Experimentation, Formation, Commercialization



Cinema quickly developed to be a form of 'show business', mainly in France. Charles Parthe even first developed the model of 'vertical monopoly organization' in which he controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures.

In America, similar trends also emerged, with the Nickelodeon boom and companies such as Edison, Vitagraph and Biograph began to set up their firms in major American cities.


George Méliès (1961-1938)

  • a magician and inventor, was one of the first people to recognize the potentials of the moving image devices. 
  • accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick (jump cut) in 1896, and was among the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, fading, time-lapse photography, and dissolves. 
  • also one of the first to develop the cinema from short singular clips to a narrative story-telling medium (Voyage to the Moon)
  • but often restricted by his 'tableau' style: shooting the whole story with one angle without moving the camera. The international audience was soon attracted to the more flexible, dynamic techniques by Porter in the US.

George Méliès' Off to Bloomingdale Asylum (1901), an example of Méliès' jump cut techniques

               

George Méliès' Voyage to the Moon (Le Voyage dan la lune), 1902

  • narrative story - follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon
  • satirical, mocking French society and its faith in modern science  
  • declared a UNESCO World Heritage!
  • first science-fiction film!
  • No change in camera angles, no intercutting. All shots were filmed in the theatrical style as if the audience was sitting in a theatre watching a live performance



Lucien Nonguet's La Passion de Notre Seigneur, 1903

  • method of stereoscope series
  • first feature film to have colorized sequences. Colorization was achieved using the Pathecolor/Pathechrome stencil-based film tinting process
  • first concept of 'epic movie'
  • first use of the moving camera, therefore liberating the narrative film from the 'static gaze' in previous films
  • Each shot represented a single, self-contained scene, with its own setting, entrances and exits. The only link between them was the consistent chronological logic between the scenes.
            



Edwin Porter (1870-1941)

    Edwin S Porter.jpg
  • an influential pioneer in the development of American cinema, in both cinematic techniques and in creating a successful industry
  • worked with inventor Thomas Edison
  • first used projector (vitascope) to project a film for an audience in 1886
  • experimented with various editing techniques which later would define cinematic language
  • *known as the first to use editing to mix clips of different settings and contexts to compose a coherent, convincing story


Edwin Porter's The Life of an American Fireman, 1903

  • first concept of montage
  • randoms scenes of fires and firemen, as well as shooting additional footage of his own, and finally assembled a dramatic film
  • examples of temporal overlapping editing: an action is shown from one angle, then shown again in the next shot from another angle.
           
  • According to Karl Reisz's The Technique of Film Editing (1953), Porter's method of using fragmented footage (joining actuality shots with staged studio shots) to assemble a coherent story is unprecedented. It implied that the meaning of a shot was not necessarily self-contained but could be used by joining with others. The viewer felt that he was witnessing a single continuous event. Porter was hence able to present a long complicated incident without resorting to the jerky continuity of a Melies film. The implication is that film-making has unlimited freedom and possibilities.
  • Also the idea of 'parallel' and 'overlapping' action

Porter's The Great Train Robbery, 1903

  • editing techniques that could 'compress time' - the idea that editing can cut out segments of movements and still convey a sense of continuity
  • composite editing, cross cutting (two scenes appear to occur simultaneously but in different locations), camera movement and on location shooting




General remarks regarding 1900-1910:

  • This form of silent films was especially attractive to the large amount of immigrants pouring into North America at the time. The silent films became a form of 'escapist entertainment' for an audience with little money or knowledge of English. 
  • The cinema continued to develop rapidly, both in techniques and in industry, in many parts of Europe and North America. 





David W Griffith (1875-1948)


    David Wark Griffith 1919.jpg
  • the next influential pioneer in American film history, known for his editing techniques that would define cinematic language as we know it today
  • cut-in editing - cutting from a long shot to a closer medium shot in Greaser's Gauntlet (1908)
  • *Continuity editing - editing to maintain a continuous sense of space, time, and hence, narrative
  • Cross-cutting / Intercutting / Parallel editing - cutting between shots of different locations/scenes in a parallel action (After Many Years, 1908; and especially in Lonely Villa, 1909, in which the technique was successfully used to create suspense and excitement) to create temporal overlapping - to establish action occurring at the same time in different locations. The camera cuts away from one action in a place to another action in another place, suggesting the simultaneity of these two actions
  • One rule in continuity editing is the 180' Rule - when filming a conversation between two characters, a camera is used over the shoulder of both characters on the same side of the axis (axis is the spatial line linking the two characters' positions)
  • Later produced the first 'feature film' The Birth of a Nation (1915), in which many of his techniques were used
  • Produced Intolerance (1916) - the first million-dollar film, 3.5 hours long, with many different camera angles, and a mixture of long shots, medium shots, close ups:
 



Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria, Italy, 1914

  • long elaborated narrative film never seen before
  • vast decors were successfully combined with actual locations 
  • unprecedented sustained use of sophisticated camera movements, angles, and lighting effects
  • contains many elements of cinematic language which we expect in films today, so much that to this day, it remains an intriguing mystery whether the American film industry was indebted to the influence of Italian cinema





Finally, an introduction to the origins of the cinema created by Filmmaker IQ is an excellent overview of the major contributor to the cinema in its early formation:




Sources:
Robinson, David. The History of World Cinema. 1971