The Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF

The Classical Hollywood Cinema
The Author
David Bordwell is Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of The
Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (University of California Press, 1981); of Narration in the Fiction Film
(Methuen, 1987), and, with Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Knopf, 1985).
Janet Staiger is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Texas-Austin. She has published articles
in Cinema Journal, Screen, Wide Angle, Film Reader 4, The Velvet Light Trap and other journals.
Kristin Thompson is Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has taught Film
studies there and at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Princeton
University Press, 1981), Export Entertainment (British Film Institute, 1985) and numerous articles on film.
THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD
CINEMA
Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson
London
Dedicated to
Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Booth, Anita Loos,

Arthur C.Miller, and their many co-workers
in the Hollywood cinema
First published in 1985
First published as a paperback 1988
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane,
London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of
the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Copyright © David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson 1985
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the publisher,
except for the quotation of brief passages
in criticism
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bordwell, David
The classical Hollywood cinema.
1. Moving-pictures—United States—History
I. Title II. Staiger, Janet
III. Thompson, Kristin
791.43’0973 PN1993.5.U6
ISBN 0-203-35881-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37137-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-00383-0 (Print Edition)
Contents
Acknowledgments xv
Preface xvi
Part One The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60 1

David Bordwell
1 An excessively obvious cinema 2
2 Story causality and motivation 11
3 Classical narration 23
4 Time in the classical film 42
5 Space in the classical film 50
6 Shot and scene 61
7 The bounds of difference 72
Part Two The Hollywood mode of production to 1930 88

Janet Staiger
8 The Hollywood mode of production: its conditions of existence 89
9 Standardization and differentiation: the reinforcement and dispersion of 98
Hollywood’s practices
10 The director system: management in the first years 200
11 The director-unit system: management of multiple-unit companies after 1909 209
12 The central producer system: centralized management after 1914 216
13 The division and order of production: the subdivision of the work from the first 231
years through the 1920s
Part Three The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28 245

Kristin Thompson
14 From primitive to classical 246
15 The formulation of the classical narrative 265
vi
16 The continuity system 287

17 Classical narrative space and the spectator’s attention 310
18 The stability of the classical approach after 1917 329
Part Four Film style and technology to 1930 473

19 Technology, style and mode of production 474
David Bordwell
and Janet Staiger
20 Initial standardization of the basic technology 497
Kristin Thompson
21 Major technological changes of the 1920s 518
Kristin Thompson
22 The Mazda tests of 1928 532
David Bordwell
23 The introduction of sound 536
David Bordwell
Part Five The Hollywood mode of production, 1930–60 548

Janet Staiger
24 The labor-force, financing and the mode of production 549
25 The producer-unit system: management by specialization after 1931 559
26 The package-unit system: unit management after 1955 571
Part Six Film style and technology, 1930–60 580

David Bordwell
27 Deep-focus cinematography 581
28 Technicolor 593
29 Widescreen processes and stereophonic sound 599
Part Seven Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema 606

David Bordwell
and Janet Staiger
30 Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice 607
31 Alternative modes of film practice 619
Envoi 627
vii
Appendix A The unbiased sample 629

Appendix B A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film industry, 1896–1960 639
Appendix C Principal structures of the US film industry, 1894–1930 643
Appendix D Lighting plots and descriptions 647
Notes 660
Select bibliography 736
Photograph credits 750
Index 752
Figures
Between pages 112 and 113

1.1 Bulldog Drummond (1929)
1.2 The Show (1927)
1.3 The Garden of Eden (1928)
2.12.5 Casbah (1948)
2.6 The Fountainhead (1949)
3.1 The Night Holds Terror (1955)
3.2 Code of the Sea (1924)
3.3 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
3.4 The Devil’s Bait (1911)
3.53.7 Partners in Crime (1928)
3.83.13 The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935)
3.143.16 The Caddy (1953)
3.173.20 The Canterville Ghost (1944)
3.21 One Touch of Nature (1917)
3.223.25 The Whip Hand (1951)
3.263.28 King Kong (1933)
4.14.2 Mr. Skeffington (1944)
4.34.5 The King and the Chorus Girl (1937)
5.1 The Caddy (1953)
5.2 The Clodhopper (1917)
5.3 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
5.4 The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.5 Laura (1944)
5.6 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
5.7 A Farewell to Arms (1932)
5.8 Carmen Jones (1954)
5.95.10 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
5.115.14 The Whip Hand (1951)
5.155.16 The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.17 The Royal Pauper (1917)
5.185.19 Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
5.20 Victory (1919)
5.21 Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)
5.22 The Three Musketeers (1921)
5.23 Affair m Havana (1957)
5.24 The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
5.25 The Little Foxes (1941)
ix

5.27 Manhandled (1949)
5.28 Wine of Youth (1924)
5.29 The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
5.30 Dangerous Mission (1954)
5.31 The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
5.32 The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)
5.34 Are Parents People? (1925)
5.36 Anthony Adverse (1936)
5.37 La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928)
5.385.39 Trying to Get Arrested (1909)
5.405.41 So This Is Paris (1926)
5.425.43 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)
5.445.45 Not Reconciled (1964)
5.465.47 Play Girl (1941)
5.485.49 Each Dawn I Die (1939)
5.505.53 Mr. Skeffington (1944)
6.16.6 Love and the Law (1919)
6.76.9 The Fountainhead (1949)
6.106.40 Play Girl (1941)
7.1 T-Men (1948)
7.2 Penthouse (1933)
9.1 A newspaper comment, November 1911
9.2 A 1913 advertisement for Atlantis
9.3 American Film releases, 1911
9.4 A 1913 advertisement for The Battle of Waterloo
9.5 A 1911 New York Motion Picture Co. announcement
9.6 A May 1911 advertisement of theater display cases
9.7 A theater display in August 1911
9.8 A September 1911 advertisement
9.9 ‘Little Mary’ [Pickford], January 1911
9.10 Owen Moore and Mary Pickford in October 1911
9.11 Film Supply Company of America advertisement, October 1912
9.12 The officers of the Photoplay Authors’ League in 1915
9.13 The Static Club in 1915
9.14 Clarence E.Sinn’s column for 21 October 1911
11.1 The IMP stock company, February 1911
11.2 Vitagraph’s main studio in Brooklyn, New York, June 1912
11.3 Plans for the Fox Studio, 1919
11.4 Dressing rooms (late 1910s)
11.5 The Lubin Firm, 1912
11.6 New York Motion Picture’s Santa Ynez studio, 1915
11.7 The Lasky studio, 1915
x
11.8 A London street set for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
11.9 A December 1922 Photodramatist article
12.1 The Star Theater (Boston, Mass.), 1911
12.2 The Victoria Theater (Lawrence, Mass.), 1911
12.3 The Liberty Theatre, Los Angeles, 1911
12.4 A 1915 Selig advertisement for The Circular Staircase
12.5 The Rights of Man (1915)
12.6 Advertisement for Dante’s Inferno (1911)
12.7 W.Stephen Bush’s 1911 lectures for Faust and Enoch Arden
12.8 Cast list for The Raiders (1913)
12.9 The scene plot for The Raiders
12.1012.12 Pages from The Raiders’ continuity script
12.13 The Bride of Hate (1916)
12.14 The Bride of Hate’s cast list
12.15 An early proposal for music for The Bride of Hate
12.16 Music cues released in the company’s press sheet for exhibitors
12.17 The accounting page for The Bride of Hate
12.18 Poster for The Bride of Hate
12.19 Script page for Framing Framers (1917)
13.1 The Lasky studio in 1918
13.2 A firm’s production chart, 1918
13.3 Art designer’s sketch (1918)
13.4 Models of sets (1918)
13.5 Sketches for scene painters (1918)
13.6 Miniatures (1918)
15.115.2 The Pickpocket (1903)
15.3 The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)
15.4 The Girl in the Armchair (1912)
15.515.6 The Hired Hand (1918)
15.715.9 A Daughter of Dixie (1911)
15.1015.13 A Race With Time (1913)
15.14 Art backgrounds for inter-titles
15.1515.17 The High Cost of Living (1912)
15.1815.22 The Warning (1914)
15.23 A Tale of Two Cities (1911)
16.116.5 Mantrap (1926)
16.616.7 The Sick Kitten (1903?)
16.8 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
16.1016.11 After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.1216.13 A Tale of Two Cities (1911)
16.1416.16 At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)
16.1716.18 After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.1916.20 Shamus O’Brien (1912)
16.2116.22 The Girl of the Cabaret (1913)
16.2316.24 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
xi
16.2516.28 The Hired Hand (1918)

16.29 Her First Adventure (1908)
16.3016.31 The Fear (1912)
16.3216.33 Alma’s Champion (1912)
16.3416.35 The Warning (1914)
16.3616.37 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
16.3816.39 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
16.4016.41 A Friendly Marriage (1911)
16.4216.43 Behind the Footlights (1916)
16.4416.45 Love and the Law (1919)
16.4616.47 The Gambler’s Charm (1910)
16.4816.49 The Fear (1912)
16.5016.51 The Girl at the Cupola (1912)
16.5216.53 Weights and Measures (1914)
16.5416.55 The Wishing Ring (1914)
16.5616.60 The Loafer (1911)
16.6116.62 A Comedy of Errors (1913)
16.6316.64 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
16.6516.66 The Wishing Ring (1914)
16.6716.72 Detective Burton’s Triumph (1914)
16.7316.74 Field of Honor (1917)
16.7516.77 The Ghost ofRosie Taylor (1918)
16.7816.79 Victory (1919)
16.8016.81 Mantrap (1926)
17.1 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
17.2 The Loafer (1911)
17.3 A Friendly Marriage (1911)
17.4 The Bandit of Tropico (1912)
17.5 Weights and Measures (1914)
17.6 Love and the Law (1919)
17.7 A Temperamental Wife (1919)
17.8 The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
17.9 Faithful (1910)
17.10 The Bells (1913)
17.11 The Girl in the Armchair (1912)
17.12 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
17.13 Rory O’More (1911)
17.14 Outdoor stages at Universal c. 1915
17.15 The Coming of Columbus (1912)
17.16 Production still for The Queen of Sheba (1921)
17.17 Design for The Beloved Rogue (1927)
17.18 A Race With Time (1913)
17.19 Damon and Pythias (1914)
17.20 The Case of Becky (1915)
17.21 Love and the Law (1919)
xii
17.22 The Magician (1926)

17.2317.24 Shamus O’Brien (1912)
17.2517.28 The Clodhopper (1917)
17.29 A 1912 advertisement for The Power of Conscience
17.30 The Loafer (1911)
17.31 The Cheat (1915)
17.32 His Phantom Sweetheart (1915)
17.33 Dolly’s Scoop (1916)
17.34 The Girl of the Golden West (1915)
17.35 Forbidden Paths (Robert Thornby, 1917, Lasky)
17.37 A Cumberland Romance (1920)
17.38 Night Life of New York (1925)
17.39 The Ghost of Rosy Taylor (1918)
17.40 Norma Talmadge c. 1923
17.41 Mr. Billings Spends His Dime (1923)
17.42 Her Code of Honor (1919)
17.4317.45 The Hired Hand (1918)
17.4617.47 At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)
17.4817.50 The Dumb Girl ofPortici (1915)
17.51 The camera elevator used for Hotel Imperial (1926)
17.52 A cutaway set and elevator used for Seventh Heaven (1927)
18.118.4 Code of the Sea (1924)
Sound personnel at RKO, 1931
20.1 Publicity photograph for The Hand of Peril (1916)
20.1 Allan Dwan’s cinematographers at the American Film Co. in 1911
20.3 The Pathé studio model
20.4 A 1920 illustration of the Bell & Howell camera
20.5 Universal newsreel cameraman Normal Alley and his Akeley
20.6 A Paramount Famous Lasky Western on location in the late twenties
20.7 Charles Rosher and Mary Pickford
20.8 Sol Polito and director Albert Roper
20.9 A Mitchell advertisement
20.10 The first Eyemo model
20.11 The New York Biograph Studio in 1909
20.12 An outdoor stage at Essanay in 1912
20.13 A corner of the main outdoor stage at Inceville
20.14 Thomas Ince in the Triangle Studio at Culver City, 1916
20.15 Filming in the Edison studio
20.16 The sunlight arc and its accessories
20.17 Transferring film at the Bloom Laboratory in Hollywood in 1918
21.1 Cinematographer Joe La Shelle
20.2 A film editor at MGM, c. 1928
21.3 The 1918 model Bell & Howell automatic splicer
21.4 Shooting a scene for Duke Steps Out (1929)
xiii
21.5 D.W.Griffith
21.621.7 Way Down East (1919)
21.9 La Bohème (1926)
21.10 The camera crew for Sparrows (1926)
21.1121.12 Foolish Wives (1922)
21.13 Sparrows (1926)
21.14 Clarence White’s 1905 landscape photograph, ‘Morning’
21.15 ‘Mrs Eugene Meyer’ by Edward Steichen
21.16 Way Down East (1919)
21.17 Foolish Wives (1922)
21.18 ‘Cigarette Girl—A Poster Design’
22.1 Lighting Warners’ Singing Fool (1928)
23.1 Warners’ Vitaphone Studios, Brooklyn (1926)
23.2 Gentlemen of the Press (1929)
23.323.10 The Lights of New York (1928)
23.1123.12 Downstairs (1932)
23.1323.14 The Show (1927)
23.1523.16 Moby Dick (1930)
23.17 Sunny (1930)
23.18 The crane used to film Broadway (1929)
24.1 A 1912 Reliance advertisement
25.1 Two pages from the script for Juarez (1939)
25.2 Scriptwriters for Juarez
25.3 Max Factor’s new building (1929)
25.4 A 1937 make-up chart at Warner Bros
25.5 An optically printed set (1932)
25.6 A November 1939 American Cinematographer article by Byron Haskin
25.7 Warner Bros’ Scientific Research Department (1929)
25.8 The floor plan of the Casbah set for Algiers (1938)
25.9 Several production stills from publicity about Juarez
25.10 Part of Warner Bros’ 1939 staff of cinematographers
27.1 Casbah (1948)
27.2 The Kid Brother (1927)
27.3 Greed (1924)
27.4 The Show (1927)
27.527.6 So This is Paris (1926)
27.727.8 Seventh Heaven (1927)
27.9 Moby Dick (1930)
27.10 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)
27.11 The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
27.12 Each Dawn I Die (1939)
27.13 Bulldog Drummond (1929)
27.15 Anthony Adverse (1936)
xiv
27.16 All That Money Can Buy (1941)

27.17 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
27.18 Our Town (1940)
27.19 Kings Row (1941)
27.20 Drawing for Alibi (1929)
27.21 Jezebel (1938)
27.22 Arrowsmith (1931)
27.2327.24 Our Town (1940)
27.25 Filming Ball of Fire (1941)
27.26 Dead End (1937)
27.2727.28 These Three (1936)
27.29 Dead End (1937)
27.30 The Long Voyage Home (1940)
27.31 Dead End (1937)
27.32 Dead End (1937)
27.33 The Long Voyage Home (1940)
27.34 Citizen Kane (1941)
27.35 T-Men (1948)
27.36 Gun Crazy (1949)
27.37 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
27.3827.39 Kings Row (1941)
27.40 Ball of Fire (1941)
27.41 The Little Foxes (1941)
27.4327.46 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
28.1 At Sword’s Point (1952)
28.2 The Goldwyn Follies (1938)
29.1 Filming Oklahoma! (1955)
29.2 Carmen Jones (1954)
29.3 Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957)
29.4 Not Reconciled (1964)
29.529.11 River of No Return (1954)
29.12 Pierrot le fou (1964)
Acknowledgments
We thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Communication Arts Department, and the University of Delaware Department of English for financial
support of this research. Several libraries, archives, and film distributors helped immeasurably: the Museum
of Modern Art, the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, the George S. Amberg Film Study Center
at New York University, the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the
Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Cleveland Public Library, the National Film Archive, the Danish
Film Archive, the UCLA Theatre Arts collection, the UCLA Film Archive, the Margaret Herrick Library at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute Library, the American
Society of Cinematographers, the Eastman Kodak Research Library, Macmillan Audio-Brandon, and Films,
Inc.
We also thank the many friends and colleagues who aided us in our work; these include Jeanne Allen,
J.Dudley Andrew, David Armitage, Tino Balio, Dana Benelli, Jane and Berney Berninghausen, Edward
Branigan, Mike Budd, Elaine Burrows, Keith Cohen, Mary Corliss, Michael Drozewski, Thomas Elsaesser,
Maxine Fleckner, Douglas Gromery, Ron Gottesman, Rob and Kit Hume, Robert C.Hummel, Roberta
Kimmel, Barbara Klinger, Jay Leyda, William Luhr, Russell Merritt, Judith Milhaus, Charles Musser, Al
P.Nelson, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Rodney Recor, David Rodowick, Bob Rosen, Phil Rosen, Paul Sandro,
Peter Schofer, Robert Self, Emily Sieger, Charles Silver, Three Tyler, Marc Wanamaker, and Alan
Williams.
We are particularly grateful for the kindness of Charles G.Clarke, Stanley Cortez, Linwood Dunn,
William K.Everson, William Hornbeck, Sidney P.Solow, and Karl and Ethel Struss, and for the patience of
Peter Staiger.
Preface
Hollywood as the dream factory: ‘How can you tell if people would want drugs so much today, if we still
gave them this dream-world on film?’ (Ruth Waterbury). Hollywood as an arm of the culture industry: ‘The
tone adopted by every film is that of the witch handing food to the child she wants to enchant or devour,
while mumbling horribly: “Lovely, lovely soup. How you’re going to enjoy it!”’ (T.W.Adorno). Hollywood
as celluloid imperialism: ‘Hollywood may be physically situated in this country, but it is an international
enterprise.’ (Will H.Hays). Hollywood as escape: ‘All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you
lack in your daily life are in— Pictures.’ (Advertisement for a film). Hollywood as nostalgia: ‘Take a good
look, because we’ll never see its like again.’ (That’s Entertainment!). Hollywood as imaginary landscape:
‘Hollywood is a place you can’t geographically define. We don’t really know where it is.’ (John Ford).1
The number of books promulgating all these versions of Hollywood (and more) would fill the library of a
small town in America. Hollywood has been celebrated by cultists and camp followers, castigated by
reformers and social theorists, and boosted by an army of publicists. Anthropologists have treated it as a
tribal village, economists as a company town. The films of Hollywood have been lumped together as
indistinguishable vulgarity, and they have been splintered into a hundred categories: the films of Garbo, of
Goldwyn, of Griffith; the Paramount pretties, automobiles in the cinema, the gangster film, the serial, music
for the movies; direction by Alfred Hitchcock, costumes by Edith Head, cinematography by Gregg Toland,
sets by Van Nest Polglase; silent films, sound films, color films, films noirs.
Yet another treatment of the subject requires some justification. This book is an examination of
Hollywood cinema as a distinct artistic and economic phenomenon. We will look at American studio
filmmaking much as an art historian would trace the stylistic traits and business transactions of Parisian
academic painting in the nineteenth century, or as a historian of music would examine the aesthetic and
economic forces involved in the development of Viennese classicism. We take Hollywood seriously,
treating it as a distinct mode of film practice with its own cinematic style and industrial conditions of
existence.
A mode of film practice is not reducible to an oeuvre (the films of Frank Capra), a genre (the Western),
or an economic category (RKO films). It is an altogether different category, cutting across careers, genres,
and studios. It is, most simply, a context. And we cannot arrive at this context simply by adding up all the
histories of directors, genres, studios, producers, etc.; this would be, as George Kubler suggests, like trying
to determine a country’s network of railroads by studying the itinerary of every traveler.2 Just as the railroad
system is of another logical order than your or my trip on it, so the Hollywood mode of film practice
constitutes an integral system, including persons and groups but also rules, films, machinery, documents,
institutions, work processes, and theoretical concepts. It is this totality that we shall study. And while we
could justify this book as filling in the background for this or that individual’s achievement, our aims go
xvii
further. We hope to show that understanding this mode of film practice is indispensible to a full grasp of the
art and industry of cinema as it has existed in history.
Recent academic film criticism has focused more and more exclusively upon the text. Sophisticated
methodologies drawn from anthropology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism have
dramatically broadened our sense of how a film works. But too often critical analysis has been unable to
specify the historical conditions that have controlled and shaped textual processes.3 On the other hand, the new
generation of film historians, while an exciting development, has generally avoiding confronting the films
themselves.4 Detailed accounts of Hollywood financing, labor, distribution, exhibition, and technology have
not usually sought to link economic factors to stylistic ones. In this book, we show how the concept of a
mode of film practice can historicize textual analysis and connect the history of film style to the history of
the motion picture industry.
The concept of a mode of film practice situates textual processes in their most pertinent and proximate
collective context. This context includes both a historically defined group of films and the material practices
that create and sustain that group. Raymond Williams has posed the problem:5
We have to break from the common procedure of isolating an object and then discovering its
components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions….
The recognition of the relation of a collective mode and an individual product— and these are the
only categories we can initially presume—is a recognition of related practices. That is to say, the
irreducibly individual projects that particular works are, may come in experience and analysis to show
resemblances which allow us to group them into collective modes. These are by no means always
genres. They may exist as resemblances within and across genres. They may be the practice of a
group in a period, rather than the practice of a phase in a genre. But as we discover the nature of a
particular practice, and the nature of the relation between an individual product and a collective mode,
we find that we are analyzing, as two forms of the same process, both its active composition and its
conditions of composition, and in either direction this is a complex of extending active relationships.
For the Hollywood cinema, the practices of film production constitute a major component of that process of
which Williams speaks. Film production must be understood not simply as a background to individual
achievement but as a crucial ‘condition of composition’ of resemblances among texts. The ways that films are
conceived, planned, and produced leave their marks upon the films— not only directly, in telltale details, but
structurally as well.6 At the same time, stylistic aims have shaped the development of the mode of
production. The relations between film style and mode of production are, we argue, reciprocal and mutually
influencing.
A mode of film practice, then, consists of a set of widely held stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining
an integral mode of film production. Those norms constitute a determinate set of assumptions about how a
movie should behave, about what stories it properly tells and how it should tell them, about the range and
functions of film technique, and about the activities of the spectator. These formal and stylistic norms will
be created, shaped, and supported within a mode of film production—a characteristic ensemble of economic
aims, a specific division of labor, and particular ways of conceiving and executing the work of filmmaking.
Through time, both the norms and the mode of production will change, as will the technology they employ,
but certain fundamental aspects will remain constant. Thus to see Hollywood filmmaking from 1917–60 as
a unified mode of film practice is to argue for a coherent system whereby aesthetic norms and the mode of
film production reinforced one another. This argument is the basis of this book.
xviii
If we have taken the realms of style and production as primary, it is not because we consider the concrete
conditions of reception unimportant. Certainly conditions of consumption form a part of any mode of film
practice. An adequate history of the reception of the classical Hollywood film would have to examine the
changing theater situation, the history of publicity, and the role of social class, aesthetic tradition, and
ideology in constituting the audience. This history, as yet unwritten, would require another book, probably
one as long as this. While we have not treated reception fully, the present book does introduce certain issues
—e.g., the activities which the Hollywood film solicits from the spectator, or the importance of early
advertising in establishing classical canons— which we believe to be necessary to any future study of how
the classical film has been consumed under specific circumstances.
As a historical account, our argument makes use of a great deal of empirical data about filmmaking,
including much information not previously brought to light. But we should stress that the concept of a mode
of film practice is not one that can be retrieved by ‘simply looking’ at films, documents, and machines. For
rhetorical purposes, our argument is cast chronologically, but the idea of a ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ is
ultimately a theoretical construct, and as such it must be judged by criteria of logical rigor and instrumental
value. This book thus stands out not only as a history of the Hollywood cinema but also as an attempt to
articulate a theoretical approach to film history.
There are many ways to organize a study such as this one. It would be possible to trace the history of the
Hollywood cinema three times— once recounting changes in the mode of production, then treating changes
in film style, then tracing technological developments. This we rejected, since the length of the three
sections would be likely to break apart the parallels and causal connections we wished to bring out among
the three realms. And placing one realm, such as the mode of production, first might imply that it had a
monolithic determining status. But another alternative, that of simply limning a chronological account of
American cinema and raising each argument seriatim, was clearly too atomistic. It would not allow us to
treat broad institutional and stylistic patterns in a systematic way. We finally settled upon a format which
permits us to delineate theoretically distinct realms while still weaving our arguments into a fundamentally
chronological pattern. Our seven-part structure is a compromise between the need to analyze several
‘levels’ of historical change (style, economics, technology) and the need to cut ‘vertically’ across those
levels at moments in which significant changes occurred. In this way, we balance localized accounts and
generalized explanation. The book should then be seen as outlining the fundamental principles of historical
stability and change at work in the Hollywood cinema and as displaying those principles in detail in
particular instances.
The result can be sketched out in broad strokes. Part One establishes the stylistic norms fundamental to
Hollywood filmmaking from 1917 to 1960. It is here that the concepts of norm, function, and style are
defined and the ordinary Hollywood film is analyzed.
In Parts Two, Three, and Four, we consider three aspects of pre-1930 Hollywood filmmaking: the
economic, the stylistic, and the technological. Part Two examines the economic aims and principles of the
Hollywood mode of production and traces how that mode created a series of hierarchical, divided work
systems. Part Three shows that while the Hollywood mode of production found its definitive form, the
stylistic norms were also becoming consolidated. Part Four shows how the norms and the mode of
production impell and respond to technological change.
Parts Five and Six deal with developments in the classical Hollywood cinema in the sound era. Part Five
examines the effects of organized labor and large-scale financing upon the mode of production and traces
further changes in production processes during the period. Part Six relates developments in technology to
changes in film style during the same years.
xix
Part Seven suggests the historical influences and the current state of this mode of film practice and
concludes with some consideration of alternative modes.
This book has had its own stylistic norms and its own mode of production. Although parts and chapters
are the work of single authors, we have conceived and executed the book as a unified argument, sharing
common assumptions and terminology. We have not, however, striven for complete homogeneity.
Differences of emphasis, value, argument, and style thus remain to remind the reader that the forms of the
medium and the division of labor leave their marks, for better or worse, upon any cultural artifact.
Part One
The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60

DAVID BORDWELL
Neither normative criticisms nor morphological description alone will ever give us a theory of
style. I do not know if such a theory is necessary; but if we want one we might do worse than
approach artistic solutions in terms of those specifications which are taken for granted in a given
period, and to list systematically, and even, if need be, pedantically, the priorities in the
reconciliation of conflicting demands. Such a procedure will give us a new respect for the
classical but will also open our minds to an appreciation of non-classical solutions representing
entirely fresh discoveries.1
E.H.Gombrich
1
An excessively obvious cinema
We all have a notion of the typical Hollywood film. The very label carries a set of expectations, often
apparently obvious, about cinematic form and style. We can define that idea, test and ground those
expectations, by using the concept of group style.
Historians routinely speak of group style in other arts: classicism or the Baroque in music, Impressionism
or Cubism in painting, Symbolism or Imagism in poetry.1 Cinema has its own group styles; German
Expressionism, Soviet montage cinema, and the French New Wave afford timehonored instances. But to
suggest that Hollywood cinema constitutes a group style seems more risky. In other national schools, a
handful of filmmakers worked within sharply contained historical circumstances for only a few years. But
Hollywood, as an extensive commercial enterprise, included hundreds of filmmakers and thousands of
films, and it has existed for over six decades. If it is a daunting challenge to define a German Expressionist
cinema or a Neorealist one, it might seem impossible to circumscribe a distinctive Hollywood ‘group style.’
The historical arguments for the existence of such style are examined later in this book. At this point, a
prima facie case for a ‘classical Hollywood style’ depends upon critically examining a body of films.
Suppose that between 1917 and 1960 a distinct and homogeneous style has dominated American studio
filmmaking—a style whose principles remain quite constant across decades, genres, studios, and personnel.
My goal here is to identify, at several levels of generality, to what extent Hollywood filmmaking adheres to
integral and limited stylistic conventions.
We could start with a description of the Hollywood style derived from Hollywood’s own discourse, that
enormous body of statements and assumptions to be found in trade journals, technical manuals, memoirs,
and publicity handouts. We would find that the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set
stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern, which makes the
film studio resemble the monastery’s scriptorium, the site of the transcription and transmission of countless
narratives; that unity is a basic attribute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’ in both
an Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to historical fact); that the
Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling;
that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional
appeal that transcends class and nation. Reiterated tirelessly for at least seventy years, such precepts suggest
that Hollywood practitioners recognized themselves as creating a distinct approach to film form and
technique that we can justly label ‘classical.’
We are not used to calling products of American mass culture ‘classical’ in any sense; the word
apparently comes easier to the French speaker. As early as 1925, a French reviewer described Chaplin’s Pay
Day (1922) as a representative of ‘cinematic classicism,’ and a year later Jean Renoir spoke of Chaplin,
Lubitsch, and Clarence Brown as contributors to a ‘classical cinema’ of the future, one ‘which owes nothing
AN EXCESSIVELY OBVIOUS CINEMA 3
to tricks, where nothing is left to chance, where the smallest detail takes its place of importance in the
overall psychological scheme of the film.’2 It was probably André Bazin who gave the adjective the most
currency; by 1939, Bazin declared, Hollywood filmmaking had acquired ‘all the characteristics of a classical
art.’3 It seems proper to retain the term in English, since the principles which Hollywood claims as its own
rely on notions of decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing
craftsmanship, and cool control of the perceiver’s response—canons which critics in any medium usually
call ‘classical.’
To stress this collective and conserving aspect of Hollywood filmmaking also affords a useful
counterweight to the individualist emphases of auteur criticism. Bazin criticized his protégés at Cahiers du
cinéma by reminding them that the American cinema could not be reduced to an assembly of variegated
creators, each armed with a personal vision:4
What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of
certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition…. The
American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only
the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous
tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.
Bazin’s point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of
the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor.
‘We said,’ remarked Truffaut bitterly, ‘that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves;
what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.’5 Pierre Kast
agreed: ‘Better a good cinéma de salarie than a bad cinéma d’auteur.’6 It is the cinéma de salarie, at least in
its enduring aspects, that represents Hollywood’s classicism.
All of which is not to say that Hollywood’s classicism does not have disparate, even ‘nonclassical’
sources. Certainly the Hollywood style seeks effects that owe a good deal to, say, romantic music or
nineteenth-century melodrama. Nor do Hollywood’s own assumptions exhaustively account for its practice;
the institution’s discourse should not set our agenda for analysis. The point is simply that Hollywood films
constitute a fairly coherent aesthetic tradition which sustains individual creation. For the purposes of this
book, the label ‘classicism’ serves well because it swiftly conveys distinct aesthetic qualities (elegance,
unity, rule-governed craftsmanship) and historical functions (Hollywood’s role as the world’s mainstream
film style). Before there are auteurs, there are constraints; before there are deviations, there are norms.
Norms, paradigms, and standards
In the final analysis, we loved the American cinema because the films all resembled each other.
François Truffaut7
The first, and crucial, step is to assume that classical filmmaking constitutes an aesthetic system that can
characterize salient features of the individual work. The system cannot determine every minute detail of the
work, but it isolates preferred practices and sets limits upon invention. The problem is, in other words, that
of defining what Jan Mukařovský has called aesthetic norms.
When we think of a norm, especially in a legal sense, we tend to think of a codified and inflexible rule.
While Mukařovský recognized that the aesthetic norms of a period are often felt by artists as constraints
upon their freedom, he stressed the norms’ comparative flexibility. He argued that the aesthetic norm is
4 THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60
characterized by its non-practical nature; the only goal of the aesthetic norm is to permit art works to come
into existence. This has important consequences: disobeying the aesthetic norm is not necessarily a negative
act (may, indeed, be quite productive); and aesthetic norms can change rapidly and considerably.
Mukařovský goes on to inventory several different kinds of norms, all of which intertwine within the art
work. There are norms deriving from the materials of the art work. Poetry, for instance, takes language as
its material, but language does not come raw to the task; it brings alongs norms of everyday usage.
Secondly, there are technical norms, basic craft practices such as metrical schemes and genre conventions.
Thirdly, there are practical, or sociopolitical norms; e.g., a character’s ethical values represented in the
work. Finally, Mukařovský speaks of aesthetic norms as such, which seem to be the basic principles of
artistic construction that form the work. These would include concepts of unity, decorum, novelty, and the
like.8
Mukařovský’s work helps us move toward denning the Hollywood cinema as an aesthetic system. Plainly,
the Hollywood style has functioned historically as a set of norms. It might seem rash to claim that
Hollywood’s norms have not drastically changed since around 1920, but Mukařovský points out that
periods of ‘classicism’ tend toward harmony and stability. Moreover, the idea of multiple norms impinging
upon the same work helps us see that it is unlikely that any Hollywood film will perfectly embody all
norms: ‘The interrelations among all these norms, which function as instruments for artistic devices, are too
complex, too differentiated, and too unstable for the positive value of the work to be able to appear as virtually
identical with the perfect fulfillment of all norms obtaining within it.’9 No Hollywood film is the classical
system; each is an ‘unstable equilibrium’ of classical norms.
Mukařovský’s work also enables us to anticipate the particular norms which we will encounter. Evidently,
classical cinema draws upon practical or ethico-socio-political norms; I shall mention these only when the
particular ways of appropriating such norms are characteristic of the classical style. For example,
heterosexual romance is one value in American society, but that value takes on an aesthetic function in the
classical cinema (as, say, the typical motivation for the principal line of action). Material norms are also
present in the cinema; when we speak of the ‘theatrical’ space of early films or of the Renaissance
representation of the body as important for classical cinema, we are assuming that cinema has absorbed
certain material norms from other media. Similarly, I will spend considerable time examining the technical
norms of classical filmmaking, since to a large extent these pervasive and persistent conventions of form,
technique, and genre constitute the Hollywood tradition. But in order to understand the underlying logic of
the classical mode, we must also study how that mode deploys fundamental aesthetic norms. How,
specifically, does Hollywood use such principles as unity and aesthetic function? As all these points
indicate, the chief virtue of Mukařovský’s work is to enable us to think of a group film style not as a
monolith but as a complex system of specific forces in dynamic interaction.
My emphasis on norms should not be taken to imply an iron-clad technical formula imposed upon
filmmakers. Any group style offers a range of alternatives. Classical filmmaking is not, strictly speaking,
formulaic; there is always another way to do something. You can light a scene high- or low-key, you can
pan or track, you can cut rapidly or seldom. A group style thus establishes what semiologists call a
paradigm, a set of elements which can, according to rules, substitute for one another. Thinking of the
classical style as a paradigm helps us retain a sense of the choices open to filmmakers within the tradition.
At the same time, the style remains a unified system because the paradigm offers bounded alternatives. If
you are a classical filmmaker, you cannot light a scene in such a way as to obscure the locale entirely (cf.
Godard in Le gai savoir); you cannot pan or track without some narrative or generic motivation; you cannot
make every shot one second long (cf. avant-garde works). Both the alternatives and the limitations of the
style remain clear if we think of the paradigm as creating functional equivalents: a cut-in may replace a
track-in, or color may replace lighting as a way to demarcate volumes, because each device fulfills the same
role. Basic principles govern not only the elements in the paradigm but also the ways in which the elements
may function.
Our account of this paradigm must also recognize how redundant it is. Not only are individual devices
equivalent, but they often appear together. For instance, there are several cues for a flashback in a classical
Hollywood film: pensive character attitude, close-up of face, slow dissolve, voice-over narration, sonic
‘flashback,’ music. In any given case, several of these will be used together. In another mode of film
practice, such as that of the European ‘art cinema’ of the 1960s, the same general paradigm governs a
movement into flashback, but the conventional cues are not so redundant (e.g., pensive close-up but with no
music or dissolve). The classical paradigm thus often lets the filmmaker choose how to be redundant, but
seldom how redundant to be.
One more conception of Hollywood cinema as a unified system plays a part in understanding the
classical style. This book will also refer to a ‘standardized’ film style. In general, this suggests only
adherence to norms. But the term also implies that Hollywood cinema has been made stringently uniform by
its dependence upon a specific economic mode of film production and consumption. Calling the Hollywood
style ‘standardized’ often implies that norms have become recipes, routinely repeating a stereotyped
product.
Yet the avant-garde has no monopoly on quality, and violating a norm is not the only way to achieve
aesthetic value. I assume that in any art, even those operating within a mass-production system, the art work
can achieve value by modifying or skillfully obeying the premises of a dominant style.
Levels of generality
If the classical style is a set of norms, we need a way to distinguish greater and lesser degrees of abstraction
in that set. A match-on-action cut is a classical convention; so is the principle of spatial continuity. But the
first convention is a particular application of the second. Broadly speaking, we can analyze the classical
Hollywood style at three levels.
1 Devices. Many isolated technical elements are characteristic of classical Hollywood cinema: three-
point lighting, continuity editing, ‘movie music,’ centered framings, dissolves, etc. Such devices are
often what we think of as the ‘Hollywood style’ itself. Yet we cannot stop with simply inventorying
these devices.
2 Systems. As members of a paradigm, technical devices achieve significance only when we understand
their functions. A dissolve between scenes can convey the passage of time; but so can a cut. To say that
the classical Hollywood style ceased to exist when most scenes were linked by cuts is to presume that a
style is only the sum of its devices. A style consists not only of recurrent elements but of a set of
functions and relations defined for them. These functions and relations are established by a system. For
example, one cinematic system involves the construction of represented space. In classical filmmaking,
lighting, sound, image composition, and editing all take as one task the articulation of space according
to specific principles. It is this systematic quality that makes it possible for one device to do duty for
another, or to repeat information conveyed by another. Thus employing a cut to link scenes conforms to
one function defined by classical premises; within this paradigm, there must be some cue for a time
lapse between scenes, and a cut may do duty for a dissolve (or a swish-pan, or a shot of a clock’s
moving hands). The systematic quality of film style also sets limits upon the paradigm; in representing
space, for instance, ambiguous camera positions and discontinuous cutting are unlikely to occur
because they violate certain principles of the system.
In this book, we shall assume that any fictional narrative film possesses three systems:
A system of narrative logic, which depends upon story events and causal relations and parallelisms
among them;
A system of cinematic time; and
A system of cinematic space.
A given device may work within any or all of these systems, depending on the functions that the
system assigns to the device.10
3 Relations of systems. If systems are relations among elements, the total style can be defined as the
relation of those systems to each other. Narrative logic, time, and space interact with one another. Does
one of them subordinate the others? Do all three operate independently? How are the principles of one
justified or challenged by another? In the Hollywood style, the systems do not play equal roles: space
and time are almost invariably made vehicles for narrative causality. Moreover, specific principles
govern that process. At this level, even irregularities in the various systems can be seen as purposeful.
For instance, if we do find a passage of discontinuous cutting, we can ask whether it is still serving a
narrative function (e.g., to convey a sudden, shocking event). In such a case, the relation among
systems would remain consistent even if the individual device or system varied from normal usage.
We can, then, characterize the classical Hollywood style by its stylistic elements, by its stylistic systems,
and, most abstractly, by the relations it sets up among those systems. No single level of description will
work. It is too narrow to define classical norms by devices, and it is unwarrantably broad to define them
solely by relations among systems. (The domination of narrative logic over cinematic time and space is
common to many styles.) Hence the importance of the second level, the stylistic systems. The categories of
causality, time, and space enable us both to place individual devices within functional contexts and to see
the classical style as a dynamic interplay of several principles. Finally, no categorical explanation of one
level can wholly swallow up another. The systematic principle of depicting space unambiguously does not
logically entail the use of three-point lighting. Those specific devices are the products of diverse historical
processes; other elements might do as well. The specificity of the classical style depends upon all three
levels of generality.
My account here will construct the classical stylistic paradigm across several decades, emphasizing the
continuity at the second and third levels. But by stressing continuity of function I do not imply that the
systems’ paradigmatic range did not change somewhat. For example, before the mid-1920s, the use of high
and low angles was severely codified: for long-shots (especially of landscapes), for optical point-of-view, or
for shot/reverse-shot patterns when one person is higher than other. (In shot/ reverse-shot editing, an image
of one element in the scene, typically a person talking, is followed by a shot of another element which is
spatially opposite the first, typically, a person listening. Chapter 5 furnishes a more systematic explanation.
See the examples in figs 16.65 and 16.66 in Chapter 16.) A medium-shot of an object or a human figure
would seldom be framed from a sharp high- or low-angle. Yet in the late 1920s, Hollywood’s spatial
paradigm widened a bit, probably as a result of the influence of certain German films. Examples can be
found in Bulldog Drummond (1929) and *The Show (1927), which dramatically use high and low angles
(see figs 1.1 and 1.2). With the coming of sound, an occasional odd angle could compensate for what was
felt to be an excessively ‘theatrical’ scene (see fig 1.3). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, steep angles took
their place as common functional equivalents for normal framings in many situations. Across history, the
paradigm develops chiefly through changes in the first level of analysis—that of devices. This process will
be examined in detail in Parts Three, Four, and Six.
Viewers, schemata, and mental sets

Considering the classical cinema as a system of norms operating at different levels of generality can seem to
create a reified object, a colossal block of attributes that says little about how film viewers see films. The
language of objectivism is hard to avoid, especially when we apply spatial metaphors like ‘levels.’ How,
then, are we to characterize the viewer’s work, or what E.H. Gombrich calls ‘the beholder’s share’?
An intricate and comprehensive theory of film viewing has yet to be constructed, and it is not within the
scope of this book to do it. Yet if we want to consider how the Hollywood film solicits a specific way of
being understood, we need to recognize at least how passive an ‘illusionist’ theory makes the spectator.
Illusionist theorists usually insist that only avant-garde texts make the viewer perform an ‘active’ reading,
or force the viewer to ‘work to produce meaning.’11 The Hollywood spectator, it is claimed, is little more
than a receptacle; few skills of attention, memory, discrimination, inference-drawing, or hypothesistesting
are required. Now this is clearly too simple. Classical films call forth activities on the part of the spectator.
These activities may be highly standardized and comparatively easy to learn, but we cannot assume that
they are simple.
Consider, as one problem, the spectator as perceiver. Illusionist theory emphasizes the deceptive quality
of projected movement or of shot space: the spectator is duped into taking image for reality. As Noël Burch
puts it, ‘spectators experience the diegetic world as environment.’12 But recent explorations in aesthetic
perception and cognition have shown that ‘illusion’ is not simply a matter of fooling the eye. The spectator
participates in creating the illusion. R.L.Gregory, for instance, speaks of perception as inferential, which
makes ‘illusion’ dependent upon errors of inference: either biological ‘mechanism’ errors (e.g., the phi
phenomenon as creating the illusion of movement) or cognitive ‘strategy’ errors (e.g., assuming that the
whole is consistent with displayed parts). Gombrich has also shown that visual illusion demands that the
spectator propose, test, and discard perceptual hypotheses based on expectation and probability.13 For
illusion to work, the spectator must meet the art work at least half way.
If perceptual illusion requires some spectatorial activity, even more is required for that imaginative
involvement solicited by narrative. No story tells all. Meir Sternberg characterizes following a tale as ‘gap-
filling,’ and just as we project motion on to a succession of frames, so we form hypotheses, make
inferences, erect expectations, and draw conclusions about the film’s characters and actions.14 Again, the
spectator must cooperate in fulfilling the film’s form. It is clear that the protocols which control this activity
derive from the system of norms operating in the classical style. For example, an insistence upon the
primacy of narrative causality is a general feature of the classical system; the viewer translates this norm
into a tacit strategy for spotting the work’s unifying features, distinguishing significant information from
‘noise,’ sorting the film’s stimuli into the most comprehensive pattern.
Gombrich describes this process in terms of ‘schemata’ and ‘mental sets.’ Schemata are traditional
formal patterns for rendering subject matter. Gombrich points out that the artist cannot simply copy reality;
the artist can only render the model in terms of one schema or another. Thus even new shapes will be
assimilated to categories which the artist has learned to handle. As Gombrich puts it, ‘making precedes
matching’—the creation of a schema precedes copying the model.15 After the making, the schema can be
modified in each particular case by the artist’s purpose (usually, the sort of information the artist wants to
convey). So far, much of this is congruent with Mukařovský’s argument: we might think of the artist’s
schemata as technical norms and the artist’s purpose as involving specific aesthetic norms. But Gombrich
goes on to show that the schemata and the purpose function for the viewer as well. The artist’s training is
paralleled by the spectator’s prior experience of the visual world and, especially, of other art works. The
painter’s traditional schemata constitute the basis of the viewer’s expectations or mental set: ‘A style, like a
culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set, which registers deviations and
modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.’16 For Gombrich, this mental set is defined in terms of
probabilities: certain schemata are more likely to fit the data than others.
By pairing concepts like schemata and mental set, we can spell out the ways in which the classical film
solicits the spectator. For instance, one well-known schema of Hollywood film editing is the shot/reverse-
shot pattern. The filmmaker has this ready to hand for representing any two figures, groups, or objects
within the same place. This schema can be fitted to many situations, whatever the differences of figure
placement, camera height, lighting, or focus; whether the image is in widescreen ratio or not; whether the
figures are facing one another or not; etc. Because of the tradition behind the schema, the viewer in turn
expects to see the shot/reverse-shot figure, especially if the first shot of the combination appears. If the next
shot does not obey the schema, the spectator then applies another, less probable, schema to the second shot.
The spectator of the classical film thus riffles through the alternatives normalized by the style, from most to
least likely. Through schemata, the style’s norms not only impose their logic upon the material but also
elicit particular activities from the viewer. The result is that in describing the classical system we are
describing a set of operations that the viewer is expected to perform.
To stress the tasks which the film allots to the spectator allows us to abandon certain illusions of our
own. We no longer need subscribe to copytheories of cinema, whereby a certain style simply replicates the
real world or normal acts of perception; schemata, tied to historically defined purposes, always intervene to
guide us in grasping the film. Nor need we imagine a Svengali cinema holding its audience in thrall. The
classical schemata have created a mental set that still must be activated by and tested against any given
film. Of course, the classical style defines certain spectatorial activities as salient, and the historical
dominance of that style has so accustomed us to those activities that audiences may find other schemata
more burdensome. Yet this dynamic concept of the viewer’s role allows us to explain the very processes that
seem so excessively obvious; as we shall see, even the spectator’s rapt absorption results from a hypothesis-
checking that requires the viewer to meet the film halfway. We can also envision alternative viewing
practices, other activities that the spectator might be asked to perform. The chapters that follow, then,
suggest at several points how the norms of the classical Hollywood style encourage specific activities on the
part of the spectator.
Style in history
If you’re not working for Brezhnev Studio-Mosfilm, you are working for Nixon-Paramount. …
You forget that this same master has been ordering the same film for fifty years.
Wind from the East
To construct the classical Hollywood style as a coherent system, we also need to account for the style’s
historical dimension. In one sense, this entire book tries to do that, by examining the Hollywood mode of
production, the consolidation of the style in a specific period, and the changes that the style undergoes in
subsequent years. At this point, I must indicate that my overall description of the classical style applies to a
set of films across an extensive period. What historical assumptions underlie such a broadly based analysis?
The three levels of generality indicate some of those assumptions. My enterprise assumes a historical
continuity at the two most abstract levels of style (systems and relations among systems); it assumes that the
most distinct changes take place at the level of stylistic devices. For example, through its history Hollywood
cinema seeks to represent events in a temporally continuous fashion; moreover, narrative logic has generally
worked to motivate this temporal continuity. What changes through history are the various devices for
representing temporal continuity such as inter-titles, cuts, irises, dissolves, whip-pans, and wipes.
By stressing the enduring principles of the classical style, we lose some specific detail. In this part, I shall
not reconstruct the choices available to filmmakers at any given moment. If I say that a scene can begin by
drawing back from a significant figure or object, that suggests that an iris, a cut, and a camera movement
are all paradigmatic alternatives. But in 1917, the most probable choice would have been the iris; in 1925,
the cut; in 1935, the camera movement. In discussing the general principles of classical style, I shall often
project the historically variable devices on to the same plane to show their functional equivalence. This
bird’s-eye view enables us to map the basic and persistent features of the style in history. The more minute
history of the devices themselves forms the bulk of Parts Three, Four, and Six.
Historical analysis demands a concept of periodization. Since we are concerned here with a stylistic
history, we cannot presuppose that the periods used to write political or social history will demarcate the
history of an art. That is, there is no immediate compulsion to define a ‘cinema of the 1930s’ as drastically
different from that of ‘the 1940s,’ or to distinguish pre-World War II Hollywood style from postwar
Hollywood style. What, then, will constitute our grounds for periodization? Norms, yes; but also the film
industry, the most proximate and pertinent institution for creating, regulating, and maintaining those norms.
This is not to say that film style and mode of production march across decades in perfect synchronization.
Parts Two and Five will provide a periodization for the Hollywood mode of production that while
congruent in some respects, cannot be simply superimposed upon stylistic history. Nevertheless, we have
chosen to frame our study within the years 1917– 60.
The earlier date is easier to justify. Stylistically, from 1917 on, the classical model became dominant, in
the sense that most American fiction films since that moment employed fundamentally similar narrative,
temporal, and spatial systems. At the same time, the studio mode of production had become organized:
detailed division of labor, the continuity script, and a hierarchical managerial system became the principal
filmmaking procedures. Parts Two and Three detail how style and industry came to be so closely
synchronized by 1917. But why halt an analysis of the classical Hollywood cinema in 1960?
The date triggers suspicion. Stylistically, there is no question that ‘classical’ films are still being made, as
Part Seven will show. Variants of the Hollywood mode of production continue as well. There are thus
compelling reasons to claim that 1960 is a premature cutoff point. On the other hand, some critics may
assert that this ‘classical’ period is far too roomy; one can see any period after 1929 as the ‘breakdown’ of
the Hollywood cinema (the tensions of the Depression, the anguish of war and Cold War, and the
competitive challenge of television).
The year 1960 was chosen for reasons of history and of convenience. In the film industry, it was widely
believed that at the end of the decade Hollywood had reached the end of its mature existence. This Was
Hollywood, the title of a 1960 book by publicist Beth Day, summarizes many reasons for considering the
year as a turning point. Most production firms had converted their energies to television, the dominant
massentertainment form since the mid-1950s; many had reduced their holdings in studio real estate; stars
had become free agents; most producers had become independent; the B-film was virtually dead.17 To
Day’s account we can add other signs of change. By 1960, a certain technological state of the art had been
reached: high-definition color films, wide formats, and high-fidelity magnetic sound had set the standard of
quality that continues today. Moreover, other styles began to challenge the dominance of classicism. The
international art cinema, spearheaded by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, certain Italian directors, and
the French New Wave, offered a more influential and widely disseminated alternative to Hollywood than
had ever existed before. Not that Hollywood was significantly shaken (Part Seven tries to show why), but
the force of the classical norm was reduced somewhat. Despite these reasons, it remains somewhat arbitrary
to see 1960 as closing the classical period. We have chosen it partly because it makes our research
somewhat manageable while still conveying the powerful spread of the classical cinema’s authority.
The ordinary film

