Camera and projection systems

In 1893 Thomas Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope moving image system, as developed by W. K. L. Dickson. Edison is also believed to have built the first film studio (called the ‘Black Maria’), with sections in the roof to let in light and with the whole building revolving in order to be able to follow the sun. Edison's method of screening films only catered for individual viewers, though, and as such was not a projection system. Other equipment designs were developed in 1896 in Britain and the United States, but it is Auguste and Louis Lumière who are regarded as having produced the first widely used successful camera and projection system in 1895, the cinématographe (see Fig. 1.1).

It is also the Lumière brothers who are usually credited with having made the first films in 1895 and with having held the first public screening on 28 December of that year, at the Grand Café in Paris. In fact Max Skladanovsky had screened a film on 1 November of the same year in Germany, but his contribution to developing film technology is often forgotten; his camera/projection system was cumbersome and impractical and developed no further, leaving the Lumières to perfect their system. Other camera and projection designs were also experimented with in other countries around the same time.

Europe

Cinema may have been dominated by the United States for most of the twentieth century, but the early years belonged to Europe. US cinema was outstripped by the film output of France, England, Denmark and Italy, and it was only during the First World War that the United States began to dominate the international film industry (see Chapter 2). Production companies such as Nordisk from Denmark, Cines from Italy and Cecil Hepworth's company in England produced and exported many films but France's Pathé Frères and Gaumont led the field. By 1905 Pathé Frères was already vertically integrated, but their control of production, distribution and exhibition was soon to be mirrored by companies in the United States.

Figure 1.1 The first camera and projection system: the cinématographe

The United States

By 1900, the three key companies in the United States were American Mutoscope and Biograph, Vitagraph and Edison's company. They had a large domestic market to satisfy, though that market was at the time also being fed by European film companies. In the United States the battle was soon on for supremacy within the industry. The Edison company took legal action to prevent other US companies from using cameras and projectors for which Edison claimed the patents. American Mutoscope and Biograph used a different type of camera, however, and they battled with Edison for control of the industry. Both forced other companies to pay for the right to use their equipment designs.

The MPPC

The rivalry between Edison's company and American Mutoscope and Biograph continued until 1908, when the two companies formed the Motion Picture Patents Company. The new company also included Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin and Selig, all of whom had to pay the two main companies for continued use of patented designs. Although the MPPC aimed to reduce the number of foreign films coming into the country to enable US producers to expand their own share of the market, a deal was struck which allowed Pathé and the Méliès company to join. Screenings of foreign films declined in the United States as a result of the increasing power of the MPPC but European cinema continued to dominate the rest of the world.

The MPPC ensured that fees were paid by production companies using its camera designs, by distribution companies dealing with its films, and by theatres showing its films and using its projection systems. Thus the MPPC soon became an oligopoly; its small number of companies controlled the emerging US film industry. The stranglehold on the industry was tightened further when Eastman Kodak signed an exclusive deal with the MPPC for supply and use of film stock.

The independents

Nonetheless, a thriving independent sector managed to grow within the United States, prompting the MPPC to respond by forming the General Film Company to release exclusively all MPPC films. However, 1912 saw the beginning of the end for the MPPC when a court ruling rejected its claim to exclusive rights to the camera and projection equipment designs. The final blow for the MPPC came three years later in 1915, when it was declared to be undermining competition within the industry and was required to cease its restrictive practices.

The independent companies were now in a strong position: their main competitor was weak and the fact that they had not previously been tied into a rigid production structure meant they were more flexible. They made early moves towards producing feature films instead of short one-reelers and many companies, realizing that the most profitable part of the industry was exhibition, reorganized accordingly. Many of these ‘independents’ in turn became vertically integrated themselves and developed the same monopolistic practices as the MPPC had before them. By 1915, the origins of companies such as Paramount, Fox, Universal, MGM and Warner existed, all of which were to become the core of the studio system during the 1930s and 1940s (see Chapter 2). Initially the US film industry had been mainly based on the East Coast and in Chicago, but by 1915 the majority of companies had relocated to the Los Angeles area, which included a district called Hollywood. The weather was more suitable for location shooting – filming was much easier with reliable sunshine – and a greater variety of landscapes was available.

