As I've mentioned before, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
And now because I love you, I present my favorite Max Linder short, Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics) (1911). He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
ACTRESS winner: Dorothy West (Swords And Hearts) nominees: Linda Arvidson (Enoch Arden Parts 1 & 2)
DIRECTOR winner:Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro (L'inferno) nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics); Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton (Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo)
SPECIAL AWARDS Francesco Bertolini and Sandro Properzi (L'inferno) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Emilio Roncarolo (L'inferno) (Cinematography)
It's a busy day here at the Monkeyhouse—Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary, the dog is celebrating her fourth anniversary of being with us, and silent film comedian Max Linder is celebrating his birthday! Who was Max Linder? Why, the first international film superstar, that's who. If you've seen Martin Scorsese's recent movie Hugo, perhaps you spotted a couple of Max Linder posters in the background.
Anyway, in Max's honor, I've stitched together excerpts from three separate essays about silent film comedy into a single post focusing on his life and films.
The first international movie star was Max Linder, a French comedian not just in the style of Charlie Chaplin but the guy Chaplin was often imitating early in his career, a fact Chaplin himself freely acknowledged. Born to a family of vintners in the Bordeaux region of France, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle joined a troupe of actors touring France. In Paris, he discovered motion pictures and signed with Pathé in 1905, changing his name at the same time. He made over two hundred movies in his career, most as the recurring character "Max," an upper class roué who is a bit baffled by practical matters.
Linder wrote and directed his own films and in the years before World War I, he was the biggest star in Europe.
Unlike most of the comics of this era, Linder largely eschewed the slapstick style of Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies in favor of gesture and reaction; and as film historian David Thomson points out, "there was little of the sentimentality that American comedians resorted to."
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
My favorite Max Linder short is Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics), and his performance in it makes him my choice as the best actor of 1911. He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
It's in two parts:
Part One
Part Two
Linder's career came to a virtual end during World War I after he was injured by mustard gas while serving as a dispatch driver in the French army. He never fully recovered and although he later made films at Chaplin's United Artists, he never again regained his audience. In 1925, he and his wife killed themselves as part of a suicide pact.
Postscript: And for those of you who can't get enough of Max Linder, here are two more short comedies, Max reprend sa liberté (a.k.a. Troubles of a Grasswidower) (1912) and Le hasard et l'amour (Love Surprises) (1913).
1911 is about as far back as I can go and still single out individual acting performances for praise. Before this, film technique and storytelling didn't allow for much of a connection between the actors and the audience (they didn't even receive screen credits), and except for Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (1910) and Max Linder's early comedies, actors were not much more than props holding up the scenery.
Speaking of Max Linder, I think his early work (pre-World War I) puts him on the Mount Rushmore of silent comedy with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. By my count, I've seen 44 of his films and I can say with absolute metaphysical certitude that Max Takes Tonics is the best of them.
See it here and read a bit more about the triumphs and ultimate tragedy of Max Linder while you're at it.
I also wrote about the groundbreaking feature film L'infernohere, and the cartoonist turned animator Winsor McCay here.
1911 PICTURE winner:Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (prod. Winsor McCay) nominees:L'inferno (prod. Milano Film); The Lonedale Operator (prod. D.W. Griffith); Manhattan Trade School For Girls (prod. unknown); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (prod. Pathé Frères)
ACTOR winner: Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics)
ACTRESS winner: Dorothy West (Swords And Hearts) nominees: Linda Arvidson (Enoch Arden Parts 1 & 2)
DIRECTOR winner: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro (L'inferno) nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics); Winsor McCay (Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo)
SPECIAL AWARDS Francesco Bertolini and Sandro Properzi (L'inferno) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Emilio Roncarolo (L'inferno) (Cinematography)
[To read previous parts of this essay, click the highlighted link: 1, 2, 3, 4a, 4b]
The Birth of The Feature Film Tentative Steps After the release of Edwin Porter's classic short film The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the motion picture industry evolved rapidly, but until D.W. Griffith developed a film "language" that made complex storytelling possible (read about that effort here), the change was primarily a matter of quantity, not quality.
In the United States, thousands of nickelodeons—theaters where patrons paid a nickle to watch the latest movie—sprang up nationwide, and with them came a need for something to show in them. Maybe that explains why so many of the early studio moguls—Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers—got their start in the industry not as filmmakers but as theater owners.
The interest of these theater-owners-turned-movie-makers was almost purely about profit, and art only entered into the equation as a means to increase ticket sales. Which is okay with me. I mean, why, for example, should Adolph Zukor, who immigrated to the United States with $40 in his pocket, give away what little money he had in order to entertain and enlighten theatergoers for free? He opened a theater to put food on the table and, I can assure you, nobody else was going to do it, at least not without the same motive in mind.
