[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.
It's in two parts:
Part One
Part Two
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.
Next: Part Four (b): Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Comedies
[To read part one of this essay, click here. To read part two, click here.]
The First Film Stars ● 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." In this short Max reprend sa liberté (a.k.a. Troubles of a Grasswidower) (1912), you can see shades of Chaplin, the Three Stooges and Lucille Ball:
His 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.
● Internationally, the best known actress was Asta Nielsen. Though born in Denmark, Nielsen made most of her films in Germany where she was known simply as "Die Asta" (The Asta). Film critic Lotte Eisner called her acting "intensely modern" and the "ideal" of European intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s. It was also, for its time, intensely erotic, and thanks to the heavy hand of American censors, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, her "exceptionally unmannered" style of acting (David Thomson) influenced the generation of performers who followed her. Her best known films now are Afgruden (a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays), Hamlet and Joyless Street, in which she co-starred with a young Swedish actress making one of her first films.
"The woman who taught me everything I know," Greta Garbo said later, "was Asta Nielsen."
Nielsen's version of Hamlet, produced by a film company she formed specifically for that purpose, is unusual in that not only does she play the title role, but she plays Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man. She abandoned movies with the advent of sound and returned to the stage in 1927. She died in 1972 at the age of 90.
● In America, actors—and everybody else, for that matter—toiled in virtual anonymity for most of this era. Growing up in an age when a film's closing titles last seven minutes and even the caterer gets a credit, film fans now may find it hard to believe that a hundred years ago nobody got a credit—not the director, not the producer, and certainly not the actors—just the name of the studio and the film's title, that was it. As crazy as that sounds now, the studios believed that by keeping the cast and crew anonymous, they would remain interchangeable and underpaid.
And the strategy worked for a while. The only problem was, audiences weren't stupid; they knew who they liked and even if they didn't know the names, they knew the faces and clamored for more movies by, for example, "the Vitagraph Girl." And even though exhibitors couldn't advertise actors by name—they didn't know them either—they could, say, put a cardboard cutout of Charlie Chaplin's readily identifiable Tramp character in front of the box office whenever one of his films was playing.
The first American actress known by name (other than those already known from another medium) was Florence Lawrence. Known for years as "the Biograph Girl," Lawrence signed with the rival Independent Moving Pictures Company—"IMP" for short. In March 1910, to promote the new "IMP Girl," studio founder Carl Laemmle concocted a publicity stunt, first planting stories that Lawrence had been killed in a streetcar accident in New York, then buying up advertising refuting the story. "We nail a lie!" the ad boasted. Lawrence made a personal appearance in St. Louis to prove she was alive and well and within days, she was a household name.
To counter the publicity, Vitagraph began promoting its own star, Florence Turner, by name as well. The star system was born.
Sadly, Lawrence was badly burned in a studio fire in 1915 and her star quickly faded. Five years later, her husband died and two subsequent marriage failed. In 1938, reduced to bit parts at $75 a film and suffering from myelofibrosis, Lawrence committed suicide.
In terms of stardom, Lawrence's counterpart, Florence Turner, fared little better. She moved to London in 1913 and formed her own production company, which produced some thirty short films, but her career went into eclipse during the war and she returned to America to work mostly in bit parts at MGM. She died a virtual unknown in 1946.
● Although credited as the first American movie stars, Lawrence and Turner were soon eclipsed by "Little Mary"—better known now as Mary Pickford. Pickford was born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto and began acting on the stage at the age of seven. Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York and changed her name to Mary Pickford, and while she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, Pippa Passes. Although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week —double the going rate. She made fifty-one movies that year alone.
Although like everyone else she remained anonymous on screen, audiences were immediately taken with her and theater owners began to bill her as "The Girl with the Golden Curls." By 1912, she abandoned the stage altogether. In 1914, by that time working for Adolph Zukor at Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount), Pickford's name for the first time appeared above the title of a film, Hearts Adrift. Her next film, Tess of the Storm Country, was one of the most popular of the year and made Pickford an international star. (The film is preserved in the National Film Registry.)
Pickford later co-founded United Artists with husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, and won an Oscar for her performance in the 1929 film Coquette. At her zenith, Pickford's power and popularity was greater than that of any actress before or since. I'll be writing about her again. In the meantime, you can read a bit more about her here.