The European film industry had also developed monopolistic practices. In France, Pathé Frères and Gaumont dominated, while in Britain most films were exhibited by the Gaumont-British company and the Associated British Pictures Corporation. With the start of the First World War in 1914, however, the film industry in Europe was severely disrupted. The next few years saw the United States establish itself as the dominant international power in the cinema.

Exhibition

The first cinema was opened in France in 1897 by the Lumière brothers, while the first US cinema did not open until 1902. Early cinemas were basic, often consisting of nothing more than a screen, a projector, a piano and several rows of chairs. Initial doubts about the viability of public screenings of films soon disappeared and by 1905 the United States had approximately 1,000 cinemas, a figure which had risen to 5,000 by 1908. One of the early cinema chains was Loew's Theatres, renamed Loews in 1969 and incorporated into AMC Theatres in 2005. The industry continued to expand and by 1910 weekly cinema attendances numbered 26 million, a figure which almost doubled over the next five years to reach 49 million by 1915. Cinema building continued apace, led by entrepreneurs such as S.L. Rothafel.

Cinemas in the UK were similarly basic and initially had little more than rows of benches surrounding a primitive projector. The Cinematograph Act of 1909 changed this with its requirements of fireproofing, separation of the projection box from the auditorium and the installation of fire exits and toilets. The worst halls closed down and many theatres were converted into cinemas, with 3,500 in existence in the UK by 1915. However, many cinemas closed down during the First World War.

In the USA prior to 1905, films tended to be shown wherever facilities existed for entertaining the general public: thus theatres, music halls, vaudeville houses and even funfairs were regularly used. It was common for vaudeville shows to begin and end with short films, but this practice was soon reversed in cinemas where it became common for a vaudeville act to perform while reels were being changed. By 1905 purpose-built venues had become the norm, and these early exhibition theatres were referred to as nickelodeons rather than cinemas, the cost of admission typically being a nickel. Nickelodeons were relatively small and had minimal facilities; they provided cheap entertainment and were well suited to their audience, which tended to be working-class. Films provided popular entertainment just as music halls and circuses had done previously, while classical concerts and plays at the theatre tended to be more expensive and remained a middle-class leisure activity.

Entertainment

Initially most films were non-fiction. Film's ability to record movement in the real world was sufficiently impressive for it to be entertaining and when films were unable to record actual events, the events were often re-staged to provide a representation of what had happened – typically of a news item of interest to the public. Re-enactments of historic moments were also frequently made and actuality films, especially travelogues, were popular. Fiction films soon became common, though, and proved to be very popular with audiences, who came to look for entertainment and escapism in addition to the information and novelty they were used to. The fiction narratives were usually simple and frequently took the form of comedies. The lack of sound in a film was often compensated for by a piano performance or the use of a gramophone, and actors sometimes spoke dialogue behind the screen to match the actions in the film. Sound effects were similarly added.

Until about 1905, production companies tended to sell copies of their films to exhibitors, which meant that films had to be screened repeatedly for the initial investment to be recouped. When the practice of renting films replaced that of purchasing them, exhibitors were able to show a greater variety of productions. Audience interest grew again with the arrival of feature films around 1910, which were usually between four and six reels long (sixty to ninety minutes) and were often released as serials, with titles like The Perils of Pauline, one reel per week. Serials were in effect a transition between one-reelers and full feature films.

Stars

Audiences were thus initially attracted to the cinema by the novelty of experiencing moving images, and soon after by the provision of entertaining stories on film. A further attraction was added by the rise of film stars when audiences began to identify particular actors and admire their performances. By 1909 two stars were already established: Florence Lawrence the ‘Biograph Girl’ and Florence Turner the ‘Vitagraph Girl’. Whereas previously audiences tended to identify films by the production company name, increasingly stars helped to sell films, and film posters came to highlight the featured star. By 1915, stars were regularly pulling in the crowds. Theda Bara was signed to the Fox company as their studio star and Charlie Chaplin became known as the loveable tramp with bowler hat and cane.