But the result was a flood of derivative and undistinguished hackwork, and when Porter (and his boss, Thomas Edison) flinched from the high-risk-high-reward proposition of The Great Train Robbery and retreated back into the safe, bland product they had produced before, American theaters saw little else. By 1914 directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett would arrive on the scene and along with Griffith catapult American studios to a commercial dominance they have yet to relinguish. But until that time, it was the ambition and artistry of foreign studios that largely defined cinema.
While the best and most successful of the foreign filmmakers during this era were the "entertainers"—Georges Méliès, Max Linder—a handful of filmmakers aspired to tell more complex stories. But intentions aren't the same as results, and while you'll find plenty of adaptations of Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, theater productions and the Bible, these films amounted to little more than densely-worded intertitle cards accompanied by a handful of moving pictures.
Directors needed both a technique to tell stories in a purely visual way, and more elbow room than a single reel (eight-to-twelve minutes) of film could afford. Griffith would eventually solve the first problem. The feature-length film would solve the other.
What qualifies as the first feature-length film depends on what you think of as a feature film. In 1903, French movie-makers Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca directed a series of interrelated short films covering events in the life of Christ, from the annunciation through the resurrection and ascension. At a time when individual theater owners had more control over the product shown on the screen than the studio that produced it, La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ a.k.a. The Passion Play was sometimes exhibited edited together into a single 44-minute film.
And then there was Alice Guy Blaché who covered the same subject in a single, 33-minute film, La vie du Christ, a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ. Guy is one of the more interesting figures of the early silent era—the first woman director in history, she started as a secretary at Gaumont, wrote film scenarios because she had access to a typewriter and became a director because the studio had more cameras than people who knew how to operate them. She later emigrated to the United States and founded her own studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey, at that time the hub of the American film industry. Of the 350 films she directed during her career, La vie du Christ remains one of her best known.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now defines a "feature" as a film over forty minutes in duration. By those terms, most film historians cite Australia's The Story Of The Kelly Gang as the first feature-length film. Released in 1906, The Kelly Gang clocked in at a then-astounding 70 minutes. Written and directed by Charles Tait, the film tells the story of Ned Kelly, an Irish-Australian bushranger who battled British authority and was eventually hanged for his trouble. The film was thought lost until one reel turned up in a Melbourne garbage dump; in 2006, additional footage was discovered in the UK, bringing the restored total to 17 minutes. What's left plays like an extended-length version of The Great Train Robbery—no knock, I assure you.
Europe Takes The Lead It was the Italians, though, who proved most willing to experiment with the long-form film. Italian filmmakers had come late to the party, with the country not producing its first fiction film until 1905. To distinguish their product from the French films that dominated the early marketplace, they focused on subjects with a distinctly Italian flavor, such as the country's recent unification, well-known historical events such as the last days of Pompeii, and notorious figures from Rome's glory days such as Nero and Messalina.
The first of the feature-length Italian films was an adaptation of Dante's epic poem about a man's journey through hell, 1911's L'Inferno. Over three years in the making, L'Inferno was a spectacle in the tradition of Méliès, Segundo de Chomón and Wladyslaw Starewicz, mixing imaginative costumes, set designs and special effects to create unforgettable visual images.
"[F]ilm historians have overemphasised early silent cinema's technical innovations over its imagistic brilliance," the author of Film: Ab Initio wrote recently. "For there are four or five scenes in this film which are as breathtaking as any I have encountered in cinema." (If you haven't checked out Film: Ab Initio, you really should—it's an audacious project, proposing to watch every major film from the beginning of time in chronological order—and I can tell you from my own personal experience that when you watch movies that way, you see things you would have otherwise missed.)
The film was a blockbuster, taking in more than $2 million at the box office, and encouraged the Italians to continue experimenting with the long form. Between 1911 and 1914, when they would make their single greatest contribution to the silent era, Cabiria, Italian studios released a dozen feature-length films, more than any other country during that period.
Throughout the era, directors explored new methods for telling stories on film—Lois Weber's use of split-screen, tracking and extreme close-ups in Suspense, Harold Shaw and Dorothy Shore's successful in-camera effects in The Land Beyond the Sunset, and of course D.W. Griffith's own experiments in The Musketeers of Pig Alley—and as they did, their output began to resemble what we now think of motion pictures. These innovations reached a critical mass in 1913 and seemingly overnight, directors the world over adopted these new camera and editing techniques as the industry-wide standard.
"[T]hat year," film historian David Bordwell has written, "seemed to be when filmmakers in several countries simultaneously seized upon what they had already learned of technique and pushed their knowledge to higher levels of expressivity."
