THEY'RE GONNA PUT ME IN THE MOVIES [348]

Histoire d'un Crime (1901)

Should the period from early film to early cinema (1895-1927) be considered as a film language in its own right, or was it a primitive search for the narrative form we have now?

Much valuable progress in the art of film storytelling was made in the time of "silent film," from the first films of Lumière to the advent of Warner Bros' "The Jazz Singer" (US, 1927, dir. Alan Crosland). Comparing the single unmoving tableau shot of "Sortie d'Usine" ("Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory", France, 1895) with the complicated special effects, storyline and "cast of thousands" in "Metropolis" (Germany, 1925, dir. Fritz Lang) shows the quantum leap made in thirty years, now a relatively short period in the history of cinema.

However, defining the "cut-off point" in this period history at the advent of sound film does not separate early film and early cinema from what followed, as if silent cinema was a separate art and discipline.

The argument for the silent era being an evolutionary period in filmmaking was taken up by Barry Salt who, in his article "Film Form 1900-1906", he looks at the first instances where certain film devices were used - this is because he notices that the development of style in early film has "some analogies with biological evolution, in the way that novel features which suddenly appear like mutations are sometimes rapidly taken up in other films, forming a line of descent, while on other occasions original devices die out because they have some unsuitability of a technical, commercial or artistic nature." (Salt 1990: 31)

Salt notices that, while a dream sequence in "Histoire d'un crime" (France, 1901) appears within the frame of the existing action, the practices of dissolves between the dream and the main action is fully established by the time "And the Villain Still Pursued Her" (US, 1906) was made. This approach to finding first instances of what would become techniques is continued throughout Salt's essay but, when it comes to trick effects, Salt concludes that the large amount of trick films made to 1906 are over-estimated in their importance to the history of cinema as a whole (Salt 1990: 40).

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903)

Meanwhile, in an article entitled "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde", Tom Gunning considers early film to about 1906-07 to have its own form, in which the illusory power of the new technology could be explored. Instead of the "voyeuristic" nature of later, narrative cinema, the "cinema of attractions... is an exhibitionist cinema... [it] is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator." (Gunning 1990: 57)

Early film came before the days of an institutionalised cinema industry, cinema chains, and even before nickelodeons. You were most often to see a film either as a fairground attraction, or as part of a bill at a music hall. Spectacle is dominant over narrative in film at this point.

The two schools of thought may conflict, as developments in film techniques may be seen, from a different perspective, as another way of using film to exhibit something - "The Gay Shoe Clerk” (US, 1903, dir. Edwin S. Porter) is seen as a development in the use of the close-up on a key point in the film's plot - the lifting of a lady's skirt to reveal her ankle while being fitted for new shoes. However, according to Gunning, "...its principal motive is again pure exhibitionism." (Gunning 1990: 58) The act of revealing the ankle is, in this case, included to provide titillation for the viewer.

The word "film" became universally recognised as a one-reel dramatic narrative from around 1907-08, coinciding with the industrialisation of film, experiments in technique did continue around this. For D.W. Griffith, such experimentations "were for him the unformulated results of practical problem-solving rather than abstract theorizing... Unrestricted by narrative conventions, since there were few at the time, Griffith simply adopted for his Biograph films what worked best in the particular circumstances, according to the dynamics of the tale." (Cook 1996: 62)

The Lonedale Operator (1911)

It is well-documented that Griffith also used theatrical techniques and the dramatic structure of Charles Dickens’s novels in his films. As an example of the former, the beginning of "The Lonedale Operator" (US, 1911) shows characters leaving the frame on one side, but re-entering in the next scene from the same side - just as you would in a theatre. This was suitable for audiences at a time when such theatrical techniques were more greatly recognised. However, when someone enters through a door later in the film, they leave the frame on one side, but enter the next scene on the opposite side. To use the same technique as described above for this particular piece of action may cause confusion, and wouldn't look right on the screen.

The "novel structure" helps to attract the new middle-class audience in picture houses that was beginning to replace the working-class in nickelodeons as the main target film audience, and, therefore, may be seen as the reason why narrative cinema replaced the "cinema of attractions". According to Gunning (1990: 57), exhibitionist cinema either moved underground - e.g. "Un Chien andalou" (France, 1928, Luis Bunuel), which depicted the dreams of the director and Salvador Dali in a series of irrational images and short narratives - or became incorporated into narrative cinema, like the boxing match in "Broken Blossoms" (US, 1919, D.W. Griffith) provides a break in a melodramatic storyline, while the whole genre of "comedian comedies" (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon etc.) features spectacle around a continuing narrative.

It can be argued that the advent of sound brought new ideas to push cinema in a new direction, while silent cinema was effectively ended as an industry within a few years. However, the basis for further growth in this period of cinema was possible due to the developments during the earlier period. There are cases when early film and early cinema can be seen as art in its own right (as trick films and exhibitionist films were mainly concentrated before 1906, for example), but it was instrumental in the search for narrative form.