● Once Mary Pickford left Biograph, D.W. Griffith found his ideal leading lady in Lillian Gish. Born in Ohio in 1893, Gish's father abandoned the family when Lillian was still a child. Her mother took up acting to support herself and Gish and her younger sister, Dorothy, joined acting troupes early, including a stint with Sarah Bernhardt in New York. Eventually, Mary Pickford introduced the Gish sisters to D.W. Griffith and they made their film debut in the short drama An Unseen Enemy in 1912.
Gish quickly established herself as one of the finest actresses in film and made forty-five movies before her starring role in 1915's The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith's 1913 melodrama The Mothering Heart -- about a wife abandoned to raise her child alone -- she displayed a gift for conveying pain, particularly of the long-suffering variety, and thereafter her best work, such as Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East, mined that vein. Gish fit Griffith's notion of the ideal Victorian maiden, and she largely played that role on screen and off for the rest of her life, even after parting company with Griffith in 1921.
Dorothy Gish was five years Lillian's junior and was as different from her older sister as two people who nevertheless remained close could be. Whereas Lillian was a serious-minded tragedian, Dorothy was a flirtatious cut-up so adept at comedy that Paramount Pictures once offered her a million dollars to make a series of comedy features. "At my age," she said, turning down the offer, "all that money would ruin my character."
Although Dorothy actually made more movies during these early years than her older sister, she didn't really achieve a breakthrough until 1918 in Griffith's war picture, Hearts of the World, in which she played a small comedic part in an otherwise grim drama. After that she specialized in comedic roles. Still, her best performance was as a blind foundling threatened by the turmoil of the French Revolution in Griffith's last commercial success, Orphans of the Storm (1921).
After watching her sister in a rare leading role, Lillian exclaimed, "Why, Dorothy is good; she's almost as good as I am!"
Dorothy continued to work throughout the silent era, then returned to the stage when talkies came in. With the exception of a handful of television appearances in the 1950s, she remained on the stage for the rest of her life.
More about the Gish sisters when I hit the early 1920s.
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 Films:Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend (1906); The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906); A Trip Down Market Street (1906); Fantasmagorie (1908); A Corner in Wheat (1909); The Country Doctor (1909); The Lonely Villa (1909); Afgruden (1910); The Lonedale Operator (1911); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (1911); Swords and Hearts (1911); Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (1911); The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (1912); The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912); An Unseen Enemy (1912); The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913); Der Student von Prag (1913); Fantômas (1913-14); Ingeborg Holm (1913); Suspense (1913); Traffic in Souls (1913); Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913); The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1914); Cabiria (1914); Gertie The Dinosaur (1914); Judith of Bethulia (1914); The Rounders (1914); The Squaw Man (1914); Tillie's Punctured Romance (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.
Must-See Films:A Trip To The Moon (1902); The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.
And where do you start, which is to say, what was the first indispensable step toward what we now think of as motion pictures? If I knew his name, I'd say it was the first caveman who thought to entertain his neighbors with shadow puppets and firelight. In fact, two of the key elements of film, movement and representation, have been staples of art and entertainment since at least the ancient Greek stage.
Turner Classic Movie's recent documentary, Moguls and Movie Stars, began with seventeenth century Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens who in 1659 invented the magic lantern show—a process of projecting light through a painted slide onto a wall or screen—and in terms of being entertained while sitting in the dark looking at pictures on a wall, the magic lantern is a reasonable place to start a history of the movies. Over the course of the two hundred years that followed, these magic lantern shows became quite sophisticated—by stacking slides one in front of the other and manipulating them, a projectionist could create the illusion of movement—and were one of the most popular forms of entertainment during the 19th century.
And then there was Eadweard Muybridge, who on a bet took a series of photographs in 1872 of a galloping horse to prove that all four of its hooves leave the ground simultaneously when it runs. Strung together on a glass cylinder and spun quickly enough, this "magic lantern show gone mad" created the illusion of a horse in motion. Muybridge also had a fondness for photographing nude models performing mundane tasks and audiences had a fondness for paying to see them, proving once again that pornography often drives the acceptance of new media. (Also check out Étienne-Jules Marey who similarly used a "chronophotographic gun" to capture remarkable images of birds in flight.)