Censorship

Some sections of society were nevertheless expressing concern at the rise of cinema as a new form of entertainment. Many felt that cinema was a powerful form of communication and believed it was likely to have an effect upon the audience. At a basic level this was illustrated by claims that audiences momentarily believed a train hurtling towards them on a cinema screen was actually about to hit them, but the real concern was with the portrayal of crime, violence and romance on screen. Concerned US citizens claimed that nickelodeons were likely to become breeding grounds for criminality, violent behaviour and loose morals. There was also a fear from sections of the establishment that film could be used as political propaganda to create social unrest (see Chapter 11 on cinema, audiences and society). However, governments themselves soon turned to using film as propaganda with the onset of the First World War.

The developing film industry was aware of growing concern and acted to halt legislation being passed by government. In the United States the major production companies co-operated with an organization calling itself The National Board of Censorship, which was set up in 1909. Wanting to seem responsible, film companies submitted films for preview before releasing them. The production of more serious films – based on literary classics, Shakespeare and religious stories – helped to hold the censors at bay and indeed allowed the industry to censor itself. A similar situation existed in Britain where the British Board of Film Censors, funded by the industry, was founded in 1912.

Movement and the moving image

The first five years of cinema produced few films with identifiable narratives. Films tended not to contain stories in which events were clearly explained and linked together. Shots often seemed to exist in isolation and there was a lack of logical progression in the actions on the screen. None of this should surprise us since the initial fascination with film resulted from its ability to record movement; that it could do this at all was often enough to impress an audience. The first task for film-makers was to understand the different ways in which a camera could be used; only once film-makers had come to terms with using cameras could they begin to think about telling coherent stories on film. As Kristin Thompson notes: ‘[D]uring most of the primitive period, films appealed to audiences primarily through simple comedy or melodrama, topical subjects, exotic scenery, trick effects and the sheer novelty of photographed movement’ (Bordwell 1985, p. 157).

The earliest films were very much the creations of the camera operator, who was usually also the director and scriptwriter. However, the emphasis gradually changed over the years as control shifted from the camera operator to the director and/or the producer. Film-making was from the outset very much a male-dominated profession, with the notable exception of Alice Guy from France, who was making films by 1896. Also from France, and best known for their early work, were the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès. Their productions were radically different, though, with the Lumières tending towards non-fiction films whereas Méliès concentrated on fiction.

It is perhaps not surprising that travel was a common theme in early films. Not only were modes of transport such as cars and trains rapidly developing at that time, which in turn led to speculation about future modes of travel, but transport is of course about movement, which was exactly what the new cine-cameras could capture on film. What did not provide movement in early films was the camera itself, which usually remained static. This is partly explained by the cumbersome early cameras which were not easy to move during filming, but it is perhaps also explained when we think of the types of popular entertainment that preceded film. Music-hall and theatre performances took place on the stage with action statically framed by the stage curtain, and early films often have the appearance of a recording of a stage performance. This is especially true of many of Méliès’ films.

Georges Méliès

In Journey to the Moon (1902) Méliès used a static camera and extreme long shots. It would be easy to believe that the events we see take place on a stage, as characters walk on from and off to the sides of the frame, and the action takes place against what is obviously a backdrop. The film is typical of much of Méliès’ work; it is a mix of comedy and fantasy and could be claimed as the first science fiction film: a group of scientists travel in a rocket to the moon.

