Cine temprano, por Robert Pearson

Early Cinema
ROBERT PEARSON

In the first two decades of its existence the cinema developed rapidly. What in 1895 had been a mere novelty had by 1913 become an established industry. The earliest films were little more than moving snapshots, barely one minute in length and often consisting of just a single shot. By 1905, they were regularly five to ten minutes long and employed changes of scene and camera position to tell a story or illustrate a theme. Then, in the early 1910s, with the arrival of the first 'feature-length' films, there gradually emerged a new set of conventions for handling complex narratives. By this time too, the making and showing of films had itself become a large-scale business. No longer was the film show a curiosity sandwiched into a variety of other spectacles, from singing or circus acts to magic lantern shows. Instead specialist venues had been created, exclusively devoted to the exhibition of films, and supplied by a number of large production and distribution companies, based in major cities, who first sold and then increasingly rented films to exhibitors all over the world. In the course of the 1910s the single most important centre of supply ceased to be Paris, London, or New York, and became Los Angeles -- Hollywood.
The cinema of this period, from the mid- 1890s to the mid-1910s, is sometimes referred to as 'pre-Hollywood' cinema, attesting to the growing hegemony of the California-based American industry after the First World War. It has also been described as pre-classical, in recognition of the role that a consolidated set of 'classical' narrative conventions was to play in the world cinema from the 1920s onwards. These terms need to be used with caution, as they can imply that the cinema of the early years was only there as a precursor of Hollywood and the classical style which followed. In fact the styles of filmmaking prevalent in the early years were never entirely displaced by Hollywood or classical modes, even in America, and many cinemas went on being pre- or at any rate non-Hollywood in their practices for many years to come. But it remains true that much of the development that took place in the years from 1906 or 1907 can be seen as laying the foundation for what was to become the Hollywood system, in both formal and industrial terms.
For the purposes of this book, therefore, we have divided the period into two. The first half, from the beginnings up to about 1906, we have simply called early cinema, while the second half, from 1907 to the mid-1910s, we have designated transitional since it forms a bridge between the distinctive modes of early cinema and those which came later. Broadly speaking, the early cinema is distinguished by the use of fairly direct presentational modes, and draws heavily on existing conventions of photography and theatre. It is only in the transitional period that specifically cinematic conventions really start to develop, and the cinema acquires the means of creating its distinctive forms of narrative illusion.

INDUSTRY
Various nations lay claim to the invention of moving pictures, but the cinema, like so many other technological innovations, has no precise originating moment and owes its birth to no particular country and no particular person. In fact, one can trace the origins of cinema to such diverse sources as sixteenth-century Italian experiments with the camera obscura, various early nineteenth-century optical toys, and a host of practices of visual representation such as dioramas and panoramas. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, efforts to project continuously moving images on to a screen intensified and inventors/entrepreneurs in several countries presented the 'first' moving pictures to the marvelling public: Edison in the United States; the Lumière brothers in France; Max Skladanowsky in Germany; and William Friese-Greene in Great Britain. None of these men can be called the primary originator of the film medium, however, since only a favourable conjunction of technical circumstances made such an 'invention' possible at this particular moment: improvements in photographic development; the invention of celluloid, the first medium both durable and flexible enough to loop through a projector; and the application of precision engineering and instruments to projector design.
In spite of the internationalization of both film style and technology, the United States and a few European countries retained hegemony over film production, distribution, and exhibition. Initially, French film producers were arguably the most important, if not in terms of stylistic innovation, an area in which they competed with the British and the Americans, then certainly in terms of market dominance at home and internationally. Pride of place must be given to the Lumière brothers, who are frequently, although perhaps inaccurately, credited with projecting the first moving pictures to a paying audience. Auguste and Louis Lumière owned a photographic equipment factory and experimented in their spare time with designing a camera that they dubbed the Cinématographe. It was first demonstrated on 22 March 1895 at a meeting of the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale. Subsequent to this prestigious début, the Lumières continued to publicize their camera as a scientific instrument, exhibiting it at photographic congresses and conferences of learned societies. In December 1895, however, they executed their most famous and influential demonstration, projecting ten films to a paying audience at the Grand Café in Paris.
Precisely dating the first exhibition of moving pictures depends upon whether 'exhibition' means in private, publicly for a paying audience, seen in a Kinetoscope, or projected on a screen. Given these parameters, one could date the first showing of motion pictures from 1893, when Edison first perfected the Kinetoscope, to December 1895 and the Lumières' demonstration at the Grand Café.
The Lumières may not even have been the 'first' to project moving pictures on a screen to a paying audience; this honour probably belongs to the German Max Skladanowsky, who had done the same in Berlin two months before the Cinématographe's famed public exhibition. But despite being 'scooped' by a competitor, the Lumières' business acumen and marketing skill permitted them to become almost instantly known throughout Europe and the United States and secured a place for them in film history. The Cinématographe's technical specifications helped in both regards, initially giving it several advantages over its competitors in terms of production and exhibition. Its relative lightness (16 lb. compared to the several hundred of Edison's Kinetograph), its ability to function as a camera, a projector, and a film developer, and its lack of dependence upon electric current (it was hand-cranked and illuminated by limelight) all made it extremely portable and adaptable. During the first six months of the Lumières' operations in the United States, twenty-one cameramen/projectionists toured the country, exhibiting the Cinématographe at vaudeville houses and fighting off the primary American competition, the Edison Kinetograph.
The Lumières' Cinématographe, which showed primarily documentary material, established French primacy, but their compatriot Georges Mélièlis became the world's leading producer of fiction films during the early cinema period. Mélièlis began his career as a conjurer, using magic lanterns as part of his act at the Théâtre RobertHoudin in Paris. Upon seeing some of the Lumières' films, Mélièlis immediately recognized the potential of the new medium, although he took it in a very different direction from his more scientifically inclined countrymen. Mélièlis's Star Film Company began production in 1896, and by the spring of 1897 had its own studio outside Paris in Montreuil. Producing hundreds of films between 1896 and 1912 and establishing distribution offices in London, Barcelona, and Berlin by 1902 and in New York by 1903, Mélièlis nearly drove the Lumières out of business. However, his popularity began to wane in 1908 as the films of the transitional cinema began to offer a different kind of entertainment and by 1911 virtually the only Mélièlis films released were Westerns produced by Georges's brother Gaston in a Texas studio. Eventually, competitors forced Mélièlis's company into bankruptcy in 1913.
Chief among these competitors was the Pathé Company, which outlasted both Mélièlis and the Lumières. It became one of the most important French film producers during the early period, and was primarily responsible for the French dominance of the early cinema market. PathéFrères was founded in 1896 by Charles Pathé, who followed an aggressive policy of acquisition and expansion, acquiring the Lumières' patents as early as 1902, and the Mélièlis Film Company before the First World War. Pathé also expanded his operations abroad, exploiting markets. ignored by other distributors, and making his firm's name practically synonymous with the cinema in many Third World countries. He created subsidiary production companies in many European nations: Hispano Film ( Spain); Pathé-Russe ( Russia); Film d'Arte Italiano; and PathéBritannia. In 1908 Pathé distributed twice as many films in the United States as all the indigenous manufacturers combined. Despite this initial French dominance, however, various American studios, primary among them the Edison Manufacturing Company, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company of America (after 1909 simply the Biograph Company), and the Vitagraph Company of America (all founded in the late 1890s) had already created a solid basis for their country's future domination of world cinema.
The 'invention' of the moving picture is often associated with the name of Thomas Alva Edison, but, in accordance with contemporary industrial practices, Edison's moving picture machines were actually produced by a team of technicians working at his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, supervised by the Englishman William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Dickson and his associates began working on moving pictures in 1889 and by 1893 had built the Kinetograph, a workable but bulky camera, and the Kinetoscope, a peep-show-like viewing machine in which a continuous strip of film between 40 and 50 feet long ran between an electric lamp and a shutter. They also developed and built the first motion picture studio, necessitated by the Kinetograph's size, weight, and relative immobility. This was a shack whose resemblance to a police van caused it to be popularly dubbed the 'Black Maria'. To this primitive studio came the earliest American film actors, mainly vaudeville performers who travelled to West Orange from nearby New York City to have their (moving) pictures taken. These pictures lasted anywhere from fifteen seconds to one minute and simply reproduced the various performers' stage acts with, for example, Little Egypt, the famous belly-dancer, dancing, or Sandow the Strongman posing.
As with the Lumières, Edison's key position in film history stems more from marketing skill than technical ingenuity. His company was the first to market a commercially viable moving picture machine, albeit one designed for individual viewers rather than mass audiences. Controlling the rights to the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, Edison immediately embarked upon plans for commercial exploitation, entering into business agreements that led to the establishment of Kinetoscope parlours around the country. The first Kinetoscope parlour, a rented store-front with room for ten of the viewing machines each showing a different film, opened in New York City in April 1894. The new technical marvel received a promotional boost when the popular boxing champion Gentleman Jim Corbett went six rounds against Pete Courtney at the Black Maria. The resulting film gained national publicity for Edison's machine, as well as drawing the rapt attention of female viewers, who reportedly formed lines at the Kinetoscope parlours to sneak a peek at the scantily clad Gentleman Jim. Soon other Kinetoscope parlours opened and the machines also became a featured attraction at summer amusement parks.
Until the spring of 1896 the Edison Company devoted itself to shooting films for the Kinetoscope, but, as the novelty of the Kinetoscope parlours wore off and sales of the machines fell off, Thomas Edison began to rethink his commitment to individually oriented exhibition. He acquired the patents to a projector whose key mechanism had been designed by Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins, who had lacked the capital for the commercial exploitation of their invention. The Vitascope, which projected an image on to a screen, was advertised under Edison's name and premièred in New York City in April of 1896. Six films were shown, five produced by the Edison Company and one, Rough Sea at Dover, by the Englishman R. W. Paul. These brief films, 40 feet in length and lasting twenty seconds, were spliced end to end to form a loop, enabling each film to be repeated up to half a dozen times. The sheer novelty of moving pictures, rather than their content or a story, was the attraction for the first film audiences. Within a year there were several hundred Vitascopes giving shows in various locations throughout the United States.
In these early years Edison had two chief domestic rivals. In 1898 two former vaudevillians, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith, founded the Vitagraph Company of America initially to make films for exhibition in conjunction with their own vaudeville acts. In that same year the outbreak of the Spanish-American War markedly increased the popularity of the new moving pictures, which were able to bring the war home more vividly than the penny press and the popular illustrated weeklies. Blackton and Smith immediately took advantage of the situation, shooting films on their New York City rooftop studio that purported to show events taking place in Cuba. So successful did this venture prove that by 1900 the partners issued their first catalogue offering films for sale to other exhibitors, thus establishing Vitagraph as one of the primary American film producers. The third important American studio of the time, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, now primarily known for employing D. W. Griffith between 1908 and 1913, was formed in 1895 to produce flipcards for Mutoscope machines. When W. K. L. Dickson left Edison to join Biograph, the company used his expertise to patent a projector to compete with the Vitascope. This projector apparently gave betterquality projection with less flicker than other machines and quickly replaced the Lumières as Edison's chief competitor. In 1897 Biograph also began to produce films but the Edison Company effectively removed them from the market by entangling them in legal disputes that remained unresolved until 1902.
At the turn of the century, Britain was the third important film-producing country. The Edison Kinetoscope was first seen there in October 1894, but, because of Edison's uncharacteristic failure to patent the device abroad, the Englishman R. W. Paul legally copied the non-protected viewing machine and installed fifteen Kinetoscopes at the exhibition hall at Earl's Court in London. When Edison belatedly sought to protect his interests by cutting off the supply of films, Paul responded by going into production for himself. In 1899, in conjunction with Birt Acres, who supplied the necessary technical expertise, Paul opened the first British film studio, in north London. Another important early British film-maker, Cecil Hepworth, built a studio in his London back garden in 1900. By 1902 Brighton had also become an important centre for British filmmaking with two of the key members of the so-called 'Brighton school', George Albert Smith and James Williamson, each operating a studio.
At this time, production, distribution, and exhibition practices differed markedly from those that were to emerge during the transitional period; the film industry had not yet attained the specialization and division of labour characteristic of large-scale capitalist enterprises. Initially, production, distribution, and exhibition all remained the exclusive province of the film manufacturers. The Lumière travelling cameramen used the adaptable Cinématographe to shoot, develop, and project films, while American studios such as Edison and Biograph usually supplied a projector, films, and even a projectionist to the vaudeville houses that constituted the primary exhibition sites. Even with the rapid emergence of independent travelling showmen in the United States, Britain, and Germany, film distribution remained nonexistent. Producers sold rather than rented their films; a practice which forestalled the development of permanent exhibition sites until the second decade of the cinema's history.
As opposed to the strict division of labour and assemblyline practices that characterized the Hollywood studios, production during this period was non-hierarchical and truly collaborative. One of the most important early film 'directors' was Edwin S. Porter, who had worked as a hired projectionist and then as an independent exhibitor. Porter joined the Edison Company in 1900, first as a mechanic and then as head of production. Despite his nominal position, Porter only controlled the technical aspects of filming and editing while other Edison employees with theatrical experience took charge of directing the actors and the mise-en-scène. Other American studios seem to have practised similar arrangements. At Vitagraph, James Stuart Blackton and Albert Smith traded off their duties in front of and behind the camera, one acting and the other shooting, and then reversing their roles for the next film. In similar fashion, the members of the British Brighton school both owned their production companies and functioned as cameramen. Georges Mélièlis, who also owned his own company, did everything short of actually crank the camera, writing the script, designing sets and costumes, devising trick effects, and often acting. The first true 'director', in the modern sense of being responsible for all aspects of a film's actual shooting, was probably introduced at the Biograph Company in 1903. The increased production of fiction films required that one person have a sense of the film's narrative development and of the connections between individual shots.

