2. Masks and Mirrors

2. Masks and Mirrors 1908, when D. W. Griffith directed his first one-reeler, In the hands of someone like Billy Bitzer, Griffith's cine- the neolithic era of special effects-the age of the trick matographer, the silent-movie camera was a wonderfully Byfilm-was essentially over. Audiences were no longer so flexible tool. Whether Vitagraph, Pathé, or some other make, easily amazed, and directors and producers were forced to pur- the silent camera was hand-cranked, a fact which both im- sue new goals. Special effects did not disappear; they simply posed severe responsibilities on the operator and allowed for began to play a legitimate role in shaping the rapidly evolving all kinds of variables and subtleties. Thirty-five millimeter si- language of the movies. Between 1909, when Griffith hit his lent film was normally projected at sixty feet per minute, six- stride, and 1916, when Intolerance was released, the cinema teen frames per second. For comedy purposes the cameraman developed from a crude form of entertainment into a complex would often undercrank, so that the film would be speeded up medium, capable of transporting the viewer convincingly into when projected, while overcranking would produce slow mo- almost any world the director was capable of imagining . tion. Even when shooting at standard speed a skillful camera- As already noted, filmmakers like Méliès used both camera man could subtly alter the mood of a scene by minutely adjust- tricks and traditional stage effects in their movies. These now ing the rate at which the film passed through the gate of the began to evolve into separate but allied specialties with ex- camera. It has sometimes been suggested that a silent movie panding applications. From the prop departments at various cameraman needed a metronome in his brain. Actually what studios emerged a group of men with a particular knack for was called for was something more like the Count Basie rhythm handling explosives or rigging buildings to collapse on cue; section. and so the discipline of practical effects (later to be known as Fades and dissolves were considered extraordinary effects physical effects or mechanical effects) came into being. Mean- when they first appeared on the screen. There is no way of while, until the coming of sound, the field of photographic or knowing which cameraman invented the fade, but he achieved optical effects remained almost exclusively the responsibility it by slowly closing the aperture of his camera as he continued of the cinematographers. to crank, a method that remained current for twenty years. To create an in-camera dissolve, the operator faded out on one film about a minstrel show, Keaton played every role: theater scene, as described above, wound back the film to the point at manager, stage director, stagehands, members of the orchestra, which the fade began, then gradually opened the aperture as the entire audience, and, of course, all the performers. Shot by he began to shoot the next scene. Smoothly executed, this pro- Keaton's regular cameraman, Elgin Lessley, the movie is full of duced an exquisite dissolve, but it had its drawbacks. There split-screen shots, but the one that caps them all is the scene was only one chance to shoot the second scene. If anything in which no fewer than nine Buster Keatons, all in blackface, went wrong, then both scenes would have to be reshot . all perfectly synchronized with each other, appear on stage at Simple masking effects had been known almost since the the same time. For this shot Keaton had a special lightproof beginning of the movies, and during the Méliès period these box built that fitted over the front of the camera. In this box began to evolve into matting techniques that proved to have were nine "gates" that could be opened one at a time. The de- an almost limitless range of application. vice worked perfectly, but even so the scene provided camera- The most basic kind of mask hardly needs explanation. A man Lessley with plenty of headaches, as Keaton describe d character in a movie is seen spying on someone through a keyhole. The next shot shows what the character sees, dramatized by having the image framed by a keyhole-shaped mask, actually just a cutout form placed in front of the lens. Directors and cameramen found countless situations for this type of ef- fect. Whenever a character looked through binoculars, a gun- sight, or a periscope, the appropriate mask would be suspended in front of the lens, or inserted into the camera's intermittent movement at the focal plane. The in-the-camera matte shot also utilized a mask of some sort, but combined it with carefully controlled double or mul- tiple exposure. One of the first matte effects, well known to the trick filmmakers, was the split screen, commonly applied when the same actor was to appear with himself in a scene (as his own twin brother, for example). For this the camera was set up on as solid a base as possible-to minimize movement and vibration-and half the lens was masked off with some form of matte, which could be as crude as tape applied di- rectly to the lens, though more commonly it was a thin sheet of board, painted flat black, which slotted into the matte box, a hood-type attachment in front of the lens. Thus only half of each frame would be exposed when the camera was cranked, and only half the scene would be recorded. The performer, of course, would be in the exposed portion of the scene, playing the banjo, perhaps, for an unseen audience. This completed, the cameraman would wind the film back to the starting point, reverse the matte so that it would mask the other half of each frame, then shoot the scene again with the performer seated in an armchair in the portion of the set that was now being recorded. When the film was developed and projected, the two portions, exposed separately, 16. A matte box is a hood-type attachment which fits in front of the camera would (if all had worked as planned) come together as a single lens. The box is equipped with slots into which mattes can be slipped, either "take" with the performer admiring his own banjo-playing. vertically or horizontally. The matte masks off some of the light entering, This kind of split -screen device reached a peak in 1921 in through the lens so that corresponding portions of the negative film stock Buster Keaton's First National comedy The Playhouse. In this in the camera are left unexposed. years later: "He had to run the film back eight times, then run the area where the steeple and sky would be, using opaque, it through again. He had to hand -crank at exactly the same fiat paint, thus creating a matte. The live-action scene would speed both ways, each time .... If he were off by the slightest then be shot in the normal way, but those areas of the negative fraction, no matter how carefully I timed my movements, the blocked out by the matte would not be exposed. This partially composite action could not have been synchronized." (R. Blesh, exposed but undeveloped film would be transferred to another Keaton, p. 168.) camera, set up-again on a heavy, vibration-proof base, typi- Keaton, incidentally, used an off-screen banjoist (who took cally a lathe-bed-in front of an easel (or "matte-board") on his beat from the cameraman), to synchronize his own move- which a painting of the steeple and sky had been mounted. ments from take to take. The area that had already been exposed during the live -action In the early days, in-camera mattes tended to be rather hit take was blacked out to form a "countermatte." Now the film or miss. It was Norman Dawn, an important special effects was run again, this time with the live-action footage masked pioneer, who introduced a more controllable version of the out and the painting of the steeple and sky exposed. The re- technique. To understand it in context, though, we must first sult, if registration and everything else were perfect, would be take a look at another of Dawn's innovations, the glass shot. a beautiful in-the-camera composite of the action and painted Still photographers (Dawn included) had long made use of image. glass shots, but Dawn seems to have been the first to use it in The advantages of this system over regular glass shots are professional cinematography. His specialty at the time was obvious enough. The time needed, on set, to paint a black filming picturesque sights for theatrical exhibition. Many of matte would be just a fraction of that involved in painting an the buildings he shot were ruins-or at least in a state of ad- illusionistic steeple (or something more complex, always re- vanced disrepair-and Dawn began to use the glass shot as a membering that the artist would have to take perspective, par- means of restoring them to their former glory. The first appli- allax, shadows, and many other factors into account). Dawn's cation he found for the technique was in a 1907 film called new system enabled this artist, soon to become known as a Missions of California. At one mission a row of arches had matte painter, to work at his own pace, carefully matching his been reduced to a few piles of broken masonry. Dawn simply work to the live-action footage already exposed.

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