Film historians have not generally acknowledged the place of the typical work. In most film histories,
masterworks and innovations rise monumentally out of a hazy terrain whose contours remain unknown. In
other arts, however, the ordinary work is granted considerable importance. Academicism, mainstream
works, the canon, tradition—the history of music, painting, and literature could not do without such
conceptions. ‘I believe,’ remarks Roman Jakobson, ‘that a very important thing in analyzing trends in the
cinema or the structure of a film, is the necessity of considering the base, the background of the spectator’s
habits. What films is the spectator used to seeing? To what forms is he accustomed?’18 My analysis of the
norms of the classical style thus gives privileged place not to the aberrant film that breaks or tests the rules
but to the quietly conformist film that tries simply to follow them.
Between 1915 and 1960, at least fifteen thousand feature films were produced in America. It is
impossible to analyze such a corpus. To construct a model of the ordinary film, we have selected in an
unbiased fashion, 100 films from this period. (Appendix A explains the sampling procedures and lists the
films.) We studied each film on a horizontal viewing machine, recording stylistic details of each shot and
summarizing the film’s action scene by scene. This body of data constitutes our unbiased sample
(abbreviated UnS), and when we cite such a film, an asterisk signals it.
In the stylistic analysis of the cinema, the practice of unbiased sampling is unprecedented, but we believe
it to be a sound way to determine historical norms. When the sample turned up what might be regarded as
auteur films, we accepted this as inevitable in an unbiased sample and treated these films exactly as we did
others. At least four-fifths of the sample, however, constitute a body of fairly obscure productions ranging
across decades, studios, and genres. Furthermore, we have sought to test the conclusions about the UnS films
by closely analyzing almost two hundred other Hollywood films of the 1915–60 period. We chose many of
these films for their quality or historical influence, but many were as undistinguished as our UnS items. We
shall refer to this second set of films as the Extended Sample (ES). My analysis of the classical style takes
the UnS films as the central source of evidence and examples, drawing upon ES films occasionally. This
means that many of the films mentioned will be unfamiliar to readers, but since I argue for their typicality,
the reader will recognize qualities present in many other films.
In one sense, the concept of group style simply makes manifest what we and Hollywood itself ‘already
know.’ Concepts like norm, paradigm, stylistic alternatives, levels of systemic function, periodization, and
schemata are, from this perspective, simply tools in making our habitual intuitions explicit. But these
concepts also enable us to reveal the patterned and stable quality of our assumptions. The concepts can show
that the classical cinema has an underlying logic which is not apparent from our common-sense reflection
upon the films or from Hollywood’s own discourse about them. The theoretical concepts introduced in this
chapter are indispensible to grasping the classical style’s systematic quality. Armed with them, we can go
on to examine how that style characteristically organizes causality, time, and space. The next five chapters,
then, should trigger a certain déja vu; the reader will recognize some familiar filmmaking practices. But
these chapters also seek to explain in a systematic way how these practices work together to create a distinct
film style which, like Poe’s purloined letter, ‘escapes observation by dint of being excessively obvious.’19
2
Story causality and motivation
There are several ways of analyzing fictional narrative cinema; the approach taken here can be broadly
called formalist. As Chapter 1 proposed, a narrative film consists of three systems: narrative logic
(definition of events, causal relations and parallelisms between events), the representation of time (order,
duration, repetition), and the representation of space (composition, orientation, etc.). Any given technical
parameter (e.g., sound, editing) can function within any or all of these systems. Lighting or camera
movements can emphasize a causally significant object while endowing the represented space with depth
and volume. Offscreen sound can operate as a narrative cause, can work to specify duration, or can define
an unseen space. In short, while this account stresses what Mukařovský calls technical norms, the
techniques are not simply isolated devices but rather functional components in the three basic formal systems.
A narrative film seldom treats its systems as equals. The Russian Formalist critics suggested that in any
text or tradition, a certain component —the dominant—subordinates others. ‘The dominant,’ writes
Jakobson, ‘may be defined as the focussing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms
the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure.’1 This integrity
deserves to be seen as a dynamic one, with the subordinated factors constantly pulling against the sway of
the dominant. In Hollywood cinema, a specific sort of narrative causality operates as the dominant, making
temporal and spatial systems vehicles for it. These systems do not always rest quietly under the sway of
narrative logic, but in general the causal dominant creates a marked hierarchy of systems in the classical
film.
Another distinction cuts across these three systems. Most film theorists recognize a difference between
the narrative material of a film (the events or actions, the basic story) and the manner in which that material
is represented in the film. The Russian Formalist literary critics distinguished between fabula (‘story’) and
syuzhet (‘plot’), and throughout this book, we will use the story/plot distinction in a sense akin to that of the
Formalists.2 ‘Story’ will refer to the events of the narrative in their presumed spatial, temporal, and causal
relations. ‘Plot’ will refer to the totality of formal and stylistic materials in the film. The plot thus includes
all the systems of time, space, and causality actually manifested in the film; everything from a flashback
structure and subjective point-of-view to minutiae of lighting, cutting, and camera movement. The plot is, in
effect, the film before us. The story is thus our mental construct, a structure of inferences we make on the
basis of selected aspects of the plot. For example, the plot might present certain events out of chronological
order; to understand the film, we must be able to reconstruct that chronological, or story, order. One virtue
of this scheme is its acknowledgment of the viewer’s activity; if the viewer knows how a certain tradition of
filmmaking habitually presents a story, the viewer approaches the film with what Gombrich calls a mental
set. In the next chapter, we shall be able to specify certain tasks which the classical film assigns to the
spectator. The work at hand is to bring to light basic principles of story causality in the classical Hollywood
12 STORY CAUSALITY AND MOTIVATION
film. Once we have done this, we will be in a position to understand how the classical story creates its
particular unity.
Causes and effects
This extra is called an actor. This actor is called a character. The adventures of these characters
are called a film.
Wind from the East
‘Plot,’ writes Francis Patterson in a 1920 manual for aspiring screenwriters, ‘is a careful and logical
working out of the laws of cause and effect. The mere sequence of events will not make a plot. Emphasis
must be laid upon causality and the action and reaction of the human will.’3 Here in brief is the premise of
Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward
overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered —i.e., personal or psychological—causality
is the armature of the classical story.
This sounds so obvious that we need to remember that narrative causality could be impersonal as well. Natural
causes (floods, genetic inheritance) could form the basis for story action, and in cinema we might think of
the work of Yasujiro Ozu, which installs a ‘natural’ rhythm or cycle of life at the center of the action. Causality
could also be conceived as social—a causality of institutions and group processes. Soviet films of the 1920s
remain the central model of cinematic attempts to represent just such supraindividual historical causality. Or
one could conceive of narrative causality as a kind of impersonal determinism, in which coincidence and
chance leave the individual little freedom of personal action. The postwar European art cinema often relies
upon this sort of narrative causality, as Bazin indicates in relation to Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest
(1950): ‘Events do indeed follow one another according to a necessary order, yet within a framework of
accidental happenings.’4
Hollywood films of course include causes of these impersonal types, but they are almost invariably
subordinated to psychological causality. This is most evident in the classical film’s use of historical
causality. Pierre Sorlin points out that classical films typically present historical events as uncaused; a war
simply breaks out, disrupting characters’ lives very much as a natural disaster might.5 When history is seen
as caused, that cause is traceable to a psychologically defined individual. (A chief instance here is The Birth
of a Nation [1915], which links Reconstruction abuses to the ambitions of Austin Stoneman.) Thus the
classical film makes history unknowable apart from its effects upon individual characters. As an old Russian
émigré says at the end of *Balalaika (1939): ‘And to think that it took the Revolution to bring us together.’
Impersonal causes may initiate or abruptly alter a line of story action which then proceeds by personal
causes. A storm may maroon a group of characters, but then psychological causality takes over. A war may
separate lovers, but then they must react to that condition. Coincidence is especially dangerous in this
context, and Hollywood rule-books insist upon confining coincidence to the initial situation. Boy and girl
may meet by accident, but they cannot rely upon chance to keep their acquaintance alive. The later in the
film a coincidence occurs, the weaker it is; and it is very unlikely that the story will be resolved by
coincidence. We see here the influence of the well-made play (e.g., the mischance that triggers the intrigue
in Scribe or Sardou) and the appeal to Aristotelian notions of plausibility and probability. Unmotivated
coincidences do occasionally crop up in Hollywood films. *The Courage of Commonplace (1917) deals
with a miners’ strike, and the film’s protagonist, the mine supervisor, will not yield to the strikers. He
declares: ‘Something’s got to happen.’ The next day, a mine collapses by natural causes. (A more careful
scenarist would have made a disgruntled foreman sabotage the mine.) Or, in *Parachute Jumper (1933), it
THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD STYLE, 1917–60 13
is not unmotivated to have the romantic couple first meet by accident, but in the last scene they meet again
by sheer chance. Most often, though, coincidence is motivated by genre (chance encounters are conventions
of comedy and melodrama). And ‘coincidental’ encounters may be prepared causally. In *Parole Fixer
(1940), the crooked Craydon must encounter the government agents at a cafe, so the script motivates the
encounter as probable. His secretary asks why Craydon eats at the cafe so often, and he answers: ‘Our
friends of the FBI eat here.’
If the character must act as the prime causal agent, he or she must be defined as a bundle of qualities, or
traits. Screenplay manuals demand that a character’s traits be clearly identified and consistent with one
another. Sources for this practice, of course, go back very far, but the most pertinent ones are the models for
characterization present in literature and theater. From the nineteenth-century melodrama’s stock
character izations, Hollywood has borrowed the need for sharply delineated and unambiguous traits.6 (Some
of melodrama’s types, such as certain ethnic types, the old maid, and the villainous lawyer, get reincarnated
in the Hollywood cinema.) From the novel comes what lan Watt calls a ‘formal realism’: characters are
individualized with particular traits, tics, or tags.7 Watt highlights, for instance, the importance of the unique
proper name (Micawber, Moll Flanders) which creates a greater singularity of personality than the
stereotyped names of the melodrama (Paddy the Irishman, Jonathan the Yankee). The popular short story acted
as a model for narrowing such individualized characterization to fixed limits. The novel can explore many
character traits and trace extensive character change, but the dominant aesthetic of the short story in the
years 1900–1920 required that the writer create characters with few traits and then focus those upon a few
key actions. The short story in a sense struck an average between the fixed character types of the melodrama
and the dense complexity of the realist novel, and this average appealed to the classical Hollywood cinema
during its formative years. (Chapter 14 will trace how the popular short story became a model for
Hollywood dramaturgy.) It was thus possible for Frank Borzage to claim in 1922 that ‘Today in the pictures
we have the old melodramatic situations fitted out decently with true characterizations.’8
The classical film’s presentation of character traits likewise follows conventions established in earlier
theoretical and literary forms. Characters will be typed by occupation (cops are burly), age, gender, and
ethnic identity. To these types, individualized traits are added. Most important, a character is made a
consistent bundle of a few salient traits, which usually depend upon the character’s narrative function. It is
the business of the film’s exposition to acquaint us with these traits and to establish their consistency. At the
beginning of *Saratoga (1937), a garrulous grandfather tells another character (and us) how his daughter
has become ‘high and mighty’ since she went to Europe. We see her almost immediately, and her snooty
behavior is consistent with his description. At the start of *Casbah (1948), police officers discuss Pepe’s
susceptibility to women; the next scene introduces Pepe, singing about women and fate to an audience of
admiring women. Sometimes, as in *Lorna Doone (1923) and *Wuthering Heights (1939), the film borrows
the novelistic device of introducing us to the characters in childhood; the already-formed principal traits we
observe will carry over into the adult lives. More commonly, the character’s salient traits are indicated—by
an expository title, by other characters’ description—and the initial appearance of the character confirms
these traits as salient. In such ways, the spectator forms clear first impressions about the characters as
homogeneous identities.
The importance of character consistency can be seen in the star system, which was a crucial factor in
Hollywood film production. Although in the United States, the theatrical star system goes back to the early
1800s, it was not until the period 1912–1917 that film companies began consistently to differentiate their
products by means of stars.9 On the whole, the star reinforced the tendency toward strongly profiled and
unified characterization. Max Ophuls praised Hollywood’s ability to give the actor an already-existing
personality with which to work in the film.10 The star, like the fictional character, already had a set of
salient traits which could be matched to the demands of the story. In describing the filming of I Was a Male
War Bride (1949), Hawks suggested that one scene did not coalesce until he discovered the scene’s
‘attitude’: ‘A man like Cary Grant would be amused’—that is, the star’s traits and the character’s traits
became isomorphic.11
In his book Stars, Richard Dyer has shown how the ‘roundness’ of the novelistic character is lacking in
Hollywood film characterization and traces this lack to the need for ‘perfect fit’ between star and role.12 It is
also the case that the classical film both trades upon the prior connotations of the star and masks these
connotations, presenting the star as character as if ‘for the first time.’13 For example, the star may portray a
character who grows into the star’s persona. In Meet John Doe (1941) the selfish pitcher John Willoughby
becomes the rustic idealist John Doe because Willoughby was, in latent form, Cary Cooper to begin with. We
discover the Gary Cooper persona afresh, even while knowing that it was there before the start. This is
perhaps the most common way to represent character change in the classical cinema, since it affirms a basic
consistency of character traits.
‘Guys like you end up in the stockade sooner or later.’ A single line in *From Here to Eternity (1953)
shows how strongly classical character traits are tied to action. Fatso’s remark follows his fight with
Maggio, and so sums up Maggie’s act of defiance. But the ‘guys like you’ assumes Maggio to be a fixed
identity, a permanent type (the hotheaded bucker of authority). Moreover, that type is defined not only by
traits but by deeds. Maggio will continue to act according to type. That he does indeed wind up in the
stockade does not make Fatso a prophet; his remark simply acknowledges the close causal relation between
a character’s traits and actions; traits are only latent causes, actions the effects of traits. We reason, as
screenwriting manuals remind us, from cause to effect and vice-versa; the writer’s procedure of
‘foreshadowing’ is nothing more than preparing a cause for an eventual effect.
If characters are to become agents of causality, their traits must be affirmed in speech and physical
behavior, the observable projections of personality. While films can entirely do without people, Hollywood
cinema relies upon a distinction between movement and action. Movement, writes Frederick Palmer,14
is merely motion. Action is usually the outward expression of inner feelings…. For instance, one
might write: ‘The whirring blades of the electric fan caused the window curtains to flutter. The man
seated at the massive desk finished his momentous letter, sealed it, and hastened out to post it.’ The
whirring fan and the fluttering curtain give motion only—the man’s writing the letter and taking it out
to post provides action.
It is of action that photoplays are wrought.
Palmer’s scene provides a precise hypothetical alternative to the classical style (one that Ozu will actualize
in his shots of objects interrupting passages of character ‘action’). Hollywood cinema, however, emphasizes
action, ‘the outward expression of inner feeling,’ the litmus test of character consistency. Even a simple
physical reaction—a gesture, an expression, a widening of the eyes—constructs character psychology in
accordance with other information. Most actions in the classical film proceed, as Bazin put it, ‘from the
commonsense supposition that a necessary and unambiguous causal relationship exists between feelings and
their outward manifestations.’15
Hollywood cinema reinforces the individuality and consistency of each character by means of recurrent
motifs. A character will be tagged with a detail of speech or behavior that defines a major trait. For example,
the nouveau riche Upshaw in *Going Highbrow (1935) is associated with his craving for tomato juice and
eggs, a sign of his ordinary tastes. The ‘fallen woman’ in *Woman of the World (1925) is defined by her
exotic tattoo, executed at a lover’s request. In *Mr. Skeffington (1944), Fanny’s flightiness is conveyed by her
habit of mentioning a luncheon engagement with another woman but then always standing her up. The
motif may associate the character with an object or locale. The heroine of *The Tiger’s Coat (1920) is
associated with a painting that compares her to a ‘tawny tiger skin.’ In *His Double Life (1933), Farrell meets
a woman who talks of her garden while the soundtrack plays ‘Country Gardens’; once he has married her,
they are seen sitting in her garden. Consistency of character is conveyed by repeating the motif through the
film. With a minor character, the motif may be a running gag that aids easy identification, as when one
soldier in *The Hasty Heart (1949) has been curious about what a Scotsman wears under his kilts and at the
end peers under the kilts to find out.
For major characters, the motif serves to mark significant stages of story action. In *A Lost Lady (1934),
the older man tells Marion that she must face life ‘with banners flying,’ and the motif defines his pride and
sets a goal for her. Once they are married, the phrase becomes a bond between them. At the film’s close,
after having decided not to leave him, Marion says: ‘Nothing to be afraid of, no more ghosts—banners
flying!’ A similar use of another line, ‘I can take it on the chin,’ runs through *Show People (1928) tracing
the heroine’s career as a movie actress. In *Prince of Players (1954), Junius Booth drunkenly orders an
audience to wait ten minutes and he’ll give them ‘the damnedest King Lear you ever saw. The name is
Booth!’ After his son Ned becomes an actor, he calms an unruly crowd by promising ‘the damnedest
Richard you ever saw. The name is Booth!’ When, at the film’s end, Ned decides to perform despite his
wife’s death, he explains, ‘The name is still Booth!’ The tiny word ‘still’ confirms that the father’s defiant
attitude persists in the son, and Ned has not changed a bit.
Once defined as an individual through traits and motifs, the character assumes a causal role because of
his or her desires. Hollywood characters, especially protagonists, are goaloriented. The hero desires
something new to his/her situation, or the hero seeks to restore an original state of affairs. This owes something
to late nineteenth-century theatre, as seen in Ferdinand Brunetière’s dictum that the central law of the drama
is that of conflict arising from obstacles to the character’s desire: ‘That is what may be called will, to set up
a goal, and to direct everything toward it.’16 Plainly the star system also supported this tendency by insisting
upon a strongly characterized protagonist. The goaloriented hero, incarnated in Douglas Fairbanks, Mary
Pickford, and William S.Hart, was quickly identified as a distinguishing trait of the American cinema. In
1924, a German critic wrote of the Hollywood character as ‘the man of deeds. In the first act his goal is set;
in the last act he reaches it. Everything that intervenes between these two acts is a test of strength.’17
Through thirty years, the claim generally held good. In *The Michigan Kid (1928), the hero resolves in his
childhood to flee to Alaska, make a fortune, and come back to marry his sweetheart. One of the policemen
in *Sh! The Octopus (1937) vows: ‘We’re gonna catch that Octopus and get that fifty thousand dollar
reward.’ The immigrant protagonist of *An American Romance (1944) has a burning desire to manufacture
steel. In *My Favorite Brunette (1947), the hero declares: ‘All my life I wanted to be a hard-boiled
detective.’ The teenage heroine of *Gidget (1959) states her aim of attracting a handsome boy on the beach.
It is easy to see in the goal-oriented protagonist a reflection of an ideology of American individualism and
enterprise, but it is the peculiar accomplishment of the classical cinema to translate this ideology into a
rigorous chain of cause and effect.
Other characters get defined by goals. Melodrama’s formula of hero versus villain, never too hoary for
Hollywood, depends upon the clash of opposed purposes. Even when the oppositions are not absolute,
characters’ goals produce causal chains. Characters may have complementary or independent goals. In
*Sweepstakes Winner (1939), when Jenny comes into a betting parlor and announces her goal (to buy a race
horse), two touts see how that can serve their own aims (to fix races and make money). In *Indianapolis
Speedway (1939), a racedriver’s girlfriend wants only a home and family; he tells her that she’ll get both
after he has put his brother through college. Goals become latent effects in the causal series: they shape our
expectations by narrowing the range of alternative outcomes of the action.
Making personal character traits and goals the causes of actions has led to a dramatic form fairly specific
to Hollywood. The classical film has at least two lines of action, both causally linking the same group of
characters. Almost invariably, one of these lines of action involves heterosexual romantic love. This is, of
course, not startling news. Of the one hundred films in the UnS, ninety-five involved romance in at least one
line of action, while eighty-five made that the principal line of action. Screenplay manuals stress love as the
theme with greatest human appeal. Character traits are often assigned along gender lines, giving male and
female characters those qualities deemed ‘appropriate’ to their roles in romance. To win the love of a man
or woman becomes the goal of many characters in classical films. In this emphasis upon heterosexual love,
Hollywood continues traditions stemming from the chivalric romance, the bourgeois novel, and the
American melodrama.
We sometimes think of a play’s second line of action as an independent subplot, such as a comic love
affair between servants. Classical Hollywood cinema, however, makes the second line of action causally
related to the romantic action. Instead of putting many characters through parallel lines of action, the
Hollywood film involves few characters in several interdependent actions. For example, in *Penthouse
(1933), the protagonist tries to solve a murder while wooing one of the suspects. Sometimes, as in the love-
triangle story, the second line of action also involves romance. More commonly, the second line of action
involves another sort of activity—business, spying, sports, politics, crime, show business—any activity, in
short, which can provide a goal for the character. In *Saratoga (1937), the protagonist Duke must win Carol
from her fiancé Hartley and he must help her grandfather to obtain a successful racehorse. In *Steamboat
Bill Jr. (1928), the son falls in love with the daughter of the town entrepreneur while trying to show his
father that he can save their steamboat line. *High Time (1960) presents a middle-aged businessman setting
out to prove that he can graduate from college and falling in love in the process: in his valedictory speech,
he looks out at the woman and says: ‘If there’s anything a man can’t achieve by himself he shouldn’t
hesitate to join with someone else.’ The tight binding of the second line of action to the love interest is one
of the most unusual qualities of the classical cinema, giving the film a variety of actions and a sense of
comprehensive social ‘realism’ that earlier drama achieved through the use of parallel, loosely related
subplots. This specific form of unity is well described by Allan Dwan: ‘If I constructed a story and I had
four characters in it, I’d put them down as dots and if they didn’t hook up into triangles, if any of them were
left dangling out there without a significant relationship to any of the rest, I knew I had to discard them
because they’re a distraction.’18
Psychological causality, presented through defined characters acting to achieve announced goals, gives
the classical film its characteristic progression. The two lines of action advance as chains of cause and
effect. The tradition of the well-made play, as reformulated at the end of the nineteenth century, survives in
Hollywood scenarists’ academic insistence upon formulas for Exposition, Conflict, Complication, Crisis,
and Denouement. The more pedantic rulebooks cite Ibsen, William Archer, Brander Matthews, and Gustav
Freytag. The more homely advice is to create problems that the characters must solve, show them trying to
solve them, and end with a definite resolution. The conventions of the well-made play—strong opening
exposition, battles of wits, thrusts and counter-thrusts, extreme reversals of fortunes, and rapid denouement
—all reappear in Hollywood dramaturgy, and all are defined in relation to cause and effect. The film
progresses like a staircase: ‘Each scene should make a definite impression, accomplish one thing, and
advance the narrative a step nearer the climax.’19 Action triggers reaction: each step has an effect which in
turn becomes a new cause.20* Chapter 6 will show how the construction of each scene advances each line of
action, but for now a single film will stand as an instance of the overall dynamics of cause and effect.
*The Black Hand (1949) begins in New York’s Little Italy in 1900. The Mafia murder a lawyer, and his
young son Gio vows to find the murderers. This becomes the overarching goal of the film. Eight years later,
Gio returns from Italy and begins to investigate. He goes to the hotel where his father was killed and is told
that he can find the night clerk with the help of the banker Serpi. When Gio visits Serpi’s bank, he meets
Isabella, and in a prolonged scene several goals get articulated: Gio declares that he wants to be a lawyer,
she suggests forming a Citizen’s League to fight the Black Hand, and a romantic attachment is defined between
the couple. Gio continues to investigate the night clerk, but he finds that the Mafia have killed him. The
romance is here a subsidiary line of action; the two principal causal lines are Gio’s drive for revenge and the
civic aim of driving out the Mafia. Both lines are advanced when Gio and Isabella form a Citizen’s League.
As Gio puts it: ‘If I haven’t got any leads, I’ll make some.’ This initiative sparks an immediate reaction: the
Mafia capture and beat Gio, and the League dissolves. The next Mafia outrage, the bombing of a shop,
plunges Gio into an alliance with the policeman Borelli. They bring the bomber to trial and Gio’s legal
training turns up evidence that leads to the bomber’s being deported. Since he is also one of the men who
killed Gio’s father, Gio is brought a step closer to his initial goal.
The bomber’s trial causes Gio to hit upon a new, legal way to achieve his goal. He suggests that Borelli
go to Italy to check on illegal immigration; the information will enable the city to deport many Mafiosi. In
Italy, Borelli finds that the banker Serpi has a criminal record. In another counterthrust, the Mafia kill
Borelli— but not before he mails Gio the incriminating evidence. From now on, cause and effect, action and
reaction, alternate swiftly. The New York gang kidnaps Isabella’s brother Rudy in order to silence Gio;
recovering Rudy thus becomes a new short-range goal. Gio discovers where Rudy is imprisoned, but he is
himself captured. He now realizes that Serpi arranged the murder of his father. Serpi’s gang acquire
Borelli’s documents, but before they can destroy them, Gio manages to touch off a bomb in their hideout. In
the melee, Gio fights with Serpi and recovers the evidence. At the film’s end, Gio has achieved both his
personal goal and the community’s goal. This was accomplished through a series of causally linked short-
term goals (law studies, Citizen’s League, immigration investigation, kidnapping) that grew out of several
mutually dependent lines of action. This process is at work in virtually every classical narrative film.
*The Black Hand exemplifies how the classical story constitutes a segment of a larger cause-effect chain.
The beginning, as Chapter 3 will show, introduces us to an already-moving action which has a first cause, a
distant but specified source. (Gio’s father is killed because he wants to divulge his knowledge of the Mafia
to the police.) What of the end? The ending is, most simply, the last effect. It too should be justified
causally. One screenplay manual asks about the characters: ‘What is their mental attitude in the beginning
of the story? Just what traits are responsible for their struggle and conflict? How do these traits of character
lead to the solving of the plot problem?’21 Just as the scene à faire of the well-made play shows the hero
triumphing over obstacles, the classical Hollywood film has a ‘big scene where matters are settled definitely
once and for all.’22 In *The Black Hand, the romance line of action is hardly in doubt; the last moments
simply celebrate the couple’s union. The same thing happens in the last two shots of *At Sword’s Point
(1952): (1) The musketeers, having restored the monarchy, shout, ‘Long live the King!’; (2) Clare and
D’Artagnan embrace. In other films, such as His Girl Friday (1939), the romance line of action is
unresolved until the film’s last moments. In either case, the ending need not be ‘happy’; it need only be a
definite conclusion to the chain of cause and effect.
This movement from cause to effect, in the service of overarching goals, partly explains why Hollywood
so prizes continuity. Coincidence and haphazardly linked events are believed to flaw the film’s unity and
disturb the spectator. Tight causality yields not only consequence but continuity, making the film progress
‘smoothly, easily, with no jars, no waits, no delays.’23 A growing absorption also issues from the steadily
intensifying character causality, as the spectator recalls salient causes and anticipates more or less likely
effects. The ending becomes the culmination of the spectator’s absorption, as all the causal gaps get filled.
The fundamental plenitude and linearity of Hollywood narrative culminate in metaphors of knitting,
linking, and filling. Lewis Herman eloquently sums up this aesthetic:24
Care must be taken that every hole is plugged; that every loose string is tied together; that every
entrance and exit is fully motivated, and that they are not made for some obviously contrived reason;
that every coincidence is sufficiently motivated to make it credible; that there is no conflict between
what has gone on before, what is going on currently, and what will happen in the future; that there is
complete consistency between present dialogue and past action—that no baffling question marks are
left over at the end of the picture to detract from the audience’s appreciation of it.
What would narrative cinema without personalized causation be like? We have some examples (in Miklós
Jancsó, Ozu, Robert Bresson, Soviet films of the 1920s), but we can find others. Erich Von Stroheim’s
Greed (1924) shows that a Naturalist causal scheme is incompatible with the classical model: the characters
cannot achieve their goals, and causality is in the hands of nature and not people. From another angle,
Brecht’s ruminations upon Aristotelian dramaturgy suggest that causality could be taken out of the power of
the individual character. ‘The attention and interest that the spectator brings to causality must be directed
toward the law governing the movements of the masses.’25 It is also possible to view Brecht’s theories as
leading toward a narrative which interrupts the action to represent actions that might have happened, thus
revealing the determinism that underlies psychologically motivated causality in the classical narrative.26
Even when personal causation remains central to a film, however, there is still the possibility of making it more
ambiguous and less linear; characters may lack clear-cut traits and definite goals, and the film’s events may
be loosely linked or left open-ended. Chapter 30 will examine how these qualities become significant in the
postwar European ‘art cinema.’
Motivation
Understanding classical story causality takes us toward grasping how a classical film unifies itself.
Generally speaking, this unity is a matter of motivation. Motivation is the process by which a narrative
justifies its story material and the plot’s presentation of that story material. If the film depicts a flashback,
the jump back in time can be attributed to a character’s memory; the act of remembering thus motivates the
flashback.
Motivation may be of several sorts.27 One is compositional: certain elements must be present if the story
is to proceed. A story involving a theft requires a cause for the theft and an object to be stolen. The classical
causal factors we have reviewed constitute compositional motivation. A second sort of motivation is
realistic motivation. Many narrative elements are justified on grounds of verisimilitude. In a film set in
nineteenth-century London, the sets, props, costumes, etc. will typically be motivated realistically. Realistic
motivation extends to what we will consider plausible about the narrative action: in *The Black Hand, Gio’s
quest for revenge is presented as ‘realistic,’ given his personality and circumstances. Thirdly, we can
identify intertextual motivation. Here the story (or the plot’s representation of it) is justified on the grounds
of the conventions of certain classes of art works. For example, we often assume that a Hollywood film will
end happily simply because it is a Hollywood film. The star can also supply intertextual motivation: if
Marlene Dietrich is in the film, we can expect that at some point she will sing a cabaret song. The most
common sort of intertextual motivation is generic. Spontaneous singing in a film musical may have little
compositional or realistic motivation, but it is justified by the conventions of the genre.28 There is, finally, a
rather special sort of motivation, artistic motivation, which I shall discuss later.
It should be evident that several types of motivation may cooperate to justify any given item in the
narrative. The flashback could be motivated compositionally (giving us essential story information),
realistically (proceeding from a character’s memory), and intertextually (occurring in a certain kind of film,
say a 1940s ‘woman’s melodrama’). Gio’s search for revenge is likewise justified as compositionally
necessary, psychologically plausible, and generically conventional. Multiple motivation is one of the most
characteristic ways that the classical film unifies itself.
The Hollywood film uses compositional motivation to secure a basic coherence. Compositional
motivation is furnished by all the principles of causality I have already mentioned—psychological traits,
goal orientation, romance, and so on. Realistic motivation typically cooperates with the compositional sort.
When Fatso alludes to Maggio as ‘Guys like you,’ the film appeals to the audience’s sense of a culturally
codified type. At certain moments, realistic motivation can override causal motivation. In T-Men (1948), a
Treasury agent passing counterfeit money is trapped because one counterfeiter recognizes the bill as the
work of a man in jail. This is coincidental, but the film’s semidocumentary prologue motivates this as
realistic: it ‘really happened’ in the case upon which the film was modeled.
More commonly, compositional motivation outweighs realistic motivation. Gérard Genette has explained
that in poetics the classical theory of the vraisemblable depends upon a distinction between things as they
are and things as they should ideally be; only the latter are fit for artistic imitation.29 In Hollywood cinema,
verisimilitude usually supports compositional motivation by making the chain of causality seem plausible.
Realism, writes one scenarists’ manual, ‘exists in the photoplay merely as an auxiliary to significance—not
as an object in itself.’30 Frances Marion claims that the strongest illusion of reality comes from tight causal
motivation: ‘In order that the motion picture may convey the illusion of reality that audiences demand, the
scenario writer stresses motivation—that is, he makes clear a character’s reason for doing whatever he does
that is important.’31 Classical Hollywood narrative thus often uses realism as an alibi, a supplementary
justification for material already motivated causally. When the photographer-hero of Rear Window (1954) is
attacked, he uses flashbulbs to dazzle the intruder: the realistic motivation (a photographer would
‘naturally’ think of flashbulbs) reinforces the causal one (he must delay the attacker somehow). Or, as
Hitchcock put it: ‘It’s really a matter of utilizing your material to the fullest dramatic extent.’32
Intertextual, particularly generic, motivation can also occasionally run afoul of compositional motivation.
If Marlene Dietrich is expected to sing, her song can be more or less causally motivated. In Busby
Berkeley’s musicals, the story action grinds to a halt when a lavish musical number takes over. The
melodrama genre often flouts causal logic and relies shamelessly upon coincidence. In *Mr. Skeffington
(1944), for instance, Fanny and George watch a war newsreel and just happen to see her lost brother in it.
Comedy justifies even a non-diegetic commentary, such as the drawing of an egg used to symbolize the
failed show in The Band Wagon (1953). Yet obviously such operations do not radically disunify the films,
since each genre creates its own rules, and the spectator judges any given element in the light of its
appropriateness to generic conventions.
On the whole, generic motivation cooperates with causal, or compositional, unity. Genres are in one
respect certain kinds of stories, endowed with their own particular logic that does not contest psychological
causality or goal-orientation. (The Westerner seeks revenge, the gangster hero seeks power and success, the
chorus girl works for the big break.) Multiple motivation— causal logic reinforced by generic convention—
is again normal operating procedure.
A simple example from the history of Hollywood lighting shows how complicated the interplay of
various kinds of motivation can be. Lighting was of course strongly motivated compositionally: salient
causal factors—the characters—had to be clearly visible, while minor elements (e.g., the rear walls of a set)
had to be less prominent. As usual, this compositional need overrode ‘realism,’ so that light sources were
often not justified realistically. (Examples of such unrealistic lighting would be the edge lighting of figures
or day-for-night shooting.) But after the mid-1920s, lighting was coded generically as well. Comedy was lit
‘high-key’ (that is, with a high ratio of key plus fill light to fill light alone), while horror and crime films
were lit ‘low-key.’33 The latter practice was considered more ‘realistic,’ since one could justify harsh low-
key lighting as coming from visible sources in the scene (e.g., a lamp or candle). By means of this generic
association with ‘realism,’ filmmakers began to apply low-key lighting to other genres. Sirk’s melodramas
of the 1950s are sometimes lit in a sombre low key, while Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957)
elicited comment for using low-key lighting for a comedy.34 Thus the appeal to ‘realism’ changed some
generic conventions.
Specifying these three types of motivation can clarify some murky narrative issues in the classical
cinema. For example, overtly psychotherapeutic films of the 1940s might seem ‘unclassical’ in that they
present inconsistent character action. The neurotic and psychotic characters of Shadow of a Doubt (1943),
The Lodger (1944), Spellbound (1945), The Locket (1946), et al., would seem evidence for a less linear,
more complex relation between mind and behavior than that operating in earlier classical films. In his
analysis of ‘Freudian’ films of the period, the French critic Marc Vernet has shown that such films none the
less respected classical dramaturgy.35 We can subsume his explanations to the types of motivation we have
already considered. First, psychoanalytic explanations of character behavior were motivated as a new
‘realism,’ a scientifically justified psychology. (That such a ‘realism’ was itself a vulgarization of Freudian
concepts does not affect its status as verisimilitude for the period.) Secondly, certain aspects of
psychoanalysis fitted generic models. Hollywood films stressed the cathartic method of psychoanalysis (not
important for Freud after 1890) because of its analogy to conventions of the mystery film. The doctor’s
questioning recalls police interrogations (the patient as witness or crook who won’t talk). Like the detective,
the doctor must reveal the secret (the trauma) and extract the confession. One could add to Vernet’s account
that the subjective points of view and expressionistic distortions in many of these films also hark back to
generically codified treatments of madness in the cinema of the 1920s. Most important, the vulgarized
psychoanalytic concepts in the films of the 1940s respected the causal unity required by compositional
motivation. In The Locket, Shadow of a Doubt, Guest in the House (1944), Spellbound, Citizen Kane
(1941), and others, the childhood trauma functions as the first cause in what Vernet calls ‘a linear
determinism of childhood history.’36 This is not to say that such films do not pose important narrative
problems, but we need to recognize that Hollywood’s use of Freudian psychology was highly selective and
distorting, trimming and thinning psychoanalytic concepts to fit an existing model of clear characterization
and causality. This can be seen in Kings Row (1942), which overtly thematizes psychoanalysis as a science
(the protagonist goes to Vienna to study this new discipline) and yet ends with a chorus singing, ‘I am the
master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’
I have already suggested that compositional, generic, and realistic motivation do not always work in
perfect unison, and I shall examine some typical dissonances in Chapter 7. But these are exceptional.
Normally, any element of a classical film is justified in one or more of these ways. When it is not, it may be
subsumable to yet another sort of motivation, one usually (if awkwardly) called ‘artistic’ motivation. By
this term, Russian Formalist critics meant to point out that a component may be justified by its power to call
attention to the system within which it operates. This in turn presupposes that calling attention to a work’s
own artfulness is one aim of many artistic traditions—a presupposition that challenges the notion that
Hollywood creates an ‘invisible’ or ‘transparent’ representational regime. Within specific limits, Hollywood
films do indeed employ artistic motivation in order, as the Formalists would put it, to make palpable the
conventionality of art.37
Hollywood has eagerly employed spectacle and technical virtuosity as means of artistic motivation.
‘Showmanship’ consists to a considerable extent of making the audience appreciate the artificiality of what
is seen. Early talkies were especially prone to slip in a song for the slightest reasons. A distant historical
period often serves as a pretext for pageantry, crowd scenes, and lascivious dancing. Hollywood producers
allotted time and money to create responses such as that triggered by the costumes in The Great Ziegfeld
(1936): ‘The designer and the producer of the picture felt that the expenditure was more than justified when
the first appearance of the costumes brought exclamations of delight from the audience.’38
Flagrant technical virtuosity can also contribute to spectacle. What Parker Tyler called Hollywood’s
‘narcissism of energy’ applies as much to cameramen as to Fred Astaire, Buster Keaton, or Sonja Henje.39
In the silent cinema, complex and daring lighting effects; in the sound cinema, depth of field and byzantine
camera movements; in all periods, exploitation of special effects—all testify to a pursuit of virtuosity for its
own sake, even if only a discerning minority of viewers might take notice. During the 1940s, for example,
there was something of a competition to see how complicated and lengthy the cinematographer could make
his tracking shots.40 This impulse can be seen not only in famous films like Rope (1948) but also in very
minor films with one striking shot, such as *Casbah (1948), at the climax of which the camera smoothly
follows the hero, moves down an airport crowd, picks up the heroine (fig 2.1), follows her into the plane
(figs 2.2 to 2.4), and settles down beside her seat, while the hero gets arrested outside (fig 2.5). It is
probable that such casual splendors offered by the Hollywood film owe a great deal to its mixed parentage
in vaudeville, melodrama, and other spectacle-centered entertainments. Nevertheless, digressions and flashes
of virtuosity remain for the most part motivated by narrative causality (the Casbah example) or genre
(pageantry in the historical film, costume in the musical). If spectacle is not so motivated, its function as
artistic motivation will be isolated and intermittent.
Artistic motivation can emphasize the artificiality of other art works; this is usually accomplished through
the venerable practice of parody. Hollywood has, of course, never shrunk from parody. In Animal Crackers
(1930), Groucho Marx shows up the soliloquys in Strange Interlude, while in Hellzapoppin (1941), Olson
and Johnson mock Kane’s Rosebud sled. In *My Favorite Brunette (1947), Ronnie Johnson tells Sam
McCloud he wants to be a tough detective like Alan Ladd; McCloud is played by Alan Ladd. Parody need
not always be so clearly comic. At the climax of The Studio Murder Mystery (1929), the Hollywood
montage sequence is parodied when the director explains at gunpoint what will happen after he kills Tony:
‘Quick fade out. Next, headlines in the morning papers.’ The following exchange from The Locket (1946)
parodies the already mannered conventions of the psychoanalytic film of the 1940s. The doctor’s wife has
just returned from a movie.
Nancy: I had a wonderful time. I’m all goose pimples.
Dr Blair: A melodrama?
Nancy: Yes, it was ghastly. You ought to see it, Henry. It’s about a schizophrenic who kills his
wife and doesn’t know it.
Dr Blair (laughing): I’m afraid that wouldn’t be much of a treat for me.
Nancy: That’s where you’re wrong. You’d never guess how it turns out. Now it may not be
sound psychologically, but the wife’s father is one of the…
Dr Blair: Darling, do you mind? You can tell me later.
When an art work uses artistic motivation to call attention to its own particular principles of construction, the
process is called ‘laying bare the device.’41* Hollywood films often flaunt aspects of their own working in
this way.42 In Angels Over Broadway (1940), a drunken playwright agrees to help a suicidally inclined man
get money and thus to ‘rewrite’ the man’s ‘last act.’ The playwright then looks out at the audience and says
musingly: ‘Our present plot problem is money.’ In von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922), the susceptible
Mrs Hughes reads a book, Foolish Wives, by one Erich von Stroheim. In His Girl Friday (1939), as Walter
starts fast-talking Hildy into staying with the newspaper, she begins to mimic an auctioneer’s patter; this not
only mocks Walter but foregrounds speech rhythm as a central device in the film. The show-business
milieux of the musical film make it especially likely to bare its devices. The ‘You were meant for me’
number in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) shows Don Lockwood staging his own spontaneous song; the way he
sets up romantic lighting, mist, and backdrops calls attention to the conventional staging of such songs. An
even more flagrant baring of this device occurs in ‘Somewhere there’s a someone’ in A Star Is Born (1954).
Classical films are especially likely to bare the central principle of causal linearity. In *One Touch of
Nature (1917), when the hero succeeds as a baseball player, an expository title dryly remarks: ‘In the course
of human events, we come logically to the deciding game of a World’s Series.’ In *The Miracle Woman
(1931), a despairing writer is about to commit suicide because, having received a rejection slip from Ziegler
Company, he exclaims: ‘I’ve tried them all from A to Z. What comes after Z?’ He hears an evangelist’s
radio broadcast and resolves to try again: ‘What comes after Z? A!’ *A Woman of the World (1925),
contains an amusing image of the story’s own unwinding. Near the beginning of the film, two old women
sit on porch rockers gossiping and knitting, with their balls of yarn smaller each time we see them. At the
film’s end, the camera shows the chairs rocking, now empty, and the yarn all gone.
Hollywood’s use of artistic motivation imputes a considerable alertness to the viewer: in order to
appreciate certain moments, one must know and remember another film’s story, or a star’s habitual role, or
a standard technique. To some extent, artistic motivation develops a connoisseurship in the classical
spectator. Yet most artistic traditions show off their formal specificity in some way. We must ask what
limits classical cinema imposes on artistic motivation. Generally, moments of pure artistic motivation are
rare and brief in classical films. Compositional motivation leaves little room for it, while generic motivation
tends to account for many flagrant instances. Indeed, baring the device has become almost conventional in
certain genres. Comedies are more likely to contain such outré scenes as that in The Road to Utopia (1945),
in which Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, mushing across the Alaskan wilds, see the Paramount logo in the
distance. Likewise, the melodrama is likely to contain a shot like that in The Fountainhead (1949), in which
two characters stand at opposite edges of the frame (fig 2.6) while the woman asserts: ‘This is not a tie but a
gulf between us.’ In His Girl Friday, Walter can describe Bruce (Ralph Bellamy) as looking like Ralph
Bellamy, but in Sunrise at Campobello (1960), no one notices FDR’s resemblance to the same actor.
Preston Sturges’s *Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) permits us to watch compositional motivation take
artistic motivation firmly in hand. The opening scene of the film is silent and is announced to be from
Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. But this fairly overt reminder of the work’s conventionality is undermined
by the covert insertion of shots not from the original film. These interposed shots, filmed by Sturges, show a
businessman watching the football game. The businessman is compositionally necessary, since he will offer
Harold a job in the next scene, but remotivating The Freshman’s opening to create a smooth causal link
between the two films tones down the silent segment’s distinct, palpably conventional qualities.
The classical cinema, then, does not use artistic motivation constantly through the film, as Ozu does in An
Autumn Afternoon (1962) or as Sergei Eisenstein does in Ivan the Terrible (1945). It does not bare its
devices repeatedly and systematically, as Michael Snow does in La région centrale (1967) or Jean-Luc
Godard does in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). Compositional motivation for the sake of story causality
remains dominant.
3
Classical narration
A film’s story does not simply shine forth; as viewers, we construct it on the basis of the plot, the material
actually before us. The classical guidelines for this construction are those principles of causality and
motivation already sketched out in Chapter 2. A film’s plot usually makes those guidelines applicable by
transmitting story information. This aspect of plot I shall call narration.
Hollywood’s own discourse has sought to limit narration to the manipulation of the camera, as in John
Cromwell’s remark that, ‘The most effective way of telling a story on the screen is to use the camera as the
story-teller.’1 And the classical film’s narration itself encourages us to see it as presenting an apparently
solid fictional world which has simply been filmed for our benefit. André Bazin describes the classical film
as being like a photographed play; the story events seem to exist objectively, while the camera seems to do
no more than give us the best view and emphasize the right things.2 But narration can in fact draw upon any
film technique as long as the technique can transmit story information. Conversations, figure position, facial
expressions, and well-timed encounters between characters all function just as narrationally as do camera
movements, cuts, or bursts of music.
From this standpoint, classical narration falls under the jurisdiction of all the types of motivation already
surveyed. In a classical film, narration is motivated compositionally; it works to construct the story in
specific ways. Narration may also be motivated generically, as when performers in a musical sing directly to
the spectator or when a mystery film withholds some crucial story information. Narration is less often
motivated ‘realistically,’ although the voice-over commentary in semidocumentary fiction films might insist
that the story action is based on fact. Artistically motivated narration is very rare in classical films and never
occurs in a pure state. A non-classical director like Jean-Luc Godard can ‘lay bare’ a film’s narrational
principles, as does the beginning of Tout va bien (1972), in which anonymous voices play with alternative
ways of opening the film, hiring cast and crew, and financing the film. But when a classical film wants to
call attention to the ‘palpability’ of its narration, it must create a context that motivates baring the device by
other means as well. For instance, in scene after scene of *The Man Who Laughs (1928), the narration
conceals Gwynplaine’s deformed mouth from us (by veils, strategically placed furniture, etc.). But in one
scene, the narration lays bare this very pattern. During his stage act, Gwynplaine looks out at us and
deliberately reveals his deformity; then a clown in his act slowly covers it again. The shot thus stages the
act of revelation and concealment that has been central to the narration throughout. However, this baring of
the device is partly motivated by realism (Gwynplaine is on stage, revealing his deformity to an audience in
the fiction) and by causal necessity (for the story to proceed, a woman in the audience must see his mouth
and take pity upon him). We encounter again the familiar multiple motivation of the classical text.
We could follow Hollywood’s lead and simply label such carefully motivated narration ‘invisible.’
Hollywood’s pride in concealed artistry implies that narration is imperceptible and unobtrusive. Editing
must be seamless, camerawork ‘subordinated to the fluid thought of the dramatic action.’3 Some theorists
24 CLASSICAL NARRATION
have called the classical style transparent and illusionist, what Noël Burch has called ‘the zero-degree style
of filming.’4 This is to say that classical technique is usually motivated compositionally. The chain of cause
and effect demands that we see a close-up of an important object or that we follow a character into a room.
‘Invisible’ may suffice as a rough description of how little most viewers notice technique, but it does not
get us very far if we want to analyze how classical films work. Such concepts play down the constructed
nature of the style; a transparent effect does not encourage us to probe beneath its smooth surface. The term
is also imprecise. ‘Invisibility’ can refer to how much the narration tells us, upon what authority it knows or
tells, or in what way it tells. A tangle of different problems of narration is packed into this ‘invisibility.’
How then to characterize classical narration? Meir Sternberg has put forth a clear theory that will prove
useful.5 Sternberg suggests that narration (or the narrator) can be characterized along three spectra.6 A
narration is more or less self-conscious: that is, to a greater or lesser degree it displays its recognition that it
is presenting information to an audience. ‘Call me Ishmael’ marks the narrator as quite self-conscious, as
does a character’s aside to the audience in an Elizabethan play. A novel which employs a diarist as narrator
is far less self-conscious. Secondly, a narration is more or less knowledgeable. The omniscient speaker of
Vanity Fair revels in his immense knowledge, while the correspondents in an epistolary novel know much
less. As these examples suggest, the most common way of limiting a narrator’s knowledge is by making a
particular character the narrator. Thus the issue of knowledge involves point-of-view. Thirdly, a narration is
more or less communicative. This term refers to how willing the narration is to share its knowledge. A
diarist might know little but tell all, while an omniscient narrator like Henry Fielding’s in Tom Jones may
suppress a great deal of information. Some of Brecht’s plays use projected titles which predict the outcome
of a scene’s action: this is less suppressive than a normal play’s narration, which tends to minimize its own
omniscience.7
Sternberg’s three scales can be summarized in a series of questions. How aware is the narration of
addressing the audience? How much does the narration know? How willing is the narration to tell us what it
knows?
Sternberg’s categories help us analyze classical narration quite precisely. In the classical film, the
narration is omniscient, but it lets that omniscience come forward more at some points than at others. These
fluctuations are systematic. In the opening passages of the film, the narration is moderately self-conscious
and overtly suppressive. As the film proceeds, the narration becomes less self-conscious and more
communicative. The exceptions to these tendencies are also strictly codified. The end of the film may
quickly reassert the narration’s omniscience and self-consciousness.
The modest narration

Classical narration usually begins before the action does. True, the credits sequence can be seen as a realm
of graphic play, an opening which is relatively ‘open’ to non-narrational elements. (Certainly it is in credits
sequences that abstract cinema has had its most significant influence upon the classical style.) Yet the
classical Hollywood film typically uses the credits sequence to initiate the film’s narration. Even these forty
to ninety seconds cannot be wasted. Furthermore, in these moments the narration is self-conscious to a high
degree. Musical accompaniment already signals the presence of this narration, and often musical motifs in
this overture will recur in the film proper. The title will most probably name or describe the main character
(*Mickey [1918], *Gidget [1959], *King of the Rodeo [1928]) or indicate the nature of the action (*Going
Highbrow [1935], *Impact [1949]). If not, the title can suggest the locale of the action (*Adventure Island
[1947], *Wuthering Heights [1939]), a motif in the film (*Applause [1929], *Balalaika [1939]), or the time
of the action (*The Night Holds Terror [1955]). The credits that list the cast may reinforce the title (e.g.,
*The King and the Chorus Girl [1937], starring Fernand Gravet and Joan Blondell), but they will certainly
introduce the film’s narrative hierarchy. Protagonist, secondary protagonist, opponents, and other major
characters will be denoted by the order, size, and time onscreen of various actors’ names. Some films
strengthen this linkage by adding shots of the characters to the credits, in which the amount of the screen
surface a character is allotted indicates the character’s importance (fig 3.1). (Compare the flattening effect
of credits which make no distinction among major actors and walk-on parts, such as the ‘democratic’ credits
of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Not Reconciled [1964].) Even the studio logo, the MGM lion or
the Paramount mountain, has been analyzed as a narrational transition.8 The credits are thus highly self-
conscious, explicitly addressed to the audience.
In the silent period, many films went no further than these cues, laying the credit sequence against black
backgrounds or a standardized design (e.g., curtains, pillars, or picture frames). Some credits sequences,
however, used ‘art titles’ whose designs depicted significant narrative elements. William S.Hart’s *The
Narrow Trail (1917), for instance, displays its credits against a painting of a stagecoach holdup. By the
1920s, such art titles were commonly used for exposition (see fig 3.2). Lettering could also indicate the
period or setting of the story, a practice probably influenced by playbills and illustrated books: narration
rendered as typography. In the 1920s, a credits sequence might appear over moving images (e.g., *Merry-
Go-Round [1923]) or might be animated (e.g., *The Speed Spook [1924]). The sound cinema canonized this
stylized ‘narrativization’ of the credits sequence, assigning it a range of functions.
The credits can anticipate a motif to appear in the story proper. In *Woman of the World (1925), the
protagonist’s scandalous tattoo is presented as an abstract design under the credits; in *The Black Hand
(1950), a stiletto forms the background for the titles. Credits’ imagery can also establish the space of the
upcoming action, as do the snowy fir trees in *The Michigan Kid (1928) or the city view in *Casbah
(1948). Credits often flaunt the narration’s omniscience and tantalize us with glimpses of action to come. As
early as *The Royal Pauper (1917), we find the credits summarizing the rags-to-riches story action by
dissolving from a shot of the star, dressed as a poor girl, to a shot of her wearing expensive clothes. Thierry
Kuntzel has shown how the opening credit sequence of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), a shot of a hand
knocking at a door, stages an important gesture of the ensuing film and anticipates several motifs in the
setting and action. The credits sequence of Bringing Up Baby (1938) presents stick-figure man, woman, and
leopard engaged in actions that will reappear in the film; *Sweepstakes Winner (1939) employs the same
strategy (see fig 3.3). As Kuntzel points out, such sequences are explicitly narrational: the unknown hand
knocking at the door can only be the viewer’s, giving an idealized representation of the viewer’s entry into
the film.9 Such overt address to the spectator can also be seen in those still-life compositions of book pages
or album leaves turned by unknown hands (e.g., *Penthouse [1933], *Easy to Look At [1945], *Play Girl
[1941]). In the postwar period, direct address in credits sequences could also be accomplished through a
voice-over narrator. In such ways, the credits sequence flaunts both the narration’s omniscience and its
ability to suppress whatever it likes.
Like credits, the early scenes of the action can reveal the narration quite boldly. Before 1925, the film
might open with a symbolic prologue, mocked by Loos and Emerson as ‘visionary scenes of Heaven or
Hell, of the Fates weaving human lives in their web.’10 (See, for example, fig 3.4, from The Devil’s Bait
[1917].) More often, silent films simply used expository titles to announce the salient features of the
narration. In the sound era, other film techniques take on this role of foregrounding the narration. After the
credits, *Partners in Crime (1928) reveals a city landscape and an inter-title, ‘Gangsters and Gun War—A
City Steeped in Crime’ (see fig 3.5). Suddenly the title shatters as hands holding guns break through to fire
directly at the audience (see figs 3.6 and 3.7). At the start of *Housewife (1934), the camera tracks with a
milkman up to the front door and lingers on the front door as he leaves. There is a cut to the welcome mat,
and the camera tracks in and tilts up to the doorbell and name card. The shots have treated the camera as if
it were a guest strolling up to the house. *Easy to Look At (1945) opens with a voice-over narrator
describing the heroine’s arrival in the city: ‘And thus New York’s population is increased by one— and
quite a number…’ as a man on the street gawks at her. Such passages reveal the narration to be widely
knowledgeable and highly aware of addressing an audience.
The narration can also exploit the opening moments to stress its ability to be more or less communicative.
*The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935) opens with a flurry of women’s legs striding up a flight of steps (see
fig 3.8) and then dissolves to a sign (see fig 3.9). Several pairs of legs are revealed (see fig 3.10). At the end
of the scene, as a former contest winner tries to claim her prize, the swindler pushes her away (see fig 3.11)
and the camera pans to an advertisement for the Lucky Legs contest (see fig 3.12). The image dissolves to a
pair of legs stretched out (see fig 3.13) and pans to their owner, the latest bilked woman, sobbing. The
gratuitous camera movement to the sign and the opening of the next scene provide overtly ironic
commentary on the contest.
The explicit presence of the narration in these heavily expository beginnings is confirmed by the eventual
emergence of the ‘pre-credits sequence.’ Here the film opens truly in medias res, with the credits presented
only after an initial scene or two of story action. This practice began in the 1950s, possibly as a borrowing
from television’s technique of the ‘teaser.’ The effect of pre-credits action was to eliminate the credits as a
distinct unit, sprinkling them through a short action sequence that conveyed minimal story information
(e.g., the establishment of a locale or the connecting of two scenes by a trip). The postponement of the
credits tacitly grants the narrational significance of whatever scenes open the film.
Yet once present in these opening passages, the narration quickly fades to the background. In the course
of the opening scenes, the narration becomes less self-conscious, less omniscient, and more communicative.
Very flagrant examples allow us to trace this fading process at work.
*The Caddy (1953) has a highly stylized credits sequence that signals the genre (comedy), repeats the
principal motif (golf clubs, tees, tartan), and anticipates story events (the cartoon figures). (See fig 3.14.) The
film’s first shot reveals a theatre marquee which carries caricatures similar to those in the credits (see
fig 3.15). The bandstand’s design repeats the caricatures, linking the figures to the live protagonists we
finally see (fig 3.16). In a sliding movement, the narration’s cartoon images of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
have become gradually replaced by the story’s images of the characters themselves. A more complex
example occurs in *The Canterville Ghost (1944). While a voice-over commentator tells of the Ghost’s
history, the image shows the relevant passage in a book, Famous Ghosts of England. There follows a
flashback to 1634, which shows how the cowardly Simon was bricked up in a wall of the mansion. The camera
tracks into a close-up of a birthmark on Simon’s neck (see fig 3.17), which freezes into an illustration in the
book as the voice-over commentary resumes (see fig 3.18). The page is turned as the narrator describes the
castle today; the illustration of the castle (see fig 3.19) dissolves to the same image on film, into which the
heroine Jessica rides (see fig 3.20). Action has replaced the non-diegetic voice, and we never see or hear the
narration so evidently again.
The phasing out of the narrator is also visible in historical changes in the silent cinema’s expository
tactics. Before 1917, films commonly introduced characters in ways that called attention to the act of
narration. An expository title would name and describe the character and attach the actor’s name; then a shot
might show the character striking a pose in a non-diegetic setting (e.g., a theater stage). After several
characters were introduced this way, the fictional action would begin. After 1917, such signs of narration
diminished. Characters would be introduced upon their first appearance in the action. Overt commentary in
the titles (‘Max, a Bully’) would be replaced by images of the character enacting typical behavior (e.g., Max
kicking a dog).11
The role of expository inter-titles changed as well. Silent scenarists were aware that the expository title
foregrounded narration. One writer compared the expository title to a Greek chorus, ‘someone who is
behind the scenes. They are in the secret of the play.’12 Another critic was even more aware of the intrusion:
‘The title may say no more than “Dawn” or “Night” or “Home”; but it clearly is the injected comment of an
outsider who is assumed, by the author’s own terms, to be absent.’13 (This, he claimed, ‘breaks the spell of
complete absorption.’) The presence of an unseen fictional narrator was also marked in expository titles by
the use of the past tense, which became standard after 1916. After 1917, Hollywood film became less and
less reliant upon expository inter-titles and more dependent upon dialogue titles. Between 1917 and 1921,
one-fifth to one-third of a film’s inter-titles would be expository; after 1921, expository titles con stituted
less than a fifth of the total. In the later silent years, we find films with no expository titles at all. Placement
and length changed too: after 1921, the early scenes of the film contain more and longer expository titles
than do later scenes. The cultivation of the art title, the expository title enhanced by a pictorial design,
further substituted image for language. Expositional tasks were shifted to character dialogue and action, not
only across the period but within the individual film.
The judicious combination of expository titles, dialogue titles, and exemplary character action created a
fairly knowledgeable and communicative narrator. Consider the opening scene of *Miss Lulu Bett (1921). The
family assembles for dinner, and an expository title introduces each family member. The title is then
followed by a character performing a typical action which confirms the title’s description. After the
narration identifies the youngest daughter, the images show her swiping food playfully. After the father is
identified, he goes to the clock to check his watch. Once most of the family are introduced, another
expository title introduces the elder daughter but adds the information that she wants to leave the family. This
title is followed by a shot of her at the front gate, holding a boy’s hand. Because the narration has already
accurately characterized the other family members, we trust its information about the daughter’s purely
private desires—information which is in turn immediately confirmed by her action. The narration is
omniscient and reliable. The smoothness of such narration was recognized in Europe in the silent era; a
Parisian critic noted that the Hollywood film always begins with a long expository title explaining the film’s
theme, followed by the rapid introduction to and delineation of characters by means of titles and actions.
The critic emphasized that Hollywood films avoided the gradual psychological revelation characteristic of
Swedish and German films of the period.14
What enables the narration to fade itself out so quickly? Any narrative film must inform the viewer of
events that occured before the action which we see. The classical film confines itself almost completely to a
sort of exposition described by Sternberg as concentrated and preliminary.15 This means that the exposition
is confined principally to the opening of the plot. In explaining how to write a screenplay, Emerson and
Loos claim that the opening should ‘explain briefly but clearly the essential facts which the audience must
know in order to understand the story,’ preferably in one scene.16 Such advice may seem commonplace, but
we need to remember that this choice commits the Hollywood film to a slim range of narrational options.
Scattered or delayed exposition has the power to alter the viewer’s understanding of events; making the
spectator wait to fill gaps of causality, character relations, and temporal events can increase curiosity and even
create artistic motivation, baring the device of narration itself. But concentrated and preliminary narration
helps the classical film to make the narration seem less omniscient and self-conscious.
Classical narration also steps to the background by starting in medias res. The exposition plunges us into
an already-moving flow of cause and effect. As Loos and Emerson put it, the action must begin ‘with the
story itself and not with the history of the case which leads up to the story.’17 When the characters thus
assume the burden of exposition, the narration can seem to vanish.
*The Mad Martindales (1942) offers a simple case. After an expository title (‘San Francisco 1900’), the
film opens with a close-up of a cake, inscribed ‘Happy Birthday Father.’ The camera tracks back, and while
a maid and butler decorate the cake they discuss household affairs. The camera follows the butler to the
piano, where Evelyn, the elder daughter, sits. Evelyn and the butler converse. We then follow the butler to
the study, past the younger daughter Cathy, who is sitting at the desk writing. The camera holds on her
while the butler leaves. Bob, Cathy’s friend, thrusts his head in the window, which gives her a chance to
explain what she’s writing (a feminist tract, surprisingly enough). The phone rings and Evelyn answers it.
The caller is her boyfriend Peter, who proposes marriage to her. At this juncture, the girls’ father arrives,
having just bought a Poussin painting. While workmen uncrate the painting, the family discuss Cathy’s
graduation, Martindale’s birthday, the news about Peter, etc. When the butler brings birthday champagne,
Cathy raises the issue of unpaid bills; at this point, the lights go out, cut off by the utility company. As the
scene ends, the family discovers that it is penniless and Cathy sorrow fully reveals her gift to her father—a
wallet. You are right to think that this scene is overstuffed with information, but it is typical of Hollywood
cinema’s almost Scribean loading of exposition into a film’s first scenes. By plunging in medias res with
the first shot of ‘Happy Birthday Father,’ the film lets the characters tell each other what we need to know.
Classical narration may reemerge more overtly in later portions of the film, but such reappearance will be
intermittent and codified. In the silent cinema, the expository art title may include imagery that comments
overtly on the action. Occasionally, the narration will reassert its omniscience by camera movement: the
cliché example is the pan from the long shot of the stagecoach to the watching Indians on the ridge. In the
sound film, an overlapping line of dialogue can link scenes in ways that call attention to the narration. Many
of the examples of artistic motivation and ‘baring the device’ that I considered in the last chapter can now
be seen as examples of self-conscious and flagrantly suppressive narration. Narrational intrusions may also
be generically motivated: in a mystery film, framing only a portion of the criminal’s body as the crime is
committed, or in a historical film, making the narrator ‘the voice of history.’18 Whatever the genre, however,
there is yet another moment that narration comes strongly forward in the classical film—during montage
sequences.
Typically, the montage sequence compresses a considerable length of time or space, traces a large-scale
event, or selects representative moments from a process.19 Cliché instances are fluttering calendar leaves, brief
images of a detective’s search for witnesses, the rise of a singer given as bits of different performances, the
accumulation of travel stickers on a trunk, or a flurry of newspaper headlines. Rudimentary montage
sequences can be found in Hollywood films of the teens and early twenties. By 1927, montage sequences
were very common, and they continue to be used in a variant form today.
From a historical perspective, the montage sequence is part of Hollywood’s gradual reduction of overt
narrational presence. Instead of a title saying ‘They lowered the lifeboats,’ or ‘While the jury was out,
McGee waited in a cold sweat,’ the film can reveal glimpses of pertinent action. The montage sequence thus
transposes conventions of prose narration into the cinema; Sartre cites Citizen Kane’s montages as examples
of the ‘frequentative’ tense (equivalent to writing ‘He made his wife sing in every theater in America’).20
Moreover, the montage sequence aims at continuity, linking the shots through non-diegetic music and
smooth optical transitions (dissolves, wipes, superimpositions, occasionally cuts). Yet the montage
sequence still makes narration come forward to a great degree. Extreme close-ups, canted angles,
silhouettes, whip pans, and other obtrusive techniques differentiate this sort of segment from the orthodox
scene. When newspapers swirl out of nowhere to flatten themselves obligingly for our inspection, or when
hourglasses and calendar leaves whisk across the screen, we are addressed by a power that is free of normal
narrative space and time. What keeps the montage sequence under control is its strict codification: it is,
simply, the sequence which advances the story action in just this overt way. Flagrant as the montage
sequence is, its rarity, its narrative function, and its narrowly conventional format assure its status as
classical narration’s most acceptable rhetorical flourish.
Causality, character, and point-of-view