STYLE
As the emergence of the film director illustrates, changes in the film texts often necessitated concomitant changes in the production process. But what did the earliest films actually look like? Generally speaking, until 1907, filmmakers concerned themselves with the individual shot, preserving the spatial aspects of the pro-filmic event (the scene that takes place in front of the camera). They did not create temporal relations or story causality by using cinematic interventions. They set the camera far enough from the action to show the entire length of the human body as well as the spaces above the head and below the feet. The camera was kept stationary, particularly in exterior shots, with only occasional reframings to follow the action, and interventions through such devices as editing or lighting were infrequent. This long-shot style is often referred to as a tableau shot or a proscenium arch shot, the latter appellation stemming from the supposed resemblance to the perspective an audience member would have from the front row centre of a theatre. For this reason, pre-1907 film is often accused of being more theatrical than cinematic, although the tableau style also replicates the perspective commonly seen in such other period media as postcards and stereographs, and early film-makers derived their inspiration as much from these and other visual texts as from the theatre.
Concerning themselves primarily with the individual shot, early film-makers tended not to be overly interested in connections between shots; that is, editing. They did not elaborate conventions for linking one shot to the next, for constructing a continuous linear narrative, nor for keeping the viewer oriented in time and space. However, there were some multi-shot films produced during this period, although rarely before 1902. In fact, one can break the pre-1907 years into two subsidiary periods: 18941902/3, when the majority of films consisted of one shot and were what we would today call documentaries, known then, after the French usage, as actualities; and 19037, when the multi-shot, fiction film gradually began to dominate, with simple narratives structuring the temporal and causal relations between shots.
Many films of the 1894-1907 period seem strange from a modern perspective, since early film-makers tended to be quite self-conscious in their narrative style, presenting their films to the viewer as if they were carnival barkers touting their wares, rather than disguising their presence through cinematic conventions as their successors were to do. Unlike the omniscient narrators of realist novels and the Hollywood cinema, the early cinema restricted narrative to a single point of view. For this reason, the early cinema evoked a different relationship between the spectator and the screen, with viewers more interested in the cinema as visual spectacle than as story-teller. So striking is the emphasis upon spectacle during this period that many scholars have accepted Tom Gunning's distinction between the early cinema as a 'cinema of attractions' and the transitional cinema as a 'cinema of narrative integration' ( Gunning, 1986 ). In the 'cinema of attractions', the viewer created meaning not through the interpretation of cinematic conventions but through previously held information related to the pro-filmic event: ideas of spatial coherence; the unity of an event with a recognizable beginning and end; and knowledge of the subject-matter. During the transitional period, films began to require the viewer to piece together a story predicated upon a knowledge of cinematic conventions.

1894-1902/3
The work of the two most important French producers of this period, the Lumières and Mélièlis, provides an example of the textual conventions of the one-shot film. Perhaps the most famous of the films that the Lumières showed in December 1895 is A Train Arriving at a Station (L'Arrivé d'un train en gare de la Ciotat), which runs for about fifty seconds. A stationary camera shows a train pulling into a station and the passengers disembarking, the film continuing until most of them have exited the shot. Apocryphal tales persist that the onrushing cinematic train so terrified audience members that they ducked under their seats for protection. Another of the Lumières' films, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Sortie d'usine), had a less terrifying effect upon its audience. An eye-level camera, set far enough back from the action to show not only the full-length figures of the workers but the high garage-like door through which they exit, observes as the door opens and disgorges the building's occupants, who disperse to either side of the frame. The film ends roughly at the point when all the workers have left. Contemporary accounts indicate that these and other Lumière films fascinated their audiences not by depicting riveting events, but through incidental details that a modern viewer may find almost unnoticeable: the gentle movement of the leaves in the background as a baby eats breakfast; the play of light on the water as a boat leaves the harbour. The first film audiences did not demand to be told stories, but found infinite fascination in the mere recording and reproduction of the movement of animate and inanimate objects.
work, which depicted events that might have taken place even in the camera's absence, this famous film stages action specifically for the moving pictures. A gardener waters a lawn, a boy steps on the hose, halting the flow of water, the gardener peers questioningly at the spigot, the boy removes his foot, and the restored stream of water douses the gardener, who chases, catches, and spanks the boy. The film is shot with a stationary camera in the standard tableau style of the period. At a key point in the action the boy, trying to escape chastisement, exits the frame and the gardener follows, leaving the screen blank for two seconds. A modern film-maker would pan the camera to follow the characters or cut to the offscreen action, but the Lumières did neither, providing an emblematic instance of the preservation of the space of the pro-filmic event taking precedence over story causality or temporality.
Unlike the Lumières, Georges Mélièlis always shot in his studio, staging action for the camera, his films showing fantastical events that could not happen in 'real life'. Although all Mélièlis's films conform to the standard period tableau style, they are also replete with magical appearances and disappearances, achieved through what cinematographers call 'stop action', that is, stopping the camera, having the actor enter or exit the shot, and then starting the camera again to create the illusion that a character has simply vanished or materialized. Mélièlis's films have played a key part in film scholars' debates over the supposed theatricality of early cinematic style. Whereas scholars had previously thought that stop action effects required no editing and hence concluded that Méliès's films were simply 'filmed theatre', examination of the actual negatives reveals that substitution effects were, in fact, produced through splicing or editing. Mélièlis also manipulated the image through the superimposition of one shot over another so that many of the films represent space in a manner more reminiscent of photographic devices developed during the nineteenth century than of the theatre. Films such as L'Homme orchestre (The One-Man Band, 1900) or Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac, 1903) showcased the cinematic multiplication of a single image (in these cases of Mélièlis himself) achieved through the layering of one shot over another.
Despite this cinematic manipulation of the pro-filmic space, Mélièlis's films remain in many ways excessively theatrical, presenting a story as if it were being performed on a stage, a characteristic they have in common with many of the fiction films of the pre-1907 period. Not only does the camera replicate the proscenium arch perspective, but the films stage their action in a shallow playing space between the painted flats and the front of the 'stage', and characters enter or exit either from the wings or through traps. Mélièlis boasted, in a 1907 article, that his studio's shooting area replicated a theatrical stage 'constructed exactly like one in a theatre and fitted with trapdoors, scenery slots, and uprights'.
For many years film theorists pointed to the Lumière and Mélièlis films as the originating moment of the distinction between documentary and fiction film-making, given that the Lumières for the most part filmed 'real' events and Mélièlis staged events. But such distinctions were not a part of contemporary discourse, since many pre-1907 films mixed what we would today call 'documentary' material, that is, events or objects existing independently of the film-maker, with 'fictional' material, that is, events or objects specifically fabricated for the camera. Take, for example, one of the rare multi-shot films of the period, The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison ( Edison, 1901), a compilation of four self-contained individual shots dealing with the execution of the assassin of President William McKinley. The first two shots are panoramas of the exterior of the prison, the third shows an actor portraying the condemned man in his cell, and the fourth re-enacts his electrocution. Given films of this kind, it is more useful to discuss very early genres in terms of similarities of subject-matters rather than in terms of an imposed distinction between fiction and documentary.
Many turn-of-the-century films reflected the period's fascination with travel and transportation. The train film, established by the Lumières, practically became a genre of its own. Each studio released a version, sometimes shooting a moving train from a stationary camera and sometimes positioning a camera on the front of or inside the train to produce a travelling shot, since the illusion of moving through space seemed to thrill early audiences. The train genre related to the travelogue, films featuring scenes both exotic and familiar, and replicating in motion the immensely popular postcards and stereographs of the period. Public events, such as parades, world's fairs, and funerals, also provided copious material for early cameramen. Both the travelogue and the public event film consisted of self-contained, individual shots, but producers did offer combinations of these films for sale together with suggestions for their projection order, so that, for example, an exhibitor could project several discrete shots of the same event, and so give his audience a fuller and more varied picture of it. Early film-makers also replicated popular amusements, such as vaudeville acts and boxing matches, that could be relatively easily reenacted for the camera. The first Kinetoscope films in 1894 featured vaudeville performers, including contortionists, performing animals, and dancers, as well as scenes from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Again, the shots functioned as self-contained units and were marketed as such, but exhibitors had the option of putting them together to form an evening's entertainment. By 1897 the popular filmed boxing matches could potentially run for an hour. The same was true of another of the most popular of early genres, Passion plays telling the life of Christ, which were often filmed recordings of theatrical companies' performances. A compilation of shots of the play's key events could last well over an hour. A third group of films told one-shot mini-narratives, most often of a humorous nature. Some were gag films, resembling the Lumières' Watering the Gardener, in which the comic action takes place in the pro-filmic event, as for instance in Elopement by Horseback ( Edison, 1891), where a young man seeking to elope with his sweetheart engages in a wrestling match with the girl's father. Others relied for their humour upon trick effects such as stop action, superimposition, and reverse action. The most famous are the Mélièlis films, but this form was also seen in some of the early films made by Porter for the Edison Company and by the film-makers of the English Brighton school. These films became increasingly complicated, sometimes involving more than one shot. In Williamson's film The Big Swallow ( 1901), the first shot shows a photographer about to take a picture of a passer-by. The second shot replicates the photographer's viewpoint through the camera lens, and shows the passerby's head growing bigger and bigger as he approaches the camera. The man's mouth opens and the film cuts to a shot of the photographer and his camera falling into a black void. The film ends with a shot of the passer-by walking away munching contentedly.

