sack, nicely striped to give it a penitentiary quality (now we know why prisoners were forced to sew mailbags: they come in so handy). Next bit made me laugh aloud — OBVIOUSLY the sack and chains alone won’t do it, so the old bill drag Jim outside and chuck him in a nearby canal. Conventional penology having failed them, they resort to the conventions of escapology, but are of course inviting defeat.

This next escape does not require Chomon to put his animator’s hat on (what does an animator’s hat look like? a Yosemite Sam stetson or more of a Cartman beanie?), but he delivers a lovely underwater sequence, either by filming through a fishtank (with air bubbles squirted through it) or by double exposing the action with such a tank. Then some trickery involving a jump cut and reverse-motion gets Jim back on the lockside. He then miracles up a bicycle from parts stowed about his person (which the bizzies somehow didn’t find when relieving him of his stolen goods)

The ensuing chase — crushers on foot versus Jim on velocipede involves Gilliamesque cut-outs, ambitious double-exposures as he leaps atop a train, and Chomon even remembers to give the stop-motion Jim a reflection when he flies over the canal, although, and I mean this only as the mildest rebuke, he only remembers halfway through the shot. Surely this is a job for the British Transport Police (composed, per Alexei Sayle, of officers too stupid and incompetent even for the regular police).

The scenery gives the game away — we may not be conclusively in and around Paris, but these are not the Home Counties or anywhere else in the UK.

Bill Posters will NOT be prosecuted, it seems — when Jim runs over one of his pursuers, slicing him in half from loins to crown, the helpful Mr. Posters repairs the divided Dibble with a lick of paste. A jump-cut finishes the job and Constable Twain is none the worse for his purely temporary bifurcation.

Slippery Jim (a Stainless Steel Rat avant la letter) scales a drainpipe by reverse motion (only really useful for the initial jump) and enters a second story apartment, inadvertently breaking the left-to-right rule (add that to his long list of infractions). Once inside, he again frustrates the would-be arresting officers by dematerialising (by dissolve — you can just see the bacon freezing on the spot to allow the transitions, but it’s artfully done). A felon who can teleport is effectively immune from arrest (how did they nab him in the first place?). One who can flatten his pursuers with a door, fold their flimsy remains up and chuck them out the window, is entirely above the law, it seems to me. By comparison, Fantomas is a mere Dortmunder.

But now the plod, thickened out again, compress their culprit into a convenient basket, but Jim easily thwarts this ploy by extruding himself through a small hole in the wicker prison, a sort of cloth snake or animate draught excluder, writhing to liberty and living up to his name. But now he apparently overreaches himself, wriggling into the cop shop and returning inopportunely to humanoid form when one of the slops trips over him.

This has been starting to seem like a film without an ending, since the bronzes won’t give up and Jim can’t be contained, but Chomon manages to conclude the film in a cheerfully anarchist way. (Early cinema is anarchist by nature — also Brechtian, since audience identification and rooting interests had barely been discovered — authoritarian tendencies only seem to have crept in when the stories started to require us to get caught up in the drama. Have we finally found something Griffith can authentically be credited with / blamed for?

Investigation continues.