After the concentrated, preliminary exposition and except for intrusions like montage sequences, the
classical film reduces narration’s prominence. Chapters 4 and 5 will show how this process shapes
cinematic space and time. For now, I want only to indicate the general ways that classical Hollywood
narration reveals self-consciousness, omniscience, and communicativeness.
After the opening portions of the classical film, the narration’s self-consciousness is generally kept low,
chiefly because character action and reaction convey the ongoing causal chain to us. It is here that the effect
of an enclosed story world, Bazin’s objectively existing play simply transmitted by the camera, is at its
strongest. Many devices of nineteenth-century realist theater—exposition by character conversation,
speeches and actions which motivate psychological developments, well-timed entrances and exits—all
assure the homogeneity of the fictional world. This homogeneity has induced many theorists and
most viewers to see the classical film as composed of a solid and integral diegetic world occasionally
inflected by a narrational touch from the outside, as if our companion at a play were to tug our sleeve and
point out a detail. We must, however, make the effort to see the film’s diegetic world as itself constructed
and, hence, ultimately just as narrational as the most obtrusive cut or voiceover commentary. Yet we need to
recognize how important this apparently natural, actually covert narration is to the classical cinema. In what
follows, I shall assume that this narration-through-character-interaction constitutes the most normal and
least noticeable ploy of Hollywood narration.
The narration reinforces the homogeneity of the fictional world by means of a non-theatrical device: the
use of public and impersonal sources of information that can be realistically or generically motivated within
the film. The most common instrument is the newspaper. ROSEN FOUND GUILTY: the headline or article
becomes an unquestioned surrogate for the narrator’s presence. In many films of the 1930s, newspaper
reporters become an expository chorus, initiating us into the action. Other public transmitters of information
include radio, television, bulletin boards, posters, ticker tape, tour guides, and reference books (e.g., the
Ghosts of England volume in *The Canterville Ghost). These impersonal sources of story information also
prove invaluable in toning down the self-consciousness of montage sequences.
Classical narration is potentially omniscient, as credits and openings show and as Hollywood’s own
discourse generally acknowledges. A.Lindsley Lane, for example, refers to ‘omniscient perception’ as the
basic law of film. In the bulk of the Hollywood film, this omniscience becomes overt occasionally but
briefly, as when a camera angle or movement links characters who are unaware of each other.21 The same
omniscience becomes overt in the anticipatory qualities of narration—the character who enters a scene just
before she or he is needed, the camera movement that accommodates a character’s gesture just before it
occurs, the unexpected cut to a doorbell just before a thumb presses it, the music that leads us to expect a
prowler to jump out of the shrubbery. ‘There is only one way to shoot a scene,’ Raoul Walsh claimed, ‘and
that’s the way which shows the audience what’s happening next.’22
The most evident trace of the narration’s omniscience is its omnipresence. The narration is unwilling to
tell all, but it is willing to go anywhere. This is surely the basis of the tendency to collapse narration into
camerawork: the camera can roam freely, crosscutting between locales or changing its position within a
single room. ‘The camera,’ writes Lane, ‘stimulates, through correct choice of subject matter and setup, the
sense within the percipient of “being at the most vital part of the experience—at the most advantageous
point of perception” throughout the picture.’23 Sometimes this ubiquity becomes only artistically motivated,
as in those ‘impossible’ camera angles that view the action from within a fireplace or refrigerator.24 Spatial
omnipresence is, of course, justified by what story action occurs in any given place, and it is limited still
further by specific schemata, as we shall see in Chapter 5. To avoid treating the camera as narrator,
however, we should remember that what the camera does not show implies omnipresence negatively—the
site of an action we will learn of only later, the whole figure of the mysterious intruder. The narration could
show us all, but it refuses.
Classical narration admits itself to be spatially omnipresent, but it claims no comparable fluency in time.
The narration will not move on its own into the past or the future. Once the action starts and marks a
definite present, movements into the past are motivated through characters’ memory. The flashback is not
presented as an overt explanation on the narration’s part; the narration simply presents what the character is
recalling. Even more restrictive is classical narration’s suppression of future events. No narration in any text
can spill all the beans at once, but after the credits sequence, classical narration seldom overtly divulges
anything about what will ensue. It is up to the characters to foreshadow events through dialogue and
physical action. If this is the last job the crooks will pull, they must tell us, for the narration will not become
more self-conscious in order to do so. If the love affair is to fail, the characters must intuit it: ‘These things
never happen twice’ (*Interlude [1957]). At most, the narration can drop self-conscious hints, such as
pointing out a significant detail that the characters have overlooked; e.g., the camera movement up to the
‘Forgotten Anything?’ sign on the hotel-room door in Touch of Evil (1957). More commonly, anticipatory
motifs can be included if the shot is already motivated for another purpose. Near the end of *From Here to
Eternity (1953), the attack on Pearl Harbor is anticipated when the camera pans to follow a character and
reveals a calendar giving the date as December 6.
Classical narration thus delegates to character causality and genre conventions the bulk of the film’s flow
of information. When information must be suppressed, it is done through the characters. Characters can
keep secrets from one another (and us). Confinement to a single point-of-view can also suppress story
information. Genre conventions can cooperate, as the editors of Cahiers du cinéma point out in their
analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Here the narration must juggle three points of view so as to keep
certain information from the spectator. Two brothers accused of murder each believe the other is guilty,
while their mother also believes that one is guilty. When all three meet, it would be plausible for them to
talk to one another and thus reveal each one’s beliefs. But if this happened, the plot twist—that neither is
guilty—would be given away prematurely. So the family’s reunion is staged as a silent vigil the night
before the trial’s last day. This convention of courtroom dramas motivates withholding information from the
audience.25
Any narrative text must repeat important story information, and in the cinema, repetition takes on a
special necessity; since the conditions of presentation mean that one cannot stop and go back, most films
reiterate information again and again. The nature of that reiteration can, however, vary from film to film.26
In a film by Godard or Eisenstein, the narration overtly repeats information that may not be repeated within
the story. Sequences late in October (1928) and Weekend (1967) replay events that we have seen earlier in
the film, and this repetition is not motivated by character memory. But a classical film assigns repetition to
the characters. That is, the story action itself contains repetitions which the narration simply passes along.
For example, after the credits for the film *Housewife (1934) have concluded, the opening scene shows the
heroine harassed by her domestic duties. At the scene’s close, a polltaker calls on her and asks her job;
‘Oh…,’ she says,‘…just a housewife.’ ‘Housewife,’ the polltaker repeats at the fade-out. In one scene of
*The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), we learn a man’s profession the moment he enters the room; a group of
police officials greet him in a chorus:
‘Warden!’
‘Warden, Chief!’
‘Hello, Warden.’
‘Hiya, Warden.’
Such repetition is not extensive—that would be as transgressive as no repetition at all. Optimally, a

significant motif or informational bit should be shown or mentioned at three or four distinct moments, as in
the warden chorus. Three is in fact a mystical number for Hollywood dramaturgy; an event becomes
important if it is mentioned three times. The Hollywood slogan is to state every fact three times, once for
the smart viewer, once for the average viewer, and once for slow Joe in the back row.27 Leo McCarey
recalls: ‘Most gags were based on “the rule of three.” It became almost an unwritten rule.’28 Irving Thalberg
is reported to have said, ‘I don’t mean tell ’em three times in the same way. Maybe you tell ’em once in
comedy, maybe you tell ’em once directly, maybe you tell ’em next time with a twist.’29 For a rare instance
of audacious repetition in the narration rather than the story, see fig 3.21.
Since classical narration communicates what it ‘knows’ by making characters haul the causal chain
through the film, it might seem logical to assume that the classical film commonly restricts its knowledge to
a single character’s point-of-view. Logical, but wrong. If we take point-of-view to be an optical subjectivity,
no classical film, not even the vaunted but misdescribed Lady in the Lake (1947), completely confines itself
to what a character sees. If we regard a character’s point-of-view as comprising what the character knows,
we still find very few classical films that restrict themselves to this degree. The overwhelmingly common
practice is to use the omnipresence of classical narration to move fluidly from one character to another.
The classical film typically contains a few subjective point-of-view shots (usually of printed matter read
by a character), but these are firmly anchored in an ‘objective’ frame of reference. Moreover, Hollywood’s
optical point-of-view cutting is seldom rigorously consistent. While in one shot a camera position will be
marked as subjective, a few shots later the same viewpoint may be objective—often resulting in anomalies
such as a character walking into his or her own field of vision (see figs 3.22 through 3.25). In a similar
fashion, classical narration will confine itself to one character’s limited knowledge, but this will then be
played off against what other characters know. Clever narrational twists often depend upon restricting us to
one character’s point-of-view before revealing the total situation. Even flashbacks, which are initially
motivated as limited, subjective point-of-view, seldom restrict themselves solely to what the character could
have known. For such reasons, it is accurate to describe classical narration as fundamentally omniscient,
even when particular spatial or temporal shifts are motivated by character subjectivity.
The Hollywood cinema quickly mastered shifts in point-of-view. As early as *Love and the Law (1919),
one can find extensive sequences of optical point-of-view cutting (see figs 16.44 and 16.45). *The Michigan
Kid (1928) begins with a montage of gold prospecting in Alaska and then moves our attention to a gambling
hall. At one table sits Jim Rowen, identified by an inter-title as the owner of the hall. In talking to two
customers, Jim reveals that he is selling out to go back to the States and rejoin the girl he left behind. As Jim
packs to leave, he stares at his tattered picture of Rose. This triggers a flashback introducing Jim as a boy,
playing with Rose and fighting off the delinquent Frank. The flashback ends and dissolves into Jim’s
optical viewpoint of Rose’s picture. At this point, however, the film widens its narrational view. There is a
cut to a customer in the gambling den. He looks at his watch before offering it as a stake. Thanks to another
point-of-view shot, we see Rose’s picture in his watch. Thus we know before Jim does that Frank has
reentered his life. A bartender takes the watch to Jim, who appraises it; we are in suspense as to whether he
will notice the picture. At first he does not, which increases the tension, but then he does. As he looks at the
picture, the shot superimposes his memory image of Rose as a girl, then his newspaper picture of her. He
asks the barkeep to bring Frank in. Using only two expository titles, the narration has presented the
essential background of the story action and has fluently moved among various degrees of subjectivity.
Beginning in medias res and letting the characters reveal exposition, the classical Hollywood film thus
moves to subjectivity only occasionally— something possible for a narration endowed with omniscience.
The example from *The Michigan Kid shows that classical narration can exploit omnipresence to conceal
information that individual characters possess. Occasionally the classical film flaunts such suppressive
operations, opening up a gap between the narration’s omniscient range of knowledge and its moderate
communicativeness. Consider the opening of *Manhandled (1949), which shows a man sitting in a study.
The framing carefully conceals his face. His wife and her lover return, but we see only their feet. After the
lover leaves, the husband follows her upstairs, his face still offscreen. He approaches his wife and starts to
strangle her. The sequence seems transgressive because the narration has overtly suppressed the faces of the
killer and the lover. Yet at the end of the sequence, there is a dissolve and a voice says: ‘At that point the
dream always ends, doctor.’ The overtness of the narration is justified retroactively as subjective. The
greater emphasis placed upon ‘psychoanalytic’ explanations of causality in the 1940s created a trend toward
such occasionally explicit narration. Similarly, play with point-of-view is a minor convention of the mystery
film. Through Different Eyes (1929) and The Grand Central Mystery (1942) both use flashbacks to recount
the same events from inconsistent points of view. The subjective film and the mystery film can thus make
narration self-conscious and overtly suppressive, but only thanks to compositional and generic motivation.
Consistently suppressive narration, such as that of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Not Reconciled
(1964) or Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977), is unknown in the Hollywood paradigm.
Classical narration, then, plunges us in medias res and proceeds to reduce signs of its self-consciousness
and omniscience. The narration accomplishes this reduction by means of spatial omnipresence, repetition of
story information, minimal changes in temporal order, and plays between restricted and relatively
unrestricted points of view. It is in the light of these aims that we must assess the power of that celebrated
Hollywood ‘continuity.’ Because we see no gaps, we never question the narration, hence never question its
source. When, in *Penthouse (1933), the scene shifts from a nightclub to a luxury yacht and the voice of the
club’s bandleader continues uninterrupted, now broadcast from a radio on board the yacht, we can recognize
the narration’s omnipresence but we are assured that no significant story action has been suppressed. At the
end of a scene, a ‘dialogue hook’ anticipates the beginning of the next (e.g., ‘Shall we go to lunch?’/long-
shot of a cafe); such a tactic implies that the narration perfectly transmits the action. Crosscutting signals
omnipresence and unrestricted point-of-view, while editing within the scene delegates to the characters the
job of forwarding the story action. Chapters 4 and 5 will assess how narrational concerns have shaped
classical patterns of space and time. At this point, it is worth looking briefly at one technique that is seldom
considered a part of narration at all.
Music as destiny
From the start, musical accompaniment has provided the cinema’s most overt continuity factor. In the silent
cinema, piano or orchestral music ran along with the images, pointing them up and marking out how the
audience should respond. Non-diegetic music was less pervasive in the early 1930s, but the rise of symphonic
scoring in the work of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernest Newman, et al. reasserted classical
cinema’s interest in using music to flow continuously along with the action. Stravinsky’s comparison of film
music to wallpaper is apt, not only because it is so strongly decorative but because it fills in cracks and
smoothes down rough textures.30 Filmmakers have long recognized these functions. As early as 1911, a
theater musician advised players not to stop a number abruptly when the scene changed.31 Hollywood
composers claimed that sudden stops and starts were avoidable by the process of imperceptibly fading the
music up and down, the practice known in the trade as ‘sneaking in and out.’32
This continuous musical accompaniment functions as narration. It would be easy to show that film music
strives to become as ‘transparent’ as any other technique—viz., not only the sneak-in but the neutrality of
the compositional styles and the standardized uses to which they are put (‘La Marseillaise’ for shots of
France, throbbing rhythms for chase scenes). Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler have heaped scorn upon
Hollywood music as pleonastic and self-effacing; Brecht compared film music’s ‘invisibility’ to the
hypnotist’s need to control the conditions of the trance.33 Yet calling the music ‘transparent’ is as true but
uninformative as calling the entire Hollywood style invisible. If music functions narrationally, how does it
accomplish those tasks characteristic of classical narration?
The sources of Hollywood film music show its narrational bent very clearly. In eighteenth-century
melodrama, background music was played to underscore dramatic points, sometimes even in alternation
with lines of dialogue. American melodrama of the 1800s used sporadic vamping, but spectacle plays and
pantomimes relied upon continuous musical accompaniment.34 The most important influence upon
Hollywood film scoring, however, was that of late nineteenth-century operatic and symphonic music, and
Wagner was the crest of that influence. Wagner was a perfect model, since he exploited the narrational
possibilities of music. Harmony, rhythm, and ‘continuous melody’ could correspond to the play’s dramatic
action, and leitmotifs could convey a character’s thoughts, point up parallels between situations, even
anticipate action or create irony. Adorno’s monograph on Wagner even argues that the dream of the
Gesamtkunstwerk anticipated the thoroughly rationalized artifact of the culture industry, as exemplified in
the Hollywood film.35
In the early teens, film trade journals solemnly supplied theater pianists with oversimplified accounts of
Wagner’s practice. One pianist explained: ‘I attach a certain theme to each person in the picture and work
them out, in whatever form the occasion may call for, not forgetting to use popular strains if necessary.’36
When Carl Joseph Breil proudly claimed to be the first composer to write a score for a film, he said he used
leitmotifs for the characters.37 Silent film scores, usually pasted together out of standardized snatches of
operas, orchestral music, and popular tunes, adhered to the crude leitmotif idea (see fig 12.16). Early
synchronized-sound films with musical tracks continued the practice: when we see the Danube, we hear
‘The Blue Danube’ (The Wedding March 119281). With the post-1935 resurgence in film scoring, Wagner
remained the model. Most of the major studio composers were trained in Europe and influenced by the
sumptuous orchestration and long melodic lines characteristic of Viennese opera.38 Max Steiner and Miklós
Rózsa explicitly acknowledged Wagner’s influence, as did Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who called a film ‘a
textless opera.’39 Characters, places, situations—all were relentlessly assigned motifs, either original or
borrowed. When motifs were not employed, certain passages functioned as a recitative to cue specific
attitudes to the scene (e.g., comic music, suspense music).40 Brecht complained that with such constantly
present music, ‘our actors are transformed into silent opera singers.’41 But Sam Goldwyn gave the most
terse advice: ‘Write music like Wagner, only louder.’42
Like the opera score, the classical film score enters into a system of narration, endowed with some degree
of self-consciousness, a range of knowledge, and a degree of communicativeness. The use of non-diegetic
music itself signals the narration’s awareness of facing an audience, for the music exists solely for the
spectator’s benefit. The scale of the orchestral forces employed and the symphonic tradition itself create an
impersonal wash of sound befitting the unspecific narrator of the classical film.43 The score can also be said
to be omniscient, what Parker Tyler has called ‘a vocal apparatus of destiny.’44 In the credits sequence, the
music can lay out motifs to come, even tagging them to actors’ names. During the film, music adheres to
classical narration’s rule of only allowing glimpses of its omniscience, as when the score anticipates the
action by a few moments. In *Deep Valley (1947), for instance, just before the convict approaches the
lovers, the music swiftly turns from pleasant to sinister. As George Antheil puts it, ‘The characters in a film
drama never know what is going to happen to them, but the music always knows.’45
Most important, musical accompaniment is communicative only within the boundaries laid down by
classical narration. Like the camera, music can be anywhere, and it can intuit the dramatic essence of the
action. It remains, however, motivated by the story. When dialogue is present, the music must drop out or
confine itself to a subdued coloristic background. ‘If a scene is interspersed with silent spots, the
orchestration is timed so closely that it is thicker during the silent shots. It must then be thinned down in a
split second when dialogue comes in.’46 Just as classical camerawork or editing becomes more overt when
there is little dialogue, so the music comes into its own as an accompaniment for physical action. Here
music becomes expressive according to certain conventions (static harmony for suspense or the macabre,
chromaticism for tension, marked rhythm for chase scenes).47 A ‘sting’ in the music can underline a
significant line of dialogue very much in the manner of eighteenth-century melodrama.
Music can also reinforce point-of-view. It establishes time and place as easily as does an inter-title or a
sign: ‘Rule Britannia’ over shots of London, eighteenth-century pastiche for the credits of *Monsieur
Beaucaire (1946). In scoring Lust for Life (1956), Rózsa modeled his score upon Debussy in order to
suggest Van Gogh’s period.48 To this ‘unrestrictive’ use of musical narration, Hollywood counterposes the
possibility of subjective musical point-of-view. The music often expresses characters’ mental states—
agitated music for inner turmoil, ominous chords for tension, and the like. In The Jazz Singer (1927), we
know Jakie is thinking of his mother when, as he sees her picture, we hear the ‘Mammy’ tune in the score.
During the spate of subjective films of the 1940s, musical experiments increased (the theremin in
Spellbound [1945], a playback reverberation in Murder, My Sweet [1944]). As one critic noted at the time,
weird coloristic effects became more common because of ‘the vogue for films dealing with amnesia, shock,
suspense, neurosis, and kindred psychological and psychiatric themes. The music counterpart of the
troubled mental states depicted in these films is a musical style which emphasizes vagueness and
strangeness, especially in the realms of harmony and orchestration.’49 By the mid-1930s, music could shift
easily from unrestrictive to restrictive viewpoints, as when a character hums a tune to himself and then, as
he steps outdoors, the orchestra takes it up.50 Hollywood music could even create misleading narration, as in
*Uncertain Glory (1944): when the prisoner Jean tells Bonet he wants to go to church to confess, the music
is sentimental, but once Bonet lets him go, Jean flees and the music becomes flippant. The first musical
passage is now revealed as having presented only Bonet’s misconception about Jean’s sincerity. Such
practices, even such deceptions, are the logical consequence of making music-as-narration dependent upon
character causality.
Since classical narration turns nearly all anticipations and recollections of story action over to the
characters, music must not operate as a completely free-roaming narration. Here is one difference from
Wagner’s method, which did allow the music to flaunt its omniscience by ironic or prophetic uses of motifs.
The Hollywood score, like the classical visual style, seldom includes overt recollections or far-flung
anticipations of the action. The music confines itself to a moment-by-moment heightening of the story.
Slight anticipations are permitted, but recollections of previous musical material must be motivated by a
repetition of situation or by character memory. At the close of *Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944), Tessa’s
wave to Eric is accompanied by the ballroom music to which they had danced in an earlier scene. The
classical text thus relies upon our forming strong associations upon a motifs first entry.
The narrational limits which the classical film puts upon music are dramatically illustrated in Hangover
Square (1945). During the credits, a romantic piano concerto plays non-diegetically but does not conclude.
Early in the film, when the composer George Bone goes to his apartment, his friend Barbara is playing the
opening of his concerto, the same music we had heard over the credits. But Bone’s version is also
unfinished, and Barbara’s father advises him to complete it. In the course of the action, Bone is plagued by
murderous amnesiac spells triggered by discordant noises, which are rendered as subjective by means of
chromatic and dissonant harmonies. Completing the concerto drives these from Bone’s head, but in the
film’s climactic scene, when he plays the concerto at a soiree, he suffers another breakdown. Yet the
performance continues, and the action of the last scene is accompanied throughout by Bone’s concerto.
Bone’s romantic score wins out over the psychotic discordances, but only by becoming identical with the
score of the film, the score that had been ‘rehearsed’ under the credits. The narration’s power lies in the fact
that Bone is allowed to score the last scene only by writing the score that the narration ‘had in mind’ all
along. The narration’s limits are revealed by its almost complete anticipation of Bone’s concerto: the film
cannot complete the piece before he does. Only the conclusion of the action—Bone finishing the
performance alone in a burning building—brings the concerto and the film itself to a close. As ‘The End’
appears on the screen, the (non-diegetic) orchestra swallows the solo piano; now the narration can have the
last word, and chord.
The reappearing narration

The finale of Hangover Square also illustrates the way in which the narration can reappear overtly but
briefly at the film’s very close. This close would minimally consist of a ‘The End’ title, usually against a
background identical to that of the opening credits, and a non-diegetic musical flourish. Such devices buckle
the film shut, making the ‘narrator’ simply a discreet curtailer, like the curtain that closes a play or ‘The
End’ that concludes a novel. This narrational movement toward finality is laid bare in the credits of King
Kong (1933). The opening credits are set against a triangular shape which steadily narrows as they proceed
(see figs 3.26 and 3.27). Not until the end credit does the triangle diagram a complete closure (see
fig 3.28).51 After about 1970, it seems, films seldom exploited these narrational possibilities and instead
dropped the ‘The End’ credit, shifted most of the opening credits to the final spot (as a signal of the end),
and expanded the credits sequence to a Talmudic intricacy.
The narration can afford to be so modest at this point because the film has already informed the audience
when it will end. Chapter 4 shows how deadlines work in this fashion. Characters also constantly look
forward to closure. In *The Arkansas Traveler (1938), Traveler tells John: ‘When this is all over, I want you
to remember just one thing.’ In the final moment of *Play Girl (1941), the heroine calls her maid to fetch
the perfume she has worn for every flirtation: ‘The last time, Josie, the last time.’ *Uncertain Glory (1944)
ends with Jean about to sacrifice his life. Bonet: ‘It’s been a long road.’ Jean: ‘But it’s come to the right
ending.’ The conditions for closure have also been non-diegetically anticipated by the narration. *The Shock
Punch (1925) begins with expository titles that describe Dan Savage as a man who believes that life is a
battle and the winner is one who ‘can command the last reserve of physical power.’ The next title
continues: ‘And as he wanted his son Ranny to be like that—to carry a final, deciding punch into every
conflict —.’ Needless to say, the film’s action is resolved when Ranny flattens the man he is fighting. At the
start of *The Black Hand (1950), a crawl title tells of Italian immigrants living in New York at the turn of
the century. Most were good citizens, the narration explains, who fought the Black Hand and eventually
purged their community of its influence. The title thus anticipates Gio’s success in overthrowing the Mafia.
At the film’s close, a fireman mutters, ‘Ah, these dagoes!’ and the captain turns. ‘I wonder where you think
Americans come from.’ His retort confirms the narration’s initial estimate of the immigrants’ civic virtues.
In contrast, it is no trivial description of an avant-garde or modernist film to say that such films often do not
let us know when they will stop. Films in these traditions deliberately exploit a sense of uncertainty about
their boundaries, as when, in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the narrator announces that The whole story
has come to its end,’ but neglects to add that the film is only half over.
The work of classical narration may also peep out from the film’s epilogue—a part of the final scene, or
even a complete final scene, that shows the return of a stable narrative state. The screenwriter Frances
Marion suggests ending the film as soon as possible after the action is resolved, but ‘not before the expected
rewards and penalties are meted out…. The final sequence should show the reaction of the protagonist when
he has achieved his desires. Let the audience be satisfied that the future of the principals is settled.’52
Emerson and Loos call this a short ‘human interest’ scene, an equivalent of ‘And so they lived happily ever
after.’53 All the films in the UnS did include an epilogue, however brief; in two-thirds of them, the epilogue
was a distinctly demarcated scene. A 1919 film *Love and the Law (1919), signalled its epilogue by a very
self-conscious title: ‘Patience, gentle audience, just one thing more.’ Soon, however, no such cues were
necessary and an epilogue could be included as a matter of course.
Epilogues will often tacitly refer back to the opening scene, proving the aptness of Raymond Bellour’s
remark that in the classical film the conclusion acknowledges itself as a result of the beginning.54 *You for
Me (1952) begins with Tony being peppered in the buttocks by a shotgun blast; a freeze frame catches him
in a comic posture. The film ends with him sitting down on a knitting needle, accompanied by a freeze
frame. *Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944) frames its story by the habitual action of the family waving to
planes overhead; at the start, the planes are anonymous, but by the close, Tessa is in love with one pilot. The
familiar here-we-go-again, or cyclical, epilogue is a variant of the same principle. The epilogue can even be
quite self-conscious about its symmetry, as is the framing narration of *Impact (1944). The opening of the
film corresponds to the opening of a dictionary by an anonymous hand, and the word ‘impact’ is enlarged. A
voice-over commentary reads the somewhat improbable definition: ‘Impact: The force with which two lives
come together, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil.’ At the end, the epilogue returns to the dictionary,
but the definition has changed: ‘Impact: The force with which two lives come together, sometimes for evil,
sometimes for good.’ The restoration of ‘good’ as the stable state creates an explicit balancing effect, as
does shutting the book to announce the close of the film.
Most classical films use the story action to confirm our expectations of closure without further nudgings
from the narration. But *Impact does show that during the last few seconds of the film, the narration can
risk some self-consciousness. The familiar running gag, a motif repeated throughout the film to be capped in
the final moments, reminds the audience to some degree of the arbitrariness of closure. Another self-
conscious marking of the narration’s perspective upon the story world is the camera that cranes back to a
high angle upon a final tableau. Most overt is a finale like that of *Appointment for Love (1941), in which
an elevator man turns from the couple and winks at the audience. As we would expect, such direct address
is usually motivated by genre (e.g., comedy) or realism (as in a frame story stressing the factual basis of the
fiction).
The winding corridor

The belief that classical narration is invisible often accompanies an assumption that the spectator is passive.
If the Hollywood film is a clear pane of glass, the audience can be visualized as a rapt onlooker. Again,
Hollywood’s own discourse has encouraged this. Concealment of artifice, technicians claim, makes
watching the film like viewing reality. The camera becomes not only the storyteller but the viewer as well;
the absent narrator is replaced by the ‘ideal observer.’55 Few theorists today would agree with Hollywood’s
equation of its style with natural perception, but contemporary accounts have still considered the spectator
to be quite inactive. Most commonly, film theorists have employed concepts taken from perspective
painting to explain the spectator’s role. Yet terms like ‘spectator placement,’ ‘subject position,’ and other
spatial metaphors break the film into a series of views targeted toward an inert perceiver.56 In Chapter 5, I will
consider ‘perspective’ as an account of the representation of classical space. For now, a metaphor involving
both space and time will be useful. The spectator passes through the classical film as if moving through an
architectural volume, remembering what she or he has already encountered, hazarding guesses about
upcoming events, assembling images and sounds into a total shape. What, then, is the spectator’s itinerary?
Is it string-straight, or is it more like the baffling, ‘crooked corridors’ that Henry James prided himself upon
designing?57
The film begins. Concentrated, preliminary exposition that plunges us in medias res triggers strong first
impressions, and these become the basis for our expectations across the entire film. Meir Sternberg calls this
the ‘primacy effect.’58 He points out that in any narrative, the information provided first about a character or
situation creates a fixed baseline against which later information is judged. As our earlier examples
indicate, the classical cinema trades upon the primacy effect. Once the exposition has outlined a character’s
traits, the character should remain consistent. This means that actions must be unequivocal and
significant.59 The star system also encourages the creation of first impressions. ‘The people who act in
pictures are selected for their roles because of the precise character impressions that they convey to
audiences. For instance, the moment you see Walter Pidgeon in a film you know immediately that he could
not do a mean or petty thing.’60 All of these factors cooperate to reinforce the primacy effect.
Many films open with dialogue that builds up an impression of the yet-to-be-introduced protagonist;
when the character appears (played by an appropriate star, caught in a typical action), the impression is
confirmed. In the first scene of *Speedy (1928), the young woman says that Speedy (Harold Lloyd) has a
new job; her father comments that Speedy cannot keep any job because he is obsessed by baseball. Scene
two begins with an expository title identifying the crucial game being played in Yankee Stadium, and shots
of the game follow. Another expository title informs us that Speedy now works where he can phone the
stadium. We then see a soda fountain, with Speedy as the soda jerk, going to the phone to learn the game’s
score. The rest of the scene confirms Pop’s judgment of Speedy’s character through gags showing Speedy
carrying his baseball mania into his work. Dialogue title, expository title, character action, and star persona
(Harold called himself ‘Speedy’ in The Freshman [1925]) all reinforce a single first impression.
The primacy effect is not confined to characterization, although first impressions are probably most firm
in that realm. In some silent films, an unusually emphatic narration previews the essential theme and
establishes the most coherent reading of what will follow. By extension, all the devices of ‘planting’ and
foreshadowing motifs— objects, conditions, deadlines—gain their saliency from the primacy effect.
Once first impressions get erected, they are hard to knock down. Sternberg shows that we tend to take the
first appearance of a motif as the ‘true’ one, which can withstand severe testing by contrary information.
When, for instance, a character first presented as amiable later behaves grumpily, we are inclined to justify
the grumpiness as a temporary deviation.61 This tactic (again, reinforced by the star system) is a common
way in which the classical film presents character change or development. In the opening of *The Miracle
Woman (1931), Florence Fallon is so distraught by her father’s death that she denounces his congregation as
hypocrites and launches into a sermon on the need for kindness. An opportunistic promoter takes advantage
of her fervor and talks her into getting revenge on people by becoming a phony faith healer. When we next
see her, she behaves cynically. Because of first impressions, we see her cynical selfishness as a momentary
aberration, caused by exceptional circumstances, and so we are not surprised when love recalls her to her
father’s ideals. The primacy effect helps explain why character change in the Hollywood film is not a
drastic shift but a return to the path from which one has strayed.
First impressions in place, the spectator proceeds through the film. How does this process work? The
narration creates gaps, holding back information and compelling the spectator to form hypotheses. Most
minimally and generally, these hypotheses will pertain to what can happen next, but many other hypotheses
might be elicited. The spectator may infer how much a character knows, or why a character acts this way, or
what in the past the protagonist is trying to conceal. The viewer may also hypothesize about the narration
itself: why am I being told this now? why is the key information being withheld? Sternberg sees every
viewing hypothesis as having three properties. A hypothesis can be more or less probable. Some hypotheses
are virtual certainties (e.g., that Bill will survive the flood in *Steamboat Bill Jr. [1928]). Other hypotheses
are highly improbable (e.g., that Bill will not get the girl he loves). Most hypotheses fall somewhere in
between. Hypotheses can also be more or less simultaneous; that is, sometimes we hold two or more
hypotheses in balance at once, while at other moments one hypothesis simply gets replaced by another. If a
man announces that he will get married, we hold simultaneous hypotheses (he will go through with it or he
won’t). But if a sworn bachelor suddenly shows up with a bride on his arm, the bachelor-hypothesis is
simply replaced; the bachelor-hypothesis never competed with another possibility. Evidently, simultaneous
hypotheses promote suspense and curiosity, while successive hypotheses promote surprise. Finally, a set of
hypotheses can be more or less exclusive. Narration may force us to frame a few sharply distinguished
hypotheses (in a chess game, there can only be win, lose, or draw), or the film may supply a range of
overlapping and indistinct possibilities (setting out on a trip, one may undergo a wide variety of
experiences).62
The three scales of probability, simultaneity, and exclusivity take us a considerable way toward
characterizing the activities of the classical spectator. Broadly speaking, Hollywood narration asks us to
form hypotheses that are highly probable and sharply exclusive. Consider, as a naive example, *Roaring
Timber (1937). In the first scene, a lumber-mill owner comes into a saloon looking for a new foreman. He
tells the bartender he needs a tough guy for the job. Since we have already seen our protagonist, Jim, enter
the bar, we form the hypothesis that the owner will ask him. The expectation is fairly probable, and there is
no information to the contrary (no other man in the room is identified as a candidate). There is also a narrow
range of alternatives (either the owner will ask Jim or he will not). Few hypotheses are as probable as this,
but one of the indices of classical narration’s reliability is that it seldom equivocates about the likeliest few
hypotheses at any given moment. Similarly, the classical film sharply delimits the range of our
expectations. The character’s question is not ‘What will I do with my life?’ but ‘Will I choose marriage or a
career?’ Even subtle cases operate by the same principles. *Beggars of Life (1928) begins with a wandering
young man coming up to a farmhouse and finding a dead man inside. He then encounters a young woman who
tells, in flashback, how the farmer tried to rape her and how she killed him. The alternative explanations
(suicide, accident, homicide, etc.) narrow to a single one (self-defense), and this becomes steadily more
probable as the woman’s tale accounts for the details the young man had noticed. True, farcical forms of
comedy permit almost anything to happen next, but there the improbability and open-endedness of
permissable hypotheses are motivated as generic conventions, and we adjust our expectations accordingly.
On the whole, classical narration creates probable and distinct hypotheses. Characters’ goal orientation
often reinforces and guides the direction these hypotheses will take. Incidentally, in *Roaring Timber, Jim
accepts the foreman’s job.
By threading together several probable and quite exclusive hypotheses, we participate in a game of
controlled expectation and likely confirmation. There is, however, more to the spectator’s activity. Any
fictional narration can call our attention to a gap or it can distract us from it. In a mystery film, for instance,
the crucial clue may be indicated quite casually; the detective may notice it but we do not. If the narration
thus distracts us, we do not form an appropriate hypothesis and the narration can then introduce new
information. These successive hypotheses, as Sternberg calls them, create surprise.63 Now it is characteristic
of classical narration to use surprise very sparingly. Too many jolts would lead us to doubt the reliability of
the narration, and the advantages of concentrated, preliminary, in medias res exposition would be lost. In our
itinerary through the classical film, the banister cannot constantly collapse under our touch.
For this reason, classical narration usually calls our attention to gaps and allows us to set up simultaneous,
competing hypotheses. The scenes from *Roaring Timber and *Beggars of Life afford clear instances, as
does a sequence in *Interlude (1957). The heroine calls on the conductor Tonio Fischer; our knowledge of
him has been identical with hers. While she waits for him, the narration takes us to another room, where
Tonio is playing the piano for another woman. The scene raises questions about the woman’s identity and
Tonio’s character traits, and these gaps encourage us to construct simultaneous alternatives to be tested in
subsequent scenes.
Our hypothesis-forming activity can be thought of as a series of questions which the text impells us to
ask. The questions can be posed literally, from one character to another, as in the beginning of *Monsieur
Beaucaire (1946): ‘Will there be war?’ Or the questions can be more implicit. Roland Barthes speaks of this
question-posing process as the ‘hermeneutic code’ and he shows how narratives have ways of delaying or
recasting the question or equivocating about the answer.64 The classical cinema always delays and may
recast, but it seldom equivocates. At the start of *Play Girl (1941), we are uncertain whether Grace is a
gold-digger or whether the title is ironic. But when the father of her current beau denounces her, not only
does she not deny her scandalous past but she accepts a bribe to let the son go. The answer to our question,
somewhat delayed, is unequivocal.
All of the foregoing instances illustrate another feature of the gaps that classical narration creates: they
are filled. Sternberg distinguishes between permanent gaps, which the text never authoritatively lets us fill
(e.g., lago’s motives), and temporary gaps, which sooner or later we are able to fill.65 It is a basic feature of
classical narration to avoid permanent gaps. ‘The perfect photoplay leaves no doubts, offers no explanations,
starts nothing it cannot finish.’66 The questions about Tonio in *Interlude are eventually answered.
Concentrated preliminary exposition, causal motivation, the use of denouement and epilogue—all seek to
assure that no holes remain in the film. This process of gap-filling helps create the continuity of impression
upon which Hollywood prides itself. Each sequence, every line of dialogue, becomes a way of creating or
developing or confirming a hypothesis; shot by shot, questions are posed and answered. Our progress
through the film, as our first impressions are confirmed and our hypotheses focus toward certainty,
resembles the graphic design in the titles of King Kong (figs 3.26–3.28): a pyramid narrowing to a point of
intelligibility. One screenplay manual puts it well: ‘In the beginning of the motion picture we don’t know
anything. During the course of the story, information is accumulated, until at the end we know
everything.’67
Again, one should not conclude that classical narration is naive or shallow, for subtle effects can be
achieved within the admittedly constrained bounds of such narration. *Wine of Youth (1924) begins with
three expository titles:
When our grandmothers were young, nice girls pretended to know nothing at all.
When our mothers were young, they admitted they knew a thing or two.
The girls of today pretend to know all there is to know.
There follow two parallel scenes. At a ball in 1870, a suitor proposes to a woman, and she accepts: ‘There
has never been a love as great as ours!’ At another dance in 1897, a suitor proposes to the couple’s
daughter, and she too accepts, repeating the line her mother had uttered years before. The symmetry is quite
exact: similar situations, same setting (a sofa in an alcove), even the identical number of shots in each
scene. At this point, the narration has established itself as highly reliable: the scenes have confirmed the
titles’ knowledge of women, and we have already formed strong first impressions about what the ‘girls of
today’ will be like. (The word ‘pretends’ strongly suggests omniscience.) When the scene moves to the
present, our impressions are confirmed. Jazz babies and lounge lizards are engaged in a wild party. Mary,
the granddaughter and daughter of the other two women, refuses to marry her suitor. We form a hypothesis
that this will not in the long run violate the pattern established in the first two scenes. Over the whole film we
wait for Mary to reconcile herself to the decent young man who loves her. A harrowing family crisis
demonstrates both the strains and the possibilities of marriage. Mary and her suitor are sitting on the sofa
(the site of both previous courtships) and he proposes. She accepts: ‘There has never been a love as great as
ours!’ It has been a long wait, but the narrational gap has finally been closed, and by an ironic repetition at
that. The narration can even afford a twist— embracing, the couple tumble off the sofa—that lends a small
surprise to the finale. Our hypotheses about the conclusion, established as very narrow and highly probable,
are tested but finally validated, and in a way that also illustrates the recurrence of the Rule of Three.
There is one genre that may seem to run counter to all these claims about spectator activity in classical
narration. The mystery film sometimes makes its narration quite overt: a shot of a shadowy figure or an
anonymous hand makes the viewer quite aware of a self-conscious, omniscient, and suppressive narration.
Similarly, the mystery film encourages the spectator to erect erroneous first impressions, confounds the
viewer’s most probable hypotheses, and stresses curiosity as much as suspense. (The mystery tale always
depends upon highly retarded exposition, the true account coming to light only at the end.) The narration
may even be revealed as retrospectively unreliable. Thus The Maltese Falcon (1941) offers an interesting
contrast with *Wine of Youth. Not only does the narration abandon its initial adherence to Sam Spade’s point-
of-view by showing the killing of his partner Archer, but the narration also declines to show the killer (we
see only a gloved hand). More important, the narration misleads us in an expository title at the very outset.
Over a still-life of the Maltese falcon, the title recounts the statuette’s origin and ends by remarking that its
whereabouts remain a mystery ‘to this day’ (fig 3.29). When the characters find only a lead replica of the
falcon, the opening title stands revealed as doubly misleading. The falcon in the still-life may be the phony,
and the phrase ‘to this day’ which we might take as meaning ‘until this story started,’ actually means ‘even
after the story concluded.’ The opening title’s equivocation is apparent only in retrospect. The same kind of
misleading narration is at work in the beginning of * Manhandled, as I’ve already suggested (p. 32). A more
drastic example, probably a limit-case, is Hitchcock’s duplicitous flashback in the beginning of Stage
Fright (1950).
The unreliable and overt narration of the mystery film remains, however, finally bound by classical
precepts. First, the narration still depends chiefly upon suspense and forward momentum: the story is
primarily that of an investigation, even if the goal happens to be the elucidation of a past event. Secondly,
the mystery film relies completely upon cause and effect, since the mystery always revolves around missing
links in the causal chain. Third, those links are always found, so even the gaps of the mystery film are
temporary, not permanent. Most important, the mystery film’s overt play of narration and hypothesis-
forming is generically motivated. Since Poe and Doyle, the classical detective story has stressed the game
of wits that the narrator proposes to the reader. In this genre, we want uncertainty, we expect both
characters and narration to try to deceive us, and we therefore erect specific sorts of first impressions,
cautious, provisional ones, based as much upon generic conventions as upon what we actually learn. We do
not feel betrayed by the Falcon’s opening title, since it is equivalent to the deceptive but ‘fair’ narrational
manipulations in certain novels by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, or Ellery Queen. The classical film
thus can generically motivate an unreliable and overt narration.
The spectator moves through, or with, classical Hollywood narration by casting expectations in the form
of hypotheses which the text shapes. Narration is fundamentally reliable, allowing hypotheses to be ranked
in order of probability and narrowed to a few distinct alternatives. Surprise and disorientation are secondary
to suspense as to which alternatives will be confirmed. Curiosity about the past takes a minor role in relation
to anticipation of future events. Gaps are continually and systematically opened and filled in, and no gap is
permanent. Lest this process seem obvious or natural, recall such a film as Last Year at Marienbad (1961),
which creates a fundamentally unreliable narration, a lack of redundancy, an open and relatively improbable
set of hypotheses, a dependence upon surprise rather than suspense, a pervasive ambiguity about the past
that makes the future impossible to anticipate, and many gaps left yawning at the film’s close. This is of
course an extreme example, but other narrative films contain non-classical narrative strategies. A film’s
narration could make the initial exposition less clear-cut, as does Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), or
the narration could establish a firm primacy effect but then qualify or demolish it, as do films as different as
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) and Resnais’s Providence (1977). The Hollywood film does not
lead us to invalid conclusions, as these films can; in the classical narrative, the corridor may be winding, but
it is never crooked.
4
Time in the classical film
Our examination of exposition has shown that the narrational aspect of plot manipulates story time in
specific ways. More generally, classical narration employs characteristic strategies for manipulating story
order and story duration. These strategies activate the spectator in ways congruent with the overall aims of
the classical cinema. We shall also have to pay some attention to how narration uses one device that is
commonly associated with the Hollywood style’s handling of time: crosscutting.
Temporal order: the search for meaning
After dramas supposedly without endings, here is a drama which would be without exposition
or opening, and which would end clearly. Events would not follow one another and especially
would not correspond exactly. The fragments of many pasts come to bury themselves in a single
now. The future mixed among memories. This chronology is that of the human mind.1
Jean Epstein, writing in 1927, thus describes his film La Glace à trois faces. Hollywood cinema, however,
refuses the radical play with chronology that Epstein proposes; the classical film normally shows story
events in a 1–2–3 order. Unlike Epstein, the classical filmmaker needs an opening, a threshold—that
concentrated, preliminary exposition that plunges us in medias res. Events unfold successively from that.
Advance notice of the future is especially forbidden, since a ftashforward would make the narration’s
omniscience and suppressiveness overt (see Chapter 30 on alternative cinemas’ use of the flashforward).
The only permissible manipulation of story order is the flashback.
Flashbacks are rarer in the classical Hollywood film than we normally think. Throughout the period 1917–
60, screenwriters’ manuals usually recommended not using them; as one manual put it, ‘Protracted or
frequent flashbacks tend to slow the dramatic progression’—a remark that reflects Hollywood’s general
reluctance to exploit curiosity about past story events.2 Of the one hundred UnS films, only twenty use any
flashbacks at all, and fifteen of those occur in silent films. Most of these are brief, expository flashbacks
filling in information about a character’s background; this device was obviously replaced by expository
dialogue in the sound cinema. In the early years of .sound, when plays about trials were common film
sources, flashbacks offered a way to ‘open up’ stagy trial scenes (e.g., The Bellamy Trial, Through Different
Eyes, The Trial of Mary Dugan, Madame X, all 1929). Another vogue for flashbacks ran from the late 1930s
into the 1950s. Between 1939 and 1953, four UnS films begin with a frame story and flash back to recount
the bulk of the main action before returning to the frame. Yet those four flashback films still comprise less
than 10 per cent of the UnS films of the period. What probably makes the period seem dominated by
flashbacks is not the numerical frequency of the device but the intricate ways it was used: contradictory
flashbacks in Crossfire (1947), parallel flashbacks in Letter to Three Wives (1948), open-ended flashbacks
in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), flashbacks within flashbacks
within flashbacks in Passage to Marseille (1944) and The Locket (1946), and a flashback narrated by a dead
man in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
It is possible, of course, to present a shift in story order simply as such, with the film’s narration overtly
intervening to reveal the past. In The Ghost ofRosie Taylor (1918), an expository inter-title announces that it
will explain how the situation became what it is; the title motivates the flashback. The Killing (1956) uses
voice-over, documentary-sty le narration to motivate ‘realistically’ its jumps back in time. The rarity of
these overt intrusions shows that classical narration almost always motivates flashbacks by means of
character memory. Several cues cooperate here: images of the character thinking, the character’s voice
heard ‘over’ the images, optical effects (dissolve, blurring focus), music, and specific references to the time
period we are about to enter. If we see flashbacks as motivated by subjectivity, then the extraordinary
fashion for temporal manipulations in the 1940s can be explained by the changing conception of
psychological causality in the period. Flashbacks, especially convoluted or contradictory ones, can be
justified by that increasing interest in vulgarized Freudian psychology which Chapter 2 has already
discussed.
Classical flashbacks are motivated by character memory, but they do not function primarily to reveal
character traits. Nor were Hollywood practitioners particularly interested in using the flashback to restrict
point-of-view; one screenwriters’ manual suggests that ‘unmotivated jumping of time is likely to rattle the
audience, thereby breaking their illusion that they participate in the lives of the characters.’3 Even the
contradictory flashbacks in Through Different Eyes or Crossfire serve not to reveal the teller’s personality
so much as they operate, within the conventions of the mystery film, as visual representations of lies. Jean
Epstein’s aim in La Glace à trois faces—to reflect the mixed temporality of consciousness, fragments of the
past in a single now—is far removed from Hollywood’s use of flashbacks as rhetorical ‘dispositions’ of the
narrative for the sake of suspense or surprise. Nor need the classical flashback respect the literary
conventions of firstperson narration. Extended flashback sequences usually include material that the
remembering character could not have witnessed or known. Character memory is simply a convenient
immediate motivation for a shift in chronology; once the shift is accomplished, there are no constant cues to
remind us that we are supposedly in someone’s mind. In flashbacks, then, the narrating character executes
the same fading movement that the narrator of the entire film does: overt and self-conscious at first, then
covert and intermittently apparent. Beginning with one narrator and ending with another (e.g., I Walked
With a Zombie), or compelling a character to ‘remember’ things she never knew or will know (e.g., Ten
North Frederick [1958]), or creating a deceased narrator (e.g., Sunset Boulevard)—all these tactics show
that subjectivity is an arbitrary pretext for flashbacks.
Classical manipulations of story order imply specific activities for the spectator. These involve what
psychologists call ‘temporal integration,’ the process of fusing the perception of the present, the memory of
the past, and expectations about the future. E.H.Gombrich points out that temporal integration depends upon
the search for meaning, the drive to make coherent sense of the material represented.4 The film which
challenges this coherence, a film like Not Reconciled (1964), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), or India Song
(1975), must make temporal integration difficult to achieve. In the classical film, however, character
causality provides the basis for temporal coherence. The manipulations of story order in Not Reconciled or
Marienbad are puzzling partly because we cannot determine any relevant character identities, traits, or
actions which could motivate the breaks in chronology. On the other hand, one reason that classical
flashbacks do not adhere to a character’s viewpoint is that they must never distract from the ongoing causal
chain. The causes and effects may be presented out of story order, but our search for their connections must
be rewarded.
44 TIME IN THE CLASSICAL FILM
Psychological causality thus permits the classical viewer to integrate the present with the past and to form
clear-cut hypotheses about future story events. To participate in the process of casting ever more narrow and
exclusive hypotheses, we must have solid ground under our feet. Therefore, through repetition within the
story action and a covertly narrated, ‘objective’ diegetic world, the film gives us clear memories of causal
material; on this basis we can form expectations. At the same time, the search for meaning of which
Gombrich speaks guides us toward the motifs and actions already marked as potentially meaningful. For
example, motifs revealed in the credits sequence or in the early scenes accumulate significance as our
memory is amplified by the ongoing story. Kuntzel suggests that these reinscribed motifs create a vague
déjà-vu that becomes gradually more meaningful: ‘The entire itinerary of The Most Dangerous Game is to
make its initial figure readable, to progressively reassure the subject plunged ex abrupto into the uncertainty
of the figure.’5 The classical aesthetic of ‘planting’ and foreshadowing, of tagging traits and objects for
future use, can be seen as laying out elements to be recalled later in the cause-effect logic of the film. If
temporality and causality did not cooperate in this way, the spectator could not construct a coherent story
out of the narration.
Our survey of narration has shown that the viewer’s successive hypotheses can be thought of as a series of
questions. Hollywood cinema’s reliance upon chronology triggers the fundamental query: What will happen
next in the story? Each shot, wrote Loos and Emerson, ‘is planned to lead the audience on to the next. At
any point, the spectator is wondering how things will come out in the next scene.’6 The forward flow of
these hypotheses may be related to the irreversibility of the film-viewing experience; Thomas Elsaesser has
speculated that the channeling of chronology into causality helps the viewer ‘manage’ the potentially
disturbing nature of the film-viewing situation.7 The relatively close correspondence between story order
and narrational order in the classical film helps the spectator create an organized succession of hypotheses
and a secure rhythm of question and answer.
Duration, deadlines, and dissolves