1902/3-1907
In this period, the multi-shot film emerged as the norm rather than the exception, with films no longer treating the individual shot as a self-contained unit of meaning but linking one shot to another. However, film-makers may have been using a succession of shots to capture and emphasize the highpoints of the action rather than construct either a linear narrative causality or clearly establish temporal-spatial relations. As befits the 'cinema of attractions', the editing was intended to enhance visual pleasure rather than to refine narrative developments.
One of the strangest editing devices used in this period was overlapping action, which resulted from film-makers' desire both to preserve the pro-filmic space and to emphasize the important action by essentially showing it twice. Georges Mélièli's A Trip to the Moon, perhaps the most famous film of 1902, covers the landing of a space capsule on the moon in two shots. In the first, taken from 'space', the capsule hits the man in the moon in the eye, and his expression changes from a grin to a grimace. In the second shot, taken from the 'moon's surface', the capsule once again lands. These two shots, which show the same event twice, can disconcert a modern viewer. This repetition of action around a cut can be seen in an American film of the same year, How They Do Things on the Bowery, directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. An irate waiter ejects a customer unable to pay his bill. In an interior shot the waiter throws the man out and hurls his suitcase after him. In the following exterior shot, the customer emerges from the restaurant followed closely by his suitcase. In a 1904 Biograph film The Widow and the Only Man, overlapping action is used not to cover interior and exterior events but to show the same event a second time in closer scale. In the first shot a woman accepts her suitor's flowers and smells them appreciatively. Then, rather than a'match cut', in which the action picks up at the beginning of the second shot from where it left off at the end of the first, as would be dictated by present-day conventions, a closer shot shows her repeating precisely the same action.
While overlapping action was a common means of linking shots, film-makers during this period also experimented with other methods of establishing spatial and temporal relations. One sees an instance of this in Trip to the Moon: having landed on the moon, the intrepid French explorers encounter unfriendly extraterrestrials (who remarkably resemble those 'hostile natives' the French were encountering in their colonies at this very time!). The explorers flee to their spaceship and hurry back to the safety of Earth, their descent covered in four shots and twenty seconds of film time. In the first shot, the capsule leaves the moon, exiting at the bottom of the frame. In the second shot, the capsule moves from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. In the third the capsule moves from the top of the frame to the water, and in the fourth the capsule moves from the water's surface to the sea-bed. This sequence is filmed much as it might be today, with the movement of the spaceship following the convention of directional continuity, that is, an object or a character should appear to continue moving in the same direction from shot to shot, the consistent movement serving to establish the spatial and temporal relationships between individual shots. But while a modern film-maker would cut directly from shot to shot, Mélièlis dissolved from shot to shot, a transitional device that now implies a temporal ellipsis. In this regard, then, the sequence can still be confusing for a modern viewer.
Linking shots through dissolves was not in fact unusual in this period, and one can see another example in Alice in Wonderland ( Hepworth, 1903). However, another English film-maker, James Williamson, a member of the Brighton school, made two films in 1901, Stop Thief! and Fire!, in which direct cuts continue the action from shot to shot. Stop Thief! shows a crowd chasing a tramp who has stolen a joint from a butcher, motivating connections by the diagonal movement of characters through each of the individual shots; the thief and then his pursuers entering the frame at the back and exiting the frame past the camera. The fact that the camera remains with the scene until the last character has exited reveals how character movement motivates the editing. Film-makers found this editing device so effective that an entire genre of chase films arose, such as Personal ( Biograph, 1904), in which would-be brides pursue a wealthy Frenchman. Many films also incorporated a chase into their narratives, as did the famous 'first' Western The Great Train Robbery ( Edison, 1903), in which the posse pursues the bandits for several shots in the fllm's second half.
In Fire!, Williamson uses a similar editing strategy to that employed in Stop Thief!, the movement of a policeman between shots 1 and 2 and the movement of fire engines between shots 2 and 3 establishing spatial-temporal relations. But in the film's fourth and fifth shots, where other film-makers might have used overlapping action, Williamson experiments with a cut on movement that bears a strong resemblance to what is now called a match cut. Shot 4, an interior, shows a fireman coming through the window of a room in a burning house and rescuing the inhabitant. Shot 5 is an exterior of the burning house and begins as the fireman and the rescued victim emerge through the window. Although the continuity is 'imperfect' from a modern perspective, the innovation is considerable. In his 1902 film Life of An American Fireman, undoubtedly influenced by Fire!, Porter still employed overlapping action, showing a similar rescue in its entirety first from the interior and then from the exterior perspective. A year later, however, Williamson's compatriot G. A. Smith also created an 'imperfect' match cut, The Sick Kitten ( 1903), cutting from a long view of two children giving a kitten medicine to a closer view of the kitten licking the spoon.
During this period, film-makers also experimented with cinematically fracturing the space of the pro-filmic event, primarily to enhance the viewers' visual pleasure through a closer shot of the action rather than to emphasize details necessary for narrative comprehension. The Great Train Robbery includes a medium shot of the outlaw leader, Barnes, firing his revolver directly at the camera, which in modern prints usually concludes the film. The Edison catalogue, however, informed exhibitors that the shot could come at the beginning or the end of the film. Narratively non-specific shots of this nature became quite common, as in the British film Raid on a Coiner's Den ( Alfred Collins , 1904), which begins with a close-up insert of three hands coming into the frame from different directions, one holding a pistol, another a pair of handcuffs, and a third forming a clenched fist. In Porter's own oneshot film Photographing a Female Crook, a moving camera produces the closer view as it dollies into a woman contorting her face to prevent the police from taking an accurate mug shot.
Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction, and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, were then there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information. In yet another example of the innovative film-making of the Brighton school, Grandma's Reading Glasses ( G. A. Smith, Warwick Trading Company, 1900), a little boy looks through his grandmother's spectacles at a variety of objects, a watch, a canary, and a kitten, which the film shows in inserted close-ups. In The Gay Shoe Clerk ( Edison/ Porter, 1903) a shoeshop assistant flirts with his female customer. A cut-in approximates his view of her ankle as she raises her skirt in tantalizing fashion. This close-up insert is an example not only of the visual pleasure afforded by the 'cinema of attractions' but of the early cinema's voyeuristic treatment of the female body. Despite the fact that their primary purpose is not to emphasize narrative developments, these shots' attribution to a character in the film distinguishes them from the totally unmotivated closer views in The Great Train Robbery and Raid on a Coiner's Den.
The editing strategies of the pre- 1907 'cinema of attractions'were primarily designed to enhance visual pleasure rather than to tell a coherent, linear narrative. But many of these films did tell simple stories and audiences undoubtedly derived narrative, as well as visual, pleasure. Despite the absence of internal strategies to construct spatial-temporal relations and linear narratives, the original audiences made sense of these films, even though modern viewers can find them all but incoherent. This is because the films of the 'cinema of attractions' relied heavily on their audiences' knowledge of other texts, from which the films were directly derived or indirectly related. Early film-makers did learn how to make meaning in a new medium, but were not working in a vacuum. The cinema had deep roots in the rich popular culture of the age, drawing heavily during its infant years upon the narrative and visual conventions of other forms of popular entertainment. The pre-1907 cinema has been accused of being 'non-cinematic' and overly theatrical, and indeed film-makers like Mélièlis were heavily influenced by nondramatic theatrical practices, but for the most part lengthy theatrical dramas provided an inappropriate model for a medium that began with films of less than a minute, and only became an important source of inspiration as films grew longer during the transitional period. As the first Edison Kinetoscope films illustrate, vaudeville, with its variety format of unrelated acts and lack of concern for developed stories, constituted a very important source material and the earliest film-makers relied upon media such as the melodrama and pantomime (emphasizing visual effects rather than dialogue), magic lanterns, comics, political cartoons, newspapers, and illustrated song slides.
Magic lanterns, early versions of slide projectors often lit by kerosene lamps, proved a particularly important influence upon films, for magic lantern practices permitted the projection of 'moving pictures', which set precedents for the cinematic representation of time and space. Magic lanterns employed by travelling exhibitors often had elaborate lever and pulley mechanisms to produce movement within specially manufactured slides. Long slides pulled slowly through the slide holder produced the equivalent of a cinematic pan. Two slide holders mounted on the same lantern permitted the operator to produce a dissolve by switching rapidly between slides. The use of two slides also permitted 'editing', as operators could cut from long shots to close-ups, exteriors to interiors, and from characters to what they were seeing. Grandma's Reading Glasses, in fact, derives from a magic lantern show. Magic lantern lectures given by travelling exhibitors such as the Americans Burton Holmes and John Stoddard provided precedents for the train and travelogue films, the lantern illustrations often intercutting exterior views of the train, interior views of the traveller in the train, and views of scenery and of interesting incidents.
In addition to mimicking the visual conventions of other media, film-makers derived many of their films from stories already well known to the audience. Edison advertised its Night before Christmas ( Porter, 1905) by saying the film 'closely follows the time-honored Christmas legend by Clement Clarke Moore'. Both Biograph and Edison made films of the hit song 'Everybody Works but Father'. Vitagraph based its Happy Hooligan series on a cartoon tramp character whose popular comic strip ran in several New York newspaper Sunday supplements. Many early films presented synoptic versions of fairly complex narratives, their producers presumably depending upon their audiences'pre-existing knowledge of the subject-matter rather than upon cinematic conventions for the requisite narrative coherence. L'Épopée napoléonienne ('The Epic of Napoleon', 1903-4 Pathé) presents Napoleon's life through a series of tableaux, drawing upon well-known historical incidents (the coronation, the burning of Moscow) and anecdotes ( Napoleon standing guard for the sleeping sentry) but with no attempt at causal linear connection or narrative development among its fifteen shots. In similar fashion, multi-shot films such as Ten Nights in a Barroom ( Biograph, 1903) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (Vitagraph, 1903) presented only the highlights of these familiar and oftperformed melodramas, with shot connections provided not by editing strategies but by the audiences' knowledge of intervening events. The latter film, however, appears to be one of the earliest to have intertitles. These title cards, summarizing the action of the shot which followed, appeared at the same time as the multi-shot film, around 1903-4, and seem to indicate a recognition on the part of the producers of the necessity for internally rather than externally derived narrative coherence.