The Impossible Journey was made by Méliès the following year and deals with similar themes. Passengers board a train, the train takes to the skies and eventually flies into the sun, where the passengers emerge from the crashed train and end up on a submarine which submerges into the sea. Méliès built his own studio, in which he constructed elaborate, fantastic sets. His complex stage designs were complemented by the frequent use of models, especially for simulating travel scenes in fantasy worlds. He often created magical effects on film through the use of stop motion techniques to join together different takes. In The Impossible Journey, stop motion is used to link together actions where the join is disguised through the use of smoke and fire. The film's fantasy world is emphasized through the use of strong colours which were used by Méliès to hand-tint the film, making it stand out from the usual repertoire of black-and-white films. As before, takes are static – though a pan shot is used at one point to follow movement – and extreme long shots are used throughout. The film lasts for six and a half minutes and contains fourteen takes, meaning an average of approximately thirty seconds per take; moreover, so skilful is Méliès’ use of stop motion that it is sometimes difficult to ascertain exactly when he has used it. He also makes extensive use of dissolves to link shots together. Such early examples of special effects engendered those of today (see Chapter 10).

The use of long takes was a common characteristic of early cinema, as it was for Méliès’ films. An individual take was often referred to as a tableau. The take commonly covered a whole scene and its length, combined with its being a static extreme long shot, tended to isolate it from the rest of the film. The individual takes, or tableaux, were virtually autonomous as editing did not link takes closely together. Editing was not used to produce or clarify meaning, the content of the takes alone providing meaning. The lack of coherence in some early films is not surprising, partly because of historical and cultural differences for a modern viewer, but especially because the use of long shots and the lack of close ups means that detail in these films is often unrecognizable.

The Lumière brothers

Travel was also a theme for other film-makers. One of the Lumières’ first films was L'Arrivée d'un train en gare (1895). A static camera framed a station platform and an arriving train with an extreme long shot to record the passengers disembarking. The film was most memorable for its depiction of diagonal movement towards the camera by the train. Most early films lacked a sense of perspective and emphasized two dimensions only.

The Lumières’ very first film from 1895 was Workers Leaving the Factory. The brothers owned a large photographic company and filmed their employees emerging through the factory gates: a typical example of an actuality film, which is what the Lumières concentrated on. They did, however, also produce fictional comedy films, their best known being The Waterer Watered (L'Arroseur arrosé, 1895). A gardener is watering plants until a boy stands on the hose pipe to stop the water, at which point the gardener looks quizzically at the end of the hose pipe; the boy steps off, leaving the water to suddenly shoot out over the gardener. As far as is known, this was the first comedy film.

Experimentation

Early cinema had no conventions; it was all about experimentation. Once the obvious visual possibilities of film had been recognized, some film-makers began to realize the further potential of the medium. The emphasis on recording the real world gradually gave way to attempts at creating the impossible on film. We have already seen examples of this in Méliès’ work; he was a professional magician and was already skilled in creating illusions. As noted above, Méliès used stop motion, using editing to create a kind of jump cut in which elements within a shot suddenly change position, appear or disappear. In addition, film-makers experimented with running film backwards, with speeding up and slowing down time and with multiple exposures, which involved running the film through the camera more than once to superimpose different images on top of each other. Méliès himself used multiple exposures to brilliant effect in his 1900 film The One Man Orchestra. A man walks on stage to play an instrument and then the same man walks on seven times to play seven different instruments, at which point the orchestra is complete.

Early British films

Britain also had its share of film pioneers and experimenters. One of the earliest British films was Rough Sea at Dover, made by Birt Acres in 1895. It contained a static long shot of Dover harbour during a storm and was impressive for its recording of movement. G. A. Smith's Grandma's Reading Glass (1900) broke new ground in the techniques used, showing a boy borrowing his grandma's magnifying glass and looking at various objects. The film was interesting in that the action was broken up into several takes, including extreme close ups from the boy's point of view through the magnifying glass. This was radically different when compared to the usual long shots that covered all the action in other films.

Another notable British film from 1900 was James Williamson's The Big Swallow. This begins with a man becoming aware that he is being filmed. He gradually becomes more irate until he moves towards the camera, mouth wide open, and appears to swallow the camera as his mouth blanks out the screen. At this point an edit takes us to a shot of the cameraman falling into a black hole, followed by another shot of a black screen from which the camera tracks back as it seems to emerge from the man's mouth. The transitions from shot to shot are well timed and hardly noticeable.

