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.

High Plane Drifting

I’ve somehow managed to not see ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING until now — the only Powell & Pressburger film that’s passed me by. It turns out not to be a major one, but it’s very enjoyable and has lots of interesting bits.

David Lean edited it — before Powell likened him to “a cheap tart walking down Oxford Street.” And it’s structured in a very interesting way. The one bit of it I’d seen was the opening.

The film begins with a substantial pre-credits sequence: first off is a letter, evidently meant to establish the film as a factual account (it isn’t). It scrolls up with a drum roll and then gunshots, so we’re already playing with time: the letter intended to seem contemporaneous, but the audio is a flashback to the executions being reported.

Which means the next thing we see is a flashback to even earlier —

A beautiful dawn shot, and a superimposed caption setting the time and date — the recent past. The film is consistently gorgeous, not surprisingly since Ronald Neame (MAJOR BARBARA) photographed it, with Robert Krasker (THE THIRD MAN) and Guy Green (GREAT EXPECTATIONS) as operators. Neame would shortly graduate to producing for David Lean, then directing for himself.

Cameo — Michael Powell’s distinctive bald head is concealed, but his equally distinctively high nasal honk is not.

Cutaways show different features and personnel of the station, imparting a documentary quality bolstered by the absence of music. This is one of Powell’s rare realist films, and he felt that while music could enhance things in many ways, it could never make your film more realistic. Later he would decide that there “is no such things as realism in the cinema,” which is true, but there are different kinds of illusionism, some of which create more of a feeling of verisimilitude than others.

“They’re all back now, except B for Bertie,” says a chap on a phone, cueing a cut to the plane in question, shot from above as it glides over a shining sea. The great shadows of offscreen clouds add variety and an air of epic mystery to the frame. It makes me think of Miyazaki’s PORCO ROSSO.

Cut to inside the plane. A steering column moves eerily by itself. The camera does the same, sharply panning to the empty pilot’s seat. The camera moving in a place where there are no people makes the cockpit seem HAUNTED.

This stuff anticipates the start of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, almost as if the Archers felt the image of a plane flying without crew was too good to be left in this film, and demanded a more metaphysical setting.

Neame lingers lovingly on the instrument binnacles, illuminated by a sharply delineated shaft of light that gently arcs up and down, imparting a strong sense of movement. The engine sound is almost drowned out by a cold wind. Cloth and cords flap about violently.

From sea, we’re suddenly over land — a real version of the plane flies through a pan, and then transforms into a model very convincingly — until it strikes a pylon and explodes, but fails to fall apart. Maybe that’s part of the film’s propaganda — British engineering is so good our planes stay intact even when bursting into flames.

But the framing and cutting are excellent — the eye is tricked into accepting the model as real, right up until the moment when its behaviour tells us it can’t be.

Powell/Lean irises in whimsically on the firestorm, and we prepare make another time jump backwards — the circular effect turns into a radio dial and an announcer speaks the title — a phrase the British public would have heard on a depressingly regular basis, despite the RAF’s care to avoid unnecessary risks. So that’s a short jump FORWARDS, but then —

2.24 into the movie and the titles begin against clouds and icy wind — the credits zoom out, like the STAR WARS main title (which could conceivably have been inspired by this). The cheeky “With the Crew of B for Bertie” title adds to the sense of faux-documentary. Now each of the main actors is introduced with pans and dissolves joining the shots together as if this were somehow all one impossible shot.

The typeface, incidentally, suggests a typewriter, adding to the impression that we’re watching a DOCUMENT.

After the crew, the rest of the players are covered in more abstract fashion: a landscape with windmill shadows stands in for those actors playing Dutch characters, and a a seascape takes care of the various navies.

Overlapping titles against travelling cloudscapes allow the heads of departments to be named. Closing the titles out, another title introduces the next flashback — the film is actually going to begin before the doomed flight.

From here on, the film will be linear, but that last title makes it seem as if only one time-jump has occurred, whereas in fact we’ve had four temporal leaps, three going back, one (slightly) forwards.