EXHIBITION
Cinema initially existed not as a popular commercial medium but as a scientific and educational novelty. The cinematic apparatus itself and its mere ability to reproduce movement constituted the attraction, rather than any particular film. In many countries, moving picture machines were first seen at world's fairs and scientific expositions: the Edison Company had planned to début its Kinetoscope at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair although it failed to assemble the machines in time, and moving picture machines were featured in several areas of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.
Fairly rapidly, cinema exhibition was integrated into pre-existing venues of 'popular culture' and 'refined culture', although the establishment of venues specifically for the exhibition of films did not come until 1905 in the United States and a little later elsewhere. In the United States, films were shown in the popular vaudeville houses, which by the turn of the century catered to a reasonably well-to-do audience willing to pay 25 cents for an afternoon or evening's entertainment. Travelling showmen, who lectured on educational topics, toured with their own projectors and showed films in local churches and operahouses, charging audiences in large metropolitan areas the same $2 that it cost to see a Broadway show. Cheaper and more popular venues included tent shows, set up at fairs and carnivals, and temporarily rented store-fronts, the forerunners of the famous nickelodeons. Early film audiences in the United States, therefore, tended to be quite heterogeneous, and dominated by no one class.
Early exhibition in Britain, as in most European countries, followed a similar pattern to the United States, with primary exhibition venues being fairgrounds, music halls, and disused shops. Travelling showmen played a crucial role in establishing the popularity of the new medium, making films an important attraction at fairgrounds. Given that fairs and music halls attracted primarily working-class patrons, early film audiences in Britain, as well as on the Continent, had a more homogeneous class base than in the United States.
Wherever films were shown, and whoever saw them, the exhibitor during this period often had as much control over the films' meanings as did the producers themselves. Until the advent of multi-shot films and intertitles, around 1903-4, the producers supplied the individual units but the exhibitor put together the programme, and single-shot films permitted decision-making about the projection order and the inclusion of other material such as lantern slide images and title cards. Some machines facilitated this process by combining moving picture projection with a stereopticon, or lantern slide projector, allowing the exhibitor to make a smooth transition between film and slides. In New York City, the Eden Musée put together a special show on the Spanish-American War, using lantern slides and twenty or more films from different producers. While still primarily an exhibitor, Cecil Hepworth suggested interspersing lantern slides with films and 'stringing the pictures together into little sets or episodes' with commentary linking the material together. When improvements in the projector permitted showing films that lasted more than fifty seconds, exhibitors began splicing twelve or more films together to form programmes on particular subjects. Not only could exhibitors manipulate the visual aspects of their programmes, they also added sound of various kinds, for, contrary to popular opinion, the silent cinema was never silent. At the very least, music, from the full orchestra to solo piano, accompanied all films shown in the vaudeville houses. Travelling exhibitors lectured over the films and lantern slides they projected, the spoken word capable of imposing a very different meaning on the image from the one that the producer may have intended. Many exhibitors even added sound effects -- horses' hooves, revolver shots, and so forth-and spoken dialogue delivered by actors standing behind the screen.
By the end of its first decade of existence, the cinema had established itself as an interesting novelty, one distraction among many in the increasingly frenetic pace of twentieth-century life. Yet the fledgeling medium was still very much dependent upon pre-existing media for its formal conventions and story-telling devices, upon somewhat outmoded individually-driven production methods, and upon pre-existing exhibition venues such as vaudeville and fairs. In its next decade, however, the cinema took major steps toward becoming the mass medium of the twentieth century, complete with its own formal conventions, industry structure, and exhibition venues.

Bibliography
Balio, Tino (ed.) ( 1985), The American Film Industry.
Barnes, John ( 1976). The Beginnings of the Cinema in England.
Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin ( 1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
Chanan, Michael ( 1980), The Dream that Kicks.
Cherchi Paolo Usai, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.) ( 1990), Before Caligari.
Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, André, and Gunning, Tom (eds.) ( 1992), Une invention du diable?
Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.) ( 1990), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.
Fell, John L. ( 1983), Film before Griffith.
--- ( 1986), Film and the Narrative Tradition.
Gunning, Tom ( 1986), "The Cinema of Attractions".
Holman, Roger (ed.) ( 1982), Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytic Study.
Low, Rachael, and Manvell, Roger ( 1948), The History of the British Film, 1896-1906.
Musser, Charles ( 1990), The Emergence of Cinema.
--- ( 1991), Before the Nickelodeon.

En: The Oxford History of World Cinema EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

The Early Years, por Cherchi Usai

THE EARLY YEARS
Origins and Survival
PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

PRE-CINEMA, FILM, TELEVISION
The history of cinema did not begin with a 'big bang'. No single event -- whether Edison's patented invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891 or the Lumière brothers' first projection of films to a paying audience in 1895 -- can be held to separate a nebulous pre-cinema from cinema proper. Rather there is a continuum which begins with early experiments and devices aimed at presenting images in sequence (from Étienne Gaspard Robertson's Phantasmagoria of 1798 to Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes lumineuses of 1892) and includes not only the emergence in the 1890s of an apparatus recognizable as cinema but also the forerunners of electronic image-making. The first experiments in transmitting images by a television-type device are in fact as old as the cinema: Adriano de Paiva published his first studies on the subject in 1880, and Georges Rignoux seems to have achieved an actual transmission in 1909. Meanwhile certain 'pre-cinema' techniques continued to be used in conjunction with cinema proper during the years around 1900-5 when the cinema was establishing itself as a new mass medium of entertainment and instruction, and lantern slides with movement effects continued for a long time to be shown in close conjunction with film screenings.
Magic lantern, film, and television, therefore, do not constitute three separate universes (and fields of study), but belong together as part of a single process of evolution. It is none the less possible to distinguish them, not only technologically and in terms of the way they were diffused, but also chronologically. The magic lantern show gradually gives way to the film show at the beginning of the twentieth century, while television emerges fully only in the second half of the century. In this succession, what distinguishes cinema is on the one hand its technological base -- photographic images projected in quick succession giving the illusion of continuity -- and on the other hand its use prevailingly as large-scale public entertainment.