Once directors had solved the matter of how to tell stories, longer, more complex movies began turning up everywhere—Russia, France, Germany, the United States. In fact, as many feature-length films hit theaters in 1913 alone as had been produced in the entire decade that proceeded it—more than fifty in all.
Among these features were films by some of the most important directors of the silent era. Victor Sjöström and Yevgeni Bauer, for example, were pioneers of Sweden and Russia cinema, respectively (I'll write more about them in the future). Both produced films that in later years would probably have been derided as "women's pictures" (or worse, "chick flicks"). Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm is a tragic look at a woman forced to give up her children after her husband's sudden death leaves her destitute. Bauer's Twilight of a Woman's Soul also focuses on a woman, but while she may be an aristocrat, her life is no happier—raped while volunteering at a homeless shelter, she is shunned by her fiance, a Russian prince.
Although neither film is the director's best—Sjöström would go on to direct The Outlaw and His Wife, The Phantom Carriage and The Wind, while Bauer would direct The Dying Swan before his untimely death in 1917—both made effective use of visual storytelling for the first time in their careers.
One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism. His film serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).
We'll talk more about him when I reach 1915.
The best of the feature-length films released in 1913 was probably Der Student von Prag (a.k.a. A Bargain With Satan, the first noteworthy film to emerge from the fledgling German film industry. Paul Wegener (with an assist behind the camera from Stellan Rye) directed and starred in this adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story about a university student who sells his soul to the devil to win the love of a beautiful woman. On a limited budget Wegener and Rye created one of the first convincing horror films, establishing a tradition that would later give us The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Faust and Metropolis. Rye died in the fighting during World War I, but Wegener went on to direct one of the classics of silent German cinema, Der Golem in 1920, and continued to act and direct until his death in 1948.
The most influential film of 1913, however, was one that didn't even make into the theaters until the following year. Giovanni Pastrone's epic Cabiria was a landmark achievement in style and spectacle, and the first truly great long-form film. The culimination of the long-form movement in Italy, Cabiria took two years to film and boasted mammoth sets and elaborate special effects. Its epic scope influenced Griffith's Intolerance and anticipated the pomp of De Mille's later Bible and history spectacles.
"The film was made with limitless scope and ambition," Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "with towering sets and thousands of extras, with stunts that (because they were actually performed by stuntmen) have an impact lost in these days of visual effects."
Set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage—a subject of great interest to Italian audiences on the eve of World War I—Cabiria is an epic on a grand scale, tracing the life of young woman from childhood to early adulthood against the backdrop of Rome's struggle to establish an empire of its own. The movie opens with the spectacular eruption of Sicily's Mt. Etna, and boasts a tracking shot of refugees trekking across the face of the erupting volcano that rivals any image previously filmed.
"For Cabiria," wrote Cole Smithey, the self-styled "smartest film critic in the world, "Pastrone pioneered the use of deep-focus filming and the since-ubiquitous 'tracking-shot'—two years before D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation would employ similar techniques."
The movie includes kidnappings, piracy, ritual sacrifices, slave revolts and even Hannibal and his elephants. It also introduced the "Maciste" character—the Herculean hero played here by Bartolomeo Pagano in a star-making performance, and later by such actors as Steve Reeves—who proved so popular in low budget sword-and-sandal films between 1914 and the 1970s.
Even though the finished film wouldn't premiere in theaters until April 1914, word of Pastrone's project leaked out of Italy and directors worldwide scrambled to make their own long-form films.
The Americans At Last According to Turner Classic Movies' series Moguls and Movie Stars, the first American producer to see the value in feature-length films was Adolph Zukor, the self-same Adolph Zukor who started life with $40 and limitless ambition. He believed that movie-makers shouldn't limit themselves to ten-minute shorts and the working class audiences that patronized them, but should instead aim for the same quality, prestige—and paying customers—as the theater productions running on New York's Broadway.
To that end, in 1912 Zukor obtained the distribution rights to Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth, a 45-minute film about the life of Britain's Queen Elizabeth I. Starring Sarah Bernhardt, the film's success in America allowed Zukor to found his own studio, Famous Players, and commit the company to producing six feature-length pictures a year.
Meanwhile, in 1913, Carl Laemmle a German immigrant who owned a chain of nickelodeons in Chicago, embarked on a feature-length project of his own. Seeking to cash in on the then-current scandal of forced prostitution among the newly-arrived immigrant population of New York City, Traffic In Souls was a sensation upon its release, earning $500,000 on its $25,000 investment and encouraged Laemmle to found Universal Studios.
"[A]bout twenty minutes into Traffic in Souls, [cinematographer Henry Alder] Leach does something extraordinary," writes Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He anticipates action, panning the camera from William Powers standing on the shore to Flora Nason and Vera Hansey, two in a crowd of passengers on a ferry pulling into a dock. It was a planned, choreographed shot, one hat predicted the future of cinematography."