To return to the theme of travel, Cecil Hepworth made two films in 1900 with cars as the main theme. How it Feels to be Run Over shows a car driving towards the camera; just as the car fills the screen an edit cuts to a black screen on which appears the message ‘oh, mother will be pleased’. Explosion of a Motor Car uses stop motion. A car travels down a road and a large cloud of smoke billows from the car. At this point an edit cuts to another take in which a very similar cloud of smoke clears to reveal bits and pieces of a car lying on the ground. The two shots appear as one continuous take. This is followed by a policeman looking into the sky and then from off screen parts of the car's passengers come falling down. Such reference to events outside the camera frame was unusual. R. W. Paul's The Motorist (1906) contains several examples of stop motion and includes the use of models to make the impossible appear on screen. A policeman is caught on a car's bonnet; a convincing dummy falls off in front of the car, which runs over it; the policeman stands up again and runs after the car. Where the running-over seems to be a continuous take, it is in fact two, the second one beginning with the policeman getting up having apparently been run over. Other stop motions in the film create the illusion of a car driving up the front of a house and a car being transformed into a horse and cart. With the use of models, the car appears to be driving over clouds and around the moon.

Cecil Hepworth's 1905 Rescued by Rover was notable for editing that was more complex than that usually found at that time. The film tells the story of a baby that is stolen. The parents are alerted by their dog, Rover, who leads them to the place where the baby has been hidden. There is a coherence to the way the story is told which is lacking in other early films. The editing provides consistency of direction and pace of movement between each shot. Time and space are presented in a way that makes the film's narrative intelligible. The film was so popular that it was remade twice after the negatives wore out from producing so many copies.

Edwin S. Porter

To return to the United States, another film that broke new ground in the methods used to tell a narrative was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903). A gang of outlaws rob a train; a telegraph operator alerts the sheriff, who rounds up a posse to track down the outlaws. The innovation was in the use of cross-cutting when the film shows the outlaws robbing the train but then cuts to the telegraph operator sending a message. We assume he is trying to alert someone to the robbery. At another point we see the outlaws fleeing on horseback, then after a cut we see the sheriff and his posse; the cross-cut edit indicates to the viewer that there is likely to be conflict. However, the effect is partly lost because of the difficulty of knowing which set of characters we are looking at, since the predominance of extreme long shots makes character identification difficult. Another scene in the film, a tableau, is also made fairly incomprehensible by reliance on an extreme long shot: when the outlaws order all the passengers off the train, the passengers are presumably being robbed by the outlaws but the lack of detail makes it difficult to ascertain if this is the case. The uncertainty of the shot is increased by the fact that it lasts almost two minutes.

Another unusual element in the film is the inclusion at the end of a close up of one of the outlaws looking straight to camera and firing a gun, effectively at the audience. The shot exists outside the narrative, but has the effect of reminding us of the complex relationship between the film and the audience by transforming the viewer into the one being viewed by a character in the film – a technique which has remained unusual throughout cinema history, though we should note the clear homage at the end of Scorsese's GoodFellas!

Alice Guy-Blaché

A roll call of key names from the early days of cinema reveals an era that appears to be exclusively male: Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, Cecil Hepworth, George Méliès, Birt Acre, Edwin Porter. However, these notable directors and producers were also complemented by a French woman who had an immediate and lasting impact on film, Alice Guy. Her directorial debut was with La Fée aux Choux (1896), a one minute story about children born in a cabbage patch, the second fiction film, following the Lumière's L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895) by a few months.

Alice Guy directed more than 300 films between 1896 and 1920 and was also the producer for much of her work. She initially worked for the Gaumont Film Company. Her output was impressive in terms of quality and quantity and she soon became the head of production, supervising other directors. As well as playing a central role in the development of cinematic techniques and narratives, Guy also contributed to technical advances. She used early Gaumont motion picture equipment and Chromophone sound recording technology from the early 1900s. Guy was also an early experimenter, along with Méliès, in special effects such as double exposure and running film backwards. It has also been suggested that she was the first to use representations of aspects of homosexuality in films with the inclusion of effeminate men and women dressed as men.