THE BASIC APPARATUS
Films produce their illusion of continuous movement by passing a series of discrete images in quick succession in front of a light source enabling the images to be projected on a screen. Each image is held briefly in front of the light and then rapidly replaced with the next one. If the procedure is rapid and smooth enough, and the images similar enough to each other, discontinuous images are then perceived as continuous and an illusion of movement is created. The perceptual process involved was known about in the nineteenth century, and given the name persistence of vision, since the explanation was thought to lie in the persistence of the image on the retina of the eye for long enough to make perception of each image merge into the perception of the next one. This explanation is no longer regarded as adequate, and modern psychology prefers to see the question in terms of brain functions rather than of the eye alone. But the original hypothesis was sufficiently fertile to lead to a number of experiments in the 1880s and 1890s aimed at reproducing the so-called persistence of vision effect with sequential photographs.
The purposes of these experiments were various. They were both scientific and commercial, aimed at analysing movement and at reproducing it. In terms of the emergence of cinema the most important were those which set out to reproduce movement naturally, by taking pictures at a certain speed (a minimum of ten or twelve per second and generally higher) and showing them at the same speed. In fact throughout the silent period the correspondence between camera speed and projection was rarely perfect. A projection norm of around 16 pictures ('frames') per second seems to have been the most common well into the 1920s, but practices differed considerably and it was always possible for camera speeds to be made deliberately slower or faster to produce effects of speeded-up or slowed-down motion when the film was projected. It was only with the coming of synchronized sound-tracks, which had to be played at a constant speed, that a norm of 24 frames per second (f.p.s.) became standard for both camera and projector.
First of all, however, a mechanism had to be created which would enable the pictures to be exposed in the camera in quick succession and projected the same way. A roll of photographic film had to be placed in the camera and alternately held very still while the picture was exposed and moved down very fast to get on to the next picture, and the same sequence had to be followed when the film was shown. Moving the film and then stopping it so frequently put considerable strain on the film itself -- a problem which was more severe in the projector than in the camera, since the negative was exposed only once whereas the print would be shown repeatedly. The problem of intermittent motion, as it is called, exercised the minds of many of the pioneers of cinema, and was solved only by the introduction of a small loop in the threading of the film where it passed the gate in front of the lens (see inset).

FILM STOCK
The moving image as a form of collective entertainment -what we call 'cinema' -- developed and spread in the form of photographic images printed on a flexible and semitransparent celluloid base, cut into strips 35 mm. wide. This material -- 'film' -- was devised by Henry M. Reichenbach for George Eastman in 1889, on the basis of inventions variously attributed to the brothers J. W. and I. S. Hyatt ( 1865), to Hannibal Goodwin ( 1888), and to Reichenbach himself. The basic components of the photographic film used since the end of the nineteenth century have remained unchanged over the years. They are: a transparent base, or support; a very fine layer of adhesive substrate made of gelatine; and a light-sensitive emulsion which makes the film opaque on one side. The emulsion generally consists of a suspension of silver salts in gelatine and is attached to the base by means of the layer of adhesive substrate. The base of the great majority of 35 mm. films produced before February 1951 consists of cellulose nitrate, which is a highly flammable substance. From that date onwards the nitrate base has been replaced by one of cellulose acetate, which is far less flammable, or increasingly by polyester. From early times, however, various forms of 'safety' film were tried out, at first using cellulose diacetate (invented by Eichengrun and Becker as early as 1901), or by coating the nitrate in non-flammable substances. The first known examples of these procedures date back to 1909. Safety film became the norm for non-professional use after the First World War.
The black and white negative film used up to the mid1920s was so-called orthochromatic. It was sensitive to ultraviolet, violet, and blue light, and rather less sensitive to green and yellow. Red light did not affect the silver bromide emulsion at all. To prevent parts of the scene from appearing on the screen only in the form of indistinct dark blobs, early cinematographers had to practise a constant control of colour values on the set. Certain colours had to be removed entirely from sets and costumes. Actresses avoided red lipstick, and interior scenes were shot against sets painted in various shades of grey. A new kind of emulsion called panchromatic was devised for Gaumont by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1912. In just over a decade it became the preferred stock for all the major production companies. It was less light-sensitive in absolute terms than orthochrome, which meant that enhanced systems of studio lighting had to be developed. But it was far better balanced and allowed for the reproduction of a wider range of greys.
In the early days, however, celluloid film was not the only material tried out in the showing of motion pictures. Of alternative methods the best known was the Mutoscope. This consisted of a cylinder to which were attached several hundred paper rectangles about 70 mm. wide. These paper rectangles contained photographs which, if watched in rapid sequence through a viewer, gave the impression of continuous movement. There were even attempts to produce films on glass: the Kammatograph ( 1901) used a disc with a diameter of 30 cm., containing some 600 photographic frames arranged in a spiral. There were experiments involving the use of translucent metal with a photographic emulsion on it which could be projected by reflection, and films with a surface in relief which could be passed under the fingers of blind people, on a principle similar to Braille.

FORMATS
The 35 mm. width (or 'gauge') for cellulose was first adopted in 1892 by Thomas Edison for his Kinetoscope, a viewing device which enabled one spectator at a time to watch brief segments of film. The Kinetoscope was such a commercial success that subsequent machines for reproducing images in movement adopted 35 mm. as a standard format. This practice had the support of the Eastman Company, whose photographic film was 70 mm. wide, and therefore only had to be cut lengthwise to produce film of the required width. It is also due to the mechanical structure of the Kinetoscope that 35 mm. film has four perforations, roughly rectangular in shape, on both sides of each frame, used for drawing the film through the camera and projector. Other pioneers at the end of the nineteenth century used a different pattern. The Lumière brothers, for example, used a single circular perforation on each side. But it was the Edison method which was soon adopted as standard, and remains so today. It was the Edison company too who set the standard size and shape of the 35 mm. frame, at approximately 1 in. wide and 0.75 in. high.
Although these were to become the standards, there were many experiments with other gauges of film stock, both in the early period and later. In 1896 the Prestwich Company produced a 60 mm. film strip, an example of which is preserved in the National Film and Television Archive in London, and the same width (but with a different pattern of perforations) was used by Georges Demený in France. The Veriscope Company in America introduced a 63 mm. gauge; one film in this format still survives -- a record of the historic heavyweight championship fight between Corbett and Fitzsimmons in 1897. Around the same time Louis Lumière also experimented with 70 mm. film which yielded a picture area 60 mm. wide and 45 mm. high. All these systems encountered technical problems, particularly in projection. Though some further experiments took place towards the end of the silent period, the use of wide gauges such as 65 and 70 mm. did not come into its own until the late 1950s.
More important than any attempts to expand the image, however, were those aimed at reducing it and producing equipment suitable for non-professional users.
In 1900 the French company Gaumont began marketing its 'Chrono de Poche', a portable camera which used 15 mm. film with a single perforation in the centre. Two years later the Warwick Trading Company in England introduced a 17.5 mm. film for amateurs, designed to be used on a machine called the Biokam which (like the first Lumière machines) doubled as camera, printer, and projector; this idea was taken up by Ernemann in Germany and then by Pathé in France in the 1920s. Meanwhile in 1912 Pathé had also introduced a system that used 28 mm. film on a non-flammable diacetate base and had a picture area only slightly smaller than 35 mm.
An alternative to celluloid film, the Kammatograph (c. 1900) used a glass disc with the film frames arranged in a spiral
The amateur gauge par excellence, however, was 16 mm. on a non-flammable base, devised by Eastman Kodak in 1920. In its original version, known as the Kodascope, this worked on the reversal principle, producing a direct positive print on the original film used in the camera. Kodak launched their 16 mm. film on the market in 1923, and around the same time Pathé brought out their 'PathéBaby', using 9.5 mm. non-flammable stock. For many years 9.5 was a fierce competitor with 16 mm., and it survived for a long time as a reduced projection gauge both for amateur film-making and for the showing of films originally made on 35 mm.
Filoteo Alberini, unidentified 70 mm. film ( 1911). Frame enlargement from a negative in the film collection at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
There were also more exotic formats, using film divided into parallel rows which could be exposed in succession. Of these only Edison's Home Kinetoscope, using 22 mm. film divided into three parallel rows with an image-width of just over 5 mm., each of them separated by a line of perforations, had any significant commercial application.

COLOUR
As early as 1896, copies of films which had been handcoloured frame by frame with very delicate brushes were available. The results achieved by this technique were often spectacular, as in the case of Georges Méliès's Le Royaume des fées ( 1903), whose images have the glow of medieval miniatures. It was very difficult, however, to ensure that the colour occupied a precise area of the frame. To achieve this, Pathé in 1906 patented a mechanical method of colouring the base called Pathécolor. This method, also known as 'au pochoir' in French and stencil in English, allowed for the application of half a dozen different tonalities.
A far less expensive method was to give the film a uniform colour for each frame or sequence in order to reinforce the figurative effect or dramatic impact. Basically there were three ways of doing this. There was tinting, which was achieved either by applying a coloured glaze to the base, or by dipping the film in a solution of coloured dyes, or by using stock which was already coloured. Then there was toning, in which the silver in the emulsion was replaced with a coloured metallic salt, without affecting the gelatine on the film. And finally there was mordanting, a variety of toning in which the photographic emulsion was treated with a non-soluble silver salt capable of fixing an organic colouring agent. Tinting, toning, mordanting, and mechanical colouring could be combined, thus multiplying the creative possibilities of each technique. A particularly fascinating variation on tinting technique is provided by the Handschiegl Process (also known as the Wyckoff-DeMille Process, 1916-31), which was an elaborate system derived from the techniques of lithography.
The first attempts (by Frederick Marshall Lee and Edward Raymond Turner) to realize colour films using the superimposition of red, green, and blue images date back to 1899. But it was only in 1906 that George Albert Smith achieved a commercially viable result with his Kinemacolor. In front of the camera Smith placed a semi-transparent disc divided into two sectors: red and blue-green. The film was then projected with the same filters at a speed of 32 frames per second, and the two primary colours were thus 'merged' in an image which showed only slight chromatic variations but produced an undeniable overall effect. Smith's invention was widely imitated and developed into three-colour systems by Gaumont in 1913 and the German Agfa Company in 1915.
The first actual colour-sensitive emulsion was invented by Eastman Kodak around 1915 and shortly afterwards marketed under the trademark Kodachrome. This was still only a two-colour system, but it was the first stage in a series of remarkable developments. Around the same time a company founded by Herbert T. Kalmus, W. Burton Westcott, and Daniel Frost Comstock -- the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation -- began experimenting with a system based on the additive synthesis of two colours; disappointed by the results thus obtained, the three changed tack in 1919 and began exploring (still with two colours only) the possibility of using the principle of subtractive synthesis first elaborated by Duclos du Hauron in 1868. This worked by combining images each of which had filtered out light of a particular colour. When the images were combined, the colour balance was restored. Using the subtractive principle the Technicolor team were ready within three years to present a colour film -- The Toll of the Sea ( Chester M. Franklin, Metro Pictures, 1922) -created on two negatives and consisting of two sets of positive images with separate colours printed back to back.
The late 1910s and early 1920s saw many other inventions in the field of colour, but by the end of the decade it was clear that Kalmus and his associates were way ahead of the field, and it was their system that was to prevail for professional film-making throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile the great majority of films during the silent period continued to be produced using one or other of the methods of colouring the print described above. Literally black and white films were in the minority, generally those made by smaller companies or comic shorts.