Traffic in Souls is preserved in the National Film Archive. (It was the first film to inspire a "novelization," the practice of turning a film into a book.)
That same year, vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky teamed up with struggling Broadway playwright Cecil B. DeMille to found the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Company. Reluctantly bankrolled by Lasky's brother-in-law, Samuel Goldwyn, Lasky and DeMille set out to make a feature-length film version of the stageplay The Squaw Man—an audacious undertaking consider that none of them had ever made a movie before.
The Squaw Man is the story of a British aristocrat who find success in the American west after being falsely accused of embezzlement. Lasky and DeMille insisted on filming on location and headed west to film it. The pair stopped initially in Flagstaff, Arizona, but DeMille envisioned open spaces rather than the mountainous, heavily-forested terrain around Flagstaff, so they journeyed on to Los Angeles where they scouted filming locations and settled on a sleepy village named Hollywood.
Legend has it that DeMille and Lasky set up shop in a barn, but legend neglects to mention that the barn already housed a complete movie studio before they got there.
Nevertheless, The Squaw Man was the first feature filmed in Hollywood. It's reception at the box office encouraged both Lasky and DeMille, with the former eventually merging with Zukor's Famous Players to found Paramount Pictures, while the latter went on to become one of the most successful producer-directors in Hollywood history.
Perhaps the most important of the early American feature films was D.W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia. Filmed in 1913 but released a year later thanks to a contract dispute between Griffith and his employer, the Biograph Company, Judith is one of the earliest examples of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.
Already the most influential director in the world, Griffith's development of classical continuity editing would become the industry standard by 1917 and is the single most common editing style in use by film and television directors today.
The film proved to be pivotal for Griffith, not, however, because it was a financial success. Judith was expensive and Biograph balked at financing additional feature films.
Biograph, wrote Lillian Gish later, "thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes."
Rather than settling for his paymasters' limited artistic vision, Griffith left and joined the Mutual Film Company. There, he directed his second feature-length film, The Avenging Conscience (1914). Not as well known as Judith of Bethulia but perhaps even better, The Avenging Conscience was based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and is a taut psychological drama involving love, obsession, murder and finally madness. Griffith's technical expertise is on full display here, with parallel compositions used to convey parallel emotions, and an increasingly frantic cutting style that anticipates Eisenstein's use of montage a decade later.
With two feature films under his belt, Griffith was ready to tackle the biggest project of his career, The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative and most controversial film of the entire silent era.
Finally, I'll mention Mack Sennett and the first feature-length comedy in movie history, Tillie's Punctured Romance. I've previously written at some length about Tillie here, but I would like to point out that the film's enormous box office appeal further underscored the commercial viability of the long form.
Shorts and features would continue to compete with each other on an equal footing until the 1920s when comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd began making feature films—not, ironically, because their short comedies weren't as popular as feature films, quite the opposite actually, but because theater owners paid rental fees based on the length of the film. By the time talkies arrived in theaters in the late 1920s, feature films had thoroughly eclipsed shorts, and would dominate the artistic and commercial landscape for decades to come.
[To read part one of this essay, click here. For part two, here. And for part three, here.]
Early Silent Comedy "In order to laugh at something, it is necessary 1. to know what you are laughing at, 2. to know why you are laughing, 3. to ask some people why they think you are laughing, 4. to jot down a few notes, 5. to laugh. "Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days."—Robert Benchley
The Earliest Comedies: 1890-1905 What you consider the first comedy in movie history depends in no small part on what you think is funny. The Internet Movie Database lists the first comedy as William K.L. Dickson's 1890 experimental film Monkeyshines No. 1, but given that the white blob at the center of the screen is barely identifiable as a human being, much less a funny one, I think its designation as a comedy derives purely from the short's title.
Then there's the case of poor Émile Reynaud whose "praxinoscope" allowed him to project hand-drawn cartoons to an audience. His animated short Pauvre Pierrot is a whimsical tale of a man serenading a beautiful woman beneath her balcony, but while the Internet Movie Database lists this as a comedy, I don't really see it as such. Reynaud made other films but when his business failed, he threw his invention and most of his films into the Seine. Did he make the first movie comedy only to destroy it later? The world may never know.
Other contenders for the title include boxing cats, boxing brothers, and vaudeville stars Robetta and Doretto performing a series of slapstick stunts for Thomas Edison's company. Each of these probably satisfy somebody's idea of comedy.