Alice Guy married Herbert Blaché, head of Gaumont distribution in Britain, and they moved to the USA to oversee Gaumont's interests there. Together they went on to form their own production company, Solax, in New Jersey, helping to establish the East Coast as the centre of US film production before the industry's gradual gravitation towards the West Coast and ultimate settlement in Los Angeles’ Hollywood.

Film techniques and narratives

The lack of clarity in some early films, partly due to the lack of sound, was the reason why inter-titles were often used, either to explain the situation within which events were happening or to elaborate upon an interaction between characters. Similarly, the acting in early films frequently seems exaggerated and theatrical rather than naturalistic because in the absence of sound it too could help clarify the narrative. The exaggerated use of gesture already had a long history in unlicensed theatre, in which dialogue could not be used; this had led to the evolution of the stage melodrama and of a melodramatic acting style. The increasing use of genres also helped explain narratives and raise particular expectations in the audience. Common genres of the time were fantasy, comedy, crime, melodrama, chase and actuality (see Chapter 14 on genre).

By 1905, films were regularly built around narratives which had an identifiable beginning, middle and end, contained motivated characters and concluded with some kind of resolution. However, this highlighted the problem of how to clearly tell a visual story. Thompson and Bordwell have identified this issue and the film-makers’ response as follows:

(Bordwell 2003, p. 43)

Filmmakers came to assume that a film should guide the spectator's attention, making every aspect of the story on the screen as clear as possible. In particular, films increasingly set up a chain of narrative causes and effects. One event would plainly lead to an effect which would in turn cause another effect, and so on.

Over the next ten years conventions were to become established which aided the coherent presentation of film narratives.

Film form and conventions

Movement takes place over time and within space. It was necessary that time and space be dealt with appropriately if films were to be able to tell stories clearly. Camera and editing techniques were to provide the solution. The content and function of shots were clarified through the breaking up of scenes into several takes using different shot sizes and camera angles. The increasing use of close ups provided information and detail to the viewer and made it easier to identify characters and develop greater characterization. Variety of camera angles gave a stronger sense of space through the provision of different perspectives on action and location. However, using a greater variety of shot types meant that how the takes were edited together became more important. Consistency in shot content was necessary in terms of speed and direction, as well as of location and props. An eye-line match also became necessary when editing between one person and another as they interacted with each other. Cross-cutting also became more common (see Chapter 8).

The emphasis on consistency between the takes that were edited together resulted in the concept of continuity editing. The types of shots filmed and the way they were edited together needed to present a smooth flowing narrative that progressed logically and clearly so that the story could be easily understood by the audience. By 1915 these techniques were in common use and were in effect film-making conventions, identified by Noël Burch as the ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’, as distinct from the ‘primitive’ mode of representation that had gone before. Film form had changed radically since the birth of the medium.

Two films that neatly sum up the results of the evolution of film form between 1895 and 1915 are Chaplin's The Tramp and D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, both made in 1915. The Tramp is the story of how a vagabond saves a girl who has been attacked and is then taken in by her family. He comes to believe that she is in love with him, as he is with her, but his heart is broken when her lover arrives. The film makes extensive use of close ups and achieves a depth of characterization unusual in early cinema. The effectiveness of the character development resulted in Chaplin being recognized and remembered for his ability to get an audience to empathize with his character on screen. The Birth of a Nation is set during the American Civil War and while its racism is objectionable, its use of film techniques is admirable. Griffith brought together and refined the techniques that had been developing since 1895. The use of camera and editing not only provided a clear narrative but also managed to involve the viewer emotionally. Variety of shot size and of camera angle were employed throughout with effective use of cross-cutting, the principles of continuity editing were applied to ensure narrative coherence, and characters were well developed and given a depth not often present in films of the time. The film was an epic: it lasted over three hours and cost $110,000 to make.