Part Ii the Elements of Film

PART II THE ELEMENTS OF FILM 43 Historical Overview: The Development of the Image EARLY MECHANISMS The invention of photography in the early part of the nineteenth century by Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre in France was the first step toward capturing the moving image of reality, a dream held by artists and philosophers for thousands of years. Once still photography had been achieved, attempts to invent moving photographic pictures began. There already were mechanical devices that gave motion to drawn figures, ancestors of our animated films (Figure 1). There were also experiments that attempted to use the photographic process to give motion to images of real figures; a series of still photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s with a battery of twenty-four cameras so as to capture increments of motion in a racehorse was projected on a screen in rapid succession to give the illusion of movement. But the final stages of the development of a practical motion picture camera and projection system had to wait until the perfection of a flexible film that could replace glass photographic plates. Soon after a celluloid film base was discovered by an amateur inventor, the first roll film was marketed by George Eastman in 1888. It was the team of William Dickson and Thomas Edison, however, who used the flexible film for cinematography rather than still photographs. By 1889, the rudimentary problems with regulating the movement of the celluloid strips through the camera had been solved, and Edison shortly marketed a box device into which a single viewer could peer to see the unprojected images in motion. The kinetoscope, as it was called, was a great success. By 1894 there were peep-show parlors all across the country and around the world as well. Within a year inventors from every industrial nation came out with their own versions of cameras that could take moving pictures, and it was only a short step to adapt the mechanism for projection on a large screen. For ex- 44 1 Throughout the nineteenth century, inventors tried to solve the problem of creating the illusion of motion. Based on Roget’s theories about the “persistence of vision,” these parlor toys were the first steps toward the motion picture. The movements drawn in individual pictures blend together to give the impression of continuous motion when the machines are revolved. The key to the illusion is that each of the little pictures must be seen separately and distinctly. The Zoëtrope (top left) uses slits to isolate each increment of motion; the motion picture process uses a shutter. ample, Auguste and Louis Lumière devised their Cinématography, which took, printed, and projected the films they made; their contribution to the development of an effective projection system was their invention of a clawlike device that regulated the movement of the film in front of the source of light. They projected their first set of films in Paris in 1895 (Figure 2). 45 2 Although the Lumière brothers chiefly produced short films of everyday occurrences, their first program of publicly projected films included fictional narratives. This scene comes from The Hoser Hosed, a slapstick physical comedy from 1895. The first films, lasting only about a minute, simply showed anything that moved: scenes from ordinary daily life (people walking, a train entering a station, workers taking lunch) alternated with the extraordinary, such as staged performances of jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. From the beginnings of film there were filmmakers who wanted to capture images of real life on the screen and filmmakers who wanted to create an imaginary or fictional world on the screen. Even the Lumière brothers, who were primarily interested in photographing daily life and objects, made a few short films that had a little narrative action: a practical joke being played on a gardener, a card game which ends with the classic accusation of cheating and the upended table and scuffle. The narrative powers of the motion picture began to emerge as a function of longer lengths of film just as viewers were becoming jaded and bored. Seeing a film of the world in motion was no longer enough to sustain viewer interest. After all, one could look around one and see the world in motion. Georges Méliès, a professional theatrical magician in France, became fascinated with his discovery that the camera could not only record tricks and illusions, but also perform them. In short pantomime films, Méliès used the camera mechanism to create mysterious disappearances and reappearances of his characters, to dissolve one image into another, to duplicate images in the same frame through 46 masking, double exposures, and superimpositions, and to tell fantastic stories like A Trip to the Moon (1902). Yet another Frenchman, Ferdinand Zecca, employed fast motion and slow motion in his fantasy films, usually culminating in a comic chase. Filmmakers now had the mechanical equipment and the imagination to alter reality if they chose, to defy gravity, to play games with time and space. The two greatest assets of the film medium had been discovered its ability to record and its ability to create. THE MOBILE CAMERA In all these films, however, the camera never moved from its firmly rooted position on a tripod, no matter whether the subject was recorded or created. All of the action and all of the bodies of the players were visible in the frame. The frame was treated almost as a stage and the camera like the eyes of the theater-goer who had the best orchestra seat. Although it seems like the simplest of ideas in retrospect, someone had to think of moving the camera. To do so, one would have to be thinking cinematically, not theatrically. The physical limitations of the stage were not relevant to this new and mechanical medium. Working for Biograph Studios between 1908 and 1912, D. W. Griffith began changing the position of the camera within scenes as well as between them, attempting to create more dynamic angles from which to view the action. For example, in The Lonely Villa (1909) the camera is placed so that the diagonal movement of the robbers is emphasized as they enter; this is more visually dynamic than if the camera had viewed their entrance straight on. Griffith composed his actors into groupings, using cinematic space more dramatically than it had been used before. For example, the farmers in A Corner in Wheat (1910) are not found simply in the center of the frame (Figure 3, Figure 4). Their asymmetrical arrangements and movements emphasize their relationship to their environment in visually significant images. Griffith also experimented with the use of shadows and highlights. By the time he made The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith had liberated the camera from its fixed position during individual shots so it could follow and participate in the action. In short, Griffith’s greatest contribution to the art of film was to make the motion picture camera almost as important as human actors in developing a narrative through exposition and drama; the camera no longer merely recorded a story - it structured, interpreted, and narrated the story through its shifting perspectives, movements, and visual emphases. FURTHER EXPRESSIVE TECHNIQUES In Germany, filmmakers explored ways in which the camera could express psychological subjectivity through lighting, highly stylized and artificial sets and acting. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) used angular sets and heavy shadows to develop a macabre and horrific atmosphere for its tale of 47 3 In this scene from A Corner in Wheat (1910) D. W. Griffith broke with the tradition of placing the actors in the center of the frame. 4 Griffith displays composition in depth in this shot from A Corner in Wheat. murder and madness; although in many ways visually unique, the film was also typical of the early German cinema’s preoccupation with nightmarish themes conveyed by subjective and expressive images - what was to become conventionalized as the horror film. There were also German filmmakers who dealt with more realistic subjects but who did so expressively. In The Last Laugh (1924), F. W. Murnau dispensed with the common practice of using titles between shots and relied primarily on his images to communicate the narrative. He used a subjective camera at times: the audience sees the scene as the leading character does, for example, in an intoxicated blur. He took his camera on location into the street and moved it down alleys and into buildings, through 48 crowded apartments. In Murnau’s hands, the camera became a mobile spectator of the action; special cranes, dollies, and elevators were built so that the camera seemed to have unlimited mobility. The point of view shifts instantaneously from that of one character to another and then to the third person, the dispassionate bystander. Although the German film in the 1920s contributed much to the development of the image within the frame, other countries’ contributions should not be overlooked. The Russians, too, were bent on conveying meaning without the use of a great many titles to explain the action; in many films, the way in which the images were composed created dynamic and dramatic tension and the high or low angles from which they were shot told the audience how to regard the characters and situations. France also contributed to the growing sophistication of silent cinema. Paralleling changes in the other arts, French cinema was often highly experimental. The film frame was used as a canvas for cinematic surrealism, abstraction, cubism. The fluidity of the film images seemed perfectly suited to the rejection of realism and to the espousal of dream logic that characterized the surrealists.

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