But personally, I credit the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, with having written and directed the first full-blown comedy. You remember the Lumière brothers, don't you? They invented the first truly portable and practical combination movie camera-projector; they were also the first moviemakers to charge admission for one of their films. L'arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned On The Gardener), premiered in Paris on December 28, 1895, and shows us the simplest of gags—a gardener is watering the lawn, a mischievous boy steps on the hose, the gardener looks at the nozzle to see what's wrong, the boys steps off the hose, the gardener gets a face full of water.
Admittedly, it's not particularly funny, but L'arroseur arrosé has a beginning, middle and end, creates a sense of anticipation and has a payoff. You've got to start somewhere, right?
Unfortunately, for the next decade or so, comedy pretty much ended there as well. In the early days of film, the only qualification one needed to become a director was access to a camera, and judging from the quality of the comedy made during this era, technical expertise and a sense of humor rarely went hand in hand. Gags tended to be no more sophisticated than that first one; the setups were obvious (boy steps on hose), the payoffs predictable (hose squirts man) and the resulting joke was not likely to elicit much more than a chuckle from anyone over the age of seven.
More elaborate variations on the theme—boy ties rollerskates to sleeping man, man wakes up and falls down—didn't make the films any funnier, just longer getting to the point. Turns out that where comedy is concerned, getting exactly what you expect every single time isn't all that satisfying.
Adding to the frustration for a would-be film historian is the fact that you see the same simple gags repeated note for note over and over again. This was not so much because the gag was particularly funny but because it was often cheaper for a theater owner to make his own version of a film than to pay the rental of the original. Thus, there are many more versions of the mischievous boy gag than you're ever going to want to see.
Even Georges Méliès, the most consistently original director of this early era, wasn't quite able to lick the comedy genre. Although he's primarily known now for his science fiction and fantasy films, Méliès also directed some three dozen comedies, mostly turning on surprising camera tricks —for example, the story of a man preparing for bed only to find it impossible to undress.
The trick photography, usually a series of jump cuts, was the most sophisticated of its day, but when observed in film after film, proves more tiresome than humorous. By his own admission, Méliès was never much interested in character or human situations, a real limitation given that comedy (and drama, for that matter) ultimately is about the inherent absurdity of being human. Without that essential element, his films wound up being about nothing at all and were successful only as long as the tricks were fresh and inventive. As soon as he began to repeat himself, his audience abandoned him for other novelties—he was broke and out of the business by 1913.
Indeed, comedies made before 1906 are more significant for their role in advancing editing techniques—the point-of-view iris shot and the cut-in to emphasize the key prop in a joke, the "wipe" in Mary Jane's Mishap (1903), the dissolve in Méliès's Les Cartes Vivantes (1904)—than for any humor they may contain. The Big Swallow (1901), for example, is remembered now only for what might be the first close-up in movie history (and no, Lillian Gish wasn't in it).
Historic though it may be, hilarious it isn't.
Max Linder (Again) As I mentioned in Part Three of this essay, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
And now because I love you, I present my favorite Max Linder short, Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics) (1911). He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
Speaking of French comedy, you might also check out the work of Linder's fellow Frenchman, Ernest Bourbon, who performed under the name Onésime. A particular favorite of the surrealists, Bourbon relied heavily on trick photography in such shorts as Onésime horloger (Onésime, Clockmaker) (1912), in which to receive an inheritance more quickly, he builds a special clock to speed up time. I confess, he's not really my cup of tea—to me, he plays like the poor man's Méliès—but you might want to track him down nevertheless.
And finally, as if to prove that "French" and "sophisticated" aren't necessarily synonymous, film historian Matt Berry recently wrote about one of the earliest examples of scatological humor, 1903's Erreur de porte (The Wrong Door), in which a country bumpkin can't tell the difference between a telephone booth and a lavatory. It's bathroom humor—literally. You've been warned.
To continue to Part Four (b), Mack Sennett and the Keystone Comedies, click here.
Documentaries and Animation ● In the years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith's first film in 1908, the most interesting films were documentaries. Although in form, they more resemble "newsreels" than what we now think of as documentaries, these short films provided audiences of the time a window into people and places they might otherwise have never seen and continue to offer an insight into the era for historians.
● The first great documentarians were the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who I wrote about at some length in a previous post. Their forays into documentary film making were more in the nature of experiments with their newly-invented camera, mostly recording scenes from the world around them although they did occasionally film newsworthy events, such as the arrival of delegates to a conference on photography in 1895. The Lumière brothers abandoned movies altogether in 1900, famously declaring "the cinema is an invention without any future."