The notion that early film and early cinema were a primitive search for narrative form seems inappropriate - it suggests that such exploration was confined to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. However, the central questions for any filmmaker - what can the technology do, and what can they do with it - is still relevant today.

Un Chien Andalou (1928)

Bibliography

Salt, B. (1990) "Film 1900-1906" in Elsaesser, T. (ed.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute. pp. 31-44.

Gunning, T. (1990) "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde" in Elsaesser, T. (ed.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute. pp. 56-62.

Cook, D.A. (1996) A History of Narrative Film (3rd ed.) London: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

CAUSE YOU’RE NOT HERE [270]

The CBS radio network, just before 9pm on Sunday 30^thOctober 1938:

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night... so we did the best next thing...”

Apparently, an executive at the network did not want Welles to add a disclaimer at the end of his theatre company’s radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel “The War of the Worlds,” just in case they could be held liable for anything, like causing mass panic. As the hour-long play ended, anyone still in the broadcaster’s studios were commandeered to answer phone calls from members of the public for reassurance the broadcast wasn’t serious, in what must be the first instance of a call centre. At 10.30pm, 11.30pm and midnight, CBS broadcast messages confirming that all they did was broadcast a modernised play of a fictional Victorian novel, swapping English place names for American ones. The following morning, a haggard Orson Welles appeared in front of reporters and newsreel cameras, saying none of his company thought it was going to cause mobs in the streets, block telephone lines and cause traffic jams. The people that chose instead to listen to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen on NBC were none the wiser.

The recounting of this incident portrays Americans as having overreacted to a radio drama. Less remarked upon is how live radio news reports, of the type parodied by “The War of the Worlds,” really only began being heard regularly on US radio in 1938. Like the first cinema audience ducking from the Lumière brothers’ oncoming train in 1895, people were only just getting used to the concept, just as the gravity of world events increased their need, and demand, for breaking news.

“...We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C.B.S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business...”

Radio in the United States was originally seen by newspapers as a way of promoting themselves through a new medium, but once it became more established, newspapers saw how they could threaten their existence – the CBS and NBC radio networks established their own news divisions once wire services, like the Associated Press, stopped their work from being used for broadcasting. The Biltmore Agreement, named after the New York hotel where it was signed in 1933, restricted networks to two five-minute news bulletins a day, after 9.30am and after 9pm, to protect morning and evening newspapers – these bulletins could only use information supplied by newspapers, and no story could last more than thirty words. Because the agreement did not cover independent stations, or programmes featuring news commentators, this weird state of affairs died within two years, by which point newspapers started opening their own radio stations.

What proved the power of “live” radio news was Herbert Morrison exclaiming “oh the humanity” as he saw the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster unfold in May 1937. Chicago station WLS had no ability to complete outside broadcasts, but Morrison’s commentary, recorded onto disc at the scene of the disaster and played out later the same night, demonstrated the urgency of radio reporting, if not the immediacy. The first episode of “CBS World News Roundup,” broadcast on 13^th March 1938, was a one-off live broadcast reporting of the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany the previous day. The broadcast experiment was repeated the next day, and once again later in the year before the deepening pre-war conflict in Europe created turned “Roundup” into a daily show.

In this light, it is curious that NBC were meanwhile broadcasting a weekly radio newsreel dramatisation of events into short sketches. “The March of Time,” started by and named after the news magazine, once featured Orson Welles on its staff of actors, portraying himself in 1936 when a production of “Macbeth” he directed opened in Harlem. The show began in 1931 as one of the first regular news programmes, but by the time it ended in 1945, regular news bulletins outmoded it entirely.

Orson Welles is reported as having said the approach of his company’s dramatization came from a British radio production. “Broadcasting the Barricades” was a 1926 talk by the Reverend Father Ronald Knox, was broadcast to all BBC stations from Edinburgh on Saturday 16^th January 1926 at 7.40pm - the listing in the “Radio Times” has no description for the programme itself, but Knox was well-known as a detective novelist. The surviving script for the programme started with a BBC announcer interrupting an academic lecture from Oxford to announce that Communists had invaded London, followed by news that the Savoy hotel, next door to the BBC’s then headquarters, had been set on fire; Big Ben had been blown up; and the transport minister had been hung from a lamppost.

After twenty minutes, the show was over, and it was time for variety, probably from the Savoy Hotel. The BBC received 249 written complaints, and 2,307 written appreciations of the programme. This hoax did cause a minor panic, reported by newspapers in the United States, but if radio was still too new a technology to play with in 1938, it certainly was if regular broadcasts in Britain had only been running for three years.

With the expectation that live reporting was one hundred percent reliable was what made the approach used by Welles in “The War of the Worlds” work too well, especially if a listener tuned in after the drama began – to an audience only expecting to hear this type of radio in only one context, it could be argued that attempting to change or play with that context while the form was still, well, forming, has to be approached very carefully. It should therefore be taken that Welles, his theatre company, and CBS had assumed the intelligence of their audience when it decided to start playing.

“...So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian... It's Hallowe'en.”