Like order, classical Hollywood duration respects very old conventions. The narration shows the important
events and skips the intervals between them. The omitted intervals become codified as a set of punctuation
marks: expository inter-titles (‘The Next Day’) and optical effects. From 1917 to 1921, fade-ins and -outs
and iris-ins and -outs were the most common optical transitions between scenes. Between 1921 and 1928,
the iris fell into disuse, replaced by the fade as the most common transition. In the sound era, fades and
dissolves were the most common signs of temporal ellipsis. Wipes enjoyed a vogue between 1932 and 1941
and appeared occasionally thereafter. Such optical punctuation marks were often compared with theatrical or
literary conventions (curtain, end of chapter). Within a scene, of course, some of the same ellipses could be
used. After the late 1920s and until the early 1950s, scenes often began with a shot of a building or a sign
and then dissolved to the action proper. In the same period, a wipe, either hard- or soft-edged, might follow
a character moving from one sub-scene to another. (Not until the late 1950s did a few films begin to eliminate
such internal punctuation and simply use the straight cut to link scenes and subscenes.8) Such a clear set of
cues creates an orderly flow of action; compare the disruptive effect, in the films of Eisenstein and Godard,
of beginning a scene’s action and then, part of the way through, interrupting the action with a title that tells
us when the action is occurring.
Punctuation marks enable the narration to skip unimportant intervals by simple omission. The montage
sequence lets the narration represent, however briefly, those intervals. The montage sequence does not omit
time but compresses it. A war, a prison sentence, or a career can be summed up in a few shots. Films which
cover a great length of time may make heavy weather of montage sequences, as does *High Time (1960),
which employs montages of seasons and semesters to cover four years on a college campus. The montage
sequence was especially important in literary adaptations, since the plots of novels tended to cover
extensive periods.9 So critical were montages to temporal construction that they were also called ‘time-
lapse’ sequences.
The classical film creates a patterned duration not only by what it leaves out but by a specific, powerful
device. The story action sets a limit to how long it must last. Sometimes this means simply a strictly
confined duration, as in the familiar convention of one-night-in-a-mysterioushouse films (The Cat and the
Canary [1927], Seven Footprints to Satan [1929], *One Frightened Night [1935], *Sh! The Octopus
[1937]). More commonly, the story action sets stipulated deadlines for the characters.
The mildest and most frequent form of the deadline is the appointment. This is most evident in the
romance line of action, wherein a suitor will invite a woman out for dinner, to a dance, etc. If the film
makes romance primary, the acceptance, rejection, or deferral of such invitations forms a significant part of
the drama (e.g., *Interlude [1957], *The King and the Chorus Girl [1937]). The very title of *Appointment
for Love (1941) conveys the same idea. Even if the film does not rely completely upon the romance line of
action, many scenes include the making of appointments for later encounters. Just as motifs anticipate future
actions, so appointments gear our expectations toward later scenes.
The deadline proper is the strongest way in which story duration cooperates with narrative causality. In
effect, the characters set a limit to the time span necessary to the chain of cause and effect. Over three-
quarters of the UnS films contained one or more clearly articulated deadlines. The deadline may be
stipulated in a line of dialogue, a shot (e.g., a clock), or crosscutting; whatever device is used, it must
specify the durational limit within which cause and effect can operate. Most frequently, the deadline is
localized, binding together a few scenes or patterning only a single one. Scenes in *Miss Lulu Bett (1921)
are structured around the repeated deadline of the family’s dinner hour. A series of short episodes in *High
Time (1960) are governed by the fact that the freshmen must build a bonfire by seven o’clock. The localized
deadline is of course most common at the film’s climax. In *Fire Down Below (1957), one of the
protagonists is trapped in the hold of a ship; it is on fire and sinking, and the suspense is predicated upon the
slow drainage of time until the situation becomes hopeless. *The Canterville Ghost (1944) presents the
climactic scene of the ghost and young William proving their courage by towing a ticking bomb across the
landscape. When William says, If it’ll hold for twenty seconds more!’ the Ghost starts to count the seconds
off. The conventional last-minute rescue is the most evident instance of how the classical film’s climax
often turns upon a deadline.
A deadline may also determine the entire structure of a classical film. The protagonist’s goal can be
straightforwardly dependent upon a deadline, as when in *Roaring Timber (1937), Jim agrees to deliver
eighty million feet of lumber in sixty days. *The Shock Punch (1925) gives the protagonist the task of finishing
construction of a building by a certain date; the film’s last scene occurs on the deadline day. In 1940s films,
the use of the flashback can also limit the duration of the story action. For example, *No Leave, No Love
(1946) begins with the protagonist rushing to a maternity ward; while he waits for news of his child’s birth,
he tells another husband the story of how he met his wife. By halting the action at a point of crisis and
flashing back to early events, the film makes those events seem to operate under the pressure of a deadline.
(See also The Big Clock [1948] and Raw Deal [1948].)
*Uncertain Glory (1944) offers a clear example of how appointments mix with deadlines to unify the
duration of the classical Hollywood film. The film’s action takes place in France under the Nazi Occupation.
The first six scenes present the escape of the convict Jean and his capture by the police detective Bonet; in
these portions, alternating point-of-view creates suspense. When Bonet has captured Jean, we learn that the
Gestapo will shoot one hundred hostages if a partisan saboteur does not surrender in five days. This long-
term deadline structures the bulk of the film, as Bonet tries to convince Jean to pose as the saboteur, help
the Resistance, and save the hostages. While the deadline hovers over the action, the two men quarrel,
villagers conspire against them, Jean falls in love with a village woman (entailing small-scale
appointments), and Jean tries several times to escape from Bonet. Finally, in the penultimate scene, at five
o’clock Jean decides to surrender himself: ‘Deadline’s six o’clock, isn’t it?’ He turns himself in.
It should be evident that deadlines function narrationally. Issuing from the diegetic world, they motivate
the film’s durational limits: the story action, not the narrator, seems to decide how long the action will take.
Planning appointments makes it ‘natural’ for the narration to show the meeting itself; setting up deadlines
makes it ‘natural’ for the narration to devote screen time to showing whether or not the deadline is met.
Moreover, appointments and deadlines stress the forward flow of story action: the arrows of the spectator’s
expectations are turned toward the encounter to come, the race to the goal. When, in * Applause (1929), the
sailor from Wisconsin asks April for a date, we expect to see the date; when he says he has only four days
of leave, we are not surprised that he should ask her to marry him before his leave is up. Deadlines and
appoint ments thus perfectly suit classical narration’s emphasis upon eliciting hypotheses about the future.
As a formal principle, the deadline is one of the most characteristic marks of Hollywood dramaturgy.
Alternative styles of filmmaking can often be recognized by their refusal to set such explicit limits on the
duration of story action. The alternatives vary. Ozu structures his films by repeated routines and cycles of
family behavior. Jacques Tati uses a fixed duration (a week, a day or two) simply as a block of time without
a deadline. Eisenstein often composes a film of separate, durationally distinct episodes (e.g., Ivan the Terrible
[1945]). The ‘art cinema’ of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, or Michelangelo Antonioni is characterized
partly by its refusal of deadlines, its replacement of appointments by chance encounters, and its ‘open’
endings that do not allow the audience to anticipate when the chain of cause and effect will be completed. A
Hollywood version of L’avventura (1960) would be sure to include a scene in which someone says: ‘If we
don’t find Sandra in three days, her supply of food will run out.’
Within the classical scene, the viewer assumes durational continuity unless signals say otherwise. The
individual shot is assumed to convey a continuous time span which only editing can disrupt. Yet the
classical cinema is a cinema of cutting; the single-shot sequence is very rare. Thus classical editing
strategies have to signal temporal continuity. Match-on-action cutting is the most explicit cue for moment-
to-moment continuity. If a character starts to stand up in one shot and continues the movement in the next
shot, the classical presumption is that no time has been omitted (see figs 4.1 and 4.2). Editors are warned
that if they mismatch action, audiences will be confused about temporal progression.10 But the match-on-
action cut, expensive and timeconsuming, is relatively rare; of all the shot-changes in a classical film, no
more than 12 per cent are likely to be matches on action. In the absence of information to the contrary,
spatial editing cues, such as eyeline-match cutting, imply durational continuity.
The adoption of synchronized sound-on-film had a very powerful effect on how the classical cinema
represented story time, as Chapter 23 will show in detail. Diegetic sound created a concrete perceptual
duration that could aid editing in creating a seamless temporal continuity. If two characters are talking, the
sound editor could make the continuous sound conceal the cut. A British editor summarized American
practice:11
This flowing of sound over a cut is one of the most important features of the editing of sound films—
in particular, of dialogue films. The completely parallel cut of sound and action should be the
exception rather than the rule. … Most editors today make a practice of lapping the last one or two
frames of modulation on the soundtrack of the shot they are leaving over onto the oncoming shot.
That is, the shot change precedes the dialogue change by a syllable or a word. This ‘dialogue cutting point’
(Barry Salt’s term) became standard by 1930.12 On other occasions, of course, the sound can lead the
image; very commonly a classical film will motivate a cut by an offscreen sound. The noise of a door
opening, a character starting to speak, the music of a radio from another room—these can all help sound
flow over a cut.
Another way of using sound to secure durational continuity is to employ diegetic music. Of course non-
diegetic music, as accompaniment, had been present in the silent cinema, but there its quality as narration made
it temporally abstract. In the sound film, diegetic music could cover certain gaps at the level of the image
while still projecting a sense of continuous time. For example, in Flying Fortress (1942), a couple sit down
to dinner in a restaurant while a band is playing. The meal is abbreviated by means of dissolves, creating
ellipses on the visual track; but the band’s music continues uninterrupted. The bleeding of music over large
ellipses suggests how easily the temporal vagueness of music can make sound fulfill narrative functions.
The dissolve, the most common indication of duration, affords us an instructive example of how classical
narration does its temporal work. Visually, the dissolve is simply a variant of the fade—a fade-out
overlapped with a fade-in—but it is a fade during which the screen is never blank. ‘To the layman or the
average theatregoer, a lap dissolve passes unobtrusively by on the screen without his being aware that it had
happened. A lap dissolve serves the purpose of smoothly advancing the story.’13 The dissolve was quickly
restricted to indicating a short, often indefinite interval, if only a few seconds (e.g., a dissolve from a detail
to a full shot). This makes the dissolve a superb way to soften spatial, graphic, and even temporal
discontinuities. The dissolve could blend newsreel footage with studio shots, cover mismatched figure
positions or screen direction, or blend an extreme-long shot with a close-up (see figs 4.3 through 4.5).
Filmmakers of the 1920s in Europe and Russia showed that the dissolve opens up a realm of sheerly graphic
possibilities, but Hollywood severely curtailed these: apart from a few exceptions (such as Josef Von
Sternberg’s work), the Hollywood dissolve became, as Tamar Lane puts it, ‘a link…. It bridges over from
one situation to another without a jarring break of action and without need for explanatory matter.’14
After 1928, the dissolve on the image track was accompanied by a sound transition as well. At first, the
procedures of sound editing and the uncertainties of sound perspective made technicians puzzled. Imagine
switching abruptly from the blast of a jazz orchestra to a flash of a whispered conversation, then to the rush
of a train and back to the silken vampire sleeping peacefully in her boudoir. Such a rush of conflicting
sound ought to leave an audience as nervous as a doe at a waterhole.’15 Sound dissolves were declared
distracting; while a closeup of a face could dissolve to a long shot of a crowd, to mix even briefly the
character’s speech with the crowd’s babble would result in cacophony. Instead, the character would
complete the dialogue and pause; the crowd noise would then be sneaked in over the dissolve. Like the
offscreen sound that motivates the cut to a new space, the sound bridge here may sometimes very slightly
anticipate the next image. Both image and sound dissolving procedures show how, once a transition became
codified, it could provide a continuous and unself-conscious narration.
Like our experience of story order, the viewer’s experience of story duration depends upon a search for
meaning. Gombrich writes: ‘We cannot judge the distance of an object in space before we have identified it
and estimated its size. We cannot estimate the passage of time in a picture without interpreting the event
represented.’16 In the classical cinema, the narration’s emphasis upon the future gears our expectations toward
the resolution of suspense. It is this that determines what periods the narration will eliminate or compress.
When this does not happen, when the narration dwells upon ‘dramatically meaningless intervals,’ duration
comes forward as a system in the film and vies with causality for prominence. (See the various critiques17
of Hitchcock’s use of the long take in Rope [1948].) Time in the classical film is a vehicle for causality, not
a process to be investigated on its own. Hence the stricture that a walk without dialogue is ‘dead’ or wasted
time. (Compare the durational importance of the silent walk in Dreyer, in Antonioni, and, from a different
culture, in the Navajo films described by Sol Worth and John Adair.18)
More generally, classical narration’s insistence upon closure rewards the search for meaning and makes
the time span we experience seem a complete unit. Even from shot to shot, our expectation of causally
significant completion controls how we respond. ‘We hardly realize that we look at two different shots if
the first one shows the beginning of an action and the next one its continuation.’19 The match-on-action cut,
the bleeding of sound over a cut, the use of dissolves and diegetic music all confirm our expectation of
completion. The viewer’s ability to test hypotheses against a film’s unfolding cause and effect means that
duration again becomes secondary to a search for narrative meaning.
Hollywood has also exploited our search for temporal meaning by shaping the felt duration of our
experience. Narrative ‘rhythm’ can be thought of as a way in which narration focuses and controls
successive hypotheses. Camera movement, especially if it is independent of the figures and closely timed to
music, can create a moment-by-moment arc of expectation.20 Editing was the earliest rhythmic realm which
the classical cinema systematically exploited; by 1920, scenarists were recommending using short shots to
increase excitement.21 Rhythmic editing is still far from clearly understood theoretically, but certainly the
time needed to grasp a new shot depends partly upon expectation. It appears that if the viewer is prepared
and if the shot is graphically comprehensible, the viewer requires between half a second and three seconds
to adjust to the cut.22 Slowly paced editing leaves a comfortable margin, so that the new shot is on the
screen quite long enough for the viewer to assimilate it. But in Hollywood’s use of accelerated editing, the
viewer is primed to expect a very narrow range of alternative outcomes and the shots then flash on the
screen so quickly that the viewer can ‘read’ them only in gross terms: do they confirm or disconfirm the
immediate hypothesis? This process is evident in the last-minute rescue, when all the viewer wants to know
is whether the rescuers will arrive in time, so the accelerating editing builds excitement by confining each
shot to posing, retarding, and eventually answering this question. The ability of rapid editing to funnel the
spectator’s hypotheses into very narrow channels is confirmed by Robert Parrish’s claim that fast pace can
cover story problems. Asserting that The Roaring Twenties (1939) works like ‘one big ninety-minute
montage,’ Parrish notes: ‘The audience never gets a chance to relax and think about the story holes. They’re
into the next scene before they have time to think about the last one.’23
Crosscutting
Strictly speaking, crosscutting can be considered a category of alternating editing, the intercalation of two
or more different series of images. If temporal simultaneity is not pertinent to the series, the cutting may be
called parallel editing; if the series are to be taken as temporally simultaneous, then we have crosscutting.
For example, if the film alternates images of wealth and poverty with no temporal relation to one another, we
have parallel editing; but if the rich man is sitting down to dinner while the beggar stands outside, we have
crosscutting. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) uses both types: parallel editing makes abstract analogies among
the four epochs, while crosscutting within each epoch depicts simultaneous actions. In the classical
Hollywood cinema, parallel editing is a distinctly unlikely alternative, since it emphasizes logical relations
rather than causality and chronology.
Crosscutting is a narrational process: two or more lines of action in different locales are woven together.
Our hero gets up in the morning; cut to the boss looking at the clock; cut to our hero eating breakfast; cut to
the boss pacing. Christian Metz has pointed out that such a sequence manipulates both order and duration.24
Within each line of action, the events are consecutive; but between the lines of action taken as wholes, the
temporal relations are simultaneous. The hero gets up somewhat before the boss looks at the clock, but
across the whole sequence, we understand that while the hero gets up and comes to work the boss waits for
him. There is yet another factor involved, which Metz does not mention: usually, crosscutting creates
ellipses. If we cut from hero waking up to boss to hero leaving, the shot of the boss covers all the time it
takes our hero to dress, wash, etc. Crosscutting almost always skips over intervals in exactly this way.
Crosscutting, then, creates a unique set of temporal relations—order, ellipsis, simultaneity —which function
for specific narrational ends.
Alternation of narrational point-of-view has a long history in literature and other arts, but crosscutting is
often linked to specifically nineteenth-century theatrical and literary sources. Nicholas Vardac found ‘cross-
cut’ scenes in nineteenth-century drama, which used dual box sets and area lighting to switch between lines
of action.25 Eisenstein traced Griffith’s parallel montage through theatrical melodrama back to Dickens’s
novels.26 The analogies with other arts emphasize the brevity of the scenes alternated and the simultaneity
of the actions represented. Chapter 16 will show that both these aspects of crosscutting were common in
American filmmaking long before 1917. But such analogies with other arts do not specify all the features of
classical crosscutting.
Classical crosscutting traces out personal cause and effect, creates deadlines, and frees narration from
restricting itself to a single character’s point-of-view. We most commonly think of crosscutting as
supporting a deadline—supremely, the last-minute rescue situation. But a silent film might employ
crosscutting in a great many scenes—as exposition, as a reminder of characters’ whereabouts, and
especially as a way in which narration could control the viewer’s hypothesis-framing. Crosscutting thus
reveals narration to be omniscient (the narration knows that something important is happening in another
line of action), but this omniscience, true to classical precept, is rendered as omnipresence.
In 1920, Loos and Emerson advised the screen-writer that two crosscut lines of action would help keep the
audience interested.27 Of the UnS silent films, 84 per cent use extensive passages of crosscutting. With the
coming of sound, however, crosscutting became far less frequent. Of the UnS sound films, only 49 per cent
use any crosscutting at all, and only 16 per cent use it as extensively as did silent films. The reasons are
evident. Dialogue would not be cut as quickly as silent action, and crosscutting lines of dialogue (done in
Europe by René Clair and Fritz Lang) probably seemed too narrationally intrusive for Hollywood film-
making.28 The abandonment of crosscutting thus became consonant with a greater reticence on the part of
sound-film narration.
None the less, the principle behind crosscutting remained important for the sound film. As Chapter 23
will show, the rhythm of silent film editing found a functional equivalent in the sound film’s rapid shifts
from scene to scene. In *The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), our hero’s boss notices that he is late and
begins to interrogate other employees. The scene switches to Jones at home, asleep; he wakes up, notices
the time, and rushes off. We then see Jones arrive at work. Such shifts in locale could be motivated by
sound links as well (music, radio or television broadcasts, phone conversations, etc.). In such ways, a rapid
alternation of distinct scenes could stimulate crosscutting’s characteristic play with time— consecutive order,
ellipsis, and an overall sense of simultaneity. A discreet narration oversees time, making it subordinate to
causality, while the spectator follows the causal thread.
5
Space in the classical film
The motion picture industry for many years has been trying to remove the one dimension of the
screen. By lighting, with lenses of inexplicable complexity, through movement, camera angles,
and a variety of other techniques, the flatness of the screen has largely been overcome.1
Ranald MacDougall, 1945
In making narrative causality the dominant system in the film’s total form, the classical Hollywood cinema
chooses to subordinate space. Most obviously, the classical style makes the sheerly graphic space of the film
image a vehicle for narrative. We can see this principle at work negatively in the prohibitions against ‘bad’
cuts. ‘The important subjects should be in the same general area of the frame for each of the two shots
which are to be cut together,’ but ‘as long as the important subject is not shifted from one side of the screen
to the other, no real harm is done.’2 In describing the classical cinema’s use of space we are most inclined to
use the term ‘transparent,’ so much does that cinema strive to efface the picture plane. ‘The screen might be
likened to a plate-glass window through which the observer looks with one eye at the actual scene.’3 We
need, however, a fuller account of how classical narration uses image composition and editing to create a
powerful representation of three-dimensional space.
The image: composition

While recognizing that Hollywood cinema subordinates space to narrative causality, we ought also to
acknowledge that the classical spatial system is, in a strictly logical sense, arbitrary. We could imagine
other systems that privileged different devices (e.g., decentered framings, discontinuity editing) but which
were equally coherent and equally supportive of causality. Historically, however, the classical construction
of space appears far from arbitrary, since it synthesizes many traditions which have dominated various
Western arts.
Post-Renaissance painting provided one powerful model. Cinematographers and directors constantly
invoked famous paintings as sources. Cecil B.De Mille claimed to have borrowed from Doré, Van Dyck,
Corot and one ‘Reubens.’4 Robert Surtees cited the Impressionists, Leon Shamroy imitated Van Gogh.
Discussions of lighting invariably invoke Rembrandt.5 To a point, such assertions are simply hyperbole.
Allan Dwan remarked: ‘Once in a while we would undertake the imitation or reproduction of something
artistic—a famous painting, let’s say.’6 (Staged replicas of famous pictures were also a convention of
theatrical melodrama.) But in a more significant sense, Hollywood did perpetuate many precepts of post-
Renaissance painting. The very name ‘film studio’ derives from the term for the workroom of the painter or
sculptor. While no major cinematographers were professional painters, many (Charles Rosher, Karl Struss,
Stanley Cortez, James Wong Howe) had been portrait photographers, a field in which academic rules of
composition and lighting prevailed. And occasionally a cinematographer would articulate principles of
filmmaking that directly echo those of academic painting.7 We ought not to be surprised, then, that
Hollywood’s practices of composition continue some very old traditions in the visual arts.
An outstanding example is the Hollywood cinema’s interest in centered compositions. In post-
Renaissance painting, the erect human body provides one major standard of framing, with the face usually
occupying the upper portion of the picture format. The same impulse can be seen in the principle of horizon-
line isocephaly, which guarantees that figures’ heads run along a more or less horizontal line.8 Classical
cinema employs these precepts. While extreme long shots tend to weight the lower half of the image (this
derives from landscape painting traditions), most shots work with a privileged zone of screen space
resembling a T: the upper one-third and the central vertical third of the screen constitute the ‘center’ of the
shot. This center determines the composition of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups, as well as the
grouping of figures (see figs 5.1 through 5.8). In widescreen films, the center area is proportionately
stretched, so even slightly off-center compositions are not transgressive (especially in a balanced shot/
reverse-shot cutting pattern). Classical filmmaking thus considers edge-framing taboo; frontally positioned
figures or objects, however unimportant, are seldom sliced off by either vertical edge. And, as the
illustrations indicate, horizon-line isocephaly is common in classical filmmaking. Thus the human body is
made the center of narrative and graphic interest: the closer the shot, the greater the demand for centering.
But how to center moving figures? The classical style quickly discovered the virtues of panning and
tilting the camera. The subtlest refinement of this practice was the custom of reframing. A refraining is a
slight pan or tilt to accommodate figure movement. Every film in the UnS contained some reframings; after
1929, one out of every six shots used at least one reframing. The chief alternative to reframing is what
Edward Branigan has called the frame cut.9 Within a defined locale, a figure leaves the shot, and, as the
body crosses the frame line, the cut reveals the figure entering a new shot, with the body still crossing the
(opposite) frame line (see figs 5.9 through 5.14). Frame-cutting is extraordinarily common in classical
cinema, partly because it is the least troublesome match-on-action cut to make but also because it confirms
the importance of the center zone of the screen. In a frame cut, the image’s edge becomes only a bridge
over which figures or objects pass on their way to center stage.
With centering comes balance, but the complex and dynamic equilibrium of great Western painting is
usually lacking in Hollywood compositions. Overall balance and an avoidance of distractingly perfect
symmetry generally suffice. Once centered, the human body provides enough slight asymmetries to yield a
generally stable image, and camera viewfinders, engraved with cross-hatchings, enabled cameramen to
balance the shot. When balance is lost, the results leap to the eye. In figures 5.15 and 5.16, from The
Bedroom Window (1924), William C.deMille’s practice of multiple-camera shooting has pushed the shots
off-center and off-balance. Of course, such imbalance can be causally motivated, as in Harvey (1950), for
which cinematographer William Daniels had to frame the shots asymmetrically to include the invisible
rabbit.10 The value of balance in the classical cinema can be seen in the way that a vacancy in the frame
space will be reserved for the entry of a character; that figure will complete the balanced composition (see
figs 5.17 through 5.19).
Both centering and balancing function as narration in that these film techniques shape the story action for
the spectator. The narrational qualities of shot composition are also evident in the classical use of frontality.
Renaissance painting derived many principles of scenography from Greek and Roman theater, so that the
idea of a narrative action addressed to the spectator became explicit in Western painting. The classical film
image relies upon such a conception of frontality. The face is positioned in full, three-quarter, or profile
view; the body typically in full or threequarter view. The result is an odd rubbernecking characteristic of
52 SPACE IN THE CLASSICAL FILM
Hollywood character position; people’s heads may face one another in profile but their bodies do not (see
figs 5.20 and 5.21). Standing groups are arranged along horizontal or diagonal lines or in half-circles;
people seldom close ranks as they would in real life (see figs 5.22 and 5.23). The dyspeptic Welford Beaton
was one of the few critics who noticed this practice:11
In most of our pictures the directors make their characters face the camera by the simple expedient of
turning them around until they face it, no matter how unnatural the scene is made thereby. In
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1928], there is an exhibition of flagrant disregard of common sense in
grouping characters. Ruth Taylor, Alice White, and Ford Sterling are shown seated at a round table in
a restaurant. Instead of forming a triangle, they are squeezed together so closely that Sterling, in the
center, scarcely can move.
Yet complete frontality—e.g., direct address to the camera—is rare; a modified frontality requires that a
wedge be driven into the space, opening up the best sightlines.
Frontality constitutes a very important cue for the viewer. When characters have their backs to us, it is
usually an index of their relative unimportance at the moment. George Cukor points out a scene from
Adam’s Rib (1949) in which Katharine Hepburn was turned from the camera: ‘That had a meaning: she
indicated to the audience that they should look at Judy Holliday.’12 Groupings around tables often sacrifice
a good view of the least significant character in the scene. One UnS film, * Saratoga (1937) vividly
illustrates how troubled the film’s space becomes when frontality is disrupted. Jean Harlow died in the
course of the film’s production, before several scenes were shot. In those scenes, Harlow was replaced by a
double who never faces the camera, resulting in the odd phenomenon of having no portrayal of the
heroine’s expressions during climactic moments of the action.
Most important, frontality can be lost if it is then regained. Over-the-shoulder shot/reverseshot cutting
decenters a figure and puts his or her back to us, but the reverse shot reinstates that character front and
center. Once the figures are arranged for us in the image, editing can introduce new angles, but then closer
shots will typically be centered, balanced, and frontal in their turn. Even if one minimizes editing, as Orson
Welles and William Wyler are often thought to do, the deep-focus composition cannot forfeit frontality—
indeed, in films like The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Little Foxes (1941), classical frontality is
in fact exaggerated (see figs 5.24 and 5.25).
The most obvious way that the classical cinema works to treat the screen as a plate-glass window is in the
representation of depth. Probably the most important depth cue in cinema is movement. When a figure
moves and creates a continuous stream of overlapping planes and receding shapes, when the camera glides
through or across a space —under these circumstances it becomes very difficult to see the screen as a flat
surface. This is perhaps one of the reasons that modernist and avant-garde films have often suppressed the
kinetic depth effect by such devices as flicker, still images, and graininess.
Classical Hollywood space is created in planes through various depth cues. To the usual cues of visual
overlap (the object that overlaps must be closer) and familiar size, the classical image adds pattern, color,
texture, lighting, and focus to specify depth. Geometrical patterns and colors, especially of costumes, stand
out from plainer backgrounds (see figs 5.26 and 5.27). Even in black-and-white filming, set designers
painted sets in different colors to create planes in depth.13 More dense and concentrated textures were
reserved for the figures in the foreground, and cinematographers would diffuse the light on backgrounds to
make them more granular. Lighting is particularly important in establishing depth. Cinematographers were
careful to alternate planes in contrasting keys and half-tones (a silhouetted foreground, a bright middle
ground, a darker background).14 Hollywood’s standardized three-point lighting system (key, fill, and
backlighting), supplemented by background lighting, eye lights, and other techniques, had as its effect the
careful articulation of each narratively relevant plane. The importance of backlighting cannot be
overestimated here. Commonly thought of as a Griffith cliché or a sudden lyrical effect, backlighting is in
fact one of the most common ways the Hollywood filmmaker distinguishes figure from background: A
pencil-line of light around the body’s contour pulls the figure forward (see figs 5.28 and 5.29).15 Edge
lighting of figures remained common even after fast film stocks and color films enhanced figure separation
(see fig 5.30). Low-key lighting could be very effective in picking out planes if edge-lighting supplemented
it (see fig 5.31). Finally, the planes of the classical image also usually get defined by selective focus, an
equivalent of aerial perspective in painting. In framings closer than medium shot, the characters are in focus
while other planes are not.16 Variations are possible—in deep-space compositions, a figure in the
foreground might be out of focus while another in the background is in focus—but the principle generally
holds good. No classical films throw figures out of focus to favor insignificant objects (kegs, stoves) in the
manner of Ozu’s films or of certain avant-garde works.17
Stacked planes are not enough; the classical style stresses volumes as well. Cinematographers valued
‘roundness’ as much as depth, using highlights to accentuate curves of face and body or to pick out folds in
drapery.18 As early as 1926, the cinematographer was compared to the sculptor:19
It is chiefly by the use of such lighting equipment that the sculptor-director seeks his worshipped
‘plasticity.’ Failing a true stereoscopic effect in film, he models his figures to a roundness with lights
behind and above and on either side, softening here and sharpening up for accent elsewhere with a
patience and skill inevitably lost on the layman.
Make-up was designed to enhance the roundness of faces. Likewise, a set had to be represented as a volume,
a container for action, not a row of sliced planes. Designers often built three-dimensional models of sets in
order to try out various camera positions. Even the ceiling, which usually could not be shown, had to be
implied through shadow.20 Camera movement could endow the set with a sculptural quality too, as Dwan
observed: ‘In dollying as a rule we find it’s a good idea to pass things in order to get the effect of
movement. We always noticed that if we dollied past a tree, it became solid and round, instead of flat.’21
The importance of planes and volumes in defining classical scenographie depth makes academic
perspective rather rare. Developed during the Renaissance as a revision of ancient Greek perspective, central
linear perspective organizes planes around the presumed vantage point of a stationary monocular observer.
The impression of depth results from the assumption that parallel lines receding from the picture surface
seem to meet at a single point on the horizon, the vanishing point.22 Now it is indisputable that certain aspects
of Hollywood film production, such as set design and special-effects work, frequently draw upon principles
of linear perspective.23 But images in the Hollywood cinema seldom exhibit the central vanishing point,
raked and checkered floorplans, and regular recession of planes characteristic of what Pierre Francastel calls
the ‘Quattrocento cube.’24 (Such conventions are far more common in pre-classical films; see fig 5.32.) The
classical shot is more usually built out of a few planes placed against a distant background plane—in a long
shot, the horizon; in a closer view, the rear wall of a room (see figs 5.33 and 5.34). A limited linear
perspective view can be supplied by the corner of a room or ceiling or the view out of a window.
Sometimes, especially in 1940s films, a more explicit sense of perspective emerges; an occasional
establishing shot exhibits a deep recessional interior (see fig 5.35) or a skewed vanishing point (see
fig 5.36). But in medium-long and medium shots (the majority of the shots in a film), linear perspective
remains of little importance, and pronounced depth is achieved by interposing figures and objects on
various planes.
Such art-historical traditions would not seem easily applicable to the scenographie space constructed by
the soundtrack. But the classical cinema modeled its use of sound upon its use of images. (Chapter 23
examines how this occurred historically.) As one technician wrote:25
With the two-dimensional camera, which bears the same psychological relation to the eye as
monaural sound does to the ear, the illusion of depth can be achieved by the proper use of lighting and
contrast, just as by the manipulations of loudness and reverberation with the microphone. And just as
the eye can be drawn to particular persons or objects by the adjustment of focal length, so can the ear
be arrested by the intensification of important sounds and the rejection of unimportant ones.
What Hollywood technicians called ‘sound perspective’ was the belief that the acoustic qualities of dialogue
and noise had to match the scale of the image. Engineers debated how to convey ‘natural’ sound while
granting that strictly realistic sound recording was unsuitable. Microphones had to be rotated in the course of
conversations; musical numbers had to be prerecorded; some dialogue had to be post-synchronized; and,
most importantly, sounds had to be segregated onto separate tracks for later mixing. In the theater, the
speakers were placed behind the screen, as centered as were the figures in the frame. The same conceptions
of balance, centrality, and spatial definition were applied to stereophonic sound in the early 1950s.26
Thus in the Hollywood cinema the space constructed by the soundtrack is no less artificial than that of the
image. Alan Williams points out that like visual perspective, sonic perspective is narrational, yielding not
‘the full, material context of everyday vision or hearing, but the signs of such a physical situation.’27 He
shows how selective the sonic space of a Hollywood locale is in comparison with that of the racketfilled
café in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966). Similar effects occur in the dense, layered
montage of offscreen sound in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Third Generation (1980) and In a Year of
Thirteen Moons (1980), during which radios, television sets, and several conversations compete for our
attention. In this sense, classical sound technique articulates foreground (principal voice) and background
(silence, ‘background’ noise, music ‘under’ the action) with the same precision that camera and staging
distinguish visual planes.
Centering, balancing, frontality, and depth— all these narrational strategies—encourage us to read filmic
space as story space. Since the classical narrative depends upon psychological causality, we can think of these
strategies as aiming to personalize space. Surroundings become significant partly for their ability to
dramatize individuality. Hence the importance of doors: the doorway becomes a privileged zone of human
action, promising movement, encounters, confrontations, and conclusions. The classical film also charges
objects with personal meanings. Props (guns, rings, etc.), and especially representational props
(photographs, dolls, portrait paintings) all bear an ineluctable psychological import. (How many classical
films convey a lover’s disgust by violence against the picture of the beloved.) Shot scale is also geared to
expressivity, with the plan américain (the knees-up shot) and the medium shot the most common ones
because they ‘retain facial expressions and physical gestures—partially lost in the long shot—and relate
these, dramatically, to the action involved’28 A close-up, which can theoretically show anything, becomes
virtually synonymous with the facial close-up, the portrait that reveals character. It is significant, however,
that extreme facial close-ups—framings closer than full facial shots—are almost absent from the classical
cinema, as if cutting the face completely free of the background made the close-up too fragmentary.
(Compare the frequency of enlarged portions of faces in the Soviet cinema of the 1920s.) Lighting brings
out the personality of the character, while diffusion distinguishes women by spiritualizing them.29 In the
sound cinema, the voice parallels the face as a vehicle of personalization. In all these ways, the classical
cinema declares its anthropocentric commitment: Space will signify chiefly in relation to psychological
causality.
Classical narration of space thus aims at orientation: The scenography is addressed to the viewer. Can we
then say that a larger principle of ‘perspective’ operates here—not the adherence to a particular spatial
composition but a general ‘placing’ of the spectator in an ideal position of intelligibility?30 Certainly
Hollywood’s own description of its work emphasizes the camera as an invisible witness, just as the
soundtrack constitutes an ideal hearing of the scene. This aesthetic of effaced present is anthropocentric
(camera and sound as eye and ear) and idealist (the witness is immaterial, an omniscient subject), hence also
ideological. Yet the viewer is not wholly a passive subject tyrannized by a rigid address. Analogies with
perspective, being spatial, tend to neglect the spectator’s activities. Just as the viewer must meet causal and
temporal systems halfway, the viewer must contribute something in order to make classical space work.
That contribution includes the sort of hypothesisforming and -testing that I have emphasized in earlier
chapters. That we tend to anticipate data, that we frame our hunches as more or less likely alternatives (or
paradigmatic choices), that we retroactively check our hypotheses—all these activities operate in our
construction of classical space.
So, for instance, centering procedures quickly lead the viewer to perform certain operations. Confining
significant narrative action to any constant zone of screen space effectively insures that attention paid to
other areas will not be rewarded. Moreover, psychologists have long known that it is hard to read a
configuration as three-dimensional if we are markedly aware of the edges of the image: our eye tests for
consistency, and the depth of the represented space conflicts with the boundary of the picture.31 Centered
film compositions, either static or moving, draw our attention away from the frame edge. Even the viewing
situation encourages this, since black masking on the theater screen conceals the aperture line.
Cinematographers often darkened the edges of the image to avoid a glaring contrast between the picture and
the theater masking.32 Distracting our attention from the edge thus discourages us from testing the image as
a flat space. Compare, however, the flattening effect of edge-framed compositions in non-Hollywood
traditions (see fig 5.37).
Similarly, frontality functions as a strong cue for the spectator. Since the classical Hollywood cinema is
predominantly anthropocentric, the representation of the expressive body arouses in us an interest nourished
not only by art but by everyday life. Our principal information about people’s mental states is derived in
large part from posture, gesture, facial expression, and eye movement (as well as voice), so that if classical
cinema is to represent psychological causation in its characters, narrational space must privilege these
behavioral cues. Moreover, as Gombrich points out, some objects give a more exact feeling of frontality
than do others. We are remarkably sensitive to anglings of body, face, and especially eyes, and we tend to
orient ourselves to postures and gazes with a precision that we do not apply to walls or trees.33 In addition,
of course, ‘normal’ camera height, standardized at between 5 and 6 feet, corresponds to a gaze from an
erect human body, a position canonized not only in art but also in culture generally.34 Imagine a classical
film with only one difference: it is entirely shot from straight above the characters. The consistent bird’s-eye
view would destroy the expressive basis of the narrative because the classical filmmaker lacks schemata for
rendering such an orientation and the film viewer has no appropriate repertoire of expectations.
And what of the spectator’s construction of depth? The various depth cues, most prominently movement,
require an act of spatial integration on the viewer’s part. If classical space does not pose the visual
paradoxes of images in some German Expressionistic cinema or in abstract film, that is partly because we
scale our expectations to a limited set of possibilities. But consider the baffling space of figure 5.38, from
Griffith’s Trying to Get Arrested (1909). A tiny man runs in at the lower left corner. The cue of familiar size
dictates that he looks small because he is far away, but the receding planes of the shot seem to deny this. Is
the man then a leprechaun? No, he is indeed in the distance, as a later frame (fig 5.39) makes clear. The
peculiarity of this primitive shot arises from the way the image foils those expectations about planes and
volumes that the classical cinema would have confirmed by composition and framing. Certainly seeing an
image as deep is ‘easier’ in cinema than in other arts, but even film depth must be achieved to some degree,
relying upon what Gombrich has called ‘the beholder’s share.’35
Continuity editing
Theorists are still a long way from fully understanding how the viewer contributes to the creation of
classical space, but some consideration of the process of editing may help. Certainly editing can work
against the orientation achieved within the image, as it does in the films of Eisenstein, Ozu, Nagisa Oshima,
Godard, and other filmmakers.36 Classical continuity editing, however, reinforces spatial orientation.
Continuity of graphic qualities can invite us to look through the ‘plate-glass window’ of the screen. From
shot to shot, tonality, movement, and the center of compositional interest shift enough to be distinguishable
but not enough to be disturbing. Editors seldom discussed graphic continuity, but the procedure was
explained as early as 1928 by two visitors to the Hollywood studios, who claimed that either the point of
interest in shot B should be on the screen ‘almost’ where the point of interest of shot A ended, or B should
continue A’s movement:37
This has no reference to the story itself, but merely to the making of the pictures considered only as
spots of colour and centres of pictorial interest. The eye should be led a gentle dance, swaying easily
and comfortably from side to side of the picture, now fast, now slow, as the emotional needs of the
story demand.
Compare the graphically gentle cut of the typical shot/re verse-shot series, which only slightly shifts the
center of interest (see figs 5.40 through 5.43) with the graphically jarring cut which alters that center of
interest quite drastically (see figs 5.44 and 5.45).
Once graphic continuity is achieved, the editing can concentrate upon orienting us to scenographie space.
Crosscutting creates a fictive space built out of several locales. As Chapter 4 points out, classical
crosscutting presupposes that shifts in the locale are motivated by the story action. More often, editing
fulfills the narrational function of orienting us to a single locale (a room, a stretch of sidewalk, the cab of a
truck) or to physically adjacent locales (a room and a hallway, the rear of the truck). Thus the principles and
devices of continuity editing function to represent space for the sake of the story.
André Bazin has summarized the basic premises of classical continuity editing:38
1 The verisimilitude of the space in which the position of the actor is always determined, even
when a close-up eliminates the decor.
2 The purpose and the effects of the cut are exclusively dramatic or psychological.
In other words, if the scene were played on a stage and seen from a seat in the orchestra, it would have
the same meaning, the episode would continue to exist objectively. The changes of point of view
provided by the camera would add nothing. They would present the reality a little more forcefully,
first by allowing a better view and then by putting the emphasis where it belongs.
Besides spelling out the classical assumptions about consistent spatial relations and the determining role of
character psychology, Bazin reveals the extent to which classical editing continues and elaborates the
scenography of nineteenth-century bourgeois theater. Bazin’s mobile-yet-stationary spectator in the
orchestra personifies the viewpoint created by the classical ‘180°’ or ‘axis-of-action’ system of spatial
editing. The assumption is that shots will be filmed and cut together so as to position the spectator always
on the same side of the story action. Bazin suggests that the ‘objective’ reality of the action independent of
the act of filming is analogous to that stable space of proscenium theatrical representation, in which the
spectator is always positioned beyond the fourth wall. The axis of action (or center line) becomes the
imaginary vector of movements, character positions, and glances in the scene, and ideally the camera should
not stray over the axis. In any scene, explains Robert Aldrich, ‘You have to draw the center line…. You
must never cross the line.’39 If we assume that two conversing characters are angled somewhat frontally (as
is usual), the classic 180° system will be as laid out in diagram 5.1. Camera positions A, B, C, and D (and
indeed any position within the lower half-circle) will cut together so as to orient the viewer, while camera
position X (or any position on the other side of the center line) is thought to disorient the spectator.
The 180° principle governs all the more specific devices of continuity editing. Analytical editing moves the
spectator into or back from a part of a total space. A cut from position A to position B (or vice versa) would
be an analytical cut, respecting the axis of action. Shot/reverse-shot cutting assumes that the series of shots
alternates a view of one end-point of the line with a view of the other. Thus cutting from camera position C
to that of D would be a shot/reverse-shot pattern. Typically, shot/reverse-shot editing joins shots of
characters facing one another, but it need not. The same principle applies to vehicles, buildings, or any
entities posited as being at opposite ends of the axis of action. Eyeline-match cutting uses character glance as
a cue to link shots. The assumption is that the eyeline runs parallel to the axis, so the camera positions will
remain on one side of the line. Shots C and D when cut together will yield correct eyeline matches in a way
that, say, shots X and D would not. A comparatively uncommon case of eyeline-match cutting, point-of-
view cutting, reveals the limits of permissibility in the 180° system. The first shot shows the character
looking at something offscreen; the second shot shows what the character is seeing, but more or less from
the character’s optical vantage point. Remarkably, critics continue to reduce shot/reverse-shot cutting to
point-of-view cutting. A recent monograph defines shot/reverse shot in a conversation scene as taking the
second shot ‘from the first character’s point-of-view.’40 Hollywood shot/reverse- shot cutting is more
properly what Jean Mitry calls semi-subjective: we are often literally looking over a character’s shoulder.41
(Edward Branigan has shown that camera angle is the critical variable here: camera distance is often inexact
in classical point-of-view cutting.42) But even the point-of-view shot remains within the 180° convention
because it represents a camera position on the axis itself (e.g., position E on the diagram). The power of the
180° system may also be seen in what we may call the ‘earline-match’ cut, in which a character listens from
outside the space of the scene. The assumption is that the sound travels in a straight line, which constitutes
the axis of action. If a listener at a door cocks his ear to screen left, a cut to someone inside the room
walking to that door must show the character moving screen right.
Obviously, across a series of shots all these editing devices work smoothly to reinforce each other, so that
an establishing shot will be linked by an analytical cut to a closer view, and then a series of shot/reverse
shots will follow. But the system, being part of a stylistic paradigm, has a certain latitude as well, so that
one can use the shot/reverse-shot schema if one character has turned his back to the other, if there are five
or six characters present, and so on.
One more device of the 180° system deserves mention, not least because it dramatizes the extent to which
the system defines a coherent but limited field for the spectator. Editing for directional continuity translates
the imaginary line into a vector of movement. If a character or vehicle is moving left to right in shot 1, it
should continue to do so in shot 2. Directional continuity cutting is like eyeline cutting: just as two shots of
figures looking in opposite directions imply that the figures are looking at each other, so two shots of
figures moving in opposite directions lead us to expect the figures to meet. Directional continuity also
resembles point-of-view cutting in that one can show the movement from a position on the axis of action—
i.e., either a heads-on or a tails-on shot of the action. (A shot from this position can function as a transition
if one wants to cross the line.) Directional continuity is often used within a circumscribed space, as when a
character goes from the window (exit frame left) and comes to the desk (enter frame right). In these cases,
Hollywood directional continuity depends upon the frame cut. What is more revealing, though, is that
directional continuity can be maintained across separate spaces, for in that case the 180° system
presupposes that the ideal spectator is situated on one side of an axis perhaps miles long! The closed
chamber-space of the theater has been left behind, but Bazin’s spectator-in-the-orchestra and his or her
relation to proscenium space remain intact.
The devices of continuity editing are best seen as traditional schemata which the classical filmmaker can
impose upon any subject. As King Vidor wrote: ‘The filmmaker should be consciously aware of this 180°
rule throughout the whole field of film action. It is not only beneficial in sports, but in chase sequences, with
cowboys, Indians and cavalry, animal pursuits, moon landings, dinnertable conversations, and a thousand
other movie subjects.’43 Most film critics are aware of these schemata but consider them simply a neutral
vehicle for the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic themes or ‘personal vision.’ What makes the continuity devices so
powerful is exactly their apparent neutrality; compositional motivation has codified them to a degree of
rigidity that is still hard to realize. In each UnS film, less than 2 per cent of the shot-changes violated spatial
continuity, and one-fifth of the films contained not a single violation. No wonder that, of all Hollywood
stylistic practices, continuity editing has been considered a set of firm rules.
As with other classical techniques, continuity editing cues form a redundant paradigm. Conventional
180° editing assumes that the establishing shot and the eyeline match cut and directional continuity of
movement and the shot/reverse-shot schema will all be present to ‘overdetermine’ the scenographie space.
The redundancy of the paradigm becomes evident when we watch a non-classical filmmaker simply remove
one or two cues. In Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), the characters’ eyelines in medium shot often violate the
180° axis, but there are frequent establishing shots to orient us. Conversely, in Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne
d’Arc (1961), the eyelines respect the axis of action, but scenes frequently lack establishing shots.44 In
neither film do we lose our bearings (although, since each filmmaker exploits his devices systematically, the
result is significantly different from the space of the classical scene).
What are the narrational consequences of spatial continuity editing? One answer might be based on a
broad conception of perspective. In perpetuating the playing space of post-Renaissance bourgeois theater,
classical editing makes the spectator an ideally placed onlooker. To paraphrase Bazin, the action and the
viewer are separate (‘the episode would continue to exist objectively’), yet the narration acknowledges the
onlooker by implicitly addressing her or him (‘by allowing a better view’). In sum, the intelligible
orientation created within the single shot is kept consistent across shots by positing a spectator that can be
moved only within the limits of a theatrical space of vision.
This account is certainly correct as far as it goes. Its drawbacks are the passivity it imputes to the spectator
and its neglect of certain significant irregularities in the continuity system. For one thing, the space constructed
by continuity editing is rarely a total one, even on the favored side of the axis of action. Not only do we
seldom see the fourth wall of the typical interior, but areas immediately in front of the camera remain
relatively undefined. Films of the late teens and the 1920s sometimes have holes in their scenographie
space; the establishing shot may not show all adjacent areas from which characters may emerge. And
Hollywood practitioners have long employed the aptly named ‘cheat cut,’ in which the shift of camera
distance and angle during a cut covers a distinct change in character position (see figs 5.46 through 5.49).
The cheat cut works to enhance balance, centering, or frontality:45
‘Cheating’ is the great game between the camera operator and the Continuity girl. To compose a
foreground or a background the operator will sometimes move or substitute objects, or have the artiste
raised or lowered in relation to his surroundings. Actually, after a long while in pictures, I realised
that such ‘cheating’ is seldom noticeable to an audience, but in the studio it often seems fantastic.
The viewer’s willingness to ignore unshown areas of space and to overlook cheat cuts suggests that the
viewer actively forms and tests specific hypotheses about the space revealed by the narration. The always-
present pockets of non-established space are, in the absence of cues to the contrary, assumed to be consistent
with what we see. (We assume that there is more wall, a door, etc.) If a technician or a lighting unit peeped
into the shot, that would provoke us to revise such assumptions. The cheat cut suggests that a process of
hierarchical selection is at work. Since we are to attend to story causality, the fact that a character is first
three feet and then suddently two feet from another character becomes unimportant if our expectations
about the action are confirmed from shot to shot. Of course, there are limits to how much the cut can cheat
before the operation distracts us from story causality, and these warrant psychophysical study.46
Our hierarchical selection of what to watch is evident from the very schemata of classical cutting. For
example, the repetition of camera position becomes very important. Typically, any classical series of shots
will include several identical camera set-ups. The reestablishing shot will usually be from the same angle
and distance as the establishing shot; shot and reverse-shot framings may be repeated several times. Such
repetitions encourage us to ignore the cutting itself and notice only those narrative factors that change from
shot to shot. In a similar way, the first occurrence of a set-up often ‘primes’ us for a later action. In *The
Caddy (1953), Harvey hides from dogs in a locker room. A plan américain reveals him leaning on the door;
on the right of the frame are clothes lying on a coat rack. Cut: the dogs outside the door wander off. The
next shot repeats the plan américain of Harvey, but now Harvey notices the clothes. The first set-up
unobtrusively asked us to hypothesize that Harvey would disguise himself, and the guess is confirmed by
keeping set-ups constant. A similar process occurs in figures 5.50 through 5.53. This priming of later
actions does not occur in films by Eisenstein and Godard, for instance, who seldom exactly repeat set-ups
and who thus demand that we reorient ourselves after every cut.
The phenomenon of priming illustrates Gombrich’s point that schemata set the horizon of the viewer’s
expectations. Classical editing is organized paradigmatically, since any shot leads the viewer to infer a
limited set of more or less probable successors. For example, an establishing shot can cut away to another
space or cut in to a closer shot; the latter alternative is more likely. An angled medium shot of a character or
object is usually followed by a corresponding reverse shot. Cutting around within a locale is most likely to
be based upon eyeline matches and upon shot/ reverse-shot patterns, less likely to be based upon figure
movement, and least likely to be based upon optical point-of-view. (In this respect, Hitchcock relies upon
point-of-view cutting to an almost unique degree.) The classical construction of space thus participates in
the process of hypothesis-forming that we saw at work in narration generally. Julian Hochberg compares the
viewer’s construction of edited space to ‘cognitive mapping’: ‘The task of the filmmaker therefore is to
make the viewer pose a visual question, and then answer it for him.’47
The process of viewer expectation is particularly apparent in the flow of onscreen and offscreen space.
Consider again the shot/reverse-shot schema. The first image, say a medium shot of Marilyn, implies an
offscreen field, foreshadowing (by its angle, scale, and character glance) what could most probably succeed
it. The next shot in the series, a reverse-angled view of Douglas, reveals the narratively significant material
which occupies that offscreen zone. Shot two makes sense as an answer to its predecessor. This backing-
and-filling movement, opening a spatial gap and then plugging it, accords well with the aims of classical
narration. Furthermore, shot/reverse-shot editing helps make narration covert by creating the sense that no
important scenographie space remains unaccounted for. If shot two shows the important material outside
shot one, there is no spatial point we can assign to the narration; the narration is always elsewhere, outside
this shot but never visible in the next. This process, which evidently is at work in camera movement and
analytical cutting as well, is consistent with that unself-conscious but omnipresent narration described in
Chapter 3.48*
Classical offscreen space thus functions as what Gombrich calls a ‘screen,’ a blank area which invites the
spectator to project hypothetical elements on to it.49 Given classical viewing priorities, we are more concerned
with the distinct persons and things visible within space than with the spaces between and around them. If a
shot shows a person or object that was implicit in the previous shot, we check the new material against our
projection rather than measuring the amount of space left out. Since Hollywood scenography seldom
represents a locale in its entirety, we must construct a spatial whole out of bits. And if those bits not only
overlap in what they show but agree with the fields we have inferred to be lying offscreen, we will not
notice the fuzzy areas that have never been strictly accounted for. Classical editing supports orientation
according to Gombrich’s negative principle of perspective: A convincing image need not show everything
in the space as long as nothing we see actually contradicts what we expect.50 If classical cinema makes the
screen a plate-glass window, it is partly because it turns a remarkably coherent spatial system into the
vehicle of narrative causality; but it is also because the viewer, having learned distinct perceptual and
cognitive activities, meets the film halfway and completes the illusion of seeing an integral fictional space.
6
Shot and scene
From montage to découpage
O Minotaur, here is your Ariadne’s thread: decoupage.1