● One of the first American docum- entarians was G.W. "Billy" Bitzer. Better known now as D.W. Griffith's cinematographer, Bitzer began his career making film shorts, first collaborating with W.K.L. Dickson after the latter left Thomas Edison's lab, then later at the American Mutoscope Company, the forerunner of Biograph. Bitzer filmed hundreds of shorts, such as Film Registry title Westinghouse Works and Arrival of Immigrants at Ellis Island. In 2003, the International Cinematographers Guild named Bitzer one of the ten most influential cinematographers of all time.
● Footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake proved once and for all the power of the new film medium. Perhaps the most interesting of the many shorts emerging from the disaster is A Trip Down Market Street Before The Fire, which by happenstance was filmed four days before the San Francisco earthquake. Coupled with footage shot at the same locations immediately after the earthquake, the devastation is still shocking. Imagine what it must have been like to see this footage in 1906, the first time in history the public could bear witness to a catastrophe that had happened a world away. (I encourage you to click the fullscreen function when you watch this.)
● A pair of feature-length documentaries from 1914 show the diverging approaches to the form. In the Land of the War Canoes, Edwin S. Curtis used staged re-enactments and fictional events to show the life of an aboriginal tribe in British Columbia, aiming more for entertainment than veracity. That same year Vilhjálmur Stefánsson brought back actual footage of his own disastrous expedition to the Arctic. (I'd tell you that the latter style of documentary eventually won out, but the fact is documentarians such as Michael Moore stage events for the camera to this day.)
● The fields of animation and stop-action photography also made significant strides during the pre-Griffith film era.
● Émile Cohl was a well-known caricaturist working in Paris who got into the motion picture business when he spotted a movie poster design obviously stolen from one of his drawings. To placate Cohl, the management of the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest studio in the world) offered him a job on the spot, mostly turning out short animation sequences for insertion into live-action films. In 1908, Cohl drew and directed a two-minute film, Fantasmagorie, believed to be the first all-animated film in history. [But see the discussion in the comments section where Matthew Blanchette and I agree that the distinction should go to Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot.] ● In America, J. Stuart Blackton took an early stab at animation with such shorts as The Enchanted Drawing and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a series of faces chalked up on a canvas and a blackboard, respectively, but it was Winsor McCay who earned the title as America's first great animator. Already a successful newspaper cartoonist, McCay was inspired by his son's cartoon "flip" book to turn four thousand ink drawings based on his comic strip "Little Nemo" into a film cartoon.
After the success of Little Nemo, McCay signed with the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain where he continued with his work in the field of animation. In 1914, he produced his most famous character, Gertie The Dinosaur, often credited as the first anthropomorphic cartoon character. McCay toured with the country with the film, "interacting" with Gertie in front of the audience, using a whip to coax her out from behind an outcropping of rock and even feeding her an apple.
● Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón special- ized in surreal optical effects films. Working in France for Pathé, Chomón successfully combined miniatures and live-action, pioneered hand-tinted film and invented the "film dolly" which allowed complex tracking shots. As a director, he was known for his trick photography—for example, building one short (The Electric Hotel around a suitcase that unpacked itself, and another (Les Kiriki) around a troupe of Japanese acrobats who perform impossible stunts. Later he provided the special effects work in important feature-length films such as Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon.
● For my money, though, the best of these early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz (he later changed his name to Ladislas Starevich when he moved to France). Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:
Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.
[To read the first entry in this series, The Silent Oscars: 1888-1905, click here.]
Must-See Movies:The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906);A Corner in Wheat (1909); The Country Doctor (1909); The Lonely Villa (1909);Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (1911); The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912); Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (1912); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912); An Unseen Enemy (1912); Suspense (1913); Cabiria (1914); Judith of Bethulia (1914); Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) Recommended Films:Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend (1906); Le théâtre de Bob (1906); A Trip Down Market Street (1906); Fantasmagorie (1908); Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow (1909); Afgrunden (1910); The Lonedale Operator (1911); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (1911); The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913); Der Student von Prag (1913); Fantômas (1913-14); Ingeborg Holm (1913); Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913); The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1914); The Rounders (1914) Of InterestLa vie du Christ a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906); Swords and Hearts (1911); Richard III (1912); The Bangville Police (1913); Traffic in Souls (1913); Gertie The Dinosaur (1914); The Squaw Man (1914)
● The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth Of A Nation (1915)—what the blog Film: Ab Initio calls "cinema's forgotten decade"—might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that movies developed from a novelty into the most popular art form of the 20th century:
» D.W. Griffith took basic techniques introduced by his contemporaries and used them in ways so imaginative, he virtually invented the "language" of film we now take for granted.
» Speaking of language, a new concept entered the lexicon—"movie star"—with audiences for the first time flocking to theaters to see specific performers, among them Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Lillian Gish.
» And the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated "peep shows" to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters.