SOUND
Almost all 'silent' films had some sort of sound accompaniment. Early film shows had lecturers who gave a commentary on the images going past on the screen, explaining their content and meaning to the audience. In a number of non-western countries this practice continued long beyond the early period. In Japan, where silent cinema remained the rule well into the 1930s, there developed the art of the benshi, who provided gestures and an original text to accompany the image.
Along with speech came music. This was at first improvised on the piano, then adapted from the current popular repertoire, and then came to be specially commissioned. On big occasions this music would be performed by orchestras, choirs, and opera singers, while a small band or just a pianist would play in less luxurious establishlnents. Exhibitors who could not afford the performance of original music had two choices. The first was to equip a pianist, organist, or small band with a musical score, generally consisting of selections of popular tunes and classics in the public domain ('cue sheets'), which provided themes suitable to accompany different episodes of the film. The second, more drastic, was to fall back on mechanical instruments, from the humble pianola to huge fairground organs powered by compressed air into which the 'score' was inserted in the form of a roll of punched paper.
Music was sometimes accompanied by noise effects. These were usually obtained by performers equipped with a wide array of objects reproducing natural and artificial sounds. But the same effects could be produced by machines, of which a particularly famous and elaborate example was the one in use at the Gaumont Hippodrome cinema in Paris.
From the beginning, however, the pioneers of the moving image had more grandiose ambitions. As early as April 1895, Edison put forward a system for synchronizing his twin inventions of phonograph and Kinetoscope. Pathé also seems to have attempted the synchronization of films and discs around 1896. All such systems, however, were hampered by the lack of amplification to project the sound in large auditoriums.
The alternative to synchronizing films and discs was to print the sound directly on the film. The first experiments in this direction took place at the beginning of the century, and in 1906 Eugéne-Auguste Lauste patented a machine capable of recording images and sound on the same base.
An early example of split-screen technique in an unidentified documentary on Venice. Title on print Santa Lucia, c. 1912
It was only after the First World War that the decisive steps were taken towards the achievement of synchronized sound film. The German team of Vogt, Engel, and Massolle established a method of recording sound photographically by converting the sounds into light patterns on a separate film strip and their TriErgon system was premièred in Berlin in 1922. Kovalendov in the Soviet Union and Lee De Forest in the United States were also working in the same direction. De Forest's Phonofilm ( 1923) involved the use of a photoelectric cell to read a sound-track printed on the same strip of film as the image. Meanwhile the introduction of electric recording and the thermionic valve as an offshoot of radio technology solved the problem of amplifying the sound to make it audible in theatres.
In 1926 the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. presented Don Juan, with John Barrymore, using the Vitaphone system of sound synchronization. This was a sound-ondisc system, linking the projector to large discs, 16 in. in diameter, which ran at a speed of 33¼ r.p.m., with the needle starting at the centre and going outwards. The Vitaphone system was used again the following year for the first 'talking' picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, and continued in being for a few more years. Meanwhile a rival studio, Fox, had bought up the rights on the TriErgon and Photophone patents, using them to add sound to films that had already been shot. Fox's Movietone soundon-film system proved far more practical than Vitaphone, and became the basis for the generalized introduction of synchronized sound in the early 1930s.

ASPECT RATIO
The size and shape of the 35 mm. film frame remained virtually unchanged throughout the silent period, at about 23 mm. Oust under 1 in.) wide and 18 mm. (0.75 in.) high. The spacing of the frames meant each foot of film contained 16 frames. This too has remained unaltered, and continues to be the standard today. When projected, the ratio between width and height worked out at between 1.31 and 1.38 to 1. With the coming of sound the frame size was altered slightly to accommodate the sound-track, but the projection ratio remained roughly the same -- at approximately 4:3 -- until the arrival of widescreen processes in the 1950s. In the silent and early sound periods there were a few attempts to change the size and shape of the projected picture. The sides of the frame were occasionally masked out, to produce a square picture, as in the case of Murnau's Tabu ( 1931). In 1927 the Frenchman Henri Chrétien presented the first anamorphic system, known as Hypergonar, in which the image was 'squeezed' by the camera lens to accommodate a wider picture on the frame, and then 'unsqueezed' in the projector for presentation on a wide screen. This was an early forerunner of CinemaScope and the other anamorphic systems which came into commercial use in the 1950s. Other experiments included Magnascope ( 1926), which used a wide-angle projector lens to fill a large screen, and devices for linking multiple projectors together. As early as 1900 Raoul Grimoin-Sanson attempted to hitch up ten 70 mm. projectors to produce a 360-degree 'panorama' completely surrounding the spectator. More famous (though equally ephemeral) was the Polyvision system used in the celebrated 'triptych' sequence in Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), where three strips of film are simultaneously projected alongside each other to produce a single image.

PROJECTION
The normal method of projection from the earliest times involved placing the projector at the back of the hall and projecting the image on to the screen in a cone of light over the heads of the audience. Occasional attempts were made to devise alternative spatial arrangements. In 1909, for example, the German Messter Company experimented with showing its 'Alabastra' colour films through a complex system of mirrors on to a thin veiled screen from a projection booth placed under the theatre floor. It was also possible to project on to the screen from behind, but this process (known as back-projection) took up a lot of space and has rarely been used for public presentation. It came into use in the sound period as a form of special effect during film-making allowing actors to perform in front of a previously photographed landscape background.
Throughout the silent years projectors, whether handcranked or electrically powered, all ran at variable speeds, enabling the operator to adjust the speed of the projector to that of the camera. For its part, camera speed varied according to a number of factors: the amount of available light during shooting, the sensitivity of the film stock, and the nature of the action being recorded. To keep the movements of the characters on the screen 'natural', projectionists in the years before 1920 showed films at various speeds, most often between 14 and 18 frames per second. (The flicker effect that these relatively slow speeds tended to produce was eliminated by the introduction early in the century of a three-bladed shutter which opened and closed three times during the showing of each frame.) The average speed of projection increased as time went on, and by the end of the period it had regularly reached a norm of 24 frames per second, which became the standard for sound film. Faster and slower speeds were occasionally used for colour film experiments or in some amateur equipment.
The quality of projection was greatly affected by the type of light source being used. Before electric arc lights became standard, the usual method of producing light for the projector was to heat a piece of lime or a similar substance until it glowed white hot. The efficacy of this method (known as 'limelight') was very dependent on the nature and quality of the fuel used to heat the lime. The usual fuels were a mixture of coal-gas and oxygen or of ether and oxygen. Acetylene was also tried, but soon abandoned as it produced a weak light and gave off a disagreeable smell.

FROM PRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION
It is not known (and probably never will be known) exactly how many films of all types were produced during the silent period, but the figure is almost certainly in the order of 150,000, of which not more than 20,000 to 25,000 are known to have survived. With the rapid growth of the film business, films soon came to be printed in large numbers. For Den hvide slavehandel II ('The white slave trade II', August Blom, 1911) the Danish company Nordisk made no fewer than 260 copies for world-wide distribution. On the other hand many early American films listed in distributors' catalogues seem to have sold not more than a couple of copies, and in some cases it may be that none at all were printed, due to lack of demand.
Since the cinema was from the outset an international business, films had to be shipped from one country to another, often in different versions. Films might be recorded on two side-by-side cameras simultaneously, producing two different negatives. Intertitles would be shot in different languages, and shipped with the prints or a duplicate negative of the film to a foreign distributor. Sometimes only one frame of each title would be provided, to be expanded to full length when copies were made, and some films have survived with only these 'flash titles' or with no titles at all. Sometimes different endings were produced to suit the tastes of the public in various parts of the world. In eastern Europe for example, there was a taste for the 'Russian' or tragic ending in preference to the 'happy end' expected by audiences in America. It was also common to issue coloured prints of a film for show in luxury theatres and cheaper black and white ones for more modest locales. Finally, censorship, both national and local, often imposed cuts or other changes in films at the time of release, and many American films in particular have survived in different forms as a result of the varied censorship practices of state or city censorship boards.

DECAY
In the early years of the cinema films were looked on as essentially ephemeral and little attempt was made to preserve them once they reached the end of their commercial life. The appeal of the Polish scholar Bolesław Matuszewski in 1898 for a permanent archive of film images to be created to serve as a record for future generations fell on deaf ears, and it was not until the 1930s that the first film archives were created in a number of countries to preserve surviving films for posterity. By that time, however, many films had been irretrievably lost and many others dispersed. The world's archives have now collected together some 30,000 prints of silent films, but the lack of resources for cataloguing them means that it is not known how many of these are duplicate prints of the same version, or, in the case of what appear to be duplicates, whether there are significant differences between versions of films with the same title. While the number of films collected continues to rise, the number of surviving films is still probably less than 20 per cent of those thought to have been made.
Meanwhile, even as the number of rediscovered films rises, a further problem is created by the perishable nature of the nitrate base on which the vast majority of silent (and early sound) films were printed. For not only is cellulose nitrate highly flammable, which may in some cases lead to spontaneous combustion: it is also liable to decay and in the course of decay it destroys the emulsion which bears the image. Even in the best conservation conditions (that is to say at very low temperatures and the correct level of humidity), the nitrate base begins to decompose from the moment it is produced. In the course of the process the film emits various gases, and in particular nitrous anhydride, which, combined with air and with the water in the gelatine, produces nitrous and nitric acids. These acids corrode the silver salts of the emulsion, thereby destroying the image along with its support, until eventually the whole film is dissolved.