André Bazin
Part by part, brick by brick: the Hollywood cinema often evokes metaphors from architecture and masonry.
What Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s called montage—shot-assembling as the basic constructional activity
—Hollywood filmmakers called cutting or editing, terms associated with trimming off unwanted material.
The best term for the Hollywood practice is another French one, découpage: the parceling out of images in
accordance with the script, the mapping of the narrative action onto the cinematic material. This decoupage
became standardized in sheerly quantitative terms. In production, scriptwriters were expected to be able to
estimate scenes in advance, and one specific production role—the timer—existed to provide exact
calculations of a script’s total running time. As T.W.Adorno proposes: ‘It is a justification of quantitative
methods that the products of the culture industry, secondhand popular culture, are themselves planned from
a virtually statistical point of view. Quantitative analysis measures them by their own standard.’2
For Hollywood, the shot is the basic unit of material. But this unit of material is already a unit of meaning.
Before 1950, technicians usually called a shot a ‘scene,’ defining the strip of images as a narrative action.
The shot was also Hollywood’s basic unit of production. Chapter 11 will show how, after 1913, the
development of the classical mode of film production depended upon the continuity script, which made the
shot the minimal unit of planning. Once the story was divided into shots, the planning of the shooting could
begin. The filmmakers could tick off the shots one by one as they were completed. Rehearsals of entire
scenes were uncommon, since the actors’ performances were constructed wholly in the editing. Using long
takes was discouraged, since a paucity of shots took crucial decisions about timing and emphasis out of
producers’ and editors’ hands. The routine procedure of making shots also tended to standardize and limit
the ways each shot was handled. The Soviet cinematographer Vladimir Nilsen criticized the American
method for fetishizing the shot as an end in itself rather than as part of a total editing unit.3
The shot became the brick which built the film long before 1915, but with the help of our Unbiased Sample
we can distinguish some significant quantitative developments. It would be possible to compute some
general statistical norms, as Barry Salt has done in his discussion of average shot lengths, but such
abstractions mean little without a concept of the range of paradigmatic choice dominant at a given period.4
For instance, in the years 1915–16, a feature film (itself often only seventy-five minutes long) might contain
as few as 240 shots or as many as 1000. The most common range was between 250 and 450 shots per film,
or (at 16 frames per second) about 275–325 shots per hour. (In all figures for the silent cinema, inter-titles
62 SHOT AND SCENE
are counted as shots. Throughout the years 1915–1928, intertitles comprised around 15 per cent of the total
number of shots per film.) To say, then, that the average shot length of films of the years 1915–16 was
about twelve to thirteen seconds is true but misleading. The crucial point is that a director or cutter had a
specific range of choices and constraints: no feature film would contain fewer than two hundred shots and
only a very few, such as Walsh’s Regeneration (1915), might have over five hundred. After 1916, however,
the paradigmatic choices and constraints shifted drastically. A film would be composed of many more
shots, and the shots would be significantly shorter. The typical Hollywood feature film of the years 1917–28
contained between 500 and 1000 shots, with never fewer than 400 and seldom more than 1300. While the
average shot length (ASL) can thus be considered to be between five and seven seconds, what is more
significant is the sharp widening of paradigmatic choice. A filmmaker might employ anything between 360
and 900 shots per hour, the most common range being 500–800 shots per hour. The increase in cutting
rhythm has causes which will be discussed in Chapter 16, but one effect was to broaden the filmmakers’
options. A Douglas Fairbanks or Erich von Stroheim film might have an ASL of around three seconds,
while Maurice Tourneur might rely on much longer takes (an average of ten seconds in *Victory [1919]).
Our intuitive assumption is that the cutting rate slowed with the introduction of sound, and to some extent
the belief is correct. The ASL of the period 1929–60 is ten to eleven seconds, twice that of the classical
silent decade. But this alone cannot reveal the ways in which the paradigmatic range changed with the
coming of sound. The typical film of the sound era contained between 300 and 700 shots, or between 200
and 500 shots per hour. This afforded only slightly less choice than the range of the classical silent period.
Normal practice between 1917 and 1928 gave the filmmaker a leeway of ‘plus or minus’ 300 shots per
hour, while sound-period practice yielded a leeway of 250 more or less. Furthermore, the breadth of the
paradigm increased after 1928; if no sound film could be cut as fast as, say, von Stroheim’s Wedding March
(1928; ASL, 3.7 seconds), the range of permissible shot lengths was none the less greater. A sound film
could have an ASL of five seconds (*Indianapolis Speedway [1939]) or an ASL of thirty-seven seconds
(Caravan [1934]). Films of comparable length might employ 600 shots (The Locket [1946]) or 177 shots
(Fallen Angel [1945]).
Similarly, we tend to assume that the typical shot got longer during the sound era. The history of average
shot lengths bears this out, but only at the expense of ignoring the wide range of alternatives that were
always available. During the years 1929 to 1934, the mean ASL in the Unbiased Sample was eleven
seconds, which corresponds to common intuitions about lugubrious cutting pace in the early sound period.
But this average is derived from a set of films with ASLs ranging from 6.3 seconds (*Housewife [1934]) to
14 seconds (*Applause [1929], *Penthouse [1933]). The Extended Sample is even more revealing,
indicating that between 1929 and 1934 filmmakers could choose to use anything between 170 and 600 shots
per hour. Some contemporary sources confirm these figures. Several writers claim 200–500 shots as normal
for an early 1930s film. A 1937 source cites ten seconds as appropriate for a typical shot.5 The average
cutting rate speeds up a little in the years 1935–46 (ASL 9 seconds) and slows down between 1947 and
1960 (ASL 11–12 seconds), but the range of choice remains constant: many films favor short shots (7–8
seconds), many favor medium-length shots (9–11 seconds), and others favor longer takes (12–14 seconds).
(The UnS average in the years 1947–60 is skewed by a few films with very long takes; it is in the post-1946
period that the UnS registers the first feature films since 1917 to contain fewer than 300 shots. So the
general belief that long-take filming became more common in the postwar period is warranted, but both the
UnS and the ES suggest that it was by no means the dominant practice.) Even in 1957, during the presumed
heyday of widescreen long takes, one CinemaScope film might have 200 shots per hour (Young and
Dangerous), another 267 (*Interlude), another 450 (*Fire Down Below). A 1959 widescreen film, Journey
to the Center of the Earth, could have an ASL of around six seconds, the same as that of a 1931 Warners’
film, Dangerous Female. If the paradigm’s center of gravity shifted somewhat in the course of the sound
era, the overall breadth of choice was hardly affected.
Like the shot, the Hollywood sequence is more a narrative entity than a material one. The consensus
among contemporary theorists is that the classical sequence possesses the Aristotelian unities of duration,
locale, and ‘action,’ and that it is marked at each end by some standardized punctuation (dissolve, fade,
wipe).6 This rough description serves us well if we remember that each film establishes its own scale of
segmentation. In *One? Frightened Night (1935), the action sets up a very limited duration within a
single setting (a mansion), so slight lapses of time (usually signaled by wipes) and shifts of locale (from
room to room) constitute significant breaks between sequences. But in *An American Romance (1944),
which spans several decades and jumps across the country, the same shifts in time and space do not mark
new sequences. For instance, after Anton explains to Steve where the coal goes, the shot dissolves to the
two men walking out of the mine; the lapse of time is as brief as that between scenes in *One Frightened
Night, but in this context only longer intervals demarcate separate scenes. Most classical films are
overwhelmingly clear about the appropriate time scale for distinguishing among sequences.
Shortly I shall examine the classical sequence’s internal structure. At this point, I am concerned only with
external aspects of decoupage. How many sequences make up a classical film? How many shots does a
sequence typically contain?
Again, comparing the silent era with the sound period reveals differences in the range of paradigmatic
choices. Between 1917 and 1928, the ordinary Hollywood film contained between nine and eighteen
sequences (not including the credits sequence), with a tendency for a film to have somewhat more
sequences before 1921 than after. In the same period, the typical segment contained between forty and
ninety shots and ran from four to eight minutes. In the period 1928–60, however, the available alternatives
shifted. A sound film would most commonly contain between fourteen and thirty-five sequences. The
typical sound sequence was composed of between twelve and thirty shots and ran from two to five minutes.
Thus while shot lengths increased with the introduction of sound, the number of sequences in a Hollywood
film almost doubled and the duration of those sequences roughly halved. (It can be argued that the dynamic
rhythm of editing in the silent film was, after 1933, regained to some degree by a swift succession of short
scenes.) There is also some historical variation: post-1946 films tend to have more sequences than their
predecessors, and post-1952 films average somewhat fewer shots per sequence. What is more important,
though, is that the sound decoupage paradigm was very flexible; a sound film might have six sequences or
sixty, a scene might run one minute or ten, and a sequence might contain a great many shots.
Claude Chabrol once remarked that where an MGM editor would use four shot/reverse shots, a Universal
editor would use eight.7 The UnS, taken with the ES, suggests that in fact decoupage varied only a little
from studio to studio. In the silent period, films from Douglas Fairbanks’s and Harold Lloyd’s units have
unusually short shots. Undoubtedly, the average Warner Bros film of the 1930s is cut faster than its mate
elsewhere. There was also a tendency for MGM and Paramount films to have slightly longer ASLs. On the
whole, however, studio differences are minimal. Nor is genre a differentiating factor; there is no clear
tendency for, say, musicals to have a longer ASL or for comedies to have a shorter one.
Generally, ASL varies somewhat more consistently among directors. Certain directors habitually used
comparatively long takes throughout a film: Maurice Tourneur, John Stahl, Josef Von Sternberg, Buster
Keaton, W.S.Van Dyke, Vincente Minnelli, William Wyler, William Dieterle, and Otto Preminger.
Directors with an unusually rapid editing rhythm include D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Mervyn
LeRoy, Lloyd Bacon, and (despite the tours de force of Rope [1948] and Under Capricorn [1949]) Alfred
Hitchcock. A few films inevitably stand out. Caravan (1934), directed by Erik Charrell, has only 160 shots;
the ASL of thirty-seven seconds is due to spectacular camera movement. Contrariwise, George Stevens’s
64 SHOT AND SCENE
Shane (1953) is remarkable for averaging 720 shots per hour (even if this rapid cutting rate seems due
chiefly to an inability to stage movement within a sustained shot).
In a broader perspective, all the historical, institutional, and individual variations are relatively minor.
Whatever the options within the classical paradigm, certain constraints remained fixed. No Hollywood films
have exploited either that radical use of short shots to be seen in Soviet films or that radical use of the long
take to be seen in films by Jancsó, Dreyer, Marguerite Duras, Roberto Rossellini, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The
very existence of the shot as a material unit has been questioned in films by Dziga Vertov, Michael Snow,
Hollis Frampton, and other avantgarde filmmakers; in these works, superimpositions, single-frame
sequences, and other strategies refuse to articulate shots as discrete units. In a similar way, work upon
narrative or upon the soundtrack can break down our expectations about distinct sequences; Vertov’s
Enthusiasm (1930) and Godard’s Le gai savoir (1969) pose problems of segmentation that the stable
narrative relations of Hollywood filmmaking never raise.
Anatomy of the scene

Montage sequences, chase scenes, and extended passages of crosscutting are part of the classical paradigm,
but the straightforward scene—one or more persons acting in a limited locale over a continuous duration;
what Christian Metz calls the ‘ordinary sequence’—remains the building block of classical dramaturgy.8 A
scene, one rule book says, is a series of shots ‘naturally collected together, usually in the same or adjacent
locales or sets’; here, durational continuity is assumed.9 Yet, as Thierry Kuntzel has pointed out, the
autonomy of the classical scene is a mixed one; the scene is both a detachable segment and a link in a chain.10
As such, the scene can be taken as having two roughly distinct phases, the exposition and the development.
These phases organize all the narrative systems at work—causality, time, and space.
In the scene’s expository phase, narration specifies the time, place, and relevant characters. The time is
assumed to be after the previous scene, unless otherwise indicated, and usually the preceding scene has
stipulated when this scene must be occurring (a few minutes later, the next day). If not, an expository title, a
montage sequence, or some indication at the start of the scene’s action (e.g., calendar, clock, dialogue) will
announce this scene’s place in the film’s time scheme.
The scene’s locale will usually be indicated generally (e.g., an exterior shot of a building, or a sign), then
specifically (the immediate site of the action). Multiple cues set to work: the locale will have been
anticipated in an earlier scene, a long shot or medium-long shot will establish the totality of the relevant
space, and sound and visual action will all cooperate in defining the locale. Signs (‘Inspector Miller’s
Office’) or telephone-answering (‘Morning Post’) will also help. (Signs can be thought of as realistically
motivated equivalents of the silent film’s expository inter-title.) In a silent film, sometimes an expository
‘art’ title will establish the space, not only by naming it but by including a drawing of the locale. Typically,
the space is a room, and the expositional phase of the scene will emphasize the room’s furniture and its
windows and doors. (In this respect, classical film reveals its debt to nineteenth-century theater.11) Ernst
Lubitsch is reported to have said that the main character in his films was the door, but the claim has some
broader validity, too.12 Classical cinema is indeed ‘door-knob cinema,’ strongly reliant upon signaling
character entrances and exits from an interior.
At the scene’s start, the classical paradigm offers two ways of establishing the space: immediate or
gradual. The narration may begin with a long shot that establishes the total space; this is by far the most
common method. Most scenes in the UnS films start on an establishing long shot. Or the narration may
begin the scene by showing only a portion of the space—a character, an object, a detail of decor, a
doorway.13 In this alternative, the scene will begin by framing a detail and then by means of various devices
(dissolve, cut, iris, or tracking shot) will soon reveal the totality of the space. The establishing shot is simply
delayed, seldom eliminated (as it often is in the films of Bresson, for instance). In locales that we know from
previous scenes the narration may omit the establishing shot, though even in such instances establishing shots
are more common than not.
The expository phase does not simply signal the locale, it places characters within it. The Hollywood
screenplay format is revelatory here, in that it first indicates the place, then the time, and then the character
action. (For specimens, see figs 12.9–12.12.) Space becomes chiefly a container for character action; the story
has appropriated it. That a locale is of little interest in its own right is shown by the fact that typically the
exposition of space takes up the least time of any phase of the scene (often less than twenty seconds and
seldom more than thirty). By this point, the characters have taken over the narration.
The classical scene must immediately reveal two things about the characters: their relative spatial
positions and their states of mind. The establishing shots should, while exposing the surroundings, also
indicate where everyone is. Previous scenes and current demeanor and dialogue should reveal to us, if not to
other characters, each participant’s psychological state. Our hypothesis-building activity must be constantly
fed and usually confirmed; if a character is furious with his opponent at the close of scene A but is meek
and amiable at the beginning of scene B, we had better be quickly shown why the behavior has changed.
The centrality of characters’ interaction may incline the narration to begin with close shots of them. In
*Love and the Law (1919), after an art title establishes the overall locale (see fig 6.1), the scene begins with
tight shots of the various characters—governor, Mcllvaine, and Mina (see figs 6.2 through 6.5). Only after nine
of these detail shots does the establishing shot appear (fig 6.6). The delay in revealing the total space is
determined by the scene’s role as a crisis in the plot. More commonly, however, the narration will establish
the scene’s space quickly and then plunge into the characters’ relations. For example, following walking
characters provides a common way to reveal space and to initiate character interaction. After the 1930s, a
common strategy was to begin in a corridor or on a street, pan to follow a passing supernumerary, then pick
up the main character, and follow that character until he or she encounters another character (e.g., figs 6.7 to
6.9).14
Hollywood practitioners recognized the scene’s exposition to be as formulaic as I have indicated. Taking
a hypothetical scene, two editors described the scene’s opening as ‘setting the stage—the introduction of the
characters—their purpose in the scene—and their relation to each other.’15 Or, as Howard Hawks put it
offhandedly: ‘You know which way the men are going to come in, and then you experiment and see where
you’re going to have Wayne sitting at a table, and then you see where the girl sits, and then in a few minutes
you’ve got it all worked out, and it’s perfectly simple, as far as I am concerned.’16
Once the central characters are picked out and their psychological states established, the developmental
phase of the scene begins. Characters act toward their goals, enter into conflict, make choices, set deadlines,
make appointments, and plan future actions. In general, causal development shapes how time and space are
represented.
Dramaturgically, the classical scene participates in two processes. First, it continues, develops, or closes
off lines of cause and effect previously left open. If Paul has been trying to borrow money in the previous
scene, this scene may show him still trying. Or the previous causal line may be completed; Paul gets his
money. The classical scene’s other duty is to open and perhaps develop at least one new causal chain.
Against the backdrop of old lines of action, the scene initiates new conflicts, new goals, new questions.
Once Paul has asked everyone he knows for money, he may decide to try stealing some; in the classical film,
this decision will not be allocated a separate scene but will be introduced after an earlier line of action has
been developed in the scene. It is important that at least one new line of action be suspended in the scene; it
66 SHOT AND SCENE
will become an old line for later scenes to develop or close off. Typically, only the film’s last scene closes off
all the lines of action.
What is noteworthy about the scene’s continuation of old plot lines and the revelation of new ones is their
rigorously formulaic quality. In S/Z, Barthes points out that the narrative text (textus, ‘woven thing’) is a fabric,
in which the sequential codes are threaded together, suspended, then taken up again.17 The Hollywood film
reveals some such weaving, but of a simpler sort. Most scenes continue or close off the old line of action
before starting the new one. Other scenes may reintroduce the old line, toy with it, suspend it again,
introduce a new causal line, then close out the old and introduce yet another before the scene ends. Changes
in lines of action are often punctuated by the entry or exit of characters or by slight shifts in locale (e.g.,
from room to room). Usually the new line will get final say in the scene (even if a motif or a brief reaction
is the last thing actually presented). The new causal line thus motivates the shift to the next scene. The
famous ‘linearity’ of classical Hollywood cinema thus consists of a linkage which resembles a game of
dominoes, each dangling cause matched by its effect in the following scene. Diagrammed, the pattern looks
like this:
A simple example will illustrate how conventional such phases can be. In scene 6 of *The King and the
Chorus Girl (1937), Dorothy Ellis is brought to meet King Alfred, but he is in a drunken stupor, and she
leaves, furious. When Alfred awakes and learns that an American chorus girl has spurned him, he
indignantly orders ‘eggs and ham—American style.’ This bit of speech provides a dialogue hook to scene 7.
The Count is speaking: ‘Eggs and ham, that’s what he said.’ The camera tracks back to reveal the Count and
the Duchess in Dorothy’s room, telling her what happened after she left. The characters are thus established
in space and time while the dangling cause is tied up; the whole process takes only seventeen seconds. After
Dorothy asks why they insist that she go to Alfred, the scene returns to an old causal line. The Count and
the Duchess explain that they need a girl of ‘independent spirit’ to keep Alfred from drinking. They explain
that they’ve tried other women, but only Dorothy seems to have had the desired effect. This phase of the
scene consumes thirty-eight seconds. Now the scene opens a new causal line. The Duchess begs Dorothy to
have supper with Alfred tonight (appointment proposed). Dorothy agrees, but only if Alfred comes to fetch
her. ‘The independent spirit. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ This new line of action takes thirty-one
seconds to open and develop. The Count opines that Alfred cannot call for a commoner: ‘A Bruger call for
an Ellis? Never!’ This becomes the (negative) dialogue hook to the next scene, which begins with Alfred’s
car driving up to Dorothy’s apartment building.
If these principles of linearity seem self-evident or ‘natural,’ recall that other nlmmakers have used quite
different principles to structure and connect scenes. Antonioni will commonly protract the establishment
phase of a scene, lingering upon environmental features for some time before a causal line is broached.
Bresson will often abruptly start a scene on a new line of action without any evident connection to the
previous scene; our uncertainty is exacerbated by ambiguous temporal relations and an absence of
establishing shots. Other nlmmakers exploit unexpected narrational intrusions during the scene. In
Eisenstein’s October (1928), the ‘July days’ sequence begins suddenly, with several shots of crowds, and
only then does an expository inter-title ‘christen’ the sequence. The sequence on the Paris-Nanterre train in
Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) begins with a medium shot of two pairs of hands at a compartment window.
Voices chat offscreen. Eventually Véronique and François Jeanson lean forward into the frame. Now an
inter-title (‘Encounter with François Jeanson’) intercedes to give us our bearings. Whereas the classical film
strives to link scenes smoothly and to reserve narrational intrusions for the transitional moments, Eisenstein
and Godard disorient us by shifting the narration’s interjection to an unconventional point within the scene.
Within the classical scene, characters act and react according to principles of individualized character
psychology. They struggle, collide, and make decisions. Because such patterns resemble those of orthodox
drama, we are already inclined to see them as following the crisis/climax/ resolution trajectory beloved of late
nineteenth-century dramatic theory. But the classical scene is not structured like an act in a well-made play.
The classical scene climbs toward a climax, certainly, but the peculiar domino-linearity of the scene’s
construction makes limited kinds of resolution occur early in the scene, as old lines of action get closed off.
And the dangling cause often leaves the scene unresolved, open, and leading to the next. The classical scene
progresses steadily toward a climax and then switches the resolution of that line of action to another, later
scene.
From the standpoint of reception, this pattern enhances the spectator’s confidence in understanding the
story action. Closing off certain causal lines early in the scene gives the viewer a sense of cumulatively
following the action, retroactively clinching his or her reading of earlier scenes. Such short-term resolutions
also promise a final resolution as well. Compare this process with the operations of scenes in Persona
(1967) or L’eclisse (1963) or Pierrot le fou (1965). In these films, the scene will not necessarily answer
earlier questions; constantly posed and suddenly dropped enigmas lead to a moment-by-moment frustration
that makes the viewer suspect that closure may never come.
Both time and space fit themselves snugly to the contours of the classical scene’s action. As in the *King
and the Chorus Girl segment, the expositional phase of the scene occupies little screen duration; most is given
over to the developmental phase. Order is assumed to be chronological, unless a flashback or some
crosscutting takes place. There can be a brief ellipsis within the scene, but it will be either signalled by
dissolves or wipes or covered by cutaways (e.g., while the boss chases his secretary, her suitor waits outside).
Durational continuity from shot to shot is secured through all the devices examined in Chapter 4 (matches
on action, sound overlaps, etc.). Certainly, the use of deadlines and appointments, not only between scenes
but also within them, helps the viewer to create stable and narrow hypotheses about what turns the various
lines of action can take.
Space is also rigidly codified by the scene’s flow of cause and effect. The characters’ activity is the
fulcrum of the construction of 180° space. The initial establishing shots are followed most probably by two-
shots (plan américain or medium-long-shot framings). Then come shot/reverse shots or eyeline-matched
medium shots which can alternate for some time. Ticking and tocking against one another, these images
will usually keep the figures in the same scale in shot and countershot. Then, least commonly, may come
subjective point-of-view shots. This accentuation of the space follows the flow of cause and effect, the
opening, development, and closing of lines of action. When a character changes position, a broader view
must resituate us; when a new character enters, the almost inevitable eyeline matches must be reinforced by
an eventual establishing shot. These re-establishing shots can in turn anticipate the next cause in the chain,
as we saw in the way that one camera set-up ‘primed’ us for the next in *The Caddy (1953). All of these
factors are illustrated in the sample scene analyzed on pages 66–9.
The classical scene ends, as I have suggested, with a dangling cause—a new line of action, a step toward
a goal, a character’s reaction to a new piece of information. This pattern is echoed in the scenographie
space. While a classical film begins most scenes on an establishing shot, it does not necessarily end most
scenes on a re-establishing shot. The classical scene typically ends on only a part of the total space—usually
a character. Just as narrative causality impells us to look forward to the next scene, so the decoupage carries
us to the heart of the space, the site of character interaction, and leaves us there to anticipate how the
dangling cause will be taken up later.
As always, the individual devices that construct the scene are historically variable. Before 1927, for
instance, dissolves might be used to link a detail to a long shot during the scene’s expositional phase. After
68 SHOT AND SCENE
1927, that link would probably be made by a camera movement. Similarly, the 1930s insisted more strongly
upon intermediary stages between establishing shots and closer views than did the 1940s, which allowed
cutting from establishing shots to close, over-the-shoulder reverse angles. But these minor fluctuations simply
eliminate one of several redundant cues and do not affect the basic principles of the classical paradigm.
Those principles can be seen at work in a typical classical scene such as that analyzed below.
PLAY GIRL (1941) Commentary

Specimen Scene Shots
1 (Is) Sofa: Grace and Ellen are seated and drinking 1 The opening of the scene immediately
coffee (fig 6.10). establishes the two characters in space and
Grace: ‘How are things going with you and Tom?’ reveals their different states of mind. (They
Ellen: ‘We’re having fun.’ She sets down her talk about their feelings.) Grace’s questions
coffee cup. pick up the suspended romance-line of action
Grace: ‘What’ve you been doing about it?’ from the previous scene. Non-diegetic music
Ellen: ‘Why, nothing. What makes you think I plays softly. Ellen’s last line motivates the
ought to do anything about it?’ next shot, Grace’s reaction.
Grace: ‘No reason at all. I just thought I’d ask.’
Ellen rises and walks around the edge of the sofa

(fig 6.11).
Ellen: Tom’s a nice boy and we have a lot of
good times together, but I’d never marry him.’
2 (ms, high angle) Grace: ‘Well, you certainly had 2–5 Analytical cuts (1/2, 3/4) arid eyeline
me fooled. I could’ve sworn you were in love matches (2/3, 4/5) break the space into its
with him.’ (fig 6.12) components to emphasize the dialogue.
Edge lighting separates the characters from
the backgrounds. Refraining is used to
follow Ellen as she rises. The previous
line of action is developed to a climax:
Ellen admits she loves Tom. Music
continues, aiding shot continuity.
3 (mls) Ellen, walking to sofa toward Grace: ‘I am
in love with him.’ (fig 6.13) She leans on the
sofa back. ‘I think I have been ever since that
first day out on the road.’ (fig 6.14)
4 (ms, high angle as 2) Grace (fig 6.15). Ellen,
offscreen: ‘I’ve never stopped thinking about
him.’
5 (ms) Ellen: ‘Every night—all night long—I
dream about him.’ (fig 6.16)
6 (ms, as 2) Grace sets down coffee; she rises and 6 Grace rises and walks to Ellen, marking the
walks around sofa (figs 6.17–6.18). new line of action. She advises Ellen to
Grace: ‘My advice to you is to marry him.’ marry Tom. The camera follows Grace
Grace comes to Ellen in the right foreground and picks up Ellen in the right foreground,
(fig 6.19). ‘Marry him the very first moment he reorienting us. This composition prepares
proposes.’ for a characteristic shot/re verse-shot
Ellen: ‘He won’t propose.’ pattern. Music continues.
7 (ms as 5) Ellen, Grace on the left edge of the 7–10 Shot/reverse-shot cutting traces the rising
frame. tension between the two women. The
Ellen: ‘He almost did today, but I stopped him.’ repeated set-ups let us ignore minutiae of
She stands up angrily (fig 6.20). ‘Don’t be space and concentrate upon changes in
alarmed. I’ll see to it that nothing like this character behavior, as when Ellen pulls
happens and this little corporation of ours will away in shot 8. Sound bleeds over one cut
continue to do business just as it is.’ (9/10) in order to anticipate character
reaction. Music continues.
8 (ms, as end of 6) Grace: ‘Oh, I know how you
feel, darling, but don’t take it so much to heart.’
(fig 6.21)
Ellen, backing away: ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’
9 (ms, as 7) Ellen snorts (fig 6.22). ‘There are
other men, lots of them. Your Bill Vincents and
your Van Pacens. But there aren’t any of them
like Tom. He’s the only one that’s shown me any
genuine respect since the very first day…’
10 (ms, as 8) Grace, seen past Ellen’s shoulder
(fig 6.23).
Ellen: ‘…I met you.’
Grace: ‘I wish you hadn’t said that, Ellen.’
She smiles and walks left (figs 6.24 and 6.25).

‘As a matter of fact I was rather wishing you
would marry…’
11 (Is, as 1) The two women at either end of the 11 11 Grace’s walk left motivates a re-establishing
sofa (fig 6.26). shot. The conflict between the women
Grace: ‘…Tom.’ reaches its climax, with Ellen accusing
Ellen: ‘Of course. Nothing would give you Grace of wanting her to marry Tom for his
greater pleasure than to get your hands on eleven money. Instead of resolution, there is simply
million dollars.’ an interruption: the door buzzer. This sound
Grace: 1 was thinking first of all of your cuts off the non-diegetic music for the rest of
happiness.’ the scene, thus increasing the sense of
Ellen, voice rising: ‘And your future! But I won’t irresolution. Grace starts out of the frame
do a thing like to Tom!’ after Ellen has gone.
Grace: ‘Ellen!’
Door buzzer rings.
Grace: ‘You’d better fix your face.’ Ellen goes
out right (fig 6.27). Buzzer sounds again. Grace
goes out right (fig 6.28).
70 SHOT AND SCENE
12 (Is) Foyer. Grace comes in left (fig 6.29); pan 12 12 A frame cut and a panning movement follow
with her to door. She opens it (fig 6.30). Grace to the door. As Tom enters, the
Grace: ‘Good evening, Tom.’ framing re-establishes the characters in
Tom: ‘Hello, Grace.’ He enters. space. The camera reframes and tracks to
Grace: ‘Ellen will be here in just a moment.’ follow them to the second sofa. Grace’s ‘I
Tom: ‘Say, that’s an awfully nice dress you’ve got want to talk to you’ announces that they
on.’ will take up a suspended line of action.
Grace, as she and Tom walk to the sofa:
‘Oh, this isn’t a dress, it’s a negligee. I’m staying
in tonight.’ (fig 6.31)
Tom: ‘You are?’
Grace, sitting down on the second sofa: ‘Sit down,
Tom. I want to talk to you.’ (fig 6.32)
13 (mls) The second sofa, Tom sitting by Grace 13 13 After ascertaining Tom’s state of mind (he
(fig 6.33). loves Ellen), Grace opens a new causal line
Grace: ‘You’re very fond of Ellen, aren’t you?’ for Tom, one parallel to that she opened for
Tom:‘Well, I’ve heard tell.’ Ellen in shot 6. Grace also suggests a
Grace: ‘Going to marry her?’ deadline for Tom’s proposal. Again, the
Tom: ‘I would if I could.’ action is left unresolved; Ellen’s entry, like
Grace: ‘Give me one good reason why you can’t.’ Tom’s arrival earlier, breaks off the
Tom: ‘I don’t think she’d have me.’ conversation.
Grace: ‘Ever try asking?’
Tom: ‘No, not exactly.’
Grace: ‘I want to tell you a secret. If you were to
ask her tonight, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if
she said yes.’
Tom, eagerly: ‘Sh! Here she comes.’
Grace looks off left and Tom turns (fig 6.34).
14 (1s, as end of 12) Tom, rising as Ellen enters: 14 The cut matches on Tom’s action of
‘Hello, Ellen.’ (figs 6.35–6.36) turning. Reframing creates a new
Ellen: ‘Hello, Tom.’ establishing shot as Ellen and then Josie
Tom: ‘You look mighty grand.’ enter. After Tom leads Ellen out in the
Josie the maid enters with Ellen’s gloves. background, Josie and Grace summarize
Ellen: ‘Thank you.’ what Grace has accomplished. Josie’s ‘For
Tom: ‘Well, here we go.’ Ellen’ reintroduces Ellen’s point (shot 11)
He leads Ellen out, winking back at Grace about Grace’s future.
(fig 6.37).
Josie, coming to Grace: ‘What’s he winking
about?’
Grace: ‘I think he’s going to propose tonight.’
Josie: ‘Well, that’s fine. For Ellen.’ Josie sits
down (fig 6.38).
15 (mls, as 13) Josie and Grace on the second sofa 15 As Josie sits, another match-on-action cut
(fig 6.39). keeps temporal continuity. Two causes are
Josie, turning Grace’s chin toward her: left dangling: one immediate (will Ellen
‘But what happens to you?’ accept Tom’s proposal tonight?), the other
Grace: ‘Oh, I always get along.’ long-term (what will happen to Grace if she
Her smile fades as she picks up a magazine; Josie does?). The scene ends by lingering upon
looks skeptical (fig 6.40). Dissolve only a portion of the space, that charged
with expressivity by Josie’s concern and
Grace’s feigned nonchalance.
The scene is an object of fascination, for viewer and for analyst, partly because it offers in microcosm the
possibility of charting the classical spectator’s activity. Chapter 3 has already shown that classical narration
emerges quite overtly in the film’s opening moments, during the credits and the early scenes, and then
becomes more covert, letting character causality caught in medias res carry the narrational burden. Later
chapters have shown how systems of time and space permit this narration to become relatively less self-
conscious, to render omniscience as omnipresence, and to justify narration’s suppression of information by
character action and shifting point-of-view. At the film’s end, the action resolves itself ‘on its own terms,’
according to an internal causal or generic logic, but a final narrational intrusion (e.g., the wink to the
audience in *Appointment for Love [1941]) is permissible. Now we can see that this pattern of fluctuating
presence is at work in the scene as well. In the establishing phase, the narration is most self-conscious and
omniscient, with signs, ostentatious camera movements, and telling details leaving the traces of a relatively
overt narration. Once the action gets going, the narration slips into the background. The peculiar
dominolinkage of cause and effect takes over the scene, but the narration may become overt again by an
anticipatory cut or a stressed sound-image juxtaposition. And perhaps, at the scene’s end, the narration re-
emerges more boldly: It might call our attention to a detail which will prove important later or which will
aid the transition to the next scene, or non-diegetic music might sneak in to link this scene with the next.
This is not to say that the classical film is only the scene writ large, since, for one thing, the film comes to
rest and resolution in a way the typical scene does not. Scene and film do, however, rely upon the same
viewing activities—creating and checking first impressions; linking actions by their anticipated
consequences; weighing and testing alternative hypotheses about causality, time, and space. Brick by brick,
scene by scene, and inference by inference, the classical film impells the spectator to undertake a particular
but not naive work.
7
The bounds of difference
So far, I have emphasized the unity and uniformity of the classical stylistic paradigm. But any complete
account of Hollywood filmmaking must recognize deviations from the norm. Hollywood itself has stressed
differentiation as a correlative to standardization. Novelty and originality were taken to be valuable
qualities, and scriptwriters evolved an entire vocabulary for describing variation (gimmick, twist, boff, yak,
weenie, old switcheroo). Cameramen likewise claimed to see each story as requiring a unique visual style.
The question, though, is what principles governed this search for differentiation. What limits were set upon
variety? In what permissible ways could films differ from one another? And at what points can the overall
unity of the classical style be said to break down altogether? We must not expect gaps and breakdowns
everywhere. The principle of motivation gives the classical paradigm a great range of non-disruptive
differentiation.
Benson’s cubist picture

In Suspicion (1941), police detectives are calling upon Lina Aysgarth to inquire about her husband Johnnie.
Before and after their questions, one detective pauses to glance at a cubist painting on the wall. Stephen
Heath has found in this gesture a significant rupture of narrative unity: ‘problem of point of view, different
framing, disturbance of the law and its inspectoring eye, interruption of homogeneity of the narrative
economy, it is somewhere else again, another scene, another story, another space.’1 Yet although officer
Benson’s painting lacks compositional motivation —it is causally irrelevant—the picture can be justified by
other means. The cubist painting is generically motivated; Diane Waldman has shown that the woman’s
Gothic film of the 1940s conventionally casts suspicion upon the husband’s sanity by associating him with
the distorted style of modern art.2 Benson’s interest is itself generically motivated (the detective scans the
room for clues to Johnnie’s personality) and ‘realistically’ motivated as well: the philistine policeman is
baffled by the artifacts of upper-class life, and the narration here comically reiterates the motif of class
difference that runs through the film. (The piano phrase on the soundtrack further marks this as a narrational
joke.) Finally, it is possible to see the cubist picture as an instance of artistic motivation, calling attention to
the significance of imagery (paintings, photographs) and vision (point-of-view, correct judgment of
appearances) in Suspicion as a whole. In sum, Benson’s picture breaks unity only if we limit our notion of
unity to straightforward causal motivation.
Most instances of apparent transgression in the classical film are like Benson’s picture— intrusions which
momentarily contest causality but which are motivated in other ways. We have already seen (in Chapter 2)
how artistic motivation in Hollywood cinema can justify spectacle, parody, and baring of the device.
Motivation can also explain some apparent disruptions in the role of the star. For Parker Tyler, the star is
more important than the story, Hollywood acting is but a charade, and the star’s voice functions
disjunctively, as something detachable from the star’s personality. For Richard Dyer, the star more often
than not poses problems for creating character.3 But we must remember that genre shapes how the star is
understood. Tyler claims that since the star does not ‘act’ in the theatrical sense, he dominates the story; he
cites as an example the way that a Fred Astaire film exists only to reveal Fred’s talents.4 But this is only a way
of saying that the star has found his genre; the musical motivates its narrative to allow occasions for ingratiating
dance. The same point holds when a star crosses genres. In *The Black Hand (1949) Gene Kelly plays an
Italian who fights the Mafia; this crime film does not lead us to expect that he will burst into an angular
dance, nor is there what Dyer calls a ‘problematic fit’ between the brash, streetwise protagonists of Cover Girl
(1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1945) and the impetuous, idealistic Gio. Disruptions arise only when the star’s
presence or actions cannot be motivated by any means, and this seems to be rare.
Benson’s cubist picture suggests that it is an error to overlook realistic motivation, but it is also an error
to make too much of it. A conception of the classical film as a ‘realist text’ tends to see the stylization of
certain films as outrageous and jolting. Yet stylization, of various sorts, is a convention of many Hollywood
genres, most notably the comedy, the musical, and the melodrama. Historically, all three descend from
episodic and composite forms in the American popular theater (e.g., vaudeville, melodrama). The
nineteenth-century popular play was commonly interrupted by orchestral interludes, songs, dances, animal
acts, magicians, acrobats, and other novelties.5 To some degree, musicals, melodramas, and comedies have
followed the episodic bent of their forebears. This seldom disturbs us, however, because in such instances
the typical multiple motivation of the classical text simply gives way to a more linear series: a scene
motivated compositionally, then a song or gag motivated generically, then another scene, and so forth.
We should not, however, make too much of the episodic quality of these genres, since the classical cinema
tended to unify each genre’s disparate appeals and to limit the genre’s stylization. Compositional motivation
provided each genre with a coherent baseline against which the genre’s conventions could react. For
example, in the films of the Ritz Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx Brothers, the vaudeville skit or
comic dialogue rests within a relatively unified narrative. The backstage musical encouraged interpolated
songs and dances while still maintaining an ongoing causal chain. The ‘big scenes’ favored by stage
melodrama became more compositionally motivated in film melodrama. For the most part, space and time
remained classically coherent. The bursts of stylization (a Busby Berkeley number, a Mamoulian rhythmic
passage, or a Harpo Marx sight gag) remain tied to the classical norm in that the norm defines the duration
and range of permissible stylization. What Alan Williams remarks of the musical applies to all these genres:
their conventions seem stylized not in relation to ‘life’ but in relation to the aesthetic norm of the classical
film.6 Compositional unity and generic conventions are as important as ‘realism’ in locating the specific
dynamics of these genres.
All of which suggests that the most wrenching aspects of these films, their most ‘radical’ moments, are in
fact codified through generic conventions. Recently critics have put forward the melodrama as a subversive
genre—most crudely because its lack of verisimilitude yields unpleasure, more subtly because it reveals
contradictions in bourgeois ideology (family, business, sexual relations).7 Yet critics have yet to construct
the melodrama as an empirically or conceptually coherent genre. If we did construct such a model, we
would probably find that the genre’s ‘subversiveness’ is itself conventionalized. For example, Thomas
Elsaesser’s generally excellent essay on melodrama cites a scene in Margie (1946) in which a girl rushes
downstairs to see her teacher, only to find that he is going to the dance with someone else. Elsaesser writes:
‘The strategy of building up to a climax so as to throttle it the more abruptly is a technique of dramatic
reversal by which Hollywood has consistently criticized the streak of incurably naive moral and emotional
idealism in the American psyche.’8 But as early as 1926, the Russian Formalist critic Sergei Balukhatyi had
74 THE BOUNDS OF DIFFERENCE
pointed out that stage melodrama relied upon exactly this convention of sudden ups and downs. Daniel
Gerould summarizes Balukhatyi’s point:9
Melodrama always finds ways to introduce the unexpected into the action. The dynamic effect of this
device lies in the fact that it violates the ‘course of events’ as it has been outlined and already grasped
by the spectator, turning it in new, unknown directions through the introduction of a new fact or deed,
not stipulated by the previous action.
This is not to deny the powerful effect of such twists, nor is it to assert that they should not be studied from
a political standpoint. The point is only that the contradictory emotional wrenchings of melodrama are
generically motivated, no more socially or textually disruptive than interpolated numbers in a musical.10 In
such ways, conventions of the more stylized genres operate as limited plays with the classical compositional
dominant.
The assimilation of the European avant-garde
You cut to the back of the Big Fellow, then three lap dissolves of the presses—give’em that Ufa
stuff, then to the street—a newsboy, insert of the front page, the L roaring by — Kerist, it’s the
gutsiest thing in pictures! Call you back, chief!11
S.J.Perelman, ‘Scenario’
Like Benson’s cubist picture in Suspicion, the European avant-garde might be thought to have had a
disruptive effect when it entered Hollywood in the period 1925–50. Yet on the whole, Hollywood absorbed
and modified alternative artistic practices which had been developed in Europe and Russia. It is not too
much to say that Hollywood has perpetually renewed itself by assimilating techniques from experimental
movements. Hollywood has done this by correlating new devices with functions already defined by the
classical style. Three examples— avant-garde music, German Expressionist cinema, and Soviet montage
cinema—illustrate how this has happened.
Contrary to what we might expect, the celebrated philistinism of Hollywood producers did not bar avant-
garde composers from studio work. George Antheil recalled with astonishment that he was hired to write
discordantly: ‘We engaged you to do “modernistic” music—so go ahead and do it!’12 Stravinsky and
Schönberg were both approached to score films. Yet however modern the musical technique might be, it got
motivated in conventional ways.
It should go without saying that experimental music since Debussy need not express anguished or
tormented feeling, although some pieces certainly do. In this respect, Schönberg’s ‘Accompaniment for a
Film Scene’ (1930), subtitled, ‘Danger Threatens, Panic, Catastrophe,’ was prophetic, for Hollywood
quickly identified dissonant music with just such qualities. Disturbing music could convey disturbed states
of mind: David Raksin’s ‘piano track’ for the dreamlike scenes of Laura (1944), Miklós Rózsa’s theremin
for expressing psychosis in Spellbound (1946), or Bernard Herrmann’s dissonances which trigger the
homicidal drives of the composerprotagonist of Hangover Square (1945). Atonality was similarly
domesticated. In East of Eden (1955), Leonard Rosenmann assigned tonal music to the teenagers and
reserved atonality for ‘adult conflicts’; for The Cobweb (1955) Rosenmann used serial music because ‘I
wanted more neurosis.’13 Quite often in these films, the ‘modern’ music becomes identified with the
narrative conflict itself, so that the resolution of the action calls for a reassertion of ‘normal’ music. At the
close of Hangover Square, the composer’s romantic concerto constantly shifts between diegetic and non-
diegetic status, thus overriding the dissonances in his psyche. Of the last ten minutes of East of Eden,
Rosenmann writes: ‘The final cue returns to a more tonal, classical setting, reflecting the resolution of the
struggle, in Carl’s repentance and reconciliation.’14 There is also generic motivation. Just as single-source
lighting could signal the thriller genre, so ‘modern’ music was reserved for horror films, psychiatric
subjects, and science fiction. The latter genre also motivated the use of electronic music. After scoring
experimental shorts for lan Hugo and others, Louis and Bebe Barren went on to compose electronic music
for Forbidden Planet (1956).15 Even in recent years, horror and science fiction have remained the principal
Hollywood genres that permit ‘avant-garde’ scores (2001 [1968], Planet of the Apes [1968], The Exorcist
[1973], Halloween [1978], Alien [1979]). In short, the expressive range and formal innovations of
experimental music of this century have been stringently confined by Hollywood’s narrative conventions.
What of experimental movements within cinema itself? Of all national cinemas, the 1920s German film
had the greatest influence on Hollywood. This itself is significant, for in many respects that cinema most
resembled the classical American practice. Ufa, the major German production company, had shown how
films could be made in the completely controlled environment of a studio, a lesson that was not to be lost on
Hollywood when sound came. Moreover, certain Expressionist techniques of lighting, camerawork, and
special effects were quickly imitated by Americans. The set designs of such films as The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1920), one commentator remarked in the 1920s, made Hollywood ‘no longer terrified by
shadows.’16 From 1926 to 1928, films like Variety (1925) and The Last Laugh (1924) created a vogue for
unusual angles and the so-called ‘free’ camera. Charles Clarke recalls that at Fox, German films would be
screened for directors and cinematographers and discussions would be held afterward: ‘Well, that’s a great
shot; why can’t we do that?’17 At the end of 1928, one writer pointed out the technological demand created
by the new fashion:18
With the advent of the so-called ‘German influence’ several years ago, the first camera to be called
into service in the production of creative angles was the Akeley. Because of its light weight, facile
leveling device, and gyroscopic control, directors found chimerical ideas efficiently screened by this
remarkable camera. The Akeley specialists were called upon to lash their instruments high on the
masts of ships, on the arms of derricks, or to be still different, in deep holes looking up.
When Charles Rosher was at Ufa as a consultant on Faust (1926), he learned how to suspend a camera from
the ceiling for overhead moving shots, a technique employed later in Sunrise (1927). The false perspectives
of The Last Laugh and the miniatures in Metropolis (1926) introduced Hollywood to more sophisticated
special effects, a practice that was also to expand considerably in the studio-bound era.
The assimilation of Germanic technique, however eager, was selective. Some devices were inserted into
generic contexts: low-key lighting for mystery, distorted perspectives for horror, odd angles for shock
effects. With a few exceptions, camera movement was used to establish locales or follow principal
characters. Most important, German Expressionist techniques for indicating character subjectivity were
seized upon for momentary, intensified inserts. The drunken camera in The Last Laugh and the
somersaulting point-of-view in Variety became quickly copied, since they were easily motivated by
characters’ psychological states. In the late 1920s, Hollywood films began to include prismatic or distorted
imagery, multiple superimpositions, skewed perspective in set design, and camera gyrations to indicate a
character’s intoxication, delirium, dream, or emotional anxiety. Such devices, more rare in the 1930s, were
revived in the subjective point-of-view films of the 1940s. Other formal traits of Expressionist cinema—the
more episodic and open-ended narrative, the entirely subjective film, or the slower tempo of story events—
were not imitated by Hollywood; the classical style took only what could extend and elaborate its principles
without challenging them.
Most significant of all is the manner in which the classical Hollywood paradigm blunted the stylistic
challenge of the experimental Soviet cinema. At the level of story, the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
Dovzhenko, and others frequently refused to create individualized, psychologically defined protagonists.
Point-of-view was manipulated by a narration that constantly flaunted its presence. Stylistically, montage
editing tended to break down the unified diegetic world. Montage forced the viewer to recognize a
reworking of the raw event through constant editing gaps and mismatches: overlapping cutting distended
time, disjunctive cuts created spatial and temporal ambiguities. Even the shot itself offered uncertain cues,
since extreme close-ups, canted angles, and abstract compositional patterns against sky or neutral
backgrounds tended to disorient the viewer. In sum, Soviet montage cinema constituted a challenge to
classical narrative and decoupage on almost every front: narrative unity, narrational voice and point-of-view,
spatial and temporal continuity.
Hollywood was able to assimilate certain traits of Soviet films because its earliest awareness of
‘montage’ was based on German films. Except for Potemkin, which was seen in the United States in 1926,
Soviet montage films were not generally imported until after 1928. But ‘montage sequences’ begin to appear
in the Hollywood cinema before this; a good example is the scene of the artists’ ball in So This Is Paris
(1926). At this period, complicated dissolves with superimposed effects were often called ‘Ufa shots.’
Recognized as specifically Germanic, these shots were motivated as dreams, visions, or hallucinations. Such
early montage sequences established two crucial qualities of later American ones: the linkage of several
short shots by dissolves rather than cuts, and the motivation of montage by character psychology or other
story factors. Later, acquaintance with Soviet films induced Hollywood to add an abstraction accomplished
through framing: extreme close-ups, low angles, and canted framings. The combination of Soviet and
German techniques thus became highly functional. The stylized framings signaled that these shots did not
belong to the same narrational level as the ‘normally’ shot scenes, while the dissolves and wipes—already
codified as indicating a time lapse—implied the compression of a considerable interval. Locked within an
‘ordinary’ context, the montage passages became codified as a symbolic shorthand, not a new way of seeing.
Early talkies soon began using the montage sequence to summarize a lengthy process. In The Dance of
Life (1929), a performer’s decline from success is rendered through canted angles of theater marquees,
prismatic shots of his hectic dissipation, and rotating shots of his binges, all linked by slow dissolves. Say It
With Songs (1929) includes a montage of the hero in prison, with his face singing in the center and
superimpositions of canted angles of prison routines; a later sequence shows a ticking clock with calendar
pages superimposed. In the montage sequence, the sound cinema had found its equivalent for the expository
title, ‘Time passes and brings many changes
Furthermore, decoration could make the montage a source of spectacle in its own right, enhancing
emotional and rhythmic effect. Good examples may be found in Flying Down to Rio (1933) and in Melody
Cruise (1933), in which montage runs wild. Montage became a rhetorical device used ‘to get over a
dramatic point in a minimum of footage and with maximum force.’19 Hollywood’s leading specialist,
Slavko Vorkapich, filled his montages with visual rodomontade, employing portentous symbolism (e.g., the
Furies in Crime Without Passion [19341) and a frantic editing pace (e.g., the opening of Meet John Doe
[1941]). Vorkapich’s ostentatious sequence in Maytime (1937), tracing the rise of an opera singer, seems to
be parodied in Susan Alexander’s decline in the opera montage of Citizen Kane (1941). No matter how
elaborate, montage introduced some discontinuity, but because it was confined to short bursts for narrow
purposes, the disjunctiveness was not a drawback; indeed, it was ideally suited to express momentary
disruption, as in the montage of the earthquake in San Francisco (1936). Moreover, since any
discontinuities were overridden by a unified musical passage, the montage sequence gave the film composer
a chance to write a short but integral piece. The French term itself connoted virtuosity and sophistication;
when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started an official magazine in 1939, the
publication was called Montage.
By the mid-1930s, when the Soviet films were better known, Hollywood began to articulate what it had
done with montage. Articles explaining Soviet film theory began to appear in professional journals. Karl
Freund pointed out that the very fast cutting of Soviet films was ‘adapted’ by American studios through the
technique of optical printing.20 Most self-consciously continental was Vorkapich, who justified his work by
appeal to the commonplaces of silent film theories of ‘pure cinema’ and who called the motion picture a
‘symphony’ in space and time. Echoing Eisenstein, Vorkapich claimed a behaviorist basis for montage: ‘It
is possible to stimulate a spectator into various psychological and physical reactions by means of certain
visual imitations coming from the screen.’21 But whereas Eisenstein celebrated the possibility of doing this
throughout the film and without use of narrative, Vorkapich insisted on the need to let the story determine
the film’s shape and to use montage chiefly in ‘transitional passages.’22 A feedback loop was closed: the
early Hollywood cinema’s use of rapid cutting for suspense initially influenced the Russian formulation of
montage, which was in turn revised and corrected for decades of use in Hollywood.23 To this day, the
classically constructed film has included orthodox montage sequences (albeit without dissolves); see, for
example, the arrival of the vacationers in Jaws (1974) or the packing of the ransom money in The Taking of
Pelham 123 (1973).
The case of film noir