● It's often difficult to discern evolution as it is occurring. It's especially difficult to see when the evidence remained squirreled away in studio vaults for half a century while critics and public relations men spun up easy to grasp narratives of film's history that sold tickets but did little to describe the true events. Fortunately, historians such as Kevin Brownlow and David Bordwell, among others, have devoted their careers to setting the record straight; and blogs such as 100 Years of Movies, Alt Film Guide, the aforementioned Film: Ab Initio, and others, have taken on the task of watching these early films and reporting on their efforts in thoughtful essay form.
And then there are crazy people like me who try to swallow the entire decade in one, 170+ movie sitting and boil it all down to a single, indigestible post.
● All of the movies on my must-see list (and many, many more) are now readily available to view. (I've only seen the first episode of the twenty-part serial The Perils Of Pauline, else it would make the list as well.) I can tell you from personal experience, if you watch movies in chronological order starting with those two-second fragments from Louis Le Prince in 1888 and work your way forward, film techniques so commonplace now as to be invisible to a modern fan will jump off the screen and you'll find yourself saying aloud, "Thank you, D.W. Griffith, for rescuing me from yet another static, single-shot movie where the actors mill around like ants."
D.W. Griffith and the Invention of a Film Language
● Speaking of David Wark Griffith, he was born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins. He had aspirations of being a Broadway playwright, took small acting parts in movies for the money then switched to directing when he discovered it paid better. He directed his first movie, the twelve-minute short The Adventures of Dollie, in 1908 working from instructions written out on a single sheet of shirt cardboard by his cinematographer G.W. "Billy" Bitzer.
Over the course of the following five years, Griffith directed just shy of five hundred movies, mostly for the Biograph Company located in New York City.
● Like every other director of that era, Griffith wrestled with the problem of narrative—how to tell a story in a silent medium—but whereas other directors simply parroted the techniques that worked on stage and wound up with actors in togas milling around in front of painted backdrops, Griffith seemed to understand from the outset that film presented its own unique set of problems and opportunities. By composing his actors within the frame, by relying on revealing actions rather than words and, especially, by juxtaposing images and events through editing, Griffith was able to create within his audience an emotional involvement in his stories.
● A trio of short films from 1909 illustrate Griffith's gift at composing the frame, staging action, and creating suspense with pacing and editing.
» One of five Griffith films preserved in the National Film Registry, A Corner In Wheat is overpraised (to my mind) for being the first "message" picture, but its use of composition is masterful. Lone figures confined to the corner of the screen, overwhelmed by empty vistas, conveying through image alone the desperation the characters feel, could have come straight from an Edward Hopper painting—except that A Corner In Wheat pre-dates Hopper's breakthrough as an artist by some fifteen years.
» The Country Doctor opens with a panning shot which if you'd just watched 100+ movies from the years that preceded it, believe me, jumps off the screen with its technical sophistication. Starting with a long shot of a valley, then panning to a house on a hill to focus on a family already emerging to walk forward until they stand in medium shot, Griffith establishes with a single uninterrupted camera movement both the story's setting and the identity and socio-economic status of its characters, the sort of camera shot we take for granted now but which pretty much didn't exist before him.
That only a year into his career as a director, he concluded the tragic story with a mirror of that opening shot, panning from the now-empty house as the film ends to that same long shot of the valley, underscores just how quickly he raced ahead of his competitors in using film to convey emotion.
» Griffith didn't invent intercutting (a.k.a. cross-cutting)—the use of editing to alternate between two locations, usually to show simultaneous action—but he took it farther than anyone before him, using it not just to, say, show a key prop or establish a location, but to create a narrative flow and a sense of anticipation that was sorely lacking in early movies. In the thriller The Lonely Villa thieves break into a secluded country home and terrorize a woman and her children while her husband and the police race to their rescue. Griffith cuts back and forth between three points of view to create genuine suspense—will the would-be rescuers arrive in time to save the day?—an editing technique still used to this day.
(Griffith would return to this theme time and again, most memorably in 1911 with The Lonedale Operator and in what is perhaps the most controversial sequence of The Birth Of A Nation, where the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of Lillian Gish's virginity.)
● Griffith continued to develop new approaches to film storytelling throughout his career at Biograph.
» For example, in 1911's two-part short Enoch Arden—a wife stands on the shore waiting for her husband's return from the sea while at that moment the husband is shipwrecked and washed ashore on a tropic island—Griffith uses cutting not just to show the same action from different points of view as in The Lonely Villa, or even to establish that the action is simultaneous, but to show parallel storylines linked only by the emotional resonance between them. Griffith cuts back and forth between the two storylines—the shipwrecked sailor, the wife who waits—for the remainder of the film, showing the analogous plights of the castaway and his (presumed) widow as they each struggle to survive.