RESTORATION
The decomposition of nitrate film can be slowed down, but not halted. For this reason film archives are engaged in a struggle to prolong its life until such time as the image can be transferred to a different support. Unfortunately the cellulose acetate base on to which the transfer is made is itself liable to eventual decay unless kept under ideal atmospheric conditions. Even so, it is far more stable than nitrate and infinitely preferable to magnetic (video) tape, which is not only perishable but is unsuitable for reproducing the character of the original film. It may be that some time in the future it will prove possible to preserve film images digitally, but this has not yet been demonstrated to be a practical possibility.
The aim of restoration is to reproduce the moving image in a form as close as possible to that in which it was originally shown. But all copies that are made are necessarily imperfect. For a start, they have had to be duplicated from one base on to another, with an inevitable loss of some of the original quality. It is also extremely difficult to reproduce colour techniques such as tinting and toning, even if the film is copied on to colour stock, which, given the expense, is far from being universal practice. Many films which were originally coloured are now only seen, if at all, in black and white form.
To appreciate a silent film in the form in which it was originally seen by audiences, it is necessary to have the rare good luck of seeing an original nitrate print (increasingly difficult because of modern fire regulations), and even then it has to be recognized that each copy of a film has its own unique history and every showing will vary according to which print is being shown and under what conditions. Different projection, different music, the likely absence of an accompanying live show or light effects, mean that the modern showing of silent films offers only a rough approximation of what silent film screening was like for audiences at the time.

Bibliography
Abramson, Albert ( 1987), The History of Television, 1880 to 1941.
Cherchi Paolo Usai ( 1994), Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema.
Hampton, Benjamin B. ( 1931), A History of the Movies.
Liesegang, Franz Paul ( 1986), Moving and Projected Images: A Chronology of Pre-cinema History.
Magliozzi, Ronald S. (ed.) ( 1988), Treasures from the Film Archives.
Rathbun, John B. ( 1914), Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting.

En: The Oxford History of World Cinema EDITED BY GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH

El concepto del Modo de Representación Primitivo

Síntesis por Ricardo Parodi

Concepto de M.R.P.

El concepto de Modo de Representación Primitivo (M.R.P.) lo tomamos de Noël Burch (op. Cit.). Éste opone el M.R.P. al Modo de Representación Institucional (M.R.I.), abandonando la idea de que el cine no es un lenguaje, sino un sistema organizado de representaciones que en su nacimiento, en su génesis, no presupone necesariamente la narración.
La narración es sólo una posibilidad, uno de los caminos posibles de la Representación, una consecuencia de la influencia de múltiples factores culturales y sociales, no un presupuesto, o una condición necesaria.
En el período 1895 / 1917, muy aproximadamente, se constituiría el núcleo del M.R.P. y su tránsito hacia la constitución de un M.R.I.
Por M.R.I. entendemos toda una serie de tópicos, normativas y convenciones que regulan el conexionado, la forma de funcionamiento y producción de las representaciones cinematográficas. Tales regulaciones se extienden desde la llamada "escala de planos", que normativiza, esto es legaliza, la forma en que ha de realizarse un Primer Plano, un plano General, etc., hasta la forma en que habrá de representarse el Estado, la Policía, la familia, etc.. El M.R.I. es la consolidación, a nivel simbólico - representacional, de un cierto Imaginario, de un cierto ordenamiento narrativo del mundo.
El M.R.P., en cambio, presentifica aún un elevado grado de "caos" o anarquía en la regulación de las imágenes, dicho esto sin ningún tono peyorativo o afán de establecimiento de un escalafón jerárquico- evolucionista.
El M.R.P. no es un grado inferior o no evolucionado del M.R.I.. Por el contrario, es otra forma de organización, todavía no regulada por las formas de producción industriales de la representación.
El M.R.P. posee algunos rasgos principales:
1. Autarquía del cuadro: Cada cuadro es relativamente independiente de su antecedente y su consecuente. Todavía no está plenamente asegurada la continuidad (raccord) de un mismo movimiento de un cuadro al otro, por ejemplo. Toda acción comienza y termina dentro del mismo cuadro, no se prolonga de uno a otro.2. Posición horizontal y frontal de la cámara: la cámara siempre esta ubicada en forma perpendicular a la escena representada. Se trata siempre de un plano amplio que cubre la totalidad de la escenografía delante de la cual se desplazan horizontalmente los actores.3. Conservación del plano de conjunto: a cada escena le corresponde un único plano ("de conjunto" diríamos hoy en día). Se opera así sobre la lógica 1ª escena = 1 Cuadro. En un filme ya institucional, por ejemplo, a cada escena le corresponderán varios planos que se dedicarán a mostrar diferencialmente aquellos gestos o acciones importantes para el progreso de la acción. (13)

Sobre el comentario de Burch sobre cine temprano

5. A Parenthesis on Film History
But first, he's going to examine the process by which 19th century ideologies of representation came to determine the representational modes of Western film. This is probably the most important chapter of the book, as it constitutes a radical repositioning of the major figures at the dawn of cinema by looking at them from the ground of Japanese cinema. Nearly all narratives of the invention of cinema identify Lumiere with non-fiction and Melies with fiction. Burch intends to switch the historical division in film to Lumiere & Melies vs. Americans Dickson & Raff & Gammon et al."I regard the work of Melies and Lumiere, however, as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Conversely, the contradiction between the films shot by the Lumieres and their cameramen, and some of those produced for the Edison company during the first few years by Dickson and Raff and Gammon is I believe absolutely fundamental" (p. 61).The people working for Edison were interested in the "total reproduction of life," an "essential aspiration of the bourgeoisie with regard to representation." (p. 61). The Lumieres were still the direct heirs of Muybridge and Co., as they were interested in the silent reproduction of perceptual movement. Burch describes the Lumiere's work as non-centered spacially (not guiding the gaze of the spectator) and temporally (often having no beginning or end). The films were also non-linear viewing experiences, since the clips were often showed more than once. Burch compares these early films to recent modernist films.Burch also points out differences in their methods (Edison and Dickson put the camera in their Black Maria, prefiguring the sound stages of the 30's) while Lumieres set it up outside, recording things with an almost scientific impulse. Melies worked in a studio, but to "construct a world as radically and avowedly artificial as possible." (p. 62) Even the language they used reveals the difference: "The neologisms coined by Edison (Vitascope) and the Lumiere brothers (Cinématographe) are also emblematic of their antithetical positions: a 'vision of life' as opposed to 'an inscription of movement'."(p. 62) Burch places Porter in a middle ground between the "Lumiere/Edison contradiction", citing the medium close-up of The Great Train Robbery (1903) (which could be tacked on either the beginning or end) and the bedroom rescue in The Life of an American Fireman (1902) (shown two times from inside and outside) as impulses toward the Lumiere mode of representation. At the same time, Porter's work in the development of reverse field, cross-cutting and ellipsis places also puts him on the Edison side as they were to constitute the future Hollywood style. By WWI, the adoption of reverse field editing and the eyeline match were the last steps in breaking down the barrier of 'alienation' which informed the relationship between the early film and its essentially working-class audience. With the search for a better audience (which brought middle-class norms into the mode of representation) and the coming of sound, the project initiated by Smith, Porter, Griffith and Co. was completed.Burch takes on previous film historians, who describe Japanese cinema as constantly catching up to the rest of the world until its "golden age" in the 1950s. He asserts that the creative lag most experts see in the silent Japanese film is based on an ideological assumption, a "fundamental incompatibility between the West's developing 'codes of illusionism' and Japanese indifference to 'illusionism' in the Western sense." (p. 66) At the end of the chapter, he once again draws a line between the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shimizu, and Naruse and the most radical films of the 60's and 70's (including Godard and Warhol). Before tracing the development of Japanese separation from Western codes, however, he wants to look for its origin.

Texto sobre Porter por Musser

The Innovators 1900-1910: Time After Time

We've all heard of D. W. Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Disney, but who really made a difference to film history? Was it the technicians, the hustlers or the artists? In the first of a new series highlighting one key innovator from each decade of the twentieth century, Charles Musser looks at the storytelling achievements of editing pioneer Edwin S. Porter