But if we think of movies as something involving a strip of film and a projector, then I think the history of movies starts with Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince who in 1888 used a single-lens camera and paper film produced by George Eastman to film two seconds worth of fashionable men and women walking around a garden in Roundhay, England. Along with equally brief footage of horse and buggy traffic crossing a bridge in Leeds, Le Prince is generally credited with producing the first "films" in movie history.
Alas for Le Prince, while preparing for a cross-Atlantic trip to exhibit his invention in New York, he boarded a train bound for Paris in 1890 and literally vanished without a trace. Although theories abound—suicide, fratricide, assassination—his disappearance has never been explained. In fact, investigators turned up no leads at all and the case went cold until just seven years ago, when, while combing through its nineteenth century archives, Paris police found a photograph dating from 1890 of an unidentified drowning victim who bore a resemblance to Le Prince. But whether it was positively him or how he might have drowned on a moving train, no one can say.
After Le Prince, the story of film picks up with Charles-Émile Reynaud. A French science professor who directed and exhibited what may have been the world's first animated film, Pauvre Pierrot ("Poor Pete"), his most lasting contribution to film history was the invention of a camera that recorded images not on photographic plates but on perforated film advanced by sprockets, resulting in longer filmed sequences than a cylinder or drum would allow.
Reynaud demonstrated his camera-projector, which he called the Praxinoscope Théâtre, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 (the one with the Eiffel Tower). In the audience was the famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison who had been struggling to come up with his own movie camera without much success. By his own admission, two of Edison's greatest inventions were credit stealing and patent lawyers, deploying armies of the latter to accomplish the former—along with the light bulb, his most lasting and influential contributions—but he later insisted that his epiphany that the future of motion pictures depended on perforated film on sprockets was purely coincidental. The U.S Patent Office agreed.
"Everyone steals in industry and commerce," he said later. "I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know how to steal." (An idea he no doubt stole from his attorneys.)
Reynaud died penniless, but Edison—or more precisely his assistant William K.L. Dickson—ran with Reynaud's ideas (and, I don't know, maybe some of his own), and by 1894 created what he called the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peepshow" housed in a bulky cabinet, whereby the bored and the curious could one at a time watch brief films for a nickle. The movies were neither artistic nor adventuresome—just brief scenes of men sneezing, couples dancing, Annie Oakley shooting—but for a time at least the paying public was enthralled.
It was two French brothers, however, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who first thought to exhibit movies not to one person at a time but to a theater full of paying customers. Starting their careers in film as assistants in their father's photographic firm, the brothers—Louis as the inventor, Auguste as the business manager—developed a new and improved camera-projector. Where Edison's Kinetoscope was bulky and hard to maintain, the Lumières' combination camera-projector, the cinématographe, was light and mobile and relatively easy to use. In December 1895, these two brothers rented a hall in Paris and charged the public admission to see their new invention—the first time in history an audience paid money to see a motion picture in a theater.
Here in its entirety is that groundbreaking film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only proper way to study movie history is to watch movies, and when I sat down and watched a couple of dozen of the Lumière brothers' best-known movies (judging by the number of votes they've received on the Internet Movie Database), it quickly became clear that while the Lumières may have invented the camera, they didn't have a clue what to do with the camera. Their films never progressed beyond fifty-second home movies of whatever they happened to be standing near—trains entering a station, babies eating breakfast, etc.—audiences quickly grew jaded and early in the 20th century, the brothers famously concluded that "the cinema is an invention without any future." Instead, they turned their full attention to photography, finding their lasting success with a color photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which they patented in 1903.
It was instead another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, who was the first to grasp the unique potential of the new motion picture technology. A stage magician by trade, Méliès saw movies as a successor to the tradition of fanciful entertainments. Where Edison and the Lumière brothers used their cameras to record reality, Méliès realized that through editing and photographic trickery, film could be used to create a new reality, one that could never exist apart from film. It was perhaps the single greatest insight in movie history.
Among his many movies, one, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon), from 1902, is perhaps the one indispensable film from the quarter century of film history and gave us the single most famous movie image before Charlie Chaplin first donned his little tramp outfit.
I'll grant you, A Trip To The Moon is a relic by the standards even of the decade that followed it, but it was also wholly original, deriving from nothing before it, inspiring so much of what came after it, and containing images that are still unique and unforgettable despite the passage of a century's worth of filmmaking. Or to put it another way, that The Simpsons could spoof A Trip To The Moon as an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon (in French, no less) without the need to explain it, tells you all you need to know about how much a part of the culture Méliès really is.