(By the way, I suggest that if you watch the copy of Enoch Arden I've embedded here, you mute the sound—the accompanying soundtrack doesn't fit the mood in the least.)
» The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (1912) (you can see it here) is credited with being the first gangster movie and while its story of a thug who robs the husband of the woman he fancies is well worth watching in its own right, the film is remarkable for another startling leap in film technique, in this case the likely invention of what is now called "follow-focus"—the practice of having the camera operator keeping moving actors in focus while allowing the background to go out of focus. At a time when cameramen prided themselves on keeping the entire frame in focus, Griffith's longtime cinematographer Billy Bitzer was reluctant to follow Griffith's direction in this instance and only acceded to his request after Griffith took him to an art museum to look at paintings where the foreground subjects were in sharper focus than the background. (Indeed, Griffith got many of his ideas while strolling through New York's museums.)
» Another of Griffith's innovations was the use of the iris shot, which Tim Dirks defines as "an earlier cinematographic technique or wipe effect, in the form of an expanding or diminishing circle, in which a part of the screen is blacked out so that only a portion of the image can be seen by the viewer." The iris shot was typically used to open or close scenes, and to focus the viewer's attention on a single character or action, but in more sophisticated instances (again, credit Griffith) it could be used to link characters thematically.
» Griffith also pushed his actors to adopt a more subtle acting style, eschewing the dramatic poses of the stage for something more reserved, which he thought played more effectively on the screen. The change was incremental, and sometimes you can see both styles in the same scene, but when compared to other films of the era, the difference is striking. Among those actors who worked with Griffith at Biograph were Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, her sister Dorothy, Henry Walthall, Mae Marsh, Harry Carey, Mack Sennett, Donald Crisp, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge and Florence Turner.
● That we take Griffith's storytelling techniques for granted now—that every movie made in the last one hundred years has repeated these same tricks as a matter of routine—is a testament to just how innovative and influential he really was.
● In 1914, Griffith made his first feature-length film, Judith of Bethulia. Based on a book from the biblical apocrypha, Judith is the story of a beautiful young widow who sacrifices her own sense of virtue to seduce the leader of an invading army and save her people. Aside from its place in film history as one of the earliest feature-length films produced in America (the rest of world had been producing feature films since 1906), Judith of Bethulia features an early example of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.
A good example comes early in the film. Griffith starts with a wide shot of seated figures threshing wheat, holding on them until Robert Harron enters the screen from the left—
and crosses to the far right where he sees something in the distance.
Griffith then cuts to a medium shot of Mae Marsh at a well, back to a wide shot to establish where she is in relation to her surroundings, then to the medium shot again to show Marsh's face as she struggles with the water jug. Griffith cuts back to the wide shot as Robert Harron enters from the left then cuts on his act of helping Marsh to a medium two-shot so you can see Marsh's face as she reacts to his kindness—
then finishes the scene with a wide shot as the couple walks off the screen, holding on the empty screen until someone else enters to draw water at the well. (You can watch Judith of Bethulia in its entirety here.)
The use of classical continuity editing—as opposed to the then-typical practice of having all the actors remain on screen in the same full shot throughout the scene, what David Bordwell calls the "tableau" style—became the industry standard by 1917, but its use in Judith of Bethulia was very advanced for its day and, again, I have to tell you that after plowing through more than two hundred movies made before 1915, all of them using the same tableau set-up, to suddenly see such sophisticated compositions and editing, well, the effect is startling. And a relief.
Although a critical success, Judith of Bethulia was extremely expensive to film and Biograph declined to finance Griffith's further ambitions in this direction. As a result, Griffith struck out on his own, taking his film crew and troop of actors with him. Within a year, Griffith would film The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative film of the early silent era; Biograph was out of the film business by 1916.
● By ignoring this era of film history, critics have wound up overstating the significance of The Birth Of A Nation as a revolution in film technique. Every technique Griffith supposedly invented in The Birth of a Nation, he had already developed and mastered during his years at Biograph Studios. Likewise, because that film's racism wound up overshadowing his entire career, casual film fans have undervalued Griffith's impact as an artist and innovator.
● Ultimately, Griffith's reward for showing the world how to tell stories on film was to find himself left behind by filmmakers who used his techniques to tell better stories. To a great degree, this was his own fault. As you watch Griffith develop a film language, you can also see him develop the bad habits that would ultimately cost him his audience—his reverence for an outdated Victorian value system, his obsession with female virtue, particularly when Lillian Gish takes over the lead acting chores from Mary Pickford, and an appalling tendency in his Civil War films to sentimentalize, or worse justify, America's brutal system of racial apartheid—vices which have not only dated badly in our 21st century eyes, but which began to alienate audiences as early as the end of the First World War.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
As I've mentioned before, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
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