Issues of transgression and subversion, stylization and realism, foreign influence and domestic genre
intersect in that body of work known as film noir. It is an extraordinarily amorphous body; critics have
defined it as a genre, a style, a movement, a cycle, even a tone or mood. Two respected critics find only
twenty-two films noirs; a recent book on the subject lists over two hundred and fifty. Another critic’s list
includes High Noon (1952) and 2001 (1968).24 The concept of motivation as we have been using it can help
clarify what is often regarded as the most deeply problematic group of films produced in Hollywood.
What is film noir? Not a genre. Producers and consumers both recognize a genre as a distinct entity;
nobody set out to make or see a film noir in the sense that people deliberately chose to make a Western, a
comedy, or a musical. Is film noir then a style? Critics have not succeeded in defining specifically noir
visual techniques (one that would include, say, Laura [1944] and Touch of Evil [1957]) or narrative
structure (one that would include policiers, melodramas, and historical films like Reign of Terror [1949]). The
problem resembles one in art history, that of defining ‘nonclassical’ styles. Gombrich reminds us that most
style terms—Gothic, mannerist, Baroque— originally characterized a new style solely by its repudiation of
a norm. Such terms of exclusion cannot be simply translated into a set of traits for the style in question
because the original epithet intended no more than negative characterization. (‘Gothic’ simply meant
‘barbarous.’) Historically, however, critics tend to take the term as a positive definition and to try to find the
essential traits of the style. As Gombrich points out:25
The cook may divide fungi into edible mushrooms and poisonous toadstools; these are the categories
that matter to him. He forgets, even if he ever cared, that there may be fungi which are neither edible
nor poisonous. But a botanist who based his taxonomy of fungi on these distinctions and then married
them to some other method of classification would surely fail to produce anything useful.
A look at the history of ‘film noir’ shows substantially the same process at work. Initially, the term served
less to define than to differentiate. In the summer and fall-of 1946, the French public saw a new sort of
American film. Years of occupation had withheld The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Double
Indemnity (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and The Lost Weekend
(1945). In November of 1946, La Revue du cinéma published Jean-Pierre Chartier’s article, ‘Les américains
aussi font des films “noirs” ’ (‘Americans Also Make Films “Noirs” ’). Chartier found these films to
resemble the brooding Quai des brumes (1938) and Pépé le moko (1937), works which the French called
films noirs.26 From the start, then, the American films noirs were defined chiefly by their difference from
the mainstream Hollywood product. But later critics, such as Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton,
began to search for traits that would constitute film noir as a unified grouping, or série.27 Since then, film
critics have continued to use ‘film noir’ as a constitutive category, forgetting that it emerged as what
Gombrich calls a term of exclusion. The consequence was the still-current dispute about what film noir
really ‘is.’ We might as easily, and as fruitlessly, ask what ‘the Baroque’ essentially is. The term accretes
meaning, or rather meanings, only from the history of criticism. This is not to say that the term is thereby
phantasmic or trivial, since once a critical tradition has introduced the term, filmmakers can take their cue
from the critics’ very struggle to define it positively. Borde and Chaumeton speak of French films noirs
influenced by the American sources, and recent years have seen the release of such films as Chinatown
(1974) and The Big Fix (1978), which clearly are responses to the critical canonization of film noir.
Thus we inherit a category constructed ex post facto out of a perceived resemblance between continental
crime melodramas and a few Hollywood productions. As a result, ‘film noir’ has functioned not to define a
coherent genre or style but to locate in several American films a challenge to dominant values. It is not a
trivial description of film noir to say that it simply indicates particular patterns of nonconformity within
Hollywood. This is why films of many different sorts can be considered to belong to ‘film noir.’
What are these patterns of nonconformity? In general, film noir has been considered to challenge the
classical Hollywood cinema in four ways.
1 An assault on psychological causality. The film noir protagonist often suffers internal conflict, ‘with an
existential awareness of his or her situation.’28 As Borde and Chaumeton put it, the classical
conventions of logical action, denned characters, and a psychologically stable hero are subverted by
film noir’s attractive killers, repellent cops, confused actions, gratuitous violence, and weary or
disoriented heroes.
2 A challenge to the prominence of heterosexual romance. The film noir heroine is sexually alluring but
potentially treacherous. The psychological uncertainty of the protagonist finds its counterpart in this
enigmatic characterization of the female. Christine Gledhill points out that the narration often compells
the hero to decide whether the woman fits the type or not. Instead of winning her as a romantic partner,
the hero finds her barring access to his goal or holding him in her power; at the limit, he may have to
kill her or die himself to break free.29
3 An attack on the motivated happy ending. The resolution of the plot often expresses the working of the
fate that has overseen the entire action; in this event, the film ends unhappily. Or, if that is too shocking,
the enforced happy ending comes to seem lame and tacked-on. How, ask Borde and Chaumeton, can
we be satisfied by the resoration of justice when the film has shown representatives of justice as
monstrously corrupt? ‘Is the disturbing effect of the film completely wiped out by the last five —
minutes?’30
4 A criticism of classical technique. According to Paul Schrader, film noir uses night-lighting, location
shooting, a ‘restless and unstable’ space, and tense compositions; such a style can even undercut
conventional middle-class themes.31 According to other critics, film noir’s visual style unsettles the
viewer in order to express the hero’s disorientation.32 For the same ends, film noir traces the
protagonist’s mental states by means of voice-over narration, flashbacks, and subjective point-of-view.
All of these devices are said to challenge the neutrality and ‘invisibility’ of classical style.
Such aspects of film noir have attracted critical attention because they attack certain American values
prominent in mainstream Hollywood cinema. But formally and stylistically, all four of film noir’s challenges
none the less adhere to specific and non-subversive conventions derived from crime literature and from
canons of realistic and generic motivation.
Chartier’s term film noir came from the phrase roman noir, used in the early 1940s to refer to hard-boiled
detective novels on the American model.33 This etymology is significant because every characteristic
narrative device of film noir was already conventional in American crime fiction and drama of the 1930s
and 1940s. Borde and Chaumeton correctly emphasize the crucial influence of hard-boiled detective fiction,
which had in the 1930s become more respectable with the commercial success of books by Dashiell
Hammett, James M.Cain, Raymond Chandler, and especially James Hadley Chase. One can even claim that
Hammett’s first four novels (1929–31) defined most of the conventions of noir detective films, including
first-person narration and expressionist subjectivity (e.g., the protagonist’s dream in Red Harvest [1929]).
By 1944, the hardboiled detective story had become conventional enough for Raymond Chandler to sum it
up in his celebrated essay, ‘The simple art of murder.’34 The evidence is clear: using the Alain Silver-Elizabeth
Ward list (disputable but no more arbitrary than any), we find that adaptations of hard-boiled novels
constitute almost 20 per cent of the films noirs made between 1941 and 1948. Another sub-genre of crime
literature, the ‘psychological thriller,’ underwent rejuvenation during the 1930s, in novels and plays by
Frances lies, Emlyn Williams, and Patrick Hamilton.35 The result was a series of films stressing abnormal
psychology and murder in a middle-class setting: Gaslight (1944, adapted from Hamilton’s successful play
Angel Street), Sleep My Love (1948), Laura (1944), The Big Clock (1946), and Secret Beyond the Door
(1948). The espionage thriller, made respectable during the late 1930s by Graham Greene and Eric Ambler,
was also quickly transposed into film, in such works as The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Journey into Fear
(1942), The Confidential Agent (1945), and The Ministry of Fear (1944).36 And the postwar vogue for semi-
documentary films owes something to the police-procedural novel in crime fiction, usually considered to
have emerged with Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945).
Clearly, the narrative ‘problems’ posed by films noirs are in fact conventions taken over by Hollywood
cinema from popular literature. The relativity of right and wrong, the city as a jungle of corruption and terror,
the solitary investigator walking down ‘mean streets’—such devices of the hard-boiled novels and
espionage tales were easily assimilated by the cinema. Similarly, film noir’s atmosphere of fear and peril,
psychological ambiguity, and abnormal mental states had already been conventionalized in psychological
thrillers.
The stylistic features of film noir are just as strongly motivated. Subjective effects (flashbacks, voice-
over commentary) were part of a general trend toward the representation of extreme psychological states.
Location shooting, encouraged by wartime limits on set construction and the ‘realism’ of combat
documentaries, became common after Kiss of Death (1947) and Naked City (1948).37 Cinematographers
began to employ ‘mood lighting’—typically, low-key lighting. In normal filming, the ratio of key to fill light
was 4:1 (key plus fill to fill alone). To light low-key, say 5:1, cinematographers usually shot with normal
key and less fill, then adjusted the negative during processing or printing to bring out shadow detail.38 In
extreme cases, cinematographers used no fill light at all. Such ‘weird lighting’ was often considered realistic
in contrast to three-point studio glamour lighting, and the effect could be plausibly motivated as coming
from a single, harsh source—say, a street light or a feeble lamp (see fig 7.1). But here again, realistic
motivation operated as an alibi. Low-key lighting was already a staple of certain genres (horror films,
policiers), especially in scenes treating crime or morbid psychology (see fig 7.2). It is possible that crime
literature also contributed to noir lighting effects. John Baxter cites this passage from Cornell Woolrich’s
Black Path of Fear (1944):39
We went down a new alley…ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the
interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway…. The bars of light made
cicatrices across us…. For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot.
One can even find film noir visual conventions in 1940s comic strips like Dick Tracy and The Spirit. The
Germanic influence upon Hollywood lighting during the 1920s and 1930s re-emerged in films noirs because
current conceptions of realism came to reinforce existing generic norms.
The case of film noir can be solved by investigating realistic and generic motivation. Mystery writers had
already turned away from the orthodox detective story toward a new ‘realism’; this new realism in turn
revivified certain film genres. Moreover, the new forms were better suited to classical cinema than the
cerebral detective puzzle had been; they promised action and atmosphere. The crucial point, however, is
that formally and technically these noir films remained codified: a minority practice, but a unified one.
These films blend causal unity with a new realistic and generic motivation, and the result no more subverts
the classical film than crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel.
The reappearing author

The most influential argument for differentiation within Hollywood cinema has been advanced by auteur
critics. To choose a body of work attached to a director’s signature and to claim it as individual, personal,
even subversive is the most common way to show that the Hollywood cinema is not monolithic. And auteur
critics are right; like ‘film noir,’ the category of ‘authorship’ does locate important differences within the
classical style. But we need to recognize several different senses in which any film can be said to have an
‘author.’
The author can be thought of as a person, the actual agent (or agents) creating the text. Traditionally, this
has raised problems of attribution, authentication, the relevance of biographical data and statements of
intention, etc. In mass-production cinema, which has traditionally involved collaborative labor, scholars
have found it difficult to assign authorship to any individual. Hollywood’s own discourse has tended to
recognize the innovative worker (as Chapter 9 will show in detail), and that worker can sometimes be
granted the status of ‘author’ (e.g., Griffith, von Stroheim, possibly Welles). But identifying an innovative
worker is seldom a relevant textual factor; however Vernon Walker’s special effects for Citizen Kane
(1941) might be praised within the trade, his work has acquired no authorial status in the realm of reception
or criticism.
The author can also be thought of as a social code. Here the name of the person is invested with
ideological, even mythological status. ‘Picasso’ is more than a man; the name connotes a complex set of
artistic techniques, historical epochs, and social attitudes.’40 In this sense, the author is constructed in and
through the social institution of the specific art. Hollywood cinema has seldom constructed ‘authors’ as part
of its institution. With rare exceptions (Disney, Hitchcock, and directors who are also stars, such as Chaplin
and Jerry Lewis), the Hollywood cinema does not give directors, or even producers, authorial status.
Consider by contrast the European art cinema, which has created a complicated set of processes (criticism, film
festivals, retrospectives) to fix ‘Bergman’ or ‘Fellini’ as trademarks no less vivid than ‘Picasso.’
Both the author as empirical agent and as institutional trademark stand outside the texts themselves. We
can also think of the author as a name we give to certain operations of the art work. When we ask about the
director’s ‘attitude’ toward the action or speak of authorial manipulation or deception, we are identifying
the author to some degree with the narrational process. Thus in a film one could sometimes equate the
‘narrator’ with the author.
The politique des auteurs went further, seeking narrational constants in many works possessing the same
signature. This constitutes a fourth sense of ‘authorship.’ Insofar as the auteur critic is not simply talking
intuitively about ‘personality,’ he or she is committed to the unearthing of common stylistic or thematic
strategies within a body of work. ‘Unearthing’ is the right word because the ‘invisibility’ of Hollywood
technique, the director who claims only to be a storyteller, and the aggrandizement of rules all tend to
downplay the authorial process.
The following pages assume that identifying the ‘author’ with the narrational process, either within a film
or across several films, is the approach most pertinent to the history of film style. If we think of authorship
as characteristic processes of narration, we shall find that authorial presence in the Hollywood cinema is
usually consonant with classical norms.
It would be possible to locate authorial differences by using two of the three levels of stylistic description
I have already proposed. Authors are most readily characterized by the recurrence of particular technical
devices— Wyler’s deep focus, Von Sternberg’s cluttered compositions. Since the classical style is a
paradigm, a filmmaker may habitually and systematically choose one alternative over another. Whereas
John Ford might customarily stage an action around a doorway, Sirk might stage it in front of mirrors. At
the second level, that of formal systems, an author’s work may also reveal distinctive manipulations of
causality, time, and space. One common mark of the auteur film is ambiguity about character psychology.
Welles’s Citizen Kane is the locus classicus of this practice, but similar strategies are at work in the films of
Hitchcock, Preminger, and Fritz Lang. It is equally possible to define authorial uniqueness by virtue of a
distinctive treatment of time and space. Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1939) accelerates plot duration by
compressing story time, while Von Sternberg prolongs duration through static poses, slowed conversations,
and lengthy dissolves which no longer convey simple ellipses but graphically superimpose two discrete
story actions. Hollywood auteurs have also presented a rich variety of spatial systems, ranging from
Preminger’s sober, long-held two-shot to Lubitsch’s fastidious breakdown of the space into revealing
objects and expressions. Such variety will not surprise us if we recall Leonard Meyer’s point: ‘For any
specific style there is a finite number of rules, but there is an indefinite number of possible strategies for
realizing or instantiating such rules. And for every set of rules there are probably innumerable strategies
that have never been instantiated.’41
There is, as Meyer’s remark suggests, also a limit to authorial uniqueness in Hollywood. At the most
abstract level of generality, narrative causality dominates the film’s spatial and temporal systems. We have
already seen how genre, spectacle, technical virtuosity, and other factors encourage narrative to slip a bit
from prominence, only to allow the narration to compensate for this slip by adjusting its overall structure. In
a similar fashion, authorial reshifting of the hierarchy of systems can only be intermittent. The modernist
cinema and the avant-garde can make temporal and spatial systems vie for prominence with narrative
causality and even override it; Bresson, Tati, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Snow, Frampton, et al. can in various ways
problematize narrative, making overt narration a pervasive presence. But there is little chance in Hollywood
of what Burch calls ‘organic dialectics,’ the possibility of using purely stylistic parameters to determine the
shape of the film (including its narrative).42 When George Melford directed East of Borneo, he could not
have made Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, although the latter contains almost no shot that is not in the
former; Cornell’s film creates a play of spatial and temporal relations among elements discovered in but
freed from a narrational matrix. In the classical film, such a play cannot permanently displace story
causality from its privileged role.
This is to say that overt narration, the presence of a self-conscious ‘author’ not motivated by realism or
genre or story causality, can only be intermittent and fluctuating in the classical film. We have already seen
that the classical film contains certain codified moments when narration can be foregrounded: the beginning
and ending of the film, beginnings and endings of scenes, montage sequences, and certain (usually
generically motivated) moments within scenes. The self-conscious, omniscient, and suppressive narration of
the film comes forward usually at such points. To some extent the auteur, either within the film or across
films, can be identified with characteristic treatments of the intrusive narrational moments. For instance,
expository inter-titles always acknowledge a certain omniscience on the narration’s part; the film may play
down this omniscience (as in a majority practice) or play it up to create a specific kind of narration
(brooding and bardic in Griffith’s films, cynical and worldly in Lubitsch’s). Similarly, the opening is a
particularly self-conscious moment in the film, so one may use it to erect false impressions (as Lubitsch does
in So This is Paris) and thus emphasize the viewer’s dependence upon the narration. The author may not
intrude when we expect it: Hawks’s or Cukor’s narration almost never lapses into self-consciousness or
overt suppressiveness. Or the author may intrude more often than is usual, as in the films of Lang,
Hitchcock, and Welles.
The authorial possibilities within classical narration may be usefully illustrated by the work of two auteurs
—Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. Hitchcock’s narration capitalizes on every permissible chance to
display self-consciousness, flaunt its superior knowledge, and mark its suppressive operations. This takes
place in two ways. On the one hand, the narration confines us to a single character’s point-of-view to a
greater degree than is normal; this is reinforced by Hitchcock’s unusual insistence upon optical subjectivity.
On the other hand, blatant narrational intrusions freely comment on the action (symbolic inserts like the
waltzing couples in Shadow of a Doubt, revelatory camera movements, unexpected angles and sound
overlaps). There is thus a tension between what a character knows and what the narration tells. But the
narration must never tell all; again and again, the narration points out its suppressive operations. When in
Shadow of a Doubt Uncle Charlie sees the telltale newspaper story, the narration could show it to us; but the
narration does not do so until little Charlie discovers the story in the library. When in Psycho Norman Bates
climbs the stair to his mother’s room, the camera tentatively follows him up and cranes back to a bird’s-eye
view just outside the doorsill, self-consciously displaying its deliberate withholding of information. By
exploiting certain polar possibilities of the classical schemata of narration, Hitchcock’s authorial persona
oscillates between being modest and omnicommunicative within very narrow limits (i.e., presenting a single
character’s point-of-view) and flaunting its omniscience by suppressing crucial information.
It is exactly between these poles that Preminger’s narration lives. Preminger planes classical narration
down to a flat, almost inexpressive ground. In films like Fallen Angel (1944) or Daisy Kenyon (1947), a
poker-faced author presents contradictory or enigmatic character behavior without supplying causal
explanations. Preminger’s reluctance to use even shot/reverse-shot cutting can be seen as a symptom of the
narration’s unwillingness to specify character psychology through reaction shots. To this end, the films
forego both character subjectivity and narrational commentary, preferring instead to shift point-of-view
between scenes, moving from one combination of characters to another. Two such different authorial styles
are the results of narration and not of ‘realism’ or of ‘round’ versus ‘flat’ characters; as V.F.Perkins
remarks, ‘Hitchcock tells stories as if he knows how they end, Preminger gives the impression of witnessing
them as they unfold’43 Yet both auteurs remain within classical bounds: Hitchcock cannot always keep us
aware of his narrational presence, whereas Preminger will often claim his droit du seigneur at the end of a
film by an overt camera movement.
Historically, the degree of authorial intervention has fluctuated. Griffith is probably the first director
systematically to foreground narration, a stratagem most clearly seen in his early features. In The Birth of a
Nation (1915), Griffith synthesizes many contemporary but sporadic and partial forms into a coherent
narrational process. The film becomes a mosaic of events to be interpreted by means of the historical
argument and dramatic parallels urged by the omniscient narration. Moreover, the expository inter-titles
register a specific voice issuing from the film— one which analyzes history, certifies verisimilitude (some
titles have footnotes), anticipates action, and poetically meditates upon the images (one title refers to ‘War’s
peace’). In a final beatific vision of peace, the omniscient narration carries us to a divine perspective outside
history. Even this omniscient narration, however, is not always visible; most scenes rely upon covert,
diegetically motivated narration.
Many of Griffith’s devices became fashionable. At least one director, Erich von Stroheim, continued
Griffith’s search for a novelistic cinema that would make the narration quite overt, and in Greed (1924), a
Naturalistic causal scheme attempted to eliminate individual psychological motivation. But, as released, the
film remains an unresolved mixture of authorial intervention (in certain camera angles and in the symbolic
inserts), expressionistic subjectivity (in the dreams and fantasies of the junk dealer), and compositionally
motivated psychological narration. Most of the great Hollywood directors of the 1920s—F.W.Murnau,
Lubitsch, Ford, Buster Keaton, Borzage—utilize authorial presence in various ways, but none displaced the
sovereignty of story in the classical model. After the coming of sound, the bounds of difference were firmly
set.
The intermittent presence of the author in classical films contributed to the very shape that auteur
criticism has taken. Auteur criticism has relied almost completely upon thematic interpretation, consistently
minimizing film form and technique. The typical thematic interpretation of an auteur film commences by
summarizing the story action, moves to a psychological description of the characters and abstract thematic
oppositions, and buttresses the reading with a rundown of privileged motifs that reinforce the themes. The
very form of such essays confirms the fluctuation of classical narration. In each film, the auteur critic
invariably turns up great swatches of the classical style—sequences, even whole films, whose visual and
sonic organization cannot be thematized. Even auteurs, that is, spend a lot of time obeying the rules.
An auteur critic might argue in response that by looking at several films signed by the same director one
could find traces of the author in aspects which an analysis of a single film might consider simply
conventional. This is why auteur criticism implies, as Peter Wollen puts it, ‘an operation of decipherment; it
reveals authors where none had been seen before.’44 Auteur criticism tries, in effect, to make aspects of the
single film into narrational systems of a larger text, that of the oeuvre. But no auteur critic has in practice
shown that, say, the shot/reverse-shot patterns or the usage of lighting across all of Sirk’s films constitute a
distinct handling of the classical paradigm; what stands out in an individual film is what stands out in the
work as a whole (e.g., a tendency toward blatant symbolism for some purposes). Wollen does indicate that
‘noise’ from other codes (genres, studios, technical staff) blocks the critic from finding a consistent authorial
presence in the Hollywood film: ‘Any single coding has to compete, certainly in the cinema, with noise from
signals coded differently.’45 The most powerful of those signals, I am asserting, is the classical tradition
itself.
The intermittence of authorial presence works to reaffirm classical norms. Because the classical paradigm
encourages redundancy, the director can choose how to be redundant. By showing us how a particular range
of choices can be organized systematically, the auteur revivifies the norm and makes us appreciate its depth
and range. In His Girl Friday, Hawks pushes temporal continuity in a new direction, thus reaffirming it as a
value. Every variant upon classical space testifies to the roominess of the original paradigm. When
Hitchcock exploits optical point-of-view for surprise effect, we recognize new possibilities in such a simple
classical device. Different handlings of genres—Sirk’s and Preminger’s of the melodrama, Berkeley’s and
Minnelli’s of the musical, Keaton’s and Lloyd’s of the action comedy, Hawks’s and Sam Fuller’s of the war
film —only confirm the genre’s fertility. In such ways, conceptions of authorship enable us to appreciate
the richness of the classical cinema.
The fluctuating quality of authorial presence in the Hollywood film suggests that radical disruptions crop
up rarely. Genuine breakdowns in classical narration are abrupt and fleeting, surrounded by conventional
passages. In Hollywood cinema, there are no subversive films, only subversive moments. For social and
economic reasons, no Hollywood film can provide a distinct and coherent alternative to the classical model.
Nothing in any Hollywood auteur film rivals the idiosyncratic systems of space or time operating in the
work of Dreyer, Bresson, Mizoguchi, Straub/ Huillet, Ozu, Resnais, or Godard. In such works, narration is
pervasive, constantly foregrounded, because these modernist works create unique internal stylistic norms.
Even the most deviant Hollywood films, however, must ground themselves in the external norms of group
style. Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is certainly one of the most deviant films ever made in Hollywood since it
attacks several fundamental classical assumptions (e.g., the psychological identity of characters, the role
accorded to narration). Yet Psycho remains closer to His Girl Friday than to Diary of a Country Priest
(1951) or Pierrot le fou (1965). Really problematic Hollywood films become limit-texts, works which,
while remaining traditionally legible, dramatize some limits of that legibility. They do not, however, posit
thoroughgoing alternatives. So powerful is the classical paradigm that it regulates what may violate it.
It follows that authorial ‘disruption’ of classical norms can throw the spectator off-balance only
momentarily. The classical paradigm supplies a set of hypotheses, ranked as alternatives and in order of
likelihood, and the spectator uses those hypotheses in following the film. The narration can trigger one story
hypothesis and deliver on it, or delay delivery, or confirm the hypothesis in a fresh way; all these are
variants which do not drastically challenge the reliability of the narration. The classical spectator is somewhat
more sorely tried if the narrator is proven to be fundamentally unreliable. Meir Sternberg points out that
some narrations create a firm primacy effect only to demolish it or qualify it.46 When this occurs in classical
filmmaking, it is usually motivated generically, especially for mystery or comedy. Chapter 3 pointed out
how the expository title in The Maltese Falcon undermines the primacy effect. A comic deflation of first
impressions occurs in the opening of Trouble in Paradise (1932), when the sophisticated wealthy couple is
slowly revealed to be a pair of hardened thieves. On those rare occasions when this rise and fall of first
impressions is not motivated generically, it can have genuinely disruptive consequences. It is worth looking
at one instance in detail.
Like Psycho, Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) is widely recognized as a deviant film. The film’s
disruptions arise from a play with our expectations about the limited and intermittent intrusions of classical
narration. Specifically, we assume that narrational manipulations will be marked as such when they appear,
as Hitchcock’s camera movements are. In Lang’s film, however, we do not notice authorial intrusions when
they occur; only later, when our inferential steps have gone astray, do we retrace our path and realize how
we jumped to conclusions. Lang thus foregrounds narration ex post facto. To make us run ahead of the
evidence, You Only Live Once draws on basic assumptions of causal and generic motivation and encourages
us to assume that, given classical narration’s omnipresence, no crucial action taken by the protagonist will be
withheld from us. The narration smoothes our inferential path still more by creating unusually strong
continuity between scenes: a dissolve from parcels to the heroine’s suitcase as she packs for her honeymoon;
the heroine saying, ‘Gas,’ followed by a shot of the hero pulling into a gas station. Moreover, Lang’s first
scenes quietly signal the film’s obedience to the convention of starting a scene by tracking back from an
object. All of these procedures force us to jump to conclusions during one central scene.
Eddie, an ex-convict, is jobless and frustrated. At the end of one scene, the camera shows us Eddie’s hat,
then Eddie eyeing a gun. In the next scene, we see Eddie’s hat on the seat of a car, and the camera pans to
show a man’s face encased in a gas mask. The man robs an armored car and flees. In the rain, the truck
crashes. Then Eddie, drenched by the rain, staggers into his home and tells his wife, Jo: ‘The bottom’s
dropped out of everything.’
Cause and effect, point-of-view, continuity hooks from scene to scene, and details in scene openings all
encourage us to infer that Eddie pulled the robbery. Just as important, no information has contradicted these
inferences. But Eddie now explains that his hat was stolen and someone else robbed the car. Lang’s
narration has concealed the real criminal from us by trading upon the assumption that foregrounded
narration will be immediately noticeable; as we have seen, classical narration usually does not distract us
from gaps. In You Only Live Once, however, continuity devices link trivial items, concealing crucial events
without any cue that something is being concealed. Indeed, so strong are first impressions in this case that
even Eddie’s explanation to Jo does not resolve all doubts about his guilt; the possibility that he may be
lying creates a lingering simultaneous hypothesis that is not ruled out until the police discover the real
robber’s body many scenes later. (To make this even more complex, the film’s generic identity is dubious;
if it belongs to the ‘they-made-me-a-criminal’ sub-genre, Eddie is likely to be legally guilty, even if he is a
victim of circumstances.)
The purpose of creating such an unreliable narration is evidently to compell the viewer to judge Eddie as
unfairly as do all the respectable citizens who brand him incorrigible. More generally, Lang’s American
films frequently construct a ‘paranoid’ spectator through a narration that brutally and abruptly manipulates
point-of-view in order to conceal gaps and force the viewer to false conclusions. An analysis of this process
is indispensible to any account of Lang as an ‘author.’
In Western music, the classical style creates dynamism by departing from and returning to a stable tonal
center. Something like this dynamism appears in the Hollywood auteur film. The auteur film draws its
sustenance from the classical base, which is visible in the film. The film mixes narrational modes—some
systems operating according to classical probabilities, others intermittently foregrounded as less probable
and more distinctive. Far from being a fault or flaw, this mixture can be a source of aesthetic value to those
prepared to perceive it. Most often, an idiosyncratic exploration of causality, time, or space works to
reaffirm the norm by revealing the suppleness and range of the paradigm. At rarer moments, a deviant
narrational process can be glimpsed. We see the norm afresh, understand its functions better, recognize
previously untapped possibilities in it, and—on a few occasions—reflect upon how our trust in the norm can
mislead us. The Hollywood auteur film offers a particular pleasure and knowledge: the spectator comes to
recognize norm and deviation oscillating, perhaps wrestling, within the same art work, that work being
actively contained by the pressures of tradition.
Norms, subversion, conditions of production

Any account of the classical Hollywood film as an ideological product, a representational commodity, must
recognize the specific formal operations through which classical principles reinforce dominant ideological
positions. Hollywood has assimilated the challenge of avantgarde styles and of apparently deviant cycles
such as film noir. Certainly the stress upon goal-oriented individuals, upon character psychology as desire,
upon an ‘objective’ and inflexible story order, upon a space derived from theatrical scenography—all these
factors cluster around assumptions about the nature of social existence. Narrative resolution can work to
transcend the social conflict represented in the film, often by displacing it onto the individual (the hero torn
between duty and personal urges), the couple (the romance-plot taking precedence over the pretextaction),
the family, or the communal good.47 Recent Marxist critiques of Hollywood cinema have demonstrated its
persistent habit of reconciling social antagonisms by shifting the emphasis from history and institutions to
individual causes and effects, where ethical and even religious moral terms can operate.48 Spectacle can be
used to elide or wish away uncomfortable contradictions. Classical temporal continuity between episodes
can deny the audience time to reflect about alternatives to the events presented. Adorno even criticized the
montage sequence for dissolving humanity into prefabricated segments, cheating the human out of lived
duration.49 Our examination of classical narration has shown that it accustoms spectators to a limited and
highly probable range of expectations. Classical narration’s reliability habituates the viewer to accepting
regulated impersonality and sourceless authority.
At the same time, however, we cannot denounce the Hollywood style as uniformly suspect. Narration can,
however momentarily, break down the ideological unity of the classical film. There can be no typology of
such breakdowns, although all of the analyses in the last six chapters will suggest where trouble might
occur. If a model is needed, the arbitrary happy ending serves as well as any.
‘A good director can contrive a happy ending that leaves you dissatisfied. You know that something is
wrong—it just can’t end that way.’50 Fassbinder’s remark indicates one extreme edge of ‘subversion’ within
the classical text, whether it be film noir or film d’auteur. The classical ending, both as resolution and
epilogue, tends to usher in the narration as self-conscious and omniscient presence. Yet even this overt
narration should harmonize with the story action and generic demands. If the ending, especially the happy
ending, is inadequately motivated, then the film creates a possibly productive split of story from narration.
By including an ending that runs counter to what went before, deviant narration indicates certain
extratextual, social, historical limits to its authority. Films like Suspicion, Meet John Doe, Woman in the
Window, The Wrong Man (1957), and How Green Was My Valley (1941) tend to foreground the arbitrary
conventionality of the ending and can even raise ideological questions. The cursory resolution or epilogue
can put on display the requirements of social institutions (censorship agencies, studios) which claim to act
as delegates of audience desires. The happy ending may be there, but to some extent the need for it is
criticized.51
Conflicts of various conventions, operating at given historical moments, can create such problematic
moments in Hollywood texts. We can understand those moments only by recognizing the norms operating
in the Hollywood cinema and by being alert for glimpses, within the film, of another cinema, a cinema of
multiplicity and formal tensions not finally resolved into a ‘classical’ unity.
It is not enough to locate principles of unity and alternatives to those principles. An adequate historical
account of the classical Hollywood cinema must see the style as related to a specific mode of film
production. Just as we must scrutinize form and style carefully, we must go beyond a general dismissal of
Hollywood as an assembly-line operation. It is true that the American film industry does resemble certain
modes of manufacture, but we must remember that art works have been produced by collective labor for
centuries (e.g., Raphael’s frescoes, academic painting in the nineteenth century). Marx and Engels point out
that artistic creation was always linked to general and specific modes of production:52
Raphael as much as any artist was determined by the technical advances made in art before him, by
the organization of society and division of labor in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labor in
all the countries with which his locality had intercourse….
In proclaiming the uniqueness of work in science and art, Stirner adopts a position far inferior to
that of the bourgeoisie. At the present time [1845–7] it has already been found necessary to organize
this ‘unique’ activity. Horace Vernet would not have had time to paint even a tenth of his pictures if
he regarded them as works which ‘only this Unique person is capable of producing.’ In Paris, the
great demand for vaudevilles and novels brought about the organization of work for their production,
organization which at any rate yields something better than its ‘unique’ competitors in Germany.
While the culture industry has carried this tendency further, we shall see that Hollywood’s division of labor,
grounded in serial manufacture, still remains qualitatively different from assembly-line production.
The classical style can be linked to its conditions of production much more precisely than is generally
acknowledged. Every cut testifies to narration, but every cut also implies some sort of work. The principles
of a unified narrative both demanded and arose from a filmmaking process based upon the scenario; stylistic
continuity has depended upon a ‘continuity’ script and a ‘continuity girl.’ The division of the film into shots
and scenes bears the traces of divisions within the labor process. The repetition of camera set-ups so
important for classical spatial orientation also mirrors a rapid, economical production procedure that
depends upon shooting ‘out of continuity.’53 Soft-focus backgrounds in medium shots can save money in
set construction.54 Even authorial differences, those systematic choices within the stylistic paradigm, can be
translated back into production procedures; alternative schemata correspond to concrete choices available to
the filmmakers, and the limits upon those schemata parallel the work options open at any specific historical
juncture.
For a specific example, consider once more the montage sequence. It not only fulfilled stylistic functions;
it had the virtue of economy. Action too expensive to shoot as a scene could be conveyed by montage, thus
saving ‘both the budget and the continuity.’55 Cheaper films relied upon the montage because they could
draw on stock footage. We cannot say that the montage sequence was used simply because it was cheap, since
it would have been even cheaper to use an expository title. Neither can we say, however, that the montage
would not have been used if it had not been amenable to budgetary constraints. The film industry built the
montage sequence into its production practices. Studios began to script such sequences carefully and to create
production units specializing in them (e.g., Donald Siegel’s unit at Warner Bros).56 Once the stylistic device
had proven its narrational virtues, it was rationalized economically.
In such ways, the classical norms became important causes of and guidelines for the organization of
production. The remainder of this book is devoted to showing how the classical mode of filmic
representation both sustained and was sustained by the development of a specific mode of film production.
Part Two
The Hollywood mode of production to 1930

JANET STAIGER
8
The Hollywood mode of production: its conditions of existence
Introduction
The making of a product—particularly when it is a film—can sometimes fascinate us as much as the product
itself. Rumors of offscreen affairs between the stars create auxiliary dramas and, when the film is seen, provide
two plots for the price of one. Fascinating, too, are accounts of fabulous extravagance and ingenuity: 35,000
extras, real cream baths on the sets, multimillion-dollar location shooting ruined by hurricanes, dangerous
stunt work actually performed by the hero or heroine. Part of the fascination must be that these are
presented as true stories. In a wide-spread contagion they fascinate both those who worship Hollywood, its
aura, its glamour, and those who condemn it. It infects film critics and historians as well, few of whom
suspect themselves to be colleagues of Rona Barrett. Nor is this book immune. But we might ask questions
about the implications of those stories, what they do tell us about Hollywood production practices,
including, in fact, the reasons for generating such stories.
We want to know more about Hollywood production practices primarily because of the films that group
of filmmakers created. Hollywood films and their stars have been a source of pleasure for us. Often we use
that term, ‘the Hollywood film,’ as if we know exactly what it means. Analyzing the classical Hollywood
cinema as a group style is the work of this entire book. Part One has indicated that this concept has a valid
claim for a concrete historical existence as a group style. By systematically surveying typical films, we have
been able to verify and refine that group style as a historical film practice. If the similarities among the
Hollywood films cannot be attributed to accident, we must account for the uniformity.
The purpose of this part is to ground the film practices of Hollywood in the particular historical situation
of their making. I assume that because production practices allowed the films to look and sound the way
they did, we need to understand the production practices, how and why those practices were what they
were. As noted in the Preface, Raymond Williams has outlined the question: ‘We have to discover the
nature of a practice and then its conditions.’ We need to understand that the production of meaning is not
separate from its economic mode of production nor from the instruments and techniques which individuals
use to form materials so that meaning results. Furthermore, the production of meaning occurs in history; it
is not without real changes in time. This suggests that we need to establish the conditions of the existence of
this film practice, the relations among the conditions, and an explanation for their changes.
Some historians have already theorized what the conditions of existence of a film practice would include.
Jean-Louis Comolli has pointed out the need to consider a socio-economic base, the ideological result of
that base, and technology as an effect of both. He would include, as well, the influence of other signifying
practices besides the medium of film. By using the term ‘signifying practices,’ Comolli stresses that film is
90 THE HOLLYWOOD MODE OF PRODUCTION TO 1930
a production of meaning, a work which, as an art, is not reducible to an ideology, but is a sociohistorical
practice with an ideological function. As a signifying practice, the material specificity of the medium has to
be considered, that it can exceed any communicative meaning. Any film is a site of the interrelations,
reinforcements, and contradictions of these terms at that time.1
In a somewhat different version, John Ellis has constructed four sorts of conditions of a film practice: the
ideological (which includes various forms of visual representation as well as narrative developments, and so
forth), the economic, the political, and the technological. Unlike Comolli, Ellis, and more recent theorists,
do not privilege the socio-economic as a basis causing any ‘superstructure’ of ideology and technology.
Rather, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has suggested, the history of cinema needs to be posed as ‘immersed in a
series of histories,’ the histories of economy, technology, politics, ideology/ representation, and the
unconscious. For Nowell-Smith, histories do not accumulate but become the terrain of possibilities. Finally,
Ellis stresses that production and stylistic practices cannot be seen as necessarily the result of these histories:
‘The history of cinema cannot be read off from its conditions of existence.’ By this, Ellis means that, for
instance, ‘the existence of a particular form of factory production did not “make” the studio develop its
studio system, though it did provide one model for securing the reproduction of capital involved in mass
cinema.’2
It is this latter course which most closely typifies my position. While economic practices are an important
condition of existence for Hollywood’s production practices, equally significant was the film industry’s
commitment to particular ideological/signifying practices such as those typified by the group style
examined in Part One. Both practices were part of a socio-political formation which also often influenced
their construction (e.g., instances of censorship, current social debates, state intervention in labor relations,
patent and copyright formulations). These practices, as well, were influenced by other media both in terms
of their economic practices (e.g., systems of production, distribution, and exhibition for theater, vaudeville,
side shows) and their ideological/signifying practices (e.g., narrative structures, systems of constructing
meaning). Yet as Ellis suggests, the conditions of existence must also be seen as internal to the industry.
Once initiated, the industry generated its own economic and ideological/signifying practices that interacted
with practices in adjacent industries.
Moreover, this commitment to particular practices was not due to some essentialist ‘force’ but rather to
specifiable discourses discussing, describing, and validating these practices. These discourses appeared
throughout the institutions within and connected to the film industry. This part will develop their historical
construction and context.
This part will also show that these discourses and practices were the conditions of the existence of the
particular mode of production. Thus, rather than considering Hollywood’s mode only as the historical
conditions allowing a group style to exist, we must also see production practices as an effect of the group
style, as a function permitting those films to look and sound as they did while simultaneously adhering to a
particular economic practice. The circularity needs concrete explanation.
No film historian has ever questioned that the American film industry was an instance of the economic
system of capitalism. Films’ manufacturers intended to produce films to make a profit. But capitalism has
changed over the past eighty-five years. The implications of these changes have to be analyzed. In addition,
many people have noted that the production practices were an instance of, as Ellis puts it, ‘a particular form
of factory production.’ Now we need to specify what that form of factory production was, how it affected the
dominant production practices, and why and how it changed during subsequent years. Among other things,
to the present, the organization of the US film industry has utilized six kinds of management structures and
after 1907, film production increasingly subdivided its work into more and more specialities to handle new
technologies and increased output. Furthermore, many of Hollywood’s production practices result from a
THE HOLLYWOOD MODE OF PRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE 91
tension in the economic practices: a movement toward standardizing the product for efficient, economical
mass production and a simultaneous movement toward differentiating the product as the firms bid
competitively for a consumer’s disposable income. This tension helps explain why Hollywood film style
remained so stable through the years and still manifested minor changes.
However, equally significant in the construction of production practices were ideological/ signifying
practices. The organization of this part may imply that the economic practices are the more potent
explanation for the mode of production. While in the last instance economic practices may have been
determinant, this part will stress that ideological/signifying practices continually influenced the necessity to
divide labor and to divide it in its particular configuration. Here we have to understand the intertwining of
determinants. A very particular group style became the film practice for Hollywood, and this did not exist in
toto in 1896; in fact, it was a result of a process of movements among alternative practices, culminating
around 1917 in the style that finally characterized Hollywood’s films. (See Part Three.) What is most
revealing is that the mode of production constructed was by no means the cheapest filmmaking procedure.
Take, for instance, editing. By the 1920s, the post-shooting phase of production not only involved a film
editor but also an assistant editor (to keep track of thousands of pieces of film), a writer (to construct
additional bits of narrative information and dialogue for intertitles), and an elaborate system of paperwork
(including a continuity script, notes taken during shooting by a script secretary, notes from a cameraman’s
assistant, and written directions from producers and directors.) In the balance between economical
production and a presumed effect on the film, the latter won out. Thus, while economic practices helped
produce a divided labor system of filmmaking, in many cases, ideological/ signifying practices influenced
how the firms divided that labor.
Technology enters here as a result of not only scientific developments (another history) but of both these
economic and ideological/signifying practices. On the one hand, we shall find that technological changes in
the industry increased production economies, differentiated products for competitive market positions, and
‘improved’ the product. On the other hand, technological change had to be accommodated within both
production and film practices. That Hollywood was able to do so is attributable to the ways in which the
industry developed its technologies and assimilated those changes. (See Parts Four and Six.)
Finally, what was occurring was not a result of a Zeitgeist or immaterial forces. The sites of the
distribution of these practices were material: labor, professional, and trade associations, advertising
materials, handbooks, film reviews. These institutions and their discourses were mechanisms to formalize
and disperse descriptive and prescriptive analyses of the most efficient production practices, the newest
technologies, and the best look and sound for the films. It is with these terms, then, that we can construct a
history of the conditions of the existence of US film production practices.
A mode of production: initial definitions

Understanding the Hollywood mode of production requires analyzing what factors are involved in its
organization and the relationship of those factors to each other. (‘Mode of production’ will refer specifically
to production practices. The ‘mode’ is distinct from the ‘industry’ which is the economic structure and
conduct of the particular companies which produced, distributed, and exhibited the films. For a brief history
of the industry, see Appendices B and C.) A dynamic relationship— each element affects and influences
each of the others. Generally, three elements will be referred to in this relationship: 1) the labor force, 2) the
means of production, and 3) the financing of production.
This concept of a mode of production comes from Karl Marx. As Marx puts it: ‘In the social production
of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations
of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.’ In
his writings, Marx outlined various prior modes of production but concentrated his analyses on capitalism.3
The first term, labor force, includes all workers involved directly and indirectly in the production of the
films or the production of physical means to make them. In cinema, these workers include cameramen,
scriptwriters, stagehands, lens-makers, producers, breakaway-prop-makers, and so on.
The fact that these workers are not labeled by proper names indicates one aspect of this mode: it is
organized by the work functions, not the identity of individuals. In addition, we all know that the
breakaway-prop-maker, while a contributor to the final product, has a lot less to say about how a film will
look and sound than will a scriptwriter or cameraman—who in turn will have different things to say about
the film than will a producer. A hierarchical and structural arrangement of control over subordinate
and separate work functions and hence, input into the product, is also a characteristic of the labor force. A
system of management controls the execution of the work. The mode assigns work functions to each key
management position, making the worker in that position responsible for supervising part of the total labor
process.
The second term, the means of production, includes all physical capital related to the production of the
commodity. Generally, the means of production consists of the physical aspects of a company such as its
buildings, its sets and paints and glue, its costumes. A very particular part of the means of production for
filmmaking is its technology, its tools and materials (cameras, film stock, lighting equipment). Technology
also implies technique: the methods of use of those tools and materials. Thus, the cameraman’s placement
of an arc lamp is a concrete example of one of the relationships between the labor force and the means of
production and, hence, part of the history of the mode.4
The third term is the financing of the production. In a capitalist firm, individual persons and other
companies supply capital to a legal entity (the firm) which purchases labor power and physical capital. The
purpose of providing capital is to make a profit, usually to maximize the profit. Some historians have argued
that different forms of financing affected the films; we will examine that issue in Chapter 24. Ownership of
a firm is a separate concept from the work function of managing a company. At times ownership and
management will be congruent; at other times they will not. This theoretical and historical separation will
become useful in understanding changing divisions of responsibility in the studios.
The historical context

Hollywood’s mode of production has been characterized as a factory system akin to that used by a Ford
plant, and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining
films. The employment of a mass-production system fulfilled the owners’ goals of profit maximization.
Concurrent US business practices had set up a particular mode of production which seemed to insure the
most efficient and economical work arrangement. It was within that context that the film industry began
operating.5
Two major changes in the relationship between the workers and the work processes which led to the
typical factory mode of production need to be described: ‘mass production’ and ‘division of labor.’ ‘Mass
production,’ Henry Ford wrote, ‘is the focussing upon a manufacturing product of the principles of power,
accuracy, economy, system, continuity and speed…and the normal result is the productive organization that
delivers in quantities a useful commodity of standard material, workmanship and design at a minimum
cost.’6 Ford’s definition is debatable (are all mass-produced products ‘useful’?), but it does include certain
requisites for understanding mass production, and these can be summed up as interchangeability,
standardization, and assembly.
Interchangeability is by no means a modern concept. As John Perry points out, interchangeability of parts
goes back to ancient times. What Eli Whitney as a ‘father of mass production… did was standardize
production operations and narrow tolerances for the dimensions of parts.’ But Perry also notes that genuine
mass production implies standardization at a distance: parts made by a worker in one plant must fit with
parts made by other workers in other plants.7 Whitney managed this interchangeability primarily by
designing machine-tools and precision gauges. A less skilled laborer could operate these tools with a
precision and speed that the gunsmith craftsman could never have reached. Whitney’s example was rapidly
disseminated to others, and the 1820s and 1830s saw the quick expansion of machine-tool technology. One
economist summarized the cost advantages in this degree of interchangeability:‘(a) the percentage of
spoiled work will probably be lower; (b) the parts are more likely to be interchangeable, which would
decrease the assembly cost; and (c) the [tool] can probably be [used] by a less skilled workman, receiving a
lower hourly rate.’8 Necessary goods, such as tools, shoes, and clothes, and upper-class luxuries, such as
harpsichords, clavichords, and spinet pianos, went into mass production by the 1840s. Lower costs and
more goods available meant a better consumers’ market, and mass production practices increased
correspondingly.
Standardization, necessary for precision fit, had economic advantages within any firm which mass
produced goods, but not so apparent to the firm were the advantages of inter-company uniformity.
Companies traditionally varied their products for competing in the markets and used patent protection over
these variations to effect a monopoly not only of the product but of replacement parts. For example, in the
1840s, railroad lines were operating under a variety of gauges which effectively prevented use of one road’s
lines by another company. The advantages of standardization—facilitation of economies of production,
research and design; minimization of engineering problems; and reduction of costs of patterns, retooling,
carrying large stocks, labor retraining, and accounting—eventually began to outweigh its disadvantages.
The post-Civil-War shift toward company mergers and the move to eliminate ‘ “idiotic competition” ’9 (a
phrase used to rationalize the collusion of firms), also enhanced the change. ‘Industrial standardization,’ as
the full-blown movement was known, eventually included:10
1 Nomenclature and definitions of technical terms used in specifications and contracts; also technical
abbreviations and symbols.
2 Uniformity in dimensions necessary to secure interchangeability of parts and supplies, and makes [sic]
possible the interworking of apparatus. Dimensional standards.
3 Quality specifications for materials and equipment; composition, form, and structure.
4 Methods of testing to determine standards of quality and performance.
5 Ratings of machinery and apparatus under specific conditions.
6 Safety provisions and rules for the operation of apparatus and machinery in industrial establishments.
Safety codes and standards of practice.
7 Simplification by the elimination of unnecessary variety in types, sizes, grades, this selection being
usually based upon the relative commercial demand.
Prime movers in the trend were engineers and efficiency experts who created an institutional discourse about
standardization in their technical journals, societies, textbooks, and handbooks. The creation in 1901 of the
federal government’s Bureau of Standards provided not only a new repository for physical objects defining
standards of length, weight, volume, time, and temperature but now a testing facility for quality and
performance of materials. One of the bureau’s first activities was determining standards for electric lamps,
which led to new testing equipment: needing a measure of brightness, it developed a rapid commercial
photometer. The federal bureau gave the State’s blessing to standardization and supplied national rather
than state or industry guidelines.
Assembly, a third aspect of mass production, also involves ‘division of labor.’ Just as with all other
elements of this changing work system, division of labor has very old sources. Societies have commonly
parceled out work, often on the basis of gender: men and women may do different tasks. Within initial splits
may be further ones— some laborers making pottery, others weaving, and others growing and harvesting
crops. This is usually termed a social division of labor.11 Within social division of labor, a worker will know
and perform an integral series of tasks, from conceiving an object to be made and gathering the materials to
working on those materials and completing the object. Even if the worker at times performs only parts of
the whole task, knowledge of and skill in the entire craft belongs to the worker’s repertoire.
This situation changed with mass production. Within a capitalist economy, a laborer must sell his or her
labor power to a company. The company has the option of relying upon the social division of labor to define
the worker’s job. Analysts of capitalism have pointed out, however, that a company with a profit motive
seeks to obtain as much labor power for its wages as it can. Although the social division of labor was
adequate for certain tasks, mass production could be more efficient with a new type of work arrangement:
detailed division of labor. Here the process of making a product is broken down into discrete segments, and
each worker is assigned to repeat a constituent element of that process. Harry Braverman explains why the
change to a new mode was made: ‘The subcontracting and “putting out” systems [entailed by the social
division of labor] were plagued by problems of irregularity of production, loss of materials in transit and
through embezzlement, slowness of manufacture, lack of uniformity and uncertainty of the quality of the
product.’12 Capitalists saw possibilities in labor which were wasted in the social division mode.
Furthermore, that mode could not insure the standardization of the product parts or rapid assembly
necessary for mass production—which detailed division of labor could.
Braverman argues that the central difference between the modes is that in a detailed division of labor the
conception and execution of the work is divided: management does all of the former and laborers do only the
latter. As the work is complicated and the tasks are segmented further, the individual worker becomes more
and more specialized and loses understanding of the entire process.13
Capitalism found detailed division of labor less costly: only the laborer doing the most skilled portion of
the work had to be paid the highest rate. Marx makes several other distinctions which will become important
in understanding Hollywood’s mode of production. Within divided labor, he locates two phases—
manufacturing and, later, machine-tool (or modern) industry. Manufacturing developed either when a
capitalist assembled workers with multiple handicrafts into one workshop or when a capitalist gathered a
group of craftsmen to make the same product and then divided their labor. Marx also defines manufacturing
as either ‘heterogeneous’ or ‘serial.’ In ‘heterogeneous’ manufacture, all the parts of a product are made by
separate workers; then the commodity is assembled by one individual. The case example is the manufacture
of a watch. In ‘serial’ manufacture, the commodity goes through ‘connected phases of development.’ Thus,
the workers are dependent on one another. In such a work process, the laborer must spend no more time
than is necessary on his or her part, mass production requiring ‘continuity, uniformity, regularity, order’ for
best profits. It is in serial manufacture that a hierarchy of skilled and unskilled workers forms.14
Machine-tool, or modern, industry is organized via the machines. Detailed division of labor meshed well
with the introduction of machine-tool technology and the centralized work place. We have seen that the
move to machine-tool technology had distinct economic advantages: less spoiled work, increased
interchangeability, and less-skilled (hence cheaper) laborers. Machine-tool technology, in turn, required a
centralized work place. More complicated technology necessitated the physical unification of the work,
centralization reduced waste of time and cost in moving work from site to site, and centralization made it
easier for management to control the workers’ use of the machines. Once the company taught the laborer one
process with one machine all training costs were over, and uniformity and standard quality in the product
were assured. Thus, detailed division of labor and the new technology and work organization reinforced one
another.
Both the changing industrial structure in contemporary United States and the mode of production
supported one another. A steady supply of raw materials enhanced the assembly system—which in turn
encouraged vertical integration of the corporate unit. Mass-production industries came to depend upon
efficient distribution and marketing (which produced more vertical integration), the use of by-products
(which resulted in diversification), and the elimination of competition (which induced horizontal
integration).15* The shift to mass production and the growth of the corporate industrial structure went hand-
in-hand.
For Marx, manufacturing had the potential of collective cooperation; in modern industry, any cooperation
is only simple.16 We shall see that although it is accurate to define the Hollywood mode of production as
mass production and detailed division of labor, its organization most closely approximates serial
manufacture, allowing some collective activity and cooperation between craft workers.
Detailed division of labor and commercial filmmaking

It is useful to classify the Hollywood mode of production as mass production, but that does not explain the
disparity between D.W.Griffith at the Biograph Company in 1910 and Dore Senary at Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer in 1950. In one sense, both men were managing the mass production of films, but there is a
significant difference between producing one one-reel Biograph after another and turning out reels of glossy
MGM features. A description of all Hollywood production systems at one broad level of generality cannot
account for more specific levels of description nor can it account for changes over time.
Theoretical models have the advantage of any generalization—they permit a simplification and
unification of detail into a pattern. Likewise, they have the disadvantage of the loss of individual
differences. Just as no single film is the classical Hollywood film, no actual production company is the site
of the classical Hollywood production mode. Furthermore, just as the classical film can be subdivided into
genres or styles with distinctive characteristics, so too can Hollywood’s production mode. Because no one
has attempted before to characterize or construct the mode in any extended analysis, no precedents form a
basis for categorizing the available information.
I will be analyzing the mode of production by virtue of two descriptive and explanatory schemata related
to the organization of the labor force: the division of the work and the management systems. Theoretically,
these are separate concepts, and any historical explanation must consider different patterns of change in
each.
In examining the division of the work, I will trace the increasing subdivision of the initial work functions
and order. For instance, the cameraman’s duties subdivided to laboratory technicians, to assistants, and to
continuity clerks. This subdivision happened regardless of the management system; the causes lie not in the
management structure per se, but in economic practices (increased production rate, increased technological
complexities) and in ideological/ signifying practices (demands for certain stylistic qualities in the films).
For the management systems, I will identify two modes. The distinction between the modes of social and
detailed division of labor applies to the US film industry, which seems to have used both. The detailed
division of labor mode, however, quickly became dominant when commercial filmmaking started
emphasizing the production of narrative fiction films after 1906. Just as in the general sector, detailed
divisions of labor in filmmaking allowed faster and more predictable product output. But as we shall see, in
filmmaking mass production never reached the assembly-line degree of rigidity that it did in other
industries. Rather it remained a manufacturing division of labor with craftsmen collectively and serially
producing a commodity. After describing the social division mode manifested in the ‘cameraman’ system, I
will split the detailed division mode into five specific systems which appeared in a sequential order (I will
use the term ‘mode’ for the broader description of the work structure as defined by Braverman and the term
‘system’ for a more specific description of one form of a mode):
1) the ‘director’ system, the dominant system from 1907 to 1909;

2) the ‘director-unit’ system which developed as the manufacturers increased output after 1909;
3) the ‘central producer’ system which became dominant around 1914;
4) the ‘producer-unit’ system which resulted from a major rearrangement in the early 1930s; and
5) the ‘package-unit’ system which started in the early 1940s and became dominant by the mid-1950s.
All five systems display a detailed division of labor.