Unfortunately, Méliès wasn't much of a businessman, and Edison and his lawyers were able to copy prints of A Voyage To The Moon and exhibit them in the United States without paying royalties. Too, Méliès stopped progressing as a filmmaker. His 1912 movie, The Conquest Of The Pole, for example, could have been made a decade earlier in terms of its sets, acting, storyline and editing, and while D.W. Griffith later said of Méliès "I owe him everything," Griffith and others quickly surpassed him in terms of artistry and technique.
Méliès went bankrupt in 1913 and wound up selling toys in Paris's Gare Montparnasse train station. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1932 and died six years later.
Méliès's story is a none-too-subtle reminder that while movies are the greatest art form of the 20th century, they're also a business, and whatever else you can say about Thomas Edison, he did figure out how to make money from the movies and to popularize the medium. While men such as Le Prince and the Lumière brothers were more clever inventors and Méliès was a superior artist, it was Edison who made movies pay, and his realization that nobody was going to buy a film projector if there were no films to project on it may have been the second greatest insight in movie history. Certainly the most practical.
A variety of men made movies at Edison's behest, but the two most important were the aforementioned W.K.L Dickson and Edwin S. Porter. Dickson was primarily an inventor and his contributions as a filmmaker are largely those of a cinematographer recording his own experiments. His first works, the first American films, are simple scenes filmed in his own workshop—men blacksmithing, sneezing or shaking hands.
These snippets of life provided the content of Edison's peepshows and in the beginning were sufficient to satisfy the public's curiosity. But with more interesting films arriving from the Lumière brothers and especially Méliès, Edison realized he needed more substantial fare if his fledgling film company was to survive. Edison put Porter, who had formerly worked as a touring projectionist for a rival company, in charge of motion picture production at his New York studios, and there Porter set to work filming not just workplace scenes, but stories.
Porter directed more than one hundred eighty films between 1898 and 1915, but far away the most important and enduring of them is the 1903 western, The Great Train Robbery.
"In literature and music, as well as movies," Daniel Eagan wrote in America's Film Legacy, his collection of essays about the National Film Registry, "the past can seem slow, obvious and at times filled with odd, unexpected touches too far removed from our experiences to decipher easily—which makes The Great Train Robbery an even more remarkable achievement. The blockbuster of its time, it has lost none of its power to entertain over the past hundred years."
Put simply, The Great Train Robbery was the first great American film. Not only is the shot of Justus Barnes firing a Colt revolver directly at the camera one of the most indelible images in movie history, but Porter grasped that unlike with the stage, the "best seat in the house" was wherever the camera needed to be to show the action. Porter placed his camera on top of a movie train or riding along with the outlaws on horseback, a "conceptual leap" (Eagan again) that puts the film a decade ahead of its time.
Porter's use of jump-cuts, cross-cutting, matte shots and hand-tinted frames was equally cutting-edge, and that the film also established the narrative conventions for decades of westerns to come makes The Great Train Robbery the most important American film before The Birth Of A Nation a dozen years later.
Despite the commercial success of The Great Train Robbery, neither Porter nor his boss were comfortable with the film's technical and storytelling innovations, and thereafter, to the disappointment of the ticket-buying public, the studio's product reverted to more conventional forms. A Trip To The Moon notwithstanding, ultimately the one thing Thomas Edison couldn't steal was quality and within a few years, immigrant entrepreneurs such as Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle and directors such as D.W. Griffith equaled then surpassed Edison as a filmmaker. The company lost steam, Porter left Edison's employ in 1909 and an adverse ruling in an anti-monopoly case in 1915 exacerbated the decline. With the coming of World War I and the closing of the European market, Edison sold his studio and abandoned film altogether.
It was an ironic and somehow fitting end to the master inventor-thief's involvement in the history of motion pictures.
Postscript:Matthew Blanchette steered me to an even earlier surviving film from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, called Man Walking Around A Corner. It was shot on an earlier version of Le Prince's camera, this one with sixteen separate lenses—it looks more like a spider's eye than a camera. Thanks, Matthew!
Early Silent Comedy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