Well, I ought to be able to get at least one post out of the rest of the film…

Plane Sailing

THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI is another Mark Robson war movie made for people who have just had a bath on a Sunday. That really is the mood it’s aimed at.

It’s not a distinguished film, but it has odd things of interest. It has to do with aircraft carriers, planes, the Korean war. William Holden flies a plane and Mickey Rooney flies a helicopter. Fredric March sails a ship. So much for characterisation. Well, in fact, Holden is bitter about being called up, Rooney is a hot-tempered Irishman who wears a leprechaun hat when doing air-sea rescue, March misses his son who was killed in action. OK now? Then so much for characterisation.

Early on, Fredric March is giving a pep talk in his cabin, but there are people moving about overhead, visible through gaps in his ceiling. This is odd. Apparently the DVD’s 1:1.33 aspect ratio is incorrect, the film was shot open-matte and so we are seeing things we shouldn’t be seeing. Still, I don’t know why March’s ceiling was built with gaps, or why somebody’s moving about up there. Possibly a boom operator?

The next thing of interest is William Holden in bed with his wife, who is Grace Kelly and who loves him. Characterisation achieved, moving on. But this is 1954 so I was mildly surprised to see man and wife in the conjugal bed, or at least a Japanese hotel bed, with neither of them keeping one foot on the floor as far as I could see. I guess the Hays Code injunction was breaking down (“the characters may be married by the audience knows very well that the actors are NOT” — didn’t anyone try casting married actors to see if they could then justify shared beds, penetrative sex, graphic childbirth?). Otto Preminger released THE MOON IS BLUE without a certification the previous year, so maybe the Breen Office felt it was adapt or die. It must’ve been a bit like Glasnost — for decades we’ve maintained brutal oppression from the fear that any laxity would lead to chaos — now we’re absolutely forced to loosen up — and the result is chaos. Next stop, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE EXORCIST, SWEET MOVIE…

I was excited about seeing 50s Tokyo — the world of Ozu as presented by Hollywood. But this Japan rarely resembles the native film industry’s portrayals, despite the presence of Keiko Awaji from STRAY DOG. There are some sidestreets that do call to mind Ozu’s bar-hopping scenes, but the big night club is something else — this might even be a matte painting for all I know.

The interior of “the Showboat” might be a set, too. But everything is very solid and expensive to build — showgirls circulate on a miniature battleship on rails, and the bandstand rotates. It also seems cramped, like there was no way to get the camera far back enough to see everything properly, so it feels like a real place. And it’s crazy enough to be a real place in Japan.

The big climax is pretty impressive. Apparently the air attack was used as placeholders for the effects shots in STAR WARS. It looks totally real. But I’d just seen VON RYAN’S EXPRESS, which seemed real until I started looking for frame grabs and then suddenly the model shots popped out at me. All cut together expertly — Robson was an assistant editor on CITIZEN KANE I think and cut CAT PEOPLE — so your eye follows a real Messerschmidt across an edit where it becomes a toy plane, and William Holden fires an MG-42 on a sound stage and his stand-in fires it from a real train and a model train gets strafed…

So, basing this solely on what the film DOESN’T show us as we soar down into the valley, explosions all around us in the air, and we fly through clouds of smoke — we don’t see people running about on the ground — so I think they built some really big model bridges in a miniature valley with real mountains in the background. And they really flew the camera through it filming in slomo while they blew everything to blazes. And it looks real, really real. I think it’s a shame nobody gave Robson a scifi movie to make. They kept giving them to Robert Wise, who did pretty well with them for a while.

We also watched the new ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT which made two films in one night that ended with major characters dead in a ditch, covered in mud. Which was probably just the distraction we needed after having to say goodbye to the cat.

THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI stars Joe Gillis; Lisa Fremont; Dr Henry Jekyll/Mr Edward Hyde; Mr Yunioshi; Sgt. Stanislaus ‘Animal’ Kuzawa; Sgt. Det. Sgt. Walter Brown; Harumi Namaki, the girl-friend; Mingo; Jason Tully – conductor; Buzz Gunderson; Mr Osato; and Mirador Motel Night Manager.