In detailed division of labor systems, Braverman argues, work positions are divided between those who
conceive the work and those who execute it. At the lowest echelons of the structural hierarchy, the split
between conception and execution has caused the worker to lose the overall knowledge he or she had of a
craft. Instead, the worker knows only the part that the company or schools train him or her to do. For
Braverman, this helps explain the alienation of the worker from the work.
Although Braverman mentions a ‘middle-layer’ of employment, he generally avoids the problem of
analyzing the managerial level of workers in the modern corporation. In the approach of Antony Cutler,
Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, and Athar Hussain, ‘managers are economic agents employed to exercise the
capacity of direction on behalf of a capital.’ Four functions are involved in that management direction:17
1) Direction of Investment: the central function here is the calculation of financing (source and level of
funds), the definition of the areas of operation of the capital—this will take the form of an overall
investment decision or plan….
2) Production Planning: as a consequence of basic investment decisions this level involves decisions as to
the products, type of production process, general level of production, etc….
3) Production Operation: decisions as to the purchases of raw materials, labour-power, etc., are made on
the basis of assessment of market conditions within the constraints imposed by the financial strategy….
4) Co-ordination and Supervision: the integration of the phases of a process of production and the
maintenance of production performance.
Functions 1 and 3 involve decisions which directly affect the nature and level of economic operation
of the enterprises—they are functions which in some sense must be united in a single agency of
calculation and decision. These functions define the economic subject— the agency of direction of a
capital. Functions 2 and 4 are in general technical consequences of factors in economic and operational
decisions, and are subordinate to them….
… ‘Managers’ performing functions 1 and 3 are specialists hired to act as agents of an economic
subjectivity, directors of capital. Specialists performing functions 2 and 4 exclusively are technical
functionaries ancillary to the economic subject.
Alfred D.Chandler, Jr, has distinguished between management decisions along roughly the same lines,
calling those decisions involving long-range capital direction (functions 1 and 3) strategic decisions, and
those involving the day-to-day carrying out of the plans of a company (functions 2 and 4) tactical decisions.
Both Cutler et al. and Chandler note that in actual operation in capitalist firms, strategic-decision managers
top the pyramid in the hierarchy. In other words, they have the power to countermand any subordinate
decision—a prerogative, we shall see, they will seldom employ in the larger companies because of the lack
of familiarity with the lower-level work processes and technology. The tactical-decision makers (which
Cutler et al. call technical functionaries) are the middle management.18
Thus, three levels of work exist: strategic management, tactical or technical management, and execution.
At least at the technical level, the managers have retained craft knowledge and will probably be directly
involved with varying amounts of its execution.
Besides focusing on the division of the individual work functions and the management structure and
hierarchy, I will be emphasizing the importance of the script as a blueprint for the film. While a written plan
of the film has always been useful, I will show how in the early teens a detailed script became necessary to
insure efficient production and to insure that the film met a certain standard of quality defined by the
industry’s discourse. While pertinent before the early teens, the simultaneous diffusion of the multiple-reel
film and certain stylistic options at that point placed such demands on the production crew that a precise pre-
shooting plan became necessary. The script, furthermore, became more than just the mechanism to pre-
check quality: it became the blueprint from which all other work was organized. These issues will be raised
in the discussions of the first three systems of management in a detailed division of labor, culminating in the
central producer system in which the continuity script became standard practice.
Throughout this chapter, I have suggested that various more specific formats of management
organizations and the subdivision of work appeared in sequential order. I need to provide, then, causal
explanations of these changes. Changes within the mode will be attributed to its conditions of existence:
economic and ideological/ signifying practices. Regarding the latter, I have already referred to standards of
systems of representation which I said the filmmakers’ institutions constructed—and in many cases,
appropriated in mediated form from other signifying practices. As I suggested, a major part of my
explanation as to why the mode of production developed as it did is the standards which the film industry
discourse established. In particular, we will be looking at certain traits of the classical Hollywood group
style: the primacy of the narrative, ‘realism,’ causal coherence, continuity, spectacle, stars, genres. These
traits, among others, influenced the emphasis on certain job tasks and in some cases caused firms to create
individual jobs. Two of the more obvious instances of this are the addition of research staffs in the mid-
teens and the continuity clerk in the late teens.
Hollywood production practices related to the prevalent capitalist mode of production, justifying a broad
claim of the mode being a massproduction, factory system. Furthermore, extensive analysis reveals
subtleties in its organization which can be described and explained, and the practices can account for the
uniformity and stability of the style of the films. This analysis also provides an explanation for the
fascinating stories about making films in Hollywood. In the next chapter, we will see how in capitalism
advertising the values of the films is an important selling technique. Thus, publicity releases, true or
apocryphal, about thousands of extras, millions of dollars, and unique star personalities are all part of the
Hollywood mode of production.
9
Standardization and differentiation: the reinforcement and
dispersion of Hollywood’s practices
Thus, when D.W.Griffith began to use his softfocus lens to give added beauty or mystery to a
shot and the idea was hailed as an advance in art, we had an era of fuzzy pictures which I am
afraid did more to irritate the fans than to charm them. If a cameraman didn’t have a real soft-
focus lens, he merely threw his regular lens a bit out of focus and felt artistic for the rest of that
day. And when the Germans began using ‘unusual’ angles, generally with a definite,
psychological purpose, we kissed the idea on both cheeks and indulged in an orgy of ‘unusual’
angles, generally with no psychological or dramatic purpose whatsoever, but just to keep ahead
of the procession. Love scenes were shot from the ceiling, giving an excellent view of the tops
of both lovers’ heads; mirror shots, always the directors’ darlings, became so rampant that the
audience frequently had trouble untangling the scene from its reflection; cameras were placed
on the floor, whence the full depth and beauty of the heroine’s nostrils could be viewed;
cameras were placed behind bureaus, so that as the heroine pulled out the drawer we could peek
up at her just as if we were actually in the drawer, a rare and most artistic viewpoint.1
William de Mille, 1939
Describing and explaining Hollywood’s production practices and their changes over the years are the work
of subsequent chapters. In this chapter I shall describe how the film companies established their production
and stylistic practices throughout the industry. How could these practices have acquired such uniformity and
stability? Standardization and differentiation are useful concepts in answering this question.
‘Standard’ means two slightly different things. One is regularity or uniformity. For example, ‘the industry
sought to standardize perforations’—or to make them uniform in size, number, and position relative to each
photographed image. In the survey of the movement toward standardization in Chapter 8, I pointed out that
industrial standardization included uniformity in nomenclature and dimensions, simplification in types,
sizes, and grades, and safety provisions and rules of practice. Such standardization facilitated mass
production. Standardization also included specifications, methods of testing quality, and ratings under
specific conditions. The latter set of elements in standardization have another connotation: a criterion,
norm, degree or level of excellence. Both the movement toward uniformity and attainment of excellence
coexisted in the trend. The standardization process must be thought of not as an inevitable progression
toward dull, mediocre products (although many may be that for reasons of aesthetic differences or economy
in materials and workmanship) but instead, particularly in competitive cases, as an attempt to achieve a
precision-tooled, quality object. Once established, the standard becomes a goal to be attained.
Just as the specifications for a machine involve degrees of tolerance in individual parts so too we might
think of the standardized film. As we study the industry’s discussion of its product and the grounds on
THE HOLLYWOOD MODE OF PRODUCTION TO 1930 99
which it competed, we find a repetition of characteristics considered desirable in the film. Primary ones are
narrative dominance and clarity, verisimilitude, continuity, stars, and spectacle. We might think of these as
product specifications which guide the boundaries of the film’s construction but within those
boundaries tolerance is permitted. As a system of elements, films operate within a cultural context that
defines (and is defined by) the meaning of its systems. As the film industry and its institutions adapted
representational and aesthetic systems from other media and constructed their own specifications of
meaning for the US commercial film, they simultaneously set up hierarchies of quality work.
At a certain point in the history of the American film industry, specific industrial mechanisms appeared
which facilitated standardization. Three of these mechanisms are of interest to us: advertising practices,
industrial interest groups, and institutions adjacent to but not directly part of the industrial structure. These
mechanisms dispersed a number of different types of standards ranging from stylistic practices
(disseminated by advertising, writers’ and cinematographers’ groups, how-to books, trade papers, and
critics), to technology (the professional engineers’ society, cinematographers’ clubs, projectionists’ unions),
to business, production, and exhibition practices (trade associations and trade papers). Although existing in
part at the start of commercial filmmaking, these mechanisms coalesced into formal networks with the
formation of distribution alliances in 1908–10. By the late teens, the industry had a full array of systematic
techniques to spread industrial discourse and standards rapidly. This foundation provided the conditions for
the existence of the uniformity in the industry’s film practices.
The emphasis on uniformity does not mean that a standard will not change in small ways. New
technology, new products, and new models are continually put forth as alternative standards for the field.
One analyst of standardization wrote: ‘An innovation is successful only when it has become a new
standard.’2 That process is dynamic, with multiple practices creating the change. In fact, for the film
industry, changing its product was an economic necessity. In the entertainment field, innovations in
standards are also prized qualities. The economic reason is that the promotion of the difference between
products is a competitive method and encourages repeated consumption. The phrase differentiation of the
product is used to describe the practice in which the firm stresses how its goods or services differ from
other ones.
Economists explain that such product differentiation can create the appearance of a monopoly, and, as a
result, the manufacturer attains more control over the price of the product.3 Furthermore, this marketing
advantage will affect the production sector which through styles and packaging may even engineer product
cycles: as Braverman argues, in an ‘attempt to gear consumer needs to the needs of production instead of
the other way around.’4
In a particularly vulnerable consumption field, film has had to contend with rapidly shifting product
cycles which it helped induce. The film industry, like other industries, faced innovations —a value it has
itself standardized in its search for novelty and competitive advantage in differentiating its product.
Innovations have sometimes replaced prior norms of excellence; sometimes they have not. Thus, I will also
be stressing the implications of this economic practice for the production procedures and the group style.
‘Absolutely the superior of any moving picture film ever made’

One of the major mechanisms which established the standards for quality filmmaking was advertising
discourse. Advertising is important because it is the economic practice directing consumers to the product’s
possibilities for exchange-value. What advertising stressed became grounds for competition and a large part
of the set of standards for film practice. That the major values we associate with later Hollywood ballyhoo
were actively promoted by the early teens helps explain the formation of the classical style so early.
100 STANDARDIZATION AND DIFFERENTIATION
Advertising was not a recent invention, but a remarkable transformation in its strategies occurred during
the 1800s in the United States. Goods which were originally sold generically began to acquire brand names.
Techniques for advertising rapidly proliferated from ads in newspapers and magazines to posters on
billboards and barnsides. Tie-ins were common by the mid-1800s, and slogans became popular at the end of
the century. Businesses were not left on their own to advertise. As early as 1841 an advertising agent
organized near Philadelphia and soon had branch offices in other cities. In 1899 Ayer’s developed what
would now be called a full-service campaign for the newly formed National Biscuit Co. It launched a
national campaign through all media, did publicity work, advised on marketing, and created the trade names
Uneeda and Nabisco. Overall, expenditures on advertising changed dramatically. They rose from only about
$8 million in 1865 to $200 million in 1880 and exceeded $800 million in 1904. At that point, expenditures
amounted to 3.4 per cent of the gross national product, the same percentage level current today.5
With these practices as their example, the first motion picture manufacturers used as their routine
advertising method catalogues which listed the order number for the film, a brief, hopefully enticing,
description, and the length of the film. The firms also organized the industrial structure in part to serve their
marketing tactics. When distribution alliances formed in 1908–10 (see Appendices B and C), they
contracted to supply the exhibitor not only a varied, quality product but a service of a predictable supply of
films so that the exhibitor could change his program daily. As the Motion Picture Patents Company lawyers
rationalized the motives for the organization of General Film Company, they stressed that prior exchange
systems failed to provide the standard of service the exhibitors demanded. ‘The market value of motion
picture service,’ they argued, ‘depends entirely upon the age of the motion picture, counting from the
release date.’6 Although developed later, zoning (assuring exhibitors of a market area) and clearance (setting
lengths of runs and intervals between runs) were economic practices which responded to and reinforced the
ideology and profit advantage of new, quality product.
Advertising superlatives started with the catalogue ads. Excerpts from three Edison ads will exemplify
what qualities were being promoted:7
Life of an American Fireman (1903)

In giving this description to the public, we unhesitatingly claim for it the strongest motion picture
attraction ever attempted in this length of film. It will be difficult for the exhibitor to conceive the
amount of work involved and the number of rehearsals necessary to turn out a film of this kind. We
were compelled to enlist the services of the fire departments of four different cities, New York,
Newark, Orange, and East Orange, N.J., and about 300 firemen appear in the various scenes of this
film.
From the first conception of this wonderful series of pictures it has been our aim to portray Life of
an American Fireman without exaggeration, at the same time embodying the dramatic situations and
spectacular effects which so greatly enhance a motion picture performance….
This film faithfully and accurately depicts his thrilling and dangerous life, emphasizing the perils he
subjects himself to when human life is at stake.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903)
The photographic and dramatic qualities of our latest moving picture production, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, are excellent. We offer this film as one of our best creations and one that will prove a great
headline attraction. The popularity of the book and play of the same title is a positive guarantee of its
success. The story has been faithfully studied and every scene posed in accordance with the famous
author’s version.
In this film we have made a departure from the old methods of dissolving one scene into another by
inserting announcements with brief descriptions as they appear in succession.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
This sensational and highly tragic subject will certainly make a decided ‘hit’ whenever shown. In
every respect we consider it absolutely the superior of any moving picture film ever made. It has been
posed and acted in faithful duplication of the genuine ‘Holds Ups’ made famous by various outlaw
bands in the far West, and only recently the East has been shocked by several crimes of the frontier
order, which fact will increase the popular interest in this great Headline Attraction.
....
SCENE 14—REALISM. A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and
firing point blank at each individual in the audience…. The resulting excitement is great.
These ads seem vaguely familiar because they exhibit many of the exchange-values the industry has
consistently promoted as the qualities in their films: novelty, specific popular genres, brand names,
‘realism,’ authenticity, spectacle, stars, and certain creators of the product whose skills as artists were
considered acknowledged. Emotional effects are emphasized. Once film exhibition flourished, advertising
emphasis has also included the theater as an institution which supplied valuable entertainment that was
more than just the moving pictures. In order to understand how advertising worked as a mechanism to
disperse product standards and to implant principles which would help develop the classical film style, we
can survey some of these values, noting their implications and in the case of the star system its emergence in
the industry around 1910.
Examples of appeals to novelty manifest themselves continually in the catalogues and later newspaper
advertising. The words ‘novelty’ and ‘innovation’ became so common as to be clichés: ‘one of the most
genuine motion picture novelties,’ ‘an innovation in picture making.’8 When nothing new in the films
themselves was worth promoting, the advertisers turned to related material. The ads (figs 9.1, 9.2) displayed
the high costs of spectacles, stars, and acknowledged artist-creators as evidence of the films’ value—which
was one reason for the publicity about filmmaking and the stars’ lives in fan articles and magazines.
These fan materials started around 1910 in conjunction with the promotion of particular personalities.
Cited as the first major national exploitation of the movies in print format is the Motion Picture Story
Magazine. Started by J. Stuart Blackton, owner and producer for Vitagraph, the Motion Picture Story
Magazine announced its format:9
It is a symposium of film scenarios, as its name implies, but these have been amplified by competent
writers into really interesting storiettes of the approved magazine style. The first number of over 100
pages, is sumptuously illustrated with engraved reproductions of scenes in the film. With such a
source to draw upon the ‘Motion Picture Story Magazine’ can provide its readers with vivid and
realistic illustrations beyond the reach of any other periodical.
Exhibitors could order copies for sale in the theaters. Within a year, two other such publications were
available: Moving Picture Tales (published by the trade paper Motion Picture News) and the Sunday edition
of the Chicago Tribune. Such tie-ins quickly expanded. Film serials commonly were accompanied by story
versions in the newspapers. By 1914, book publishers were promoting leather-bound, numbered, limited
edition copies of the motion picture edition of a novel, with tipped-in stills from the films. This practice was
exploited with greater and greater finesse in subsequent years.10
Publicity directly emphasizing the lives and loves of the stars was not far behind the first issue of Motion
Picture Story Magazine. By early 1911, the Cleveland Leader was holding contests for the best amateur
criticism of films, the Sunday metro section had articles about current films, and its latest ‘innovation’ was a
copper-plate section with pictures of ‘leading photoplayers.’ Photoplay also began in 1911.11 In 1919,
statistics gathered for investment bankers Kuhn, Loeb and Company indicated the tremendous, nationwide
extent of such publicity:12
Circulation per issue of Motion Picture Magazines, 1918–19
1918 1919
Photoplay Magazine 204, 434 no record
Motion Picture Magazine 248,845 400,000
Motion Picture Classic 140,000 275,000
Picture Play Magazine 127,721 200,000
Photoplay Journal 100,000 no record
Shadow Land — 75,000
821,000 950,000
Source: American Newspaper Annual and Directory
Brand name advertising and slogans were common US economic practices by 1900. For filmmakers, the
purpose of brands was to spread the value of each film to all the films, hoping to entice repeated
consumption of the manufacturer’s offerings. If the manufacturer could succeed in this, the firm would gain
the advantage of an apparent monopoly. As a trade paper article, ‘The efficiency plan of film
salesmanship,’ cautioned, this worked a lot better if the films were all of good quality. It also required some
element in which to specialize—often a genre— and an advertising campaign which promoted that element
—perhaps through a trademark or a slogan (fig 9.3). Thus we have Biograph’s ‘AB’ in a circle, Edison’s
‘Circle E,’ Vitagraph’s ‘“V” surmounted by an eagle with spreading wings,’ Selig’s Diamond S, Bison’s
‘buffalo rampant’ for its Westerns, Essanay’s Indian head, Kalem’s blazing sun, Pathé Frères’ red rooster,
Lubin’s liberty bell. Other qualities besides genre and trademark could be used. One early film critic helped
out by distinguishing among the 1911 licensed manufacturers. The consumer could tell the individual
producers by the ‘manner of acting, the style of the construction and the character of the story.’13 In general,
however, the use of brand names.as a primary advertising tactic declined in subsequent years when multiple-
reel films supplanted the less differentiated one-reelers.
‘Realism’ was an important advertising claim. An Edison ad of 1898–9 asserted:14
Edison’s latest marvel, The Projectoscope. The giving of life to pictures so natural that life itself is no
more real.
Life motion, realism, photographed from nature so true to life as to force the observer to believe
that they [sic] are viewing the reality and not the reproduction.
If you have never seen animated pictures, don’t fail to see this one. If you have seen them, see this
one, the greatest of them all!
‘Realism’ in these ads shifts in meaning. While in this case, the ad promoted the photographic
representation of physical reality, in Life of an American Fireman, ‘realism’ was re-enacted events. The
story would be presented ‘without exaggeration, at the same time embodying the dramatic situations and
spectacular effects which so greatly enhance a motion picture performance.’ Obviously, here values start to
conflict with and contradict one another. The consumer was to receive the ‘best’ views as well as ‘real life.’
This tension among values was only partially resolved by conventions (often generic) of verisimilitude to
which the quality film tried to adhere.
A third meaning of ‘realism’ was authenticity; as Chapter 1 has shown, this appeal persisted through
American film history. The trade papers promoted this value in part by encouraging consumers to write in
about ‘mistakes’ they caught in the films. Companies, in turn, advertised meticulous research. Behind Custer’s
Last Fight (1912) were ‘months of preparation and careful study of the many historical accounts of the
great battle. The photoplay…follows the historical facts with the utmost accuracy possible.’ The argument
for authenticity was that if a consumer noted some inauthentic occurrence, his or her ‘illusion’ of reality
would be destroyed and with it the effect of the film.15 (Legitimate theater had for over a century been
promoting this value.16) This value eventually affected the division of labor by moving the research on
historical topics into the work positions of technical experts and research departments.
Spectacle was a value imported from legitimate theater and other entertainments, and film advertisers
sought new and better displays of extravagance. Advertisements for a 1912 multiple-reel film Homer’s
Odyssey compared it to an earlier success: ‘Bigger in plot—more strikingly realistic—better in story—more
scenically sensational than Dante’s Inferno.’ Or as Sam Goldwyn reputedly requested many years later: ‘I want
a film that begins with an earthquake and works up to a climax.’ The enumeration of the number of players,
the size and value of .the sets, the costs in thousands and millions of dollars signaled areas of spectacle, and
‘production value’ and ‘showmanship’ became its euphemism (see figs 9.4, 9.5). Ensuring that the consumer
knew these were installed within the film was part of the work of the publicity and exploitation segments of
the sales departments, and the source of many of the stories we have of Hollywood’s production practices.17
One particular warrant of quality was the appeal to an established success in entertainment. In Edison’s
1903 ad for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the faithful reproduction of a famous work, the description argued, was a
‘positive guarantee of its success.’ At the time of this ad, the legitimate theater was in a cycle of adapting
copyrighted fiction into plays, and the imitation of this practice by film companies responded to the same
perceived economic advantages. Not only were famous works exploited but Edison’s ‘eminent authors’ pre-
dated Goldwyn’s by a decade. The hiring of writers and dramatists to compose stories either in their own
medium or in film scenario form began about 1909 in the United States. French Gaumont announced in the
US trade papers it had signed contracts with French dramatists, and later Edison advertised the signing of
‘exclusive’ contracts for the writing services of Edward W.Townsend, Carolyn Wells, Richard Harding Davis,
and Rex Beach.18
Finally, and, with the possible exception of the story, the most important value was the stars. The ‘star
system’ already functioned in the other entertainment products of theater and vaudeville (dating back to at
least the 1820s in the United States). In September 1909, Edison’s publicity men claimed that while other
press men tried to bring out ‘some new press story’ about their ‘star’s lives,’ Edison knew it had secured
‘some of the best talent the theatrical profession affords.’ In its stock company it had ‘under contract actors
from the best companies in the business, companies such as Charles Frohman, David Belasco, E.S. Sothern,
Ada Rehan, Otis Skinner, Julia Marlowe, Mrs Fiske, the late Richard Mansfield.’ Subsequently, Edison
introduced in its catalogues its stock players with individual lengthy descriptions of their prior experiences
and successes. Kalem and Vitagraph innovated lobby display cards in early 1910 (see fig 9.6), and
information about the ‘real lives’ of the players started to appear in the trade papers. Marion Leonard (see
fig 9.7) was ‘shanghaied’ in January 1912 and King Baggott denied he was dead a week later (see figs 9.8,
9.9, 9.10).19
Whether the demand for stars came first from the consumers or was created by enterprising capitalists is
immaterial in this case since the precedents in theater and vaudeville are so immediate. The argument that
the licensed manufacturers did not exploit the stars because of fear of rising costs until they were forced into
it by the independents’ competition also does not hold up. Instead, the licensed manufacturers led the way
although the independents may haye outbid them for services of stars in later years. In addition, film
manufacturers were competing directly with vaudeville and theater both of which were using the star system.
The emergence of the indigenous motion picture star occurred around 1910. Anthony Slide locates
articles about Ben Turpin, Pearl White, and Mary Pickford in April 1909 and December 1910.20 It was but a
step from being a personality to being a star. Florence Lawrence, the ‘star that radiates and scintillates more
than other luminaries in the film firmament,’ appeared in the front pages of the New York Dramatic Mirror,
a major trade paper for theater and vaudeville, in a 1912 story, ‘Florence Lawrence, famous picture star.’21
The appearance of the theatrical and vaudeville star in movies was delayed somewhat because the
producers could not afford established stars. In the middle of 1910 Edison promoted the appearance of Mlle
Pilar Moran from the theater, and isolated campaigns increased thereafter. It was not until multiple-reel films
became more common in 1911 and 1912, however, that film companies induced many stage stars to play
roles.22 The star system became the order of the day in 1912, and publicity promoted ‘all star casts’ from the
Royal Theater of Copenhagen, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘All Star’ Film Company (see fig 9.11).23
None of this is meant to explain why this culture was and is fascinated by stars. Economically, the star
may be thought of as a monopoly on a personality. The unique qualities of Mary Pickford or Lana Turner or
Robert Redford permit a company to declare the merchandising of an exclusive product, and the
competitive value of that justified paying the salaries those stars have been able to demand. The star became
a means to differentiate product to achieve monopoly profits, and only lower-budget films would not have
had stars.
All of these values of novelty and quality allowed the firms to differentiate their product so that
exhibitors would seek their merchandise at the exchange and consumers would buy the opportunity to view
the films in the theaters. Furthermore, advertising reinforced standard requirements for a film by stressing a
certain set of characteristics in a certain way. In addition, in emphasizing these standards, advertising
simultaneously outlined the boundaries for variation. For instance, in the case of spectacle, the standard was
the bigger the better; the variant was the kind of spectacle. Or for famous writers, the variant was the latest
literary or theatrical success. If one considers alternatives, it is easy to see the boundaries of the
standard. Imagine, for example, advertising a story as ‘just like every other film you have ever seen’ or
‘written by an unknown who will remain that’ or ‘a drama completely unrealistic and unnatural.’ (Of course,
with just a twist, all of these could be turned around, exploiting favorite genres, the mystery of the writer’s
identity, or the uncanny.)
Advertising as a discourse created standards and exploited innovations. It established the grounds on
which competition would occur and set up prescriptive values which became requirements for film practice
in the United States. Stars, spectacle, ‘realism,’ popular genres, and so forth became necessary for a film. To
the historian of production practices, advertising is a guide to the areas of exchange-value between the
producer and consumer, and, as such, to the standards that those production practices would have to achieve
in their films.
Coalescence of industrial interest groups

While advertising’s effect was the standardization of product practices, industrial interest groups affected
practices in film style, production, technology, business, and exhibition. Furthermore, in some instances,
these groups deliberately attempted to standardize segments of the industry. The list of areas of industrial
standardization (Chapter 8) includes, besides uniformity and quality specifications, standardization of
nomenclature and codes of practice. In the case of trade associations, besides their informal exchange of
information, they established codes of ethical conduct (self-regulation) and agreements regarding what
subject matter would be available for competition (self-censorship). In later years, the professional
engineers’ society set up not only standards of technological design but lists of terms with approved
definitions.24
By the late teens, the Hollywood film industry had a number of these organizations, originally formed for
various purposes. There is no reason to assume that the primary reason for individuals forming such groups
was to standardize the industry; in fact, most sought personal advantages from the combinations. Although
there were a number of these organizations, three types seem most pertinent: trade associations, the
professional engineers’ association, and the labor associations. Each of these had different reasons for
forming; each had a number of effects and functions within the industry; each, in addition, contributed to
the standardization of practices.
Trade associations
The formation of trade associations was in response to various problems to which the individual firms
responded by combining into protective associations. One problem was the threat of State censorship (when
I use the capitalized term ‘State,’ I mean any one or more of the federal, state or local governmental
branches, legislative, judicial or executive); another was, first, the fear, and then the advantage, of collusion
between firms. These trade associations allowed intra-industrial exchange of information and eventually
resulted in combined action against other segments of the industry. Such alliances promoted standardization.
Protective organizations were a common business practice by 1900, having started in some cases before
the Civil War. Initially, some attempted to control prices and production, but when the government declared
that illegal, major activities by the turn of the century focused on inter-company standardization and
improvement of business conditions (indirect collusion). A valuable function was the establishment of
credit bureaus to exchange information about risks in their clients. Trade groups also developed standard
cost accounting systems, shared industry information, pooled and exchanged patents, fought unfavorable
State legislation, lobbied for favorable laws, and formed codes of ethics to prevent unfair competition.25
Although we shall not examine all of the film industry’s trade association activities, the above list describes
their range of projects as well.
Two early attempts at a trade association were in direct response to the 1908 formation of the Motion
Picture Patents Company. In January 1909 the Independent Film Protective Association formed to ally non-
licensed producers, distributors, and exhibitors against the Patents Company. In September 1909, it
reorganized into the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance which had broader goals: fighting
unfavorable legislation and unproductive business practices.26
These two trade associations for independents did not last. Around the early part of 1911 the trade papers
reported the renewed interest in a national organization primarily for exhibitors. Membership was open,
regardless of exhibitors’ ties to competing distributors. Local and state exhibitor organizations went back at
least to 1908, and the common cause for their appearance was local difficulties: taxes, regulations, and
censorship. The call for a national group was made on the grounds of the size of the film exhibition business
(which promoters estimated at 10,000 theaters, with daily attendance of 4 to 5 million, and a capital investment
of at least $60,000,000). In addition, the promoters pointed out, the auxiliary businesses supplying
furnishings and sundries greatly extended the reach of film exhibition’s economic impact. At the first
meeting in August 1911, over 200 exhibitors attended, formed the Motion Picture League of America,
elected officers, and urged state associations to affiliate.27
Besides the exchange of personal information and tactics at the national and state meetings, trade shows
accompanied such conventions. Auxiliary businesses (we shall call them support firms) found such
gatherings a convenient, cheap means of reaching exhibitors with their latest products. At the July 1913
show, displays included the latest Bell & Howell perforators and printers, the Wurlitzer organ, lithograph
supplies, ticket handling machines, slides, chairs, screens, fans, projectors, and lenses—a rapid
dissemination of the latest wares with implicit claims as to the standards of quality expected from the most
recent state-of-the-art equipment and exhibition practices.28
Like the exhibitors, the distributors organized regionally. Alliances of local exchanges went back to
about 1912. These groupings became the Film Boards of Trade. Organized to exchange information on
credit risks and illegal practices by exhibitors, the Film Boards spread. In May 1914 the New York City
renters cooperatively hired a detective agency to eliminate bicycling of prints. If exhibitors were found
guilty of that or of not paying bills or of unnecessarily damaging prints, the associates uniformly refused to
rent to them. Thus, at local and state levels, licensed versus independent alliances were superceded by
cooperative moves to improve the industry for all, and sharing information between distribution groups
became possible.29
Film advertising men began to coalesce into a formal association in mid-1914. An industrial film
company urged their banding together and ‘the adoption of standards of practice.’ In August 1916 the
Associated Motion Picture Advertisers incorporated with representatives from all but two of the major
companies.30
In September 1914 William Fox proposed another across-the-industry trade association for the
independents. Under the New York Board of Trade act, Fox incorporated the National Independent Motion
Picture Board of Trade, Inc., with a charter whose purposes included:31
to diffuse accurate and reliable information as to the standing of manufacturers, distributors and
exhibitors; to procure uniformity and certainty in the customs and usages of trade and commerce; to
obtain a standardization of machines, films, appliances and apurtenances …to settle and arbitrate
differences between and among its members.
When a permanent organization was effected a year later, it dropped the ‘independent’ segregation for a
strong producers-distributors orientation. That alliance reorganized within a year into the National
Association of the Motion Picture Industry which was the predecessor of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association (MPPDA) which organized in 1922.32
One more early important trade association was the Los Angeles producers’ organization, the Motion
Picture Producers Association, formed in 1916. Main causes for it were local attacks on the morality of the
industry, interference with granting permits for location shooting, and threats of censorship.33
Besides aligning to serve mutual business advantages, fear of State censorship was a primary motive for
combination. These associations resulted in agreements of industry-wide standards of acceptable handling
of certain subject matter. Random censorship occurred through the first years of film exhibition, but a major
crisis was the New York City mayor’s revocation of all film theater licenses on Christmas Eve, 1909. Other
cities followed suit. Stating their willingness to be censored rather than lose all profits, the New York City
exhibitors secured the cooperation of the People’s Institute, a ‘citizen bureau of social research,’ which
offered to set up committees to preview films before their release and to suggest elimination of offensive
subject matter. Both the Patent and independent manufacturers agreed to submit their films to those
committees. With the rejection of parts or all of some films and, consequently, an improved public sentiment,
the Patents Company in June 1909 asked the Institute to organize a national preview system to aid other
troubled exhibition areas. Accordingly, it set up the National Board of Censorship using committees
proposed by civic agencies, and by late 1910 it censored virtually all of the US market. The industry
exhibitors and producers paid part of the costs until 1914; thereafter, a set fee financed the Board. Although
the Board could not prohibit a film showing, the industry cooperated out of fear that the voluntary system
could be replaced by State-imposed censorship. On request, the Board also examined scenarios and offered
pre-shooting advice on questionable material. It did taboo certain subjects: in 1911, ‘brutal or wilful
murder, highway robbery, suicide, kidnapping, theft,… [and] scenes of an immoral or suggestive nature,’
setting up precedents which the MPPDA followed in later years.34
Self-censorship was also profitable in that it encouraged a product acceptable to all cultural groups. As
Charles R.Metzger was to point out many years later, the film industry responded to numerous pressure
groups. Besides the vague notion of the general public, he listed public officials and religious, social, racial,
ethnic, and trade groups. Such groups were already operating in the early teens. In 1911, Chinese in Los
Angeles protested The Chinese Trunk Mystery for creating a poor ‘reflection on the characters of members
of their race,’ and Northwest Indians were ‘registering strenuous objections’ about the industry’s
representation of their culture and life. Epes Winthrop Sargent in 1913 characterized the significance of the
flourishing international market: ‘Stick to the idea that will be as good a year from now [as] it is today and
that will appeal equally to audiences in Bombay and Boston and you will have a story that is likely to sell.’
As a result, the industry sought to mute any controversial material that might harm profits. The passage of
various state and local laws requiring censorship also produced a national uniformity. A film was made so
that it would satisfy everyone.35
Thus, by the late teens, across-the-industry groups existed: a national trade association and organizations
of exhibitors, distributors, advertisers, and producers. Although the primary purposes were protective, these
trade associations reinforced and disseminated standardized business practices. Following the lead of other
industries, these cross-company organizations also supplied a climate for informational exchange of
company activities and techniques to improve efficiency and quality in production and stylistic practices.
While providing a consistent public image for the industry, they also established formal and informal
standards of practice.
Although the concern here is the pre-1917 period, it should be stressed that these activities certainly
continued with the MPPDA (see Chapter 19). The MPPDA participated in the standardization of
technology, continued the trend toward self-censorship including more and more uniform practices, and
promoted an industrial harmony that affected labor activities, financing, and other economic practices.
A professional engineers’ association

The one early interest group which purposely formed to promote the standardization movement was the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers, which organized in 1916. The need to standardize film technology had
been apparent earlier to its users. F.H.Richardson, who wrote a weekly column for projectionists in Moving
Picture World, advocated standardization of machine-part terminology in 1912.36
When the National Motion Picture Board of Trade formed in 1915, it called for standardization.
Organizing a bureau of standards chaired by C.Francis Jenkins, it proposed setting up standards for the
trade’s technology. When that trade association reorganized, rather than tie its existence to the new group,
Jenkins proposed a permanent association for film standardization because ‘every industry has its society of
engineers, an association of men who are responsible for the form of the structure of the mechanisms used
in their trade.’ In July 1916, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers formed, with Jenkins as president and
‘a dozen manufacturers and their technicians….its avowed purpose “advancement in the theory and practice
of motion picture engineering and the allied arts and sciences, the standardization of the mechanisms and
practices employed therein and the dissemination of scientific knowledge by publication.”’ The keynote
speaker of the first meeting which was held in Washington, DC, was the Secretary of the US National
Bureau of Standards. The Society allied with the film trade association, set up committees on cameras,
perforation, projection, optics, electrical devices, and auditing, and published an engineering journal,
Transactions (later the Journal). In summarizing its work, the Society wrote later: ‘the Society through a
permanent Standards Committee, has made possible the interchangeability of apparatus parts throughout the
industry.’ As a mechanism for standardizing the technology, and its techniques of usage, the work of the
Society has been extremely influential.37
Labor associations
According to Alex Groner, the first US labor groups were primarily ‘more concerned with regulating the
conduct and improving the industry of their members than in commencing adversary representation against
the employers.’ Craft guilds and benevolent societies for skilled workers were old institutions. From the
1830s on, unionism to improve wage and labor conditions increased, as did strikes, which had some judicial
protection.38
Most of the early labor associations in the film industry began as social or benevolent organizations. One
of the earliest ones, however, did not. Theater projectionists organized locally as craft unions before 1910.
As one advocate in 1907 argued, besides imparting craft knowledge, such an ‘operators’ league’ would be
to the workers’ ‘mutual advantage.’ Generally, the locals allied with the AFL union, the International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) which provided a national network for the projectionists.
Fostered in part by Richardson in his trade paper column, unionism also promoted standardization: the
Cleveland local, for instance, sent through Richardson a new film cement for testing by other locals. Based
on its start in the projectionists’ field, IATSE eventually became the dominant union for many of the
moving picture crafts.39
Other crafts gathered as social clubs. Following the Friars Club example, the Screen Club organized in
New York City in 1912, and a Los Angeles version, the Reel Club (later the Photoplayers) followed three
months later. The first long-term writers’ clubs were basically discussion and criticism groups. The writers,
however, were worried about prices and theft of plots, and in March 1914, the Photoplay Authors’ League
(PAL) incorporated with its head Frank Woods, a former leading trade paper critic and then head of
scenario-writing for D.W.Griffith (see fig 9.12).40 Articles of incorporation included the following
objectives:41
to affiliate for the purpose of mutual protection and for the general uplift and advancement of the
heretofore only partially recognized art of motion picture play construction, and…to publish as often
as possible a bulletin announcing new members, reporting new laws that may be enacted for the
benefit of its members, and all photoplay authors, and containing a complete forum for the exchange
and dissemination of the experiences and ideas of its members.
In October PAL reported in its new journal, The Script, three cases in which it had successfully helped
writers get proper credit and payment for scripts.42
Cameramen organized about the same time as the photoplaywrights. The Static Club received its state
charter in California in April 1913 and adopted a constitution. The Cinema Camera Club organized in New
York City, in later April 1913.43 An early member, Arthur Miller, explained the clubs’ functions:44
Because I hadn’t met many cameramen in California, I joined the Static Club…. These clubs were
partly social gathering-places, but they also provided the chance for members to discuss problems of
lighting, standardization of frame-line, and other matters concerned with the art of cinematography.
The Static Club’s motto in 1915 was ‘efficiency’; it had a clubhouse; and it published ajournai, Static
Flashes (see fig 9.13). The editor, Jack Poland, described the club:45
The objects of the club are to enjoy social and educational advantages through personal meetings of
cinematographers with each other at the club, and to advance the cause of screen photography by a
more intimate knowledge of the various details through lectures that will increase the practical
efficiency of cameramen, the ‘men who make the movies,’ as their slogan mentions.
The New York Camera Club also proposed to keep members informed of technical developments through
its journal Cinema News, to build professional prestige, and to secure screen credit. In 1918 the Static Club
consolidated with a more ‘aggressive organization,’ the American Society of Cinematographers, which
formally incorporated in 1919 and later published American Cinematographer.46
During the 1920s, these labor associations continued to form, reorganize, and voice in concert the desires
of the workers. In 1920, the Screen Writers Guild organized. Headed for a time by Woods, it was so
respected that it was admitted to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Film directors and assistant
directors formed guilds. Concerted union activities by crafts were rare, however. In the early 1920s, the
union for theatrical stage actors, Actors’ Equity Association, claimed jurisdiction over two fledgling motion
picture actor unions. Equity was not particularly successful in attracting film-worker memberships or in
negotiating contracts. In 1928, the cinematographers unionized into International Photographers, which
affiliated with the AFL. Because of labor unrest, in 1927, the producers and workers incorporated the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in large part to arrange for peaceful negotiation of minimal
work conditions. For the next six years, the Academy was to play a large role in labor activities and
standardization of the technology and work practices, and it became a central site for inter-craft
communication (see chapter 19).47
These labor associations, and later unions, provided the exchange and reinforcement of many stylistic and
production practices. Their journals widely disseminated and discussed standards and techniques, and the
approval of a member’s work became the state-of-the-art, the model for future work in the field.
Adjacent institutions
Other mechanisms for standardization included ones somewhat connected to the industry—trade
publications and critics and ‘how-to’ books—and ones external to the industry—college courses, newspaper
reviewing, theoretical writing, and museum exhibitions. Undoubtedly there are others, but these will
suggest how standards were available to influence the company’s and worker’s conception of how the
motion picture ought to look and sound. While these mechanisms presented themselves as educational and
informative, they were also prescriptive. A how-to-write-a-movie-script book advised not only how it was
done but how it ought to be done to insure a sale. In the case of reviewers or theorists, the references to
established standards in other arts (theater, literature, painting, design, music, still photography) perpetuated
ideological/signifying practices—although, of course, in mediated form.
Although society journals were important, so were the trade papers. Trade papers in the entertainment
field (such as the New York Dramatic Mirror, Show World, the New York Clipper, and Variety) discussed
stylistic and production practices, and three early ones were devoted exclusively to motion pictures (Moving
Picture World, founded in 1907; Motion Picture News, 1908; and The Nickelodeon, 1909). Through their
columns and articles many early standards were discussed, prescribed, and disseminated.
Two of the more important trade critics in the early teens were Frank Woods who used the pseudonym
‘Spectator’ in the New York Dramatic Mirror and Epes Winthrop Sargent in Moving Picture World. The
trade consensus was that Woods was particularly important for his acting criticism. Sargent began as a critic
for music, theater, and vaudeville in the 1890s and had been a scenario editor and press agent for Lubin
before he arrived at the Moving Picture World in 1911. At that point he began a series of columns, the
‘Technique of the photoplay,’ which included formats of scenarios and film production information
primarily aimed at the freelance writer and the manufacturers’ scenario departments. Those columns
appeared in book form in 1912 and in an extensively revised edition in 1913. Although other handbooks of
film practice preceded his, Sargent’s work became a classic in a field that from that point on rapidly
expanded.48
In December 1909 an article, ‘How moving picture plays are written,’ informed freelance scenario
writers of the format for their submissions to film companies. It is worth note as an early but typical
example of the trade paper and handbook discourse. After discussing the differences between the film play
and the ‘drama of words,’ the writer comments:49
The stories must have situations plainly visible, a clearly defined story, and, with it, an opportunity
for artistic interpretation. Dramatically, a motion picture story must be more intense in its situations
than the spoken drama. It is often dragged into inconsistency but this is pardonable if the story is
sufficiently strong to warrant it. The point of situation cannot be too strongly emphasized.
…
We are told by our masters in short story writing and in drama writing that we must have one theme
and one theme only. Too many characters will spoil the spell that grips us when we have but two or three
people to watch. We are told to avoid rambling into green hedges off the roadside and to grip the
attention of the audience from the very start. The complications should start immediately and the
developments come with the proper regard for sequence.
…
The period of action in a motion picture play is not restricted although it is best to follow the
arrangement as depicted in the vaudeville drama. A single episode or incident which might occur within
the length of time it takes to run the film is better than dragging the tale through twenty or thirty
years. Too many notes and subtitles interrupt the story and detract from the interest….
…
A motion picture play should be consistent and the nearer to real life we get the more is the picture
appreciated. Complications which are too easily cleared up make the story unsatisfying, smacking of
unreality, thus destroying the illusion that, as the producer faithfully endeavors to portray, the scene is
not one of acting, but that we have an inside view of the comedy or tragedy of a real life. Let your
stories, though they be strong in plot, be convincing, the situations not merely possible but probable.
The producer will then have no trouble in making his actors appear to be real.
The types of normative practices that Part One has described as characteristic of the Hollywood film from
1917 on were already being promoted in their nascent form. Furthermore, the sources for these standards
were the discourse of existent signifying practices.
Allusions to standards in other arts suggest the range of sources that filmmakers called on in constructing
their film practice. In 1910 Woods called Griffith ‘the Belasco of motion pictures’ and in 1911 the Moving
Picture World argued that the best pictures came from scenarios from ‘old masters.’ One letter writer
believed that ‘[In the photoplay there is] lack of true technical construction—not sufficient introduction and
preparation; things just happen, regardless of logic and consistency—“logical sequence of events” and
“verisimilitude.” I contend that a photoplay should be as carefully constructed as a play for the speaking
stage.’50 A reviewer likened the opening compositions of A Corner in Wheat (1909) to ‘an artistic farm
scene after the style of Millet,’ and Vitagraph advertised lighting effects a la Rembrandt in 1912. One
photoplay advisor in 1912 justified the ‘American foreground’ in which figures were ‘cut off at the knees or
waist’ as having precedents in the ‘greatest sculptors and painters.’ Another critic analyzing shots from
several films compared their styles to Repin, Lorraine, Titian, and Veronese. Besides painting, still
photography was a model. Publicity releases of 1914 claimed that Griffith had achieved effects ‘hitherto
attained only in “still” photography,’ with a ‘series of films d’art which rival the pseudoimpressionistic
productions of the Fifth Avenue “still” ateliers.’ While we have to be careful in using such references, what
is of interest to us are the appeals to ‘high art’ and the suggestion of some standardization.51
Besides helping to standardize the Hollywood group style, the trade papers affected other practices.
Richardson’s column for projectionists started in early 1908, and Sargent began one on advertising
techniques in September 1911. Clarence E.Sinn ran a column on ‘Music for the picture,’ (see fig 9.14)
which in 1911 explained Wagner’s technique of leitmotifs as an approach to film music accompaniment:52
To each important character, to each important action, motive, or idea, and to each important object
(Siegmund’s sword, for example), was attached a suggestive musical theme. Whenever the action
brought into prominence any of the characters, motives, or objects, its theme or motif was sung or
played….
In addition to his leit motif, Wagner employed scenic, or descriptive music, and this idea, too,
comes well within the lines of moving picture music.
In October of that year Clyde Martin started a column on sound effects. By 1913 handbooks such as the Sam
Fox Moving Picture Music volume printed music under topical headings such as ‘Indian,’ ‘Oriental,’
‘Spanish,’ or ‘Mexican.’ In 1915, Carl Louis Gregory began a column on photography. The trade papers
supplied stories on varied aspects of the business from the results of a film in Bombay and Boston, from the
latest indirect lighting fixtures and opera chairs to the newest cameras with turret-mounted lenses and
gyroscopes.53
Not to be neglected, either, was the trade papers’ impact in educating the various members of the industry
about the entire film production process. As Harry Braverman points out, the increase in subdivision of
skills results in the workers’ decrease in understanding the work as a whole. These journals, particularly in
later years, often included articles explaining to their readers other craft activities, functions, and processes
within the industry.
Some mechanisms in this early period worked explicitly to standardize the industry. Others simply helped
perpetuate standard practices already in widespread use; such standard practices undoubtedly gained part of
their normative power through their distended usage. Raymond Williams speaks of such a cultural
hegemony in his discussion of a model of dominant social ideology:54
I would say that in any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices,
meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective.… In any case what I have
in mind is the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely
abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level
of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our
assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of
meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.
Although we are not dealing with a culture as a whole, certainly we have a group of film workers in a
constant social relationship, working to provide films with meaning to such a culture. In detailing this set of
institutions within the early industry, I have wanted to show the physical sites for the dispersion,
coalescence, and reinforcement of a specific set of meanings, values, and practices. This institutional discourse
explains why the production practices of Hollywood have been so uniform through the years and provides
the background for a group style which we show as also stable through the same period. The standardization
we find is a result of the hegemony of the discourse.
‘The balance between formula and showmanship’

Although certainly dominant, standardization was not the only process at work. There do exist smaller
internal shifts within the larger framework. As Part One pointed out regarding the group style, these
changes were at the levels of devices and systems rather than relations between the systems. These more
specific changes in the norm must also be accounted for in some way. To understand why the Hollywood
film looked as it did throughout the years and also why production practices changed in minor ways, we
must return to that tension in the economic practices between standardization and differentiation.
Standardization was a dual process—both a move to uniformity to allow mass production and a move to
attain a norm of excellence. Standardizing stylistic practices could make the production fast and simple,
therefore profitable. However, differentiation was also an economic practice, and advertising sought to use
the qualities in the films as a ground for competition and repeated consumption. Thus, difference and
‘improvement’ in film practice was also necessary. (For this reason filmmaking did not achieve the
assembly-line uniformity prevalent in other industries.) This tension results in two additional effects on the
Hollywood style and production practices: an encouragement of the innovative worker and the cyclical
innovation of styles and genres.
The innovative worker