Renowned as the maker of The Great Train Robbery, Edwin Stanton Porter has sometimes been called the "father of the story film" and the "inventor of editing". Such reductive claims ignore the contributions of his contemporaries - many of whom have been credited with the same achievements by rival historians. Nonetheless, Porter can with reasonable accuracy be called "America's first major film-maker".
Born on 21 April 1870 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the future film-maker was named Edward by his parents. A pudgy boy known as "Betty", he had changed his name to Edwin Stanton after Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, by the time he joined the US Navy in 1893. In the 1890s he worked as an exhibitor and equipment manufacturer and enjoyed considerable success as an operator at the Eden Musee entertainment complex - the leading showcase for motion pictures in New York City. Operators in those days were responsible for acquiring films from an array of often obscure sources and assembling them into individual programmes - what we now call post-production. Porter's programme The Passion Play of Oberammergau, for instance, integrated magic-lantern slides and some 23 short films into a coherent show that lasted 40 minutes or longer, accompanied by a lecture and music sung by a choir. Another favourite, Panorama of the War, offered a historical account of the Spanish-American War through a wide range of news films and re-enactments.
In the summer of 1900, as motion pictures were reaching a new low point in popularity, Porter tried his luck as a travelling showman. A fire at his New York City workshop further added to his woes. Meanwhile, inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison was having his own difficulties and came close to selling his motion-picture interests to the rival American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In the end Edison renewed his commitment to the film business, and a few days before Thanksgiving hired Porter to improve the Edison Manufacturing Company's equipment (notably its Projecting Kinetoscope projector). Edison had built a glass-enclosed rooftop studio at 41 East 21st Street in New York City; Porter was asked to outfit the studio and then stayed on to work in the company's production unit as principal cameraman alongside actor and scenic designer George S. Fleming.
Porter and Fleming were typical of the collaborative production teams working in the US before 1908-09. As cameraman, Porter was responsible for all the filmic elements: not only cinematography but developing the negative and editing, which at first was little more than "trimming" the individual shot which constituted the film as a whole. In addition he worked with Fleming on the selection of subject matter and on story development. The Porter-Fleming team demonstrated a fiair for making comedies and other acted films. Kansas Saloon Smashers (February 1901) re-enacted and lampooned the widely reported antics of Carrie Nation and her brigade of hatchet-wielding prohibitionists. The women in this film were played by men in drag. Somewhat later, when Nation's husband was reported to be demanding a divorce, they made the obvious sequel, Why Mr Nation Wants a Divorce (May 1901), in which Carrie catches her husband taking a drink and treats him the way her brigade treated the saloon. These topical films fitted into a general conception of cinema as a visual newspaper.
Between 1899 and 1903 responsibility for key aspects of post-production shifted from exhibition services to production companies, making possible a new kind of storytelling. Those most responsible for this shift were a handful of men who had experience in film exhibition and film-making but were increasingly committed to the latter, including Edwin Porter in the US, James Williamson and G. A. Smith in Britain and Georges Méliès in France. Porter enjoyed a virtually unique position: Edison had sued all his rival production companies for violating his motion-picture patents, putting many of them out of business. So the Edison Manufacturing Company enjoyed total hegemony from mid-July 1901, when his patents were upheld in the circuit courts, to March 1902, when they were declared invalid on appeal.
In the first part of 1901 Porter and Fleming made a number of two-shot films. Terrible Teddy the Grizzly King (February 1901) burlesqued president elect Theodore Roosevelt's media-conscious activities on a hunting trip. The first shot of The Finish of Brigit McKeen (February 1901) shows a thick-headed Irish servant girl pouring kerosene into a stove and blowing herself up (ethnic gags permeate many of these early comedies). In the last shot a painted backdrop displays a tombstone, on which is inscribed: "Here lies the remains of Brigit McKeen who started a fire with Kerosine." The first shot imitated the Biograph film How Brigit Made the Fire (June 1900); the last literalised the ditty on which both films were based.
Having worked as a film editor for a number of years, I have always found Porter's surviving productions from 1901-02 - in which we can trace his evolving understanding of film editing, his unfolding approach to the temporal and spatial organisation of shots - deeply moving. In The Sampson-Schley Controversy (August 1901), based on an incident in the Battle of Santiago Bay during the Spanish-American War, Porter depicted the temporal relationships between three shots all taken in the studio. The opening scene represents Commodore Winfield Schley on the bridge of the battleship Brooklyn directing gunfire against the Spanish enemy. The second is of a gun crew on the Brooklyn firing their cannon at the same distant ship. The third, added a few weeks after the initial release, shows Admiral William Sampson sipping tea with a group of old ladies. Although Sampson was apparently at a tea party while the Battle of Santiago Bay was fought, he received credit for the victory - a fact Schley (a populist hero) and his fans resented. This film thus consists of three successive shots showing actions occurring more or less simultaneously in three different locations. But this simultaneity is clear only to audiences who know about the underlying political controversy. Like Griffith in the post-1908 period, Porter was interested in exploring ways of depicting simultaneous actions in different shots, in different locations and/or from different perspectives. But their solutions were radically different.
The Execution of Czologosz (November 1901) was one of many films made around the assassination of President William McKinley. His assassin, Leon Czologosz, was executed on 29 October 1901 at Auburn State Prison. According to Edison advertisements, Porter filmed two exterior shots of the prison that morning, using sweeping camera pans. Back at the New York studio he and Fleming filmed two more 'scenes', of Czologosz being led from his cell to the execution chamber and of the condemned man's electrocution. This film involved a sustained spatial progression from outside to inside the prison and then to a confrontation with the electric chair and deadly justice. In the interior scenes the action moves between two contiguous spaces, though the precise spatial relationship of cell to execution chamber is evident only from a reading of the newspapers. Since The Execution of Czologosz could be purchased with or without the opening panoramas, one question had been raised but not fully resolved: could the production company dictate the terms of the larger narrative unit or was editing the final responsibility of the exhibitor?
Despite the groundbreaking achievement of these two films Porter and Fleming undertook nothing as ambitious for another six months. They were employees, and it may have been that company executives - given their monopoly - wanted to curtail unnecessary production costs. But once Edison lost his patent-infringement case, renewed film-making at rival US companies sparked production at the Edison studio as well. Appointment by Telephone (2 May 1902), Jack and the Beanstalk (20 June 1902), How They Do Things on the Bowery (31 October 1902) and Life of an American Fireman (21 January 1903) each represented an impressive step forward. With editorial control more firmly located in the production company, the storyline could unfold in more coherent and unified ways.
How They Do Things on the Bowery and Life of an American Fireman are fascinating primarily for their ways of depicting time. Life of an American Fireman contains a number of shots which have overlapping action: firemen wake from their beds and go down the firepole in the third shot; in the fourth we again see them come down the firepole, then get on to their fire engines and drive off. In the fifth the door of the fire station opens and the fire engines come out and race off to the fire. From the point of view of classical Hollywood cinema this creates a kind of stutter that made Porter's work seem awkward and old-fashioned. From a different perspective, however, we can see how Porter treated each shot as a self-contained unit that was also part of a larger film. As No'l Burch described him, Porter was a two-headed Janus who looked backwards (editing the film as if he was still an exhibitor) and forwards (taking advantage of centralised creative control to plot continuity of action across shots in a way that created a coherent fictional world).
The last two shots of Life of an American Fireman, which show a fire company rescuing a mother and child from a burning building, are particularly interesting. The rescue is shown first from the inside (shot 8) and then from the outside (shot 9). So the last shot is a replay of the same event from a different perspective, enabling the spectator to see everything that happened. (As in Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, 1902, which has the spaceship landing on the moon twice, from two different perspectives.) Porter thus shows us actions unfolding in two contiguous spaces, but rather than cutting back and forth between them as Griffith did in The Lonely Villa (1909) he keeps the scenes unified in a way now familiar from instant replays of sporting events. Nonetheless, when actions occur off-screen (the journey to the fire) time is condensed. Time is not verisimiliar, but highly malleable.
Immediately Life of an American Fireman was completed Edison competitor Sigmund Lubin won a court case that invalidated established ways of copyrighting films. Once again Edison curtailed production for a number of months until this was reversed in the court of appeals. Meanwhile George Fleming left the Edison company. In autumn 1903 Porter began to collaborate on a freelance basis with actor Gilbert M. Anderson (later Broncho Billy Anderson). Their best-known project was The Great Train Robbery (1903). A contribution to the newly popular crime genre that had come out of Britain, The Great Train Robbery depicted the process of robbing a train in exciting detail. Its temporal organisation and the successive depiction of two separate lines of action (the train robbers, the posse) make it exemplary of pre-1908 cinema's method of representation. And it was without doubt the most commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era, perhaps of any film prior to The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Great Train Robbery arrived at an opportune moment. The US film industry was beginning to take off and the number of exhibition outlets was expanding rapidly. At the beginning of 1905 Porter found a new full-time collaborator in Wallace McCutcheon, previously production head at the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In this period Porter continued to make occasional films in the tradition of The Great Train Robbery, though not as many as is sometimes thought: Capture of Yegg Bank Burglars (1904) and The Train Wreckers (1905) are the two principal examples. In the longer one-reel format he displayed a continuing fiair for comedy (The Terrible Kids, May 1906; Getting Evidence, September 1906) and a new one for family melodramas (Stolen by Gypsies, July 1905). In his search for subject matter he borrowed from a wide range of popular entertainments: postcards (The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, May 1905), songs (Waiting at the Church, May 1906), newspaper cartoons (The Rivals, August 1907) and films by competitors (Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, March 1906, is heavily indebted to Gaston Velle's Rêve à la lune, 1905).
An important element of Porter's work in the 1904-08 period was his sustained engagement with the world of theatre. As part of a larger change within film-making, his conception of cinema gradually shifted from having an affinity with the newspaper to one with the stage. In this period he reworked a number of popular plays, beginning with The Ex-Convict (November 1904). Porter took No. 973, a one-act drama highly dependent on dialogue, and transformed it into an eight-scene film with brief intertitles. A moving tearjerker, in which a child the ex-convict saves in an earlier scene in turn saves him after he unsuccessfully tries to rob her father's house to feed his family, it is the oldest film ever to make me cry. Other reworkings of plays included The Miller's Daughter (1905), Kathleen Mavourneen (1906), Daniel Boone; or Pioneer Days in America (1907) and The Devil (September 1908). Life of a Cowboy, which refigured Royale's The Squaw Man (1905) through a series of substitutions and inversions, was according to Porter the first film Western. The hero is the lone cowboy who displays a range of Western skills (lassoing, horse riding, gun fighting) and wins the girl from back east, even as he retains the devotion of the local Indian maiden.
The rising popularity of cinema and the demand for more and perhaps better films put increasing pressures on Porter and the Edison company. In May 1907 Porter found a new collaborator in playwright and stage manager James Searle Dawley. The two worked together for the remainder of Porter's Edison career, moving into the company's new, more spacious studio in the Bronx on 11 July 1907. Sets could be larger, and in films such as A Race for Millions (August-September 1907) a car could appear on stage. Edison films were becoming more elaborate (Stage Struck, August 1907), but what company executives really wanted was for Porter to increase his rate of production. This he found difficult to do.
In June 1908 new top management at the Edison company started a second production unit. Porter was designated studio head and oversaw both units even as he remained head of one. Meanwhile D. W. Griffith began to work as a director at the rival Biograph organisation, single-handedly outperforming both Edison units in terms of output. This was also the moment when film was becoming a form of mass entertainment with a quite different system of representation - one that served as the foundation for subsequent Hollywood cinema. This involved linear structures that eliminated overlapping actions and narrative repetitions, unfortunately a Porter trademark. Consistent screen direction, never one of Porter's concerns, also became important. And films were expected to display a narrative clarity that was not dependent on an audience's prior knowledge of the plot - again at odds with Porter's reliance on well-known stories. This new way of motion-picture storytelling was embraced by Griffith and resisted by Porter.
Porter's films received consistently positive reviews until June 1908, after which they were more and more criticised. The Edison company was losing ground rapidly, turning out more pictures but selling fewer and fewer prints. Edison executives soon concluded that the maker of The Great Train Robbery was washed up and over the hill. In February 1909 they removed him from his responsibility as studio head and in November 1909 he was fired.
The first decade of the twentieth century must have ended on as depressing a note for Porter as it began. In the interim, he played a key, at times dominant role in the development of the American film industry. The decade saw a transition from long-standing practices in which exhibitors provided their own form of individualised screen entertainment to cinema as a recognisable form of standardised mass entertainment. Porter's deep commitment to a system of production and representation - as well as his resistance to the large-scale, corporate mentality that followed - make him an exemplary figure of that time.
Sight & Sound