Mark Moran

Prof. Larry Engel

Film 3001: Midterm – Question 2

March 30, 1999

 

Narrative Evolution

 

            For many filmmakers and historians alike, George Méliès is the father of narrative film making.  While Edison and the Lumière brothers were responsible for the technical and engineering creativity that made the film medium possible, Méliès was the first person to explore the fanciful and narrative potential of film. 

Before Méliès, Edison had filmed actuality pieces, real events from life such as sneezing, kissing, and eventually an entire boxing match.  These early films were all single takes from a stationary camera and had no editing.  Yet, films like Serpentine Dance and Greenery Brothers had some aspects of a performance and hence the beginnings of narrativity (Cook 5-9).  The Lumière  brothers, whose camera system was much more portable, took their camera out into the world and filmed everyday events such as trains arriving and workers leaving a factory.  Because these films recorded the world as is rather than creating an artificial environment, they were arguably less narrative than Edison’s.  Yet the Lumière  brothers seem to have had more awareness of their camera as a physical viewer in the world.  They had the first objects to enter and exit the frame in Exiting The Factory, which created a notion of events off-screen, and they also had the first moving camera, which they accomplished by shooting from boats and so forth in films like Skyscrapers of New York (Cook 9-13, Gunning 464, Engel).

Méliès, a professional magician and former stage actor, was the first filmmaker to use film to tell a story or show something that was not possible.  The classic example is Méliès’s film La Voyage Dans La Lune, which is a fanciful story of a king who builds a space ship, travels to the moon, and then fights and escapes from hostile moon aliens (in possibly cinema’s first chase scene).  Borrowing from the rich tradition of dramatic plays and short stories, as well as his background as an illusionist, Méliès created a story-telling device that was unlike anything before.  A masterful special-effects inventor, he created fade-ins, fade-outs, the overlapping dissolve, and stop-motion photography (Cook 13-19, Engel).

Méliès’ work inspired all filmmakers to come, but most immediately the American Edwin Porter.  Edwin Porter’s Life of an American Fireman represented the next level in film storytelling with its use of continuity editing.  The Great Train Robbery and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend continued to push the narrative envelope with close-ups and dreamlike superimposition.  By crosscutting seven interior shots with six interior shots “to depict parallel actions occurring simultaneously, Porter seemed to have achieved—for the first time in motion-picture history—narrative omniscience over the linear flow of time” (Cook 20-31, Engel). 

But history’s most influential filmmaker was D.W. Griffith, who entered the film world as an actor for Edwin Porter.  While working in New York he invented parallel editing, the travelling shot, expansion, compression, and the last minute rescue, before playing a crucial role in moving the American film industry to Hollywood.  Griffith’s epic historical dramas Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were unprecedented productions with huge casts and giant sets (Engel, Gunning 462).  Their feature length allowed him to tell a rich, complex story using the parallel action techniques from Charles Dickens’ novels.  Eisenstein argues that Griffith borrows not only Dickens’ exaggerated characters and settings, but more importantly his “strict development and acceleration of pace … [and his] montage progression of parallel scenes, intercut” (Eisenstein 429).

Just as Méliès had inspired the American filmmakers twenty years earlier, in the 1920’s the Europeans began to expand on the narrative techniques of Griffith.  German filmmakers at Ufa, such as Erich Pommer, set new benchmarks in the expressionistic films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, which are noteworthy for their use of light and shadow to build tension.  Unlike Griffith, the Germans intensified reality through symbolism, allegory, and emotional metaphor.  Along with an internal narrator and framing story, these serve to explore issues of reality and imagination.  “The device of a framing story was not only an aesthetic form, but also had symbolic content,” with which these post-war Germans sought to explore “the intangible realm of the soul” (Kracauer 187-188, Engel).

Finally, the Soviet filmmakers took narrative filmmaking to its silent-film era peak.  Greatly influenced by Griffith, Eisenstein and others experimented with and refined their concept of story telling through montage.  They discovered that two unrelated scenes can be given completely new meaning by juxtaposing them together through editing.  The new meaning “derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another” and transcends the sum of the original two shots (Eisenstein 28).  Emotion and action are perceived or filled-in by the viewer merely through the changing image.  The ultimate example of this, and the pinnacle of narrative storytelling before the invention of sound, is Eisenstein’s masterpiece Potemkin.  “Griffith had discovered, in editing, the fundamental narrative structure of the cinema, but he … had used it … to tell nineteenth-century tales.  Eisenstein formulated a self-consciously modern theory of editing … which made it possible for the cinema to communicate on its own terms for the first time, without borrowing either matter or form from other media” (Cook 141).

Works Cited

 

Cook, David A.  A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. 

New York: W.W. Norton & Co.  1996

 

Eisenstein, Sergei.  “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  25-42.

 

Eisenstein, Sergei.  “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  426-434.

 

Engel, Larry.  Notes from class lectures.  Columbia University, Spring 1999.

 

Gunning, Tom.  “Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System.”  Film Theory and

Criticism, Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 461-472.

 

Kracauer, Siegfried.  “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  183-194.