The mode’s need for product differentiation encouraged the innovative worker, however much he or she
may have seemed to challenge the standard. Characteristically, Hollywood’s style effaced the techniques of
making the film (or else recuperated them into the story line). It was a cinema of concealed artifice. Rather
than a display of the apparatus and art of filmmaking, the standard was the story and what was lifelike, or
verisimilar. The coherence of the story and its ‘logic’ controlled the systems of time (ellipses and
condensations) and space (image compositions, matches-on-action, screen direction, establishing shots and
cut-ins with re-establishing shots). Causality thus harnessed time and space to a coded continuity. In these
systems, spectacle, stars, and novelties had their place, occasionally with problematic results (such as the
bogus happy endings discussed in Chapter 7).
The classical stylistic standard was systematized by the late teens, as Part Three will show. Once in place,
the standard controlled variations. The industry encouraged innovations, but they had to support or at least
not interfere with the controlling standard. Thus, the standard set up boundaries for variation. Throughout
the discourse of the industry, examples of this repeatedly appear, as though reinforcement would assure the
manufacturers and their sales people that their stylistic practice was naturally the best.
For example, in line with William de Mille’s playful description in this chapter’s epigraph, after the
critical attention paid to the imported German films of the mid-twenties, industrial personnel analyzed the
‘correct’ use of camera techniques. Sargent wrote in a screenwriters’ journal about the new fancy camerawork
called ‘cinematics’: ‘If it tells an idea better than straight shooting, then it is good cinematics. If it over-
shadows the telling of the story, it is poor, no matter how novel the idea may be.’55 Or the director Rouben
Mamoulian in 1932:56
[Camera movement] focuses the attention of the audience on the mechanical rather than upon the
story, and confuses instead of clarifies the issue. Unjustified movement is a sign of directorial
weakness, rather than strength.
Likewise spectacle and settings serve the needs of the plot. Photoplay writer Harry C.Carr claimed in 1917:
‘A spectacle is only permissible if it is subsidiary to character development.’57 And Hugo Ballin, an
important early set designer in 1921:58
Perfect sets have never made a drama. The audience follows the story. The story can be explained by
the settings. Settings are dramatic rhetoric. They should be indications of breeding. When settings
receive uncommon notice the drama is defective. When they are not noticed they are badly thought out.
The title of Ballin’s article, ‘The scenic background,’ might well have served as the heading for Cedric
Gibbons’ comments on MGM art direction in 1938: ‘The audience should be aware of only one thing—that
the settings harmonise with the atmosphere of the story and the type of character in it. The background must
accentuate that person’s role, and show him off to the best advantage.’59 These attitudes can be summarized
by George Cukor:60
In my case, directorial style must be largely the absence of style. It is all very well for a director
whose reputation is based on a certain hallmark which he imprints on all his work to subject every
new story and scene to his own style and artistic personality. He may achieve wonderful results. He may
take a poor story and poor performances, and by making them merely the groundwork of a brilliant
exercise in cinema technique, evolve a distinguished picture. But such directors are very rare, so I
shall stick to my own case of a director whose end is to extract the best that all his fellow-workers
have to give, and who is best pleased when the finished picture shows to the layman in the audience
no visible sign of ‘direction,’ but merely seems to be a smooth and convincing presentation by the
players of the subject in hand.
This collage of quotations not only lets us read the same logic across spans of time and profession but also
shows that practitioners justified changes as adding story improvements, authorial touches, or novelties. The
industry required novelty for product differentiation and materially rewarded innovative workers. Take as
another instance cameraman Lee Garnies in 1938: ‘I would be in the end a bad photographer if I created
photographic gems which shone so brightly that they dazzled the spectator and diverted his interest from the
purpose of the scene as a whole.’61 And a page later: ‘There may come a time when the photographer is
called upon to bring forth a photographic tour de force to strengthen a dramatically weak scene, or to
introduce novelty in what would otherwise run the risk of being commonplace.’62 The conflict between
standardization and differentiation is explicit in a 1957 discussion of the industry’s reaction to Love in the
Afternoon:63
From the point of photography, Love in the Afternoon, has become one of the most controversial
productions of the year…. cinematographers are divided into two camps regarding its lighting
treatment: 1) those who hold that a comedy always should be lit in high key, and 2) those who believe
that picture makers should dare to be different and break with tradition when something is to be
gained by it.
MGM producer Hunt Stromberg in 1938 described ‘formula’ as giving the public what it wants and
‘showmanship’ as ‘something novel, something truly “different”’: ‘Holding the balance between formula
and showmanship is a problem in itself.’64
Hollywood’s marketing practices meant that the workers had a goal of making a film so that it would
both satisfy the received opinion of standard quality filmmaking and yet would introduce a departure from
that standard. Instead of holding back the innovative worker, the Hollywood mode of production cultivated
him or her as long as the results provided profits. The man or woman whose work produced returns in the
box office could demand and receive higher salaries and broader decision-making powers— which
continued as long as earnings came back. ‘You are only as good as your last film’—while perhaps an
overstatement during the studio period—reflects this sort of power. As a result, some directors, writers,
cameramen, designers, and so on, had no trouble overcoming the Hollywood system: they were part of one
tendency within it. For instance, directors such as John Ford and Cecil B.De Mille commanded great sums
of money or special units within studios otherwise run by strong producers. Or Gregg Toland could boast in
an article how ‘I broke the rules in Citizen Kane’ and receive qualified praise by the industry for doing so.65
The promotion of the innovative worker who might push the boundaries of the standard was part of
Hollywood’s practices. Normally, furthermore, the innovations were justified as ‘improvements’ on the
standards of verisimilitude, spectacle, narrative coherence, and continuity. Hollywood’s goal was a certain
type of stylistic practice, not the display of the hand of a worker. For some workers, such as Cukor, the goal
was playing by the rules of ‘invisibility’—pursuing the standard of quality filmmaking; for others, such as
Toland it was breaking the rules within the overall standards of stylistic practice. Those whom criticism has
canonized as auteurs may thus be understood as strikingly innovative workers. Individuals who elaborated
upon the norms were not necessarily subverting the group style but may very well have been furthering
Hollywood’s economic aims.
Cycles
We all steal from each other. We are all stimulated by each other. I think this is true of any art
form. I think it’s true in the field of writing, of painting, of music. I think we’re all influenced
by our contemporaries and also our past masters.66
Vincent Sherman
Innovation leads to a second effect of standardization versus differentiation: cyclical change within classical
stylistic practice. Given a classical standard for quality filmmaking, an individual film still had great leeway
in minor deviations in order to establish its differentiation within the consumption market. Indeed, we have
seen that the marketing practice of publicity worked toward the appearance of novelty, and that, in fact, trade
critics functioned to support that practice.
However no retrospective ‘first’ has any significance if it has not become a prized element in the system. To
quote John Perry again, ‘an innovation is successful only when it has become a new standard.’ Hollywood
has been described as running in cycles: one film that is successful spawns a host of others. The economic
practice of profit maximization accounts in part for this. If a genre or style or technique produces positive
results (usually measured in box office receipts), other companies try an imitation of that success. Witness
de Mille’s description of the effects of Griffith’s use of a ‘soft focus’ style and the introduction of ‘German-
style’ camerawork. Thus, within its circumscribed limits, Hollywood has attempted innovations and has
standardized successes. As a result, similar films often appear closely together and constitute cycles.
The repetition of an innovation, then, leads to series. Part One has described the genesis of one such
subgroup, film noir. In the teens, a vogue for Westerns was followed by fashions for military films and later
‘vamp’ pictures. Moderate sharpness, ‘soft’ style, and ‘pan-focus’ each constituted quality cinematography
at one time or another. Stanley Cortez wrote about fads in color:67
We have so often had to follow the studios’ specific styles. I remember that M-G-M and 20th used to
fight; Louis B.Mayer saw one of [Darryl] Zanuck’s pictures in the early days, and Mayer decided to
change all his pictures from soft to hard colour as a result, and told Karl Freund and his other
cameramen what to do. The other studios followed suit. So as a result we got ‘Christmas package’
colours in Hollywood films of the forties and after—a distorted sense of colour values in which
everyone wanted to put more and more colour in.
In an analysis of the pan-focus style, a trade writer noted:68
The innovations which marked the late Gregg Toland’s photography of Citizen Kane not only
contributed to the very great success of the picture, but set a new standard in feature film photography.
The immediate result was that other cinematographers adopted Toland’s ‘deep focus’ technique and
gave it new and interesting application.
Thus, the new trend becomes the new standard, a minor change within the group style of the classical film.
These innovations, in fact, often played off conceptions of the standards. For example, Warner Bros in
the early 1930s wanted to make a film within the horror genre, but its head of studio production wanted it
different from the then-standard films of Universal. The producers intentionally varied the design of the
product by switching characteristic elements in the genre; the indefinite time and place settings in Universal
films were transformed into present-day urban United States, and the peasants became the lower class.69
Bwana Devil combined two earlier technologies to bill itself ‘the world’s first three-dimensional feature
in color.’ Salesmen advertised a 1929 Ford film The White Flame as the ‘first sound film without a
heroine.’70 Such methods of innovation also suggest techniques were periodically recovered and
recombined within more particular genres and styles. In fact, director George Stevens described it in such
terms:71
Something sort of cannibalistic is taking place. Producers, writers and directors have got into the habit
of screening over and over again the pictures that have been proved in the past to possess something
that made them box office successes. I don’t mean that they simply make them over. They break them
down into their component elements, study these carefully, and then use them again in different
arrangement, as parts of a new story, depending on them to exert the same appeal they did the first time.
Thus the appearance of any ‘progress’ may be illusory. In addition, the order of such changes, while not
chaotic, cannot be predicted.
By the end of the teens, then, a large number of various types of mechanisms reinforced and
disseminated standards. Advertising, trade associations, professional and labor associations, trade papers,
and critics promoted uniformity and quality. A tension between standardization and differentiation in the
economic system also helps explain similarities and variations among the individual films as well as the
appearance of changes in subject matter, genres, and styles, With these practices in place, the production
practices operated to achieve them; how they managed to do so is the focus of the rest of this part,
1.1 (above left) Bulldog Drummond (1929)
1.2 (above right) *The Show (1927)

1.3 (left) A striking high angle for The Garden of Eden (1928)
2.1–2.5 Phases of a shot from *Casbah (1948)

2.6 (below right) The Fountainhead (1949)
3.1 (above left) *The Night Holds Terror (1955)

3.2 (above right) *Code of the Sea (1924)
3.3 (below left) *Sweepstakes Winner (1939)

3.4 (below right) Prologue in Hell: The Devil’s Bait (1917)

3.5–3.7 *Partners in Crime (1928)

3.8–3.13 *The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935)

3.14–3.16 *The Caddy (1953)

3.17–3.20 *The Canterville Ghost (1944)

3.21 (below) *One Touch of Nature (1917)
3.22–3.25 The protagonist walks into a shot initially denned as his field of vision: *The Whip Hand (1951)
3.26–3.28 Narration in the credits of King Kong (1933)

4.1–4.2 (above) A match-on-action cut from *Mr. Skeffington (1944)

4.3–4.5 (centre and below) A dissolve during a scene’s exposition softens the transition to a closer view: *The King and
the Chorus Girl (1937)
5.1 (above left) *The Caddy (1953)

5.1–5.8 The T-composition at work in long shots (5.1, 5.2), closer views (5.3 through 5.6), and close-ups (5.7)
5.2 (above right) The Clodhopper (1917)
5.3 (centre left) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

5.4 (centre right) The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.5 (below left) Laura (1944)

5.6 (below right) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

5.8 The T-principle is also common in the composition of widescreen shots: Carmen Jones (1954)
5.9–5.10 A partial frame cut. The figure crosses the frame line at the end of one shot (5.9) and this provides a transition
to a full view (5.10): *Sweepstakes Winner (1939)
5.11–5.14 (above and centre) A complete frame cut. The character leaves the shot (5.11), crossing the frameline (5.12).
Cut to his body crossing the opposite frame line (5.13) as he moves to the center area
(5.14): *The Whip Hand (1951)
5.15–5.16 (below) The Bedroom Window (1924)
5.17 (right) Reserving frame space for a character’s entrance: *The Royal Pauper (1917)
5.18–5.19 (centre) Reserving space for an entering character: *Sweepstakes Winner (1939). A reframing camera
movement compensates for any loss of balance.
5.20 (below left) Modified frontality of body position in * Victory (1919)

5.21 (below right) Modified frontality in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)
5.22 (above left) Frontality in the dispersed group: The Three Musketeers (1921)
5.23 (above right) Frontality realistically motivated by the characters’ environment: *Affair in Havana (1957)
5.24 (centre left) The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

5.25 (centre right) The Little Foxes (1941)
5.26 (below left) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

5.27 (below right) *Manhandled (1949)
5.28 (above left) *Wine of Youth (1924)

5.29 (above right) The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
5.30 (centre left) Dangerous Mission (1954)

5.31 (centre right) The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
5.32 (below left) The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)

5.33 (below right) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
5.34 (above left) Are Parents People? (1925)

5.35 (above right) *Manhandled (1949)
5.36 (centre left) Perspective construction in Anthony Adverse (1936)

5.37 (centre right) Decentered framing in non-classical space: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)
5.38–5.39 (below) Spatial manipulation in Trying to Get Arrested (1909)

5.40–5.41 (above) The ‘gentle dance’ of shot/reverse-shot, in which each composition’s center of interest corresponds
roughly to that of the next: So This Is Paris (1926)
5.42–5.43 (centre and below) Widescreen filmmaking generally obeyed the principle of keeping the viewer’s eye close
to the previous shot’s center of interest: Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)
5.44–5.45 (above) Decentered shot/reverse-shot from a nonclassical tradition: Not Reconciled (1964)
5.46–5.47 (centre) A cheat cut from *Play Girl (1941). In the second shot, the figures are closer together, and the young
woman’s hands are clasped
5.48–5.49 (below) Each Dawn I Die (1939). This spectacular cheat cut makes the James Cagney character vanish from
the second shot. The viewer does not normally notice the lapse, probably because the cut crosses the axis of action
5.50–5.53 Four frames from *Mr. Skeffington (1944). In 5.50, the armchair in the foreground is ‘primed’ by the
establishing shot. The camera tracks in (5.51) and a short scene ensues (5.52). When Mr Skeffington sits, the chair is
waiting for him (5.53)
6.1–6.6 Spatial fragments eventually get ‘placed’ by an establishing shot: *Love and the Law (1919)
6.7–6.9 (above and left) A passing couple smoothly guides us to the significant action: The Fountainhead (1949)
6.10–6.40 (this page below and following pages) Frames from a scene of *Play Girl (1941)
6.12–6.17 Frames from a scene of *Play Girl (1941)




7.1 (left) T-Men (1948)
7.2 (right) *Penthouse (1933)

9.1 (left) High salaries for some players were already drawing comment in November 1911
9.2 (right) A 1913 advertisement for the multiple-reeler Atlantis

9.3 In 1911, American Film used the ‘Flying A’ trademark and specialized in Westerns that were ‘extremely original’
and ‘astoundingly realistic’
9.4 A 1913 advertisement for The Battle of Waterloo

9.5 (left) In 1911 New York Motion-Picture Co. heralded its hiring of the Bison 101 Wild West Show
9.6 (right) By May 1911, companies were competing over the quality of the paper advertising available to exhibitors
9.7 A theater display in August 1911. Marion Leonard was one of the earliest players to receive headline credit. (Also
see fig. 9.1)
Opposite page
9.8 (above left) A September 1911 advertisement using King Baggott as the primary exchange-value for the film
9.9 (above right) ‘Little Mary’ [Pickford] in a January 1911 advertisement

9.10 (below left) Owen Moore and Mary Pickford in October 1911
9.11 (below right) The distributing firm Film Supply Company of America transferred the star system to its cast of
manufacturers (October 1912)
9.12 (above) The officers of the Photoplay Authors’ League in 1915

9.13 (right) The Static Club in 1915

9.14 (opposite) Clarence E.Sinn’s column for 21 October 1911
11.1 The IMP stock company, February 1911, including Mary Pickford, Owen Moore, King Baggott, and Thomas Ince
Opposite page
11.2 (above left) In June 1912, Vitagraph’s main studio in Brooklyn, New York, was a departmentalized factory able to
plan, shoot, cut, and print four to five reels per week
11.3 (below) Plans for the Fox Studio, 1919

11.4 (above right) Dressing rooms that could double for a prison set (late 1910s)
11.5 The Lubin Firm, 1912

11.6 New York Motion Picture’s Santa Ynez studio. 1915

11.7 The Lasky studio, 1915

11.8 (above) A London street set for the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, under construction in the dark studio
of the Famous Players-Lasky firm
11.9 (below) A December 1922 Photodramatist article explained how mattes and glass shots were accomplished
12.1 Photographed in 1911, the Star Theater (Boston, Massachusetts) was built in 1907
12.2 (below left) The Victoria Theater (Lawrence, Massachusetts) had a seating capacity of 900 in 1911
12.3 (below right) In Los Angeles, the Liberty Theatre in 1911 boasted of being ‘one of the city’s eight first-class
moving picture theatres.’ The gold leaf statue on the cornice was 10 feet in height and held an electric torch
Opposite page
12.4 (above left) A 1915 Selig advertisement for its multiple-reel adaptation of The Circular Staircase
12.5 (above right) Lubin’s five-reel film of Louis Reeves Harrison’s The Rights of Man (1915)
12.6 (below) The Monopol Film Company advertisement for Dante’s Inferno (1911)
12.7 (above) W. Stephen Bush’s 1911 lectures for multiple-reelers Faust and Enoch Arden. (‘Scene’ is the period
term for ‘shot’)
Opposite page
12.8 (above left) One of the earliest scripts available in the Aitken Brothers papers (Wisconsin State Historical Society)
is for The Raiders, shot in December 1913 under the direction of Jan Hunt for Thomas Ince. This page is the cast of
characters. Note the explanation for an apparently longer shooting schedule than planned
12.9 (above right) The scene plot for The Raiders

12.10 (below left) Page 1 of The Raiders’ continuity script, with penciled-in commentary and footage lengths
12.11 (below right) Page 13 of The Raiders’ script. Note scenes [shots] 72–75 in which analytical editing (‘close up’)
and continuity between shots (‘lose hat’) are carefully detailed before and during shooting
12.12 (left) Page 17 of The Raiders’ script. Here the script directions specify camera movement that will keep the
central character in the center of the frame
12.13 (below) Walter Edwards directed The Bride of Hate for Ince in August-September 1916. This photograph of a
scene in the film would have been available to exhibitors for their local advertising
12.14 (left) The Bride of Hate’s cast list includes a standard admonition regarding changing the script without
permission. C. Gardner Sullivan managed Ince’s scenario department
12.15 (right) An early proposal for music for The Bride of Hate
12.16 Music cues released in the company’s press sheet for
12.17 The accounting page for The Bride of Hate. Over 68 per cent of the exhibitors direct costs were for salaries
12.18 One of the posters for The Bride of Hate

12.19 Triangle produced Framing Framers in 1917. This script page indicates the beginning of a series of shots that
represent the character Whitney remembering his youth. Three cues suggest this: the inter-title, Whitney’s stare, and the
dissolve. In subsequent action, this subjective sequence motivates Whitney’s interference in his granddaughter choice of
a husband
10
The director system: management in the first years
The introduction of a new product

Initially, the exhibitors marketed the new medium of film on the basis of its technological novelty, but they
had to find new rationales in order for consumers to repeat consumption of the product. This resulted in a
need to supply a variety of product, and several firms entered the field to produce these films. Between
Edison’s first public exhibition in 1896 and 1908 when the Film Services Association formed, the
manufacturers moved to an output which was predominantly fictional narratives. Robert Allen’s research
indicates that an important cause for this was the fact that narratives could be made in a central location and
on a predictable basis— making possible a start of efficient and profitable mass production.
With this shift to narratives, the first detailed division of labor started to dominate a craft mode of making
films. Modelled in part on the working practices of legitimate theater, the director system of filmmaking
allowed rapid, predictable, and efficient production, and it quickly became the standard labor organization
in the industry.
The first methods of marketing the product

The exhibition of projected Vitascope films on 23 April 1896, at Koster & Dial’s Music Hall, may be
considered a case of the introduction of a new product into a market. Many new products fail; this one did
not. The reason can be traced to both economic and ideological/signifying practices.
Film entered the entertainment field, which meant that it would compete for consumers’ disposable
income. Consumers had to be willing to value the product enough to spend money on it rather than on a
beer or a weekly illustrated magazine or a new phonograph record. The new product also faced an organized
market which had already realized some of the advantages of national distribution and mass production.
Legitimate theater had theater chains and national touring road companies presenting famous plays and
stars. Set pieces for the stage were manufactured for mass distribution with these groups. Mark Klaw and
Abraham Erlanger controlled a substantial string of theaters in major cities, which created an efficient
national circuit and a syndicate by 1896. Opera houses and theaters had graduated-price seating, and penny
arcades, Wild West, minstrel, and educational shows, circuses, and fairs were available to those with
modest incomes. Popular magazines, such as the Ladies Home Journal, which was first to reach a
circulation of million in 1891, used the inexpensive mails for distribution and sold advertising to pay part of
its production costs. Dime novels and children’s fiction were widely available through inexpensive mass
printing.1
THE DIRECTOR SYSTEM: THE FIRST YEARS 201
Raff & Gammon exhibited the Vitascope and its films under Edison’s name at a vaudeville house,
vaudeville being another competitor in the entertainment field. The first Vitascope presentation consisted of
a series of six vaudeville-like scenes: an umbrella dance by a variety act; a scenic of the seashore; a
burlesque boxing match by Walton and May, ‘the long and short comedians’; a section of a Hoyt farce, ‘A
Milk White Flag,’ in which ‘a couple of dozen people appeared’; a serpentine ‘skirt dance by a tall blonde’;
and a comic allegory called The Monroe Doctrine,’ ‘showing an argument between John Bull and Uncle
Sam.’ According to Robert Allen, Raff & Gammon’s decision to exploit films through an acknowledged
leader in retailing middle-class entertainment seems a conservative one. Advantages of vaudeville were
apparent: typical acts could be filmed, and their length made them compatible with the short
moving pictures. Working on the presentation of an interchangeable set of acts which were not linked
together thematically, vaudeville intentionally varied its parts for widest audience appeal. It also regularly
presented ‘dumb acts’ such as tinted stereopticon slide shows, acrobatics, and animal acts. Theater circuits
had developed, legitimate stars were appearing on its stages, and middle-class money was arriving at the
box offices of the well-appointed houses. Thus, moving pictures fitted into an already-existent market. To
achieve profits, Raff & Gammon needed to supply projectors and films—a much smaller investment and
distribution problem, than, for instance, moving into exhibition.2
Although Edison chose to concentrate on manufacturing and distributing projectors and films, other firms
solved the marketing problem differently. Following another established pattern of selling entertainment to
consumers, itinerant showmen armed with a camera, projector, and supply of film would tour the
countryside and set up wherever audiences were available. These black-top, traveling tent shows were
common in the United States through at least 1908. Combining the two methods, many firms contracted
with vaudeville houses to supply projectionist, projector, and films as a set act. The advantage to this was
that the house did not have to invest in a projector or worry about ordering films. The house only paid the
act’s salary. This distributing and merchandising method also meant rapid variation of the act with no loss of
capital investment once audience interest declined.3
Luring the customer

At first films were marketed on the basis of the technological novelty of moving pictures. But novelty has a
breaking point—Allen says, sometimes only a couple of months for the early films. The problem was to
find new rationales for consumers repeatedly to purchase the product. The solution was to shift the publicity
emphasis from films as a technological novelty to a variety of consumer appeals: stories, genres, spectacle,
information, new novelties. Selling the product by differentiating it—even in slight ways—resulted in a
need for a varied and increased supply of films.
The companies’ films fell into several broad types, five of which are worth special attention. I have
already mentioned the variety act and the fictional narrative. The earliest Vitascope films made by the
Edison Company exemplified these two categories, as do films made by Vitagraph and Biograph.
Typically, such films were produced in permanently located studios such as Edison’s Black Maria. In 1897,
Scientific American devoted a three-page article describing Biograph’s technological apparatus, explaining
that it was built ‘for taking photographs of celebrated scenes from plays or of individual performances in
which it is desired to reproduce the motions as well as the features of the subject.’4 (The description
indicates a revolving stage like the Black Maria and a camera which moved to and from the stage with its
‘necessary scenery’.) These two types of films exploited the value of famous performers, sketches, and
stories.
A third type was ‘scenics,’ a kind of family or tourist’s collection of views of everyday life: the baby
eating, workers leaving factories, vacation spots, exotic peoples and customs, far-away lands, and
celebrities. A moving record of present-day life around the world, these documentaries were the medium’s
adaptation of written and oral accounts, paintings, and photographs. Hales Tours (1905) even took the
spectator/consumer on simulated trips by projecting films of scenic views while mechanically rocking the
audience in specially constructed railroad cars. Scenics did not have to take spectators to picturesque
locales; they might take them no farther than the home town. Cameramen would visit a town, take films,
develop them, and then exhibit them on the spot. When Biograph visited Rochester, New York, in 1899, the
firm photographed the town’s fire department, police, employees from Eastman Kodak and Bausch &
Lomb, and casual passers-by for exhibition at the local opera house.5
‘Topicals’ were a fourth major type. These differed from scenics in their exploitation of the timeliness of
current events—a direct appeal to the freshness of the product. Early newsreels, these were filmings of
coronations, funerals, fires, floods, and—with the advent of the Spanish American War—armed conflict.
There were editorials: a crowd pleaser was a Vitagraph film showing the hoisting of an American flag after
the pulling down of a Spanish one. Even re-enacted representations of the war’s battles had
consumer interest. Sport was also one of the earliest subjects for filming. Enoch Rector filmed the Corbett-
Fitzsimmons bout in 1897, for an atypically long film of 11,000 feet, and the 1899 Biograph shooting of the
Jeffries-Sharkey prize fight required an early use of artificial lighting. Unlike many other subjects, sports
films held their value in repeated showings, particularly if controversial calls benefited from replays.6
Finally, ‘trick’ films provided an extension of the initial marketing appeal of the technology. Once
moving pictures as such faded as a novelty, other aspects of the technology were exploited.
Economically and ideologically, moving pictures followed established, conservative business practices.
In marketing, companies retailed the product as other entertainments had been retailed. Once the initial
novelty of the product was gone, new visual, topical, and technological lures were the loci of advertising
promotion to entice viewers to repeated consumption. The types of product—fictional narratives, variety
entertainment, scenics, topicals, and tricks—had appealed to customers before film companies introduced
moving pictures commercially; they still constitute the fare of television and other entertainment sources.
While it is not unusual for a company to introduce a new product, in a capitalist economy there remains
the task of stimulating a demand so that production can increase. In early US film production the
combination of a low cost and an accepted entertainment fare fostered a wide consumer demand. The low
cost was a result of a series of developments in the industrial structure. Exchanges developed after 1903, which
lowered the exhibitors’ cost, which in turn permitted the establishment of the nickelodeon era about 1906.
Moving pictures could then present entertainment —often vaudeville acts or short narratives—at a
significantly lower price than vaudeville or theater. (The average admission prices in Boston in 1909 were:
moving picture shows, $.10; vaudeville and moving pictures, $.15; vaudeville, $.50; regular theatre, $1.00;
and the opera, $2.00.7) Even if the consumer had to give up live, three-dimensional spectacle, the ticket-
price difference won out. As Moving Picture World said in 1908, ‘A great portion of the public is satisfied
with a reasonably good substitute for the real article [stage and vaudeville], providing it can be obtained as a
sufficiently reduced price.’ Furthermore, scenics and topicals offered a moving recording—not possible in
other entertainment media. In other words, some consumers with limited disposable income settled for the
less expensive product, while consumers with even less income could now afford one form of commercial
entertainment. This is not a case of the poor discovering cinema as their own, but the increased availability
of films—both in exhibition outlets and in footage—to all income levels. The middle-class had had moving
pictures in vaudeville; now the product’s market expanded, and, with that expansion, it could move to a
volume output and achieve economies of scale.8
The production shift to fictional narrative

With an increase in demand in the years 1906–7 (the nickelodeon boom), Allen claims commercial
filmmakers weighted their output toward fictional narratives because of their suitability to mass production.
This shift to narratives takes hold by 1907–8. (If spectators had not found these stories acceptable
entertainment, the industrial concentration would not have been possible.) The change was remarked upon
after the fact by several commentators, and their explanation makes good economic sense—for capitalist
filmmakers. Discussing why the American manufacturers chose fictional narratives, Hugo Münsterberg
wrote:9
It is claimed that the producers in America disliked…topical pictures because the accidental character
of the events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the steady production of the
photoplays.
Or, in Harry C.Carr’s picturesque language in a 1917 Photoplay article ‘the demand for plays being greater
than the supply of floods and fires, picture people began making pictures in the studios.’10
As Allen points out, fictional films could ‘be made at a low, predictable cost per foot, produced in or near
a centralized studio, and released on a regular schedule.’ Irregularity hinders mass production. The producer
needs both a constant, assured supply of raw materials and a routine assembly process. Topicals and scenics
could not yield regular production, since a large number of cameramen spread throughout the United States
sat idle for indefinite periods of time.11 Moreover, the new (1908) distribution system, the Film Service
Association, which sold exhibitors a regular, weekly supply of new films compounded the need for a steady
production schedule.
Thus requirements of production and distribution which needed to ensure a supply of films explain the
shift away from unpredictable options and toward fictional narratives. Changes in demand and supply
affected all three branches of the film industry. Manufacturers began to consider efficient ways of ordering
and expanding production; these techniques increased after the nickelodeon boom of 1906. Distributors
helped that demand increase by regularizing the films’ availability. Exhibitors expanded the number of
outlets and, through lower prices, the overall market. The film had become generally accepted as a
competitor for the consumer’s dollar in the entertainment field, and filmmakers shifted to fictional
narratives to provide efficient, steady mass production.
The ‘cameraman’ system of production (1896–1907)

In 1896, the manufacturers actually used two modes of production: a social division of labor and a detailed
division of labor. The ‘cameraman’ system dominated until about 1907. As a type of social division of
labor, the cameraman system represents a particularly unified craft situation. In general, cameramen such as
W.K.L.Dickson, Albert Smith, Billy Bitzer, and Edwin S.Porter would select the subject matter and stage it
as necessary by manipulating setting, lighting, and people; they would select options from available
technological and photographic possibilities (type of camera, raw stock, and lens, framing and movement of
camera, etc.), photograph the scene, develop and edit it. Dickson, in fact, not only was an inventor, but in
1899–1900 he spent ten months in South Africa photographing the Boer War for Biograph. Dickson
recounted staging a typical film:12
February 26th [1900]—I am lost in admiration over the stoical manner in which our men suffer and
joke over it all [the war]. Today I photographed the men as they were being carried from the Red
Cross waggons to the trains at Colenso. Before they were lifted out I went from waggon to waggon
telling them about the Biograph, and how their friends at home would see them, and that they must put
the best foot forward. Although suffering severely they were cheery, and amused themselves chaffing
with each other. The stretcher-bearers fell in with my idea and gave them every assistance, and soon a
lot of them on stretchers, carried on each other’s backs, &c., were ready to march past the machine,
one fellow remarking as he tried to rise, ‘Hello, old chap, are you winding us up for another go at old
Krooger?’
Bitzer shot narratives, variety acts, and news footage, including covering the Spanish-American War and
the Gal veston hurricane. Porter concentrated on studio production for Edison. Workmanship precedents
came from the examples of the still photographers during the second half of the 1800s.13
This description of the first work system seems comparable to the analysis of the social division of labor.
Like the artisan/craftsman, the cameraman knew the entire work process, and conception and execution of
the product were unified. In early film production, some individuals functioned as both owners/managers (with
the work responsibilities of capital direction) and cameramen (with product responsibilities); in other cases
the responsibilities were split among individuals. What is important is that those who actually made the films
were craftsmen.
The cameraman system could supply films but not as predictably, rapidly, and inexpensively as was
necessary once the nickelodeon boom started in 1906. To produce scenics and topicals, the firms needed
many cameramen to cover the entire physical space where news might occur. Even when an event did
occur, the success of the film might depend on uncontrollable factors such as the weather: if the film
jammed or was inadequately exposed, news events did not repeat themselves for retakes. While cameramen
continued making newsreels on their own, the entire growing industry could not rely on such a method to
increase production at a time when demand warranted expansion.
In the production of narratives, variety acts, and trick films in a studio, a skilled artisan such as Porter
who organized, directed, photographed, and edited most of his firm’s product could only do so much. The
number of cameramen so skilled in a variety of work processes was also limited. Furthermore, while the
companies might have trained other workers in all aspects of the craft, that would counter the cost
advantages of dividing labor. Only the most skilled workers had to be paid high salaries; if a few workers
could specialize in the technical phases, the less-skilled workers could execute the work—for lower
salaries. Training craftsmen was more expensive than dividing labor.
In both location shooting and studio production, the cameraman system—as of that period—was not able
to supply films in mass production. That the firms should shift away from a social division of labor to a
detailed division of labor follows the economic example set by many other profitable industries. The
cameraman system did not die out as such (Hal Mohr describes working in it for a small firm in 1913 and it
continues today), but by sheer weight of capital investment another mode and system began to dominate the
film industry after about 1907.14
The ‘director’ system of production (1907–1909)
You will find that the kinetoscope world is much like the dramatic, that it has its actors and
actresses, its playwrights and stage directors, its theatrical machinery, its wings, its properties,
its lights, its tricks, its make-ups, its costumes, its entrances and exits.15
Moving Picture World, 1907
Even before 1907, some firms developed a different organization of work. Vitagraph, for instance, hired its
first director in 1904. Although Bitzer had been in charge of all his product at Biograph, about 1907, a
separate worker began to take over parts of the direction. In this system of production, one individual staged
the action and another person photographed it. Moreover, the director managed a set of workers including
the craftsman cameraman. The historical precedent for this system was the legitimate theater and its stage
director.16
Historians of the theater generally date the emergence of the modern stage director from the 1870s.
Although directorial work functions were part of the labor process before then, usually the director was also
a member of the cast. The productions between 1874 and 1890 of Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, are
particularly significant:17
The most important factors in the Duke’s approach were his complete control over every aspect of a
production, and his long and careful rehearsals. A painter and draftsman, he designed the scenery,
costumes, and every movement of the actors. He did not utilize stars and each actor was subordinated
to the over-all effect…. Furthermore, stage scenery and properties were carefully designed in terms of
the action, and the total stage picture as it developed moment by moment was worked out with extreme
care.
In the United States, Augustin Daly, an early non-acting manager, also countered the prevalent star system
by stressing ensemble acting. Describing Daly’s techniques from the 1870s on, a biographer writes that ‘he
treated his artists as puppets in his scheme of mise en scène.’ By 1900 it was common both abroad and in
the United States to consider each play as having its own needs in style, scenery, and staging which the
director organized, controlled, and rehearsed in detail. Oscar Brockett comments that for directors like Max
Reinhardt a script was ‘the meager outline offered by the playwright which the director must complete.’18
Many of the early film directors came from stage acting experience: G.M.Anderson (with Selig from
1903), Hobart Bosworth (with David Belasco until hired by Selig in 1909), D.W. Griffith (with Biograph in
1907), Herbert Brenon (with IMP, 1909), Al Christie (with Nestor, 1909), and Sidney Olcott (with Kalem,
1907). When the 1907–8 shift to fictional narratives occurred, film production was able to take as a model
the stage director who controlled the choices of scenery, costumes, and acting, and used a script as an
‘outline’ of the narrative.19
In the film studio, the director made most of the major and minor decisions involved in the filming of the
product. As a producer, his employment with a company ensured that finances were available. (At this point
in the industry, the terms ‘producer’ and ‘director’ were even used synonymously.) The director/producer
like Griffith either furnished the idea for the film or rewrote one the firm had available. He selected his
stage settings and gave directions to the carpenters, painters, and property men. If any research was needed,
he would do it. He selected the people from the stock company; he found locations. One director in 1907
described his shooting procedures: ‘I rehearsed the child and dog a good many times, so’s to get just the
right kind of curves to the performance and when they were letter perfect in their parts I had the machines
planted and gave the word for the snapping to begin.’ Once the cameraman or laboratory staff developed the
film, the director edited it.20
The parallels between film director and the theatrical counterpart are evident. Edward W. Townsend
made the comparison explicitly when he described production procedures in 1909:21
Work preliminary to production runs parallel with that in a Broadway theater. Plays, some in scenario
form, some fully developed, are received in every mail and examined by professional readers who
select the possible for managerial consideration. Those finally accepted, if in scenario—the sketch of
the play —are given to a playwright to be fully developed. In their final form plays are turned over to
a stage manager, who first proceeds as does his brother of Broadway, to draw off scene plots for the
painters and carpenters, and property and costume lists for those in charge of those departments. Then
the people of the play are cast.
The firms copied other aspects of the stage work system by employing actors and actresses, stage managers,
property men, and wardrobe mistresses. There were also ‘assistants with signs, costumes and various
properties.’ In 1908 Selig hired carpenters and scene shifters who were members of the local theatrical
Stage Hands Union.22
The director system differs significantly from the cameraman system. Most obviously, the director system
split responsibility for the production between jobs, thus separating the conception and execution of the
work among individual craftsmen. This was due in part to the technology.23* The cameraman, almost
invariably, made several important decisions: the sufficiency of light, the photographic acceptability of a
take, and the quality of the negatives he or an assistant developed and printed. He may also have been
involved in other aspects of the camera’s set-up. Generally, the knowledge of this technology was outside
the province of the director, whose major photographic criterion at that time was visibility of action. After
1907, it became atypical in fictional narrative production for the work functions of director and cameraman
to be combined. In later years, around 1913, Thanhouser publicized its employee Carl L. Gregory as ‘one of
the two moving picture directors who actually operate their own cameras.’24
A further separation of conception and execution began to isolate another specific function: writing the
script outlines. (From the beginning, companies had supplied some stories for the workers to reconstruct for
filming. Credited by the early industry as the ‘first’ person hired by a company to produce stories, Roy L.
McCardell worked for Biograph from 1897.25) The cause for this split seems to be one of increasing the
supply of raw product (stories) for the move to mass production. Epes Winthrop Sargent suggested that the
nickelodeon boom and the shift to fictional narratives created an intense need for a constant and plentiful
supply of plots. As Sargent wrote in 1913:26
It was seen that the studio force could not produce each week a sufficiently strong story, and outside
writers were invited to contribute suggestions, for which they were paid from five to fifteen dollars.
These mere synopses were developed in the studio into scripts, since few of the writers possessed the
knowledge of picture-making requisite to enable them to develop the script.
By subcontracting stories from freelance writers or hiring its own writers, the company organized script
production into two phases: 1) selecting subject material and constructing a plot, and 2) breaking the plot
into parts for filming. The director or another individual in the firm did the latter. These ‘outlines’ ranged
from the causal scenario to the more formal play. Gene Gauntier recalls the scenarios which Kalem owner-
writer Frank Marion was supplying to director Sidney Olcott in the summer of 1907: ‘And he [Marion] would
hand Sid a used business envelope on the back of which, in his minute handwriting, was sketched the
outline of six scenes, supposed to run one hundred and fifty feet to the scene—as much as our little camera
would hold. A half dozen words described each scene; I believe to this day Mr. Marion holds the
championship for the shortest working scenario.’ Gauntier’s evaluation of Marion’s scenarios indicates that
his ran toward the more informal end of the continuum. The more detailed plays mentioned by Townsend in
1909 were ‘picture-play manuscripts [which] consist largely of descriptions of character, explanations of
emotions, instructions for entrances and exits and other stage directions, and contain but a few lines [of
dialogue] (and those merely for guidance).’27
The director still had great leeway in the use of these scenario outlines. In an interview with the ‘stage
director’ filming a civil war story on location in suburban Chicago in 1909, the director explained:28
I expect to call this piece ‘Brother Against Brother,’ but we don’t always know until we see how they
turn out. The idea is that the Union captain has taken his own brother prisoner as a spy, and then is
compelled to have him shot. I don’t know exactly what we’ll do with it yet. We may have the Union
captain commit suicide rather than shoot his own brother. We’ll have to work this out later.
While the director may have been in charge of the film, planning was apparently not always very advanced.
The division between the story writer and the director had become so common by 1911 that trade paper
writers were already saying that while the ideal would be a combined ‘author-director,’ few individuals
could successfully be both.29 Probably the separation of functions also owed a good deal to the mode of
legitimate theater.
By 1907, then, the artisanal cameraman mode had been replaced by a system which separated conception
and execution of the work among at least director, cameraman, and writer. There was an additional
significant difference between the cameraman and director systems. As Marx predicted regarding serial
manufacture, more craft positions created a hierarchy of management. As in the theatrical model, the
director topped a pyramid of workers: the rest of the staff followed his decisions and directions.
The split of conception and execution and the creation of a management hierarchy signal a fundamental
change in the mode of film production—a change from a social division of labor to a detailed one. Now
several individuals were functioning both as managers (with technical decision-making power) and workers
(with execution power). Part of this was due to the means of production, with its combination of crafts
(writing, directing, photographing); part, to the advantages of detailed division of labor in improving the
rate of output. After management and work processes had become clearly divided, subsequent production
systems revised the director system, generally separating the various management decisions among more
and more work positions, creating hierarchies of management and non-management workers, and further
parceling out the labor. While the future systems would be different, they all worked out of the director
system’s distribution of management and craft knowledge among various jobs.
Finally, it is not unimportant that this system of production centralized its work processes in the studio/
factory. This allowed an ease in controlling labor time, eliminating irregularity of production, and
permitting detailed division of labor as well as reducing material and labor cost. The film studio/factory was
the focal site of the manufacturing of fictional narrative films, and the shift away from the scenics and
topicals has to be attributed in part to the advantages of studio production. Even when the firm sent out a
group to shoot exteriors for a one-reel narrative, the locations at first were usually within one-day round-trip
distance. Only later when the firms made work procedures more regularized did they take advantage of
another characteristic of standardization: if parts were interchangeable, they could be made in different and
distant locations and then assembled in yet another place. The studio need not be a site for the complete
construction of the film, but for efficient mass production, a centralized place of planning and assembly was
perceived as a minimal condition.
The director system dominated US film production only a few years—most centrally, the period 1907–9.
It remains a distinct and important system, however, because it did continue as a sporadic or minority
practice. Taking its immediate precedents from theatrical work models, it did not immediately develop the
rigid work organizations then current in a very few mass production industries such as the automotive one.
As we shall see, subsequent systems in the detailed division of labor revised and reworked the basic features
of this initial system. By 1909, demand for films had increased to the point that a new system took over.
11
The director-unit system: management of multiple-unit
companies after 1909
The ‘director-unit’ system of production (1909–14)
The Selig plant is an enormous art factory, where film plays are turned out with the same
amount of organized efficiency, division of labor and manipulation of matter as if they were
locomotives or sewing machines.1
Motography, July 1911
‘There’s another sausage.’2
Attributed to D.W.Griffith during his Biograph employment
In 1911 Selig Polyscope was releasing four one-reel films per week. This was typical of the manufacturers,
who through their distribution alliances were selling a regular supply of varied goods to exhibitors. By then,
the exhibitors required twenty to thirty new films per week, and the distribution alliances, to regularize the
system and spread the product evenly across the week, assigned weekly release schedules. This required
manufacturers to systematize their production output so that the reels of film would roll out the studio doors
as regularly as those locomotives or sewing machines. Advertising practices also reinforced this need for
system. In order to achieve maximum benefit from advertising any particular film, the exhibitor had to count
on its appearance on the release date. We can attribute the dominance of a new production system after
1909 to economic practices—the need to increase production and maintain it year-round to meet exhibitor
demand.3
Selig Polyscope and the other manufacturers could have stuck with their former one reel a week, but more
profits could be made with four. A single director-producer could shoot one reel a week; he could not shoot
four. The solution was logical: hire more directors. This expansion started in 1908, as the industrial
structure began to coalesce into what became the Motion Picture Patents Company later that year. With the
anticipated stabilization of the industry, manufacturers shifted capital and attention from patent litigation to
investment in the manufacturing of more product. It was easy to increase production: the director system
made for a fully integrated work force; all the components to produce a film resided within a predictable set
of employees. By late 1909, Selig had four director-producers in three permanent locations: Francis Boggs
in California, Louis J.Howard in New Orleans, and Otis Turner and Frank Beal in Chicago. In 1911,
D.W.Griffith, Frank Powell, and Mack Sennett all directed units for Biograph.4*
Another cause of the move to the director-unit system was the necessity for year-round production to
supply the distribution exchanges. The headquarters and studios of the manufacturers had, understandably,
located themselves in the centers of the entertainment business: New York and Chicago. New York was the
staging area for the national circuits in theater and vaudeville, which provided a trained supply of labor, and
Chicago was a major midwest center. Neither city, however, was immune from the vagaries of winter snow
and grey skies. Artificial lighting in the studios might overcome the latter, but bad weather eliminated
exteriors on low-light days. As a result, some companies began sending units to better climates during the
winter.
Furthermore, this type of expansion allowed the manufacturers to retain certain aspects of the popular
scenics and topicals while making sure production schedules were met. Sending a director-unit on an
extended trip to make a series of narratives, the manufacturers combined location shooting and its values of
authenticity, realism, and spectacle with the fictional narrative and its production efficiency.
Selig, which had used a traveling unit from 1904, visited California in fall 1907. ‘Nowhere,’ it later claimed,
‘but in the real West could the proper atmosphere and wide vistas have been found [for Selig films].’5 The
Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP) headed to Cuba in January 1911 because ‘local color is the
order of the day in moving picture making.’ It continued:6
Of course there is nothing remarkable in this fact of manufacturers being located hundreds of
thousands [sic] of miles from New York City. The apple that we ate this morning was probably from
Oregon; there is no reason why the moving picture that we looked at last night should not also have
been made in the same distant State. The telephone, the telegraph, the aeroplane, as well as the fast
railroad are, in modern business economics, rapidly annihilating time and space….
IMP then used this as a mark of quality production for its first Cuban film: ‘If the excellency of this picture
is any criterion by which to judge, the expense of sending two producing companies to a clime where
exterior scenes can be filmed in the dead of winter has been justified.’ Or in a publicity article on Nestor’s
location work and a 1912 release:‘“White Cloud’s Secret” holds the interest of the onlooker not only in the
working out of the plot but also in the splendid choice of scenes, the novelty of which thrills the Easterner,
and all unaccustomed to the Western desert scenery.’7
Both the licensed and the independent manufacturers were avid travelers. Besides Selig’s various trips
and then permanent locations of units in 1909 in California and New Orleans, Kalem found its 1908–9 trip
to Jacksonville, Florida, valuable since it had no permanent studio. It also sent a unit to Ireland where the
workers produced films using Irish plays and novels as sources. In 1911 Kalem made films in the Holy
Land including From the Manger to the Cross, a six-reeler using the authentic locales. G.M.Anderson
directed a unit for Essanay Westerns from 1908 on. Traveling throughout the southwest, his unit eventually
established a permanent studio outside San Francisco. Lubin had two stock companies location shooting in
1912. One with thirty people journeyed from Florida to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River. The
other, also with thirty people, roamed Arizona. Both units had a Pullman standard sleeping and day coach
and a baggage car with scenery, props, and furniture. The variety of the exteriors must have compensated for
the lack of variation in the interiors. Nor is the imitation of a touring stage company coincidental. The
independents also used this production method of units, some of which were shooting on varied locations in
1911 and 1912. American Film traveled the Old Santa Fe Trail doing comedies and dramas; Thanhouser
had its New Rochelle Studio units and a unit in Jacksonville; and Powers had three units in New Mexico.8
The location of permanent studios in Southern California developed out of these odysseys. That the
studio sections of the firms should settle in California is not surprising. In 1911, the Los Angeles
correspondent to the Moving Picture World described a series of reasons for spending part or all of the
production season there: 1) good weather (the US Weather Bureau figured that on the average 320 days of
the year were acceptable for filming); 2) a variety of exteriors (these included not only topology and
climates but also residential areas, missions, and fine parks such as Griffith Park); 3) a good labor supply (Los
THE DIRECTOR-UNIT SYSTEM: AFTER 1909 211
Angeles had a population in 1910 of 319,198 people with up to 500,000 during the winter season); 4)
advantages as a major west coast theatrical center (both the Belasco and Burbank stock companies were
there, and ‘with the growth of the city dramatically there came the booking agencies, the scene painting
studios, theatrical costumers, and other supply companies’— including Max Factor); 5) good transportation
to other parts of the country; and 6) a number of film firms already located there (this, as we noted, provided
exchange of workers and amenable industrial ties). The interest in Hollywood and other suburbs was due to
their lower costs in labor and real estate. Room for standing sets was also plentiful. Firms which had winter
or permanent companies there in spring 1911 included the licensed firms of Selig, Pathe West
Coast, Biograph, Kalem, Essanay Western, and the independent Bison brand of New York Motion Picture
Company. By 1915, one trade paper writer estimated 15,000 workers were employed in Hollywood’s
moving picture industry with over 60 per cent of the US films produced there. Despite competition from
other locales, particularly Jacksonville, Los Angeles won out as the producing center for the United States
film industry.9
While financing units for location filming, the manufacturers expanded their home studio staffs in the
same manner—by units, often referred to as stock companies (see fig 11.1). Simultaneously, the firms
expanded their stage area to allow several companies to film at the same time. The trade papers repeatedly
report these expansions.10
The dominance of a director-unit system after 1909 resulted from two advantages: increased, efficient
production eliminated troubles from winter weather; and a variety of locations yielded exchange-values of
authenticity, realism, and spectacle. This type of increase in size in the firm justifies a distinct category. As
the firms organized the work, the director of the unit remained in charge of the producing, rewriting,
directing, and editing functions. Generally, he retained the same production staff with him from film to
film, but now there was some combining, sharing, and dividing of work by the middle-level workers such as
the cameramen, prop men, the stock company, and so on. What changes significantly is that the workers in
each unit only participated in the work of their unit or only for sections of many films rather than in the
production of all the firm’s films. As before, knowledge of the conception and execution of the product was
separated among several workers.
At the same time, the method of worker payment started to affect the work relations. The increase in the
rate of product output encouraged the use of wage payment based on fast work and deadlines. With time as
the calculator of wages, the fewer people involved for the shortest time, the less the cost. This proceeded to
reduce the involvement in planning by workers in subordinate positions in the hierarchy. The firm used most
of the workers in straight execution of work rather than in design contribution. (Had payment been by
quality of output or perhaps a profit-sharing scheme, the tendency toward disassociating certain workers
might have been reduced. For the effect when there is a change to profit-sharing, see the ‘package-unit’
system in Chapter 26.) Furthermore, with mass production, variation in design should be minimal
(standardization being the dominant goal, with only occasional differentiation) so that production is faster; a
few workers could supply variations while most of the others followed standard production design and
practices. For instance, sets could be lit basically the same way for illumination of the action no matter what
happened in the narrative or who was playing the lead. Even effects lighting (which became common after
1915) could be standardized.
Deadlines not only discouraged sharing of planning activities and encouraged standardizing the style,
they forced the further subdivision of labor. As Fred Balshofer remarked about his situation in 1912:
‘Nevertheless, directing, preparing the next story for shooting, plus the full responsibility for the company
became more than any one individual could find time to handle properly.’ As a Moving Picture World
writer in 1911 urged: ‘a proper system and division of labor’ with specialists in scene design, photography,
lighting, and locations were necessary because a ‘stage director’ could not know and do all those things.11
Although there had been some detailed division of labor and hierarchy in the director system, with the
advent of the director-unit system and the overall expansion of the number of employees, subdivision and
separation of knowledge began to proliferate, and work functions coalesced into departments. Technical
specialists (middle-level, tactical managers) took charge of these departments. Upper-level managers made
long-term decisions as to methods of financing, type of products, hiring of middle-level specialists and the
rest of the workers, and assessing of market conditions and trends. These managers left shortterm, day-to-
day production to the middle-level management. In such a line-and-staff administration, information was
generalized as it moved up the hierarchy, although the upper management might develop methods to keep
somewhat in touch. For instance, H.M.Horkheimer, general manager and president of Balboa in 1915,
said:12
I have a fixed time each day for meeting my directors. We go over the work in hand. I have
confidence in them, hence I never ask them why they are doing a thing while they are at work. I wait
until the production is finished and then pass on it. In the same way, I have conferences with the
various cameramen. I visit the laboratory and keep in touch with the wardrobe department.
The period 1909–14, then, marks the separation and subdivision of the work into departmentalized
specialities with a structural hierarchy.
The director-unit system started the large-scale movement to specialization of work. I would point out,
however, that the film industry has shown a flexibility in its use of individuals. Even though the industry
separated the jobs, it was not uncommon for a person to hold several simultaneously or successively.
Certain routines and combinations, because they were closely related in the work process, were more
susceptible to movement between them. But it is clear that the categories of work were distinct with their
specific duties and responsibilities within the overall process. In later years, this compartmentalization
increased.
The efficient, departmentalized organization of the means of production

That departmentalization was rapidly developing is evidenced by publicity descriptions of the physical
arrangements of the studios. The permanent studio was one option as a site of filmmaking, and its
centralization of the labor process with a steady supply of narrative material helped to permit a regular
output of product. Early descriptions of these studios use the term ‘factory,’ and their large brick buildings
with glass-enclosed stage spaces have an evident kinship with turn-of-the-century industrial plants. Usually,
the entire requirements for making a film stood within the factory area: laboratories for film developing and
printing, outdoor lot space for exteriors, and by the early teens, restaurants for employees’ lunches and
hospital facilities in case of accidents (see fig 11.2). With the firms’ expansion, the studios, like the labor
force, grew larger to accommodate the needs of the multiple stock companies at work.13
By 1912, following the standard assembly system in mass production, Solax had reorganized the means of
production at its studio. Its departments included executive, production, direction, art, wardrobe, small
properties, electrical, mechanical, laboratory, sales, publicity, shipping, and accounting, and it positioned
them physically so that ‘harmonious co-operation [can] be maintained and thus the highest average of
efficiency secured.’ ‘The laboratory,’ Solax’s publicity boasted, ‘is so arranged that the whole process of
film manufacture after the camera man turns in his negative proceeds logically from room to room in each
succeeding process without needlessly making a single step that would tend toward delay or entail a waste
of movement and consequently a waste of energy.’14 Solax was typical. An exchange of 1913 boasted of
using the ‘exact business practices to-day.’15
The departmental lines in our organization are carefully and rigidly drawn…. Every department has
its distinct functions with a responsible department head in charge. While our departments are
physically separated from each other, our work is so systematized that the co-operation of
departments is perfect.
This organization intensified in later years. In 1916, ‘efficiency engineers’ rearranged the Triangle-Fine
Arts studio ‘to meet the needs of increased production and large numbers of companies.’ The Bosworth
Company used the new building material of re-inforced concrete for its stages. Scientific American
described the building of Fox’s new combined facility in 1919 (see fig 11.3): ‘It has been laid out along
scientific lines by authorities on factory and office construction, with a view to speed, economy, and
concentration in every possible phase of efficient motion-picture production, from the filming to
bookkeeping to stenography to starring.’ Firms also constructed their studios for multiple purposes. At
Universal City in 1916, ‘the principal bridge across this stream is simply a foundation bridge and may be
hastily transformed from a Roman bridge into a railroad-crossing.’ Architects also designed dressing rooms
with various fronts (see fig 11.4), and they planned landscaping so it could double as an exterior.16
Not only were the plants efficiently organized, but following progressive business leaders, the film firms
also participated in contemporary corporate welfare for their employees. As early as 1911 Sigmund Lubin
established a restaurant at his Philadelphia plant (see fig 11.5): ‘Mr. Lubin feels…that it is a good
investment aside from any philanthropic aspect, because it adds to the health and comfort, and, therefore, to
the capacity for accomplishment of the employees.’17 The New York Motion Picture Company refurbished
the Keystone scenario department in 1915:18
Soft carpets, easy chairs, subdued colors and every little detail of comfort and restfulness have been
resorted to with the idea that the staff of writers will do better in the improved surroundings. A library
of reference books, individual stenographers for each writer, dictating machines, and other
conveniences are combined in the most up-to-date scenario department in the west.
By the mid-teens, the companies were adding equipment to insure continuous production. Vitagraph
manufactured its own arc-lamps in 1912, and most firms had shops to make breakaway and explosive props
by 1915. Electrical lighting, even in sunny California, became standard equipment in case of inadequate
natural light, and by 1916 some companies had moved from outdoor stages with muslin overhangs to glass
studios with lights for all their interior settings (see figs 11.6, 11.7). Inceville’s eight California stages were
all ‘equipped with the most up-to-date lighting devices, including the wonderful nitrogen light, so that on
dark days during rainy seasons pictures may be made with every effect and value of sunlight.’ In 1921, one
cameraman wrote that interiors were almost always lit with artificial lighting and that the light for exterior
sets was often boosted by electrical lights as well.19
This move was also due to the films having acquired specific realistic and compositional standards for
quality work including, in particular, effects lighting. To achieve realistic lighting for night scenes and
interiors, some companies built ‘dark studios.’ Vitagraph had one in 1912: ‘Arc-lamps…are used for
artificial lighting purposes, where . concentrated light effects are needed in a scene at night or during the
day. These produce very strong Rembrandt effects, particularly in a picture which is produced in the Dark
Studio in the day-time.’ By the late teens, the firms had painted some of the glass studios black for the same
reason (see fig 11.8).20
The firms began a steady exodus from location shooting into the studio and back lot after the mid-teens.
One 1916 writer pointed out that producers used to go away to shoot foreign scenes; now they were done in
the United States ‘where the producers have better laboratory facilities, understand the light better, can
secure experienced players—and save time.’ With a particular standard for the quality film, location work
even miles away became more difficult and expensive. Negative development, lighting control and cost,
electrical current access, location set problems (low ceilings in houses which hampered quality lighting
arrangements), and transportation of larger labor staffs and more equipment all decreased location
shooting’s desirability. Besides, better set construction, with the use of miniatures and glass shots (see
fig 11.9) when necessary, adequately represented exterior locales and ‘local color’ sets.21
Changes in script writing practices: the scenario script

The director-unit system not only saw specialization and departmentalization, including the reorganization
of studios into a predictable, efficient assembly system, but the studios’ script writing practices changed. The
causes for this are economic and ideological: efficient production and the standards of the quality product.
In the director system, the story outline sufficed as a production plan. But the manufacturers found two
defects in the casual story outline. First, for efficient production, filmmakers quickly realized that they
saved time and money if all the shots to be taken at one place or on one set were done at the same time,
rather than in the order of the final film. The director could break the story into shots and could supervise
the drawing up of a ‘scene plot’ which listed the shots to be taken in each setting. After the crew
photographed all the shots, the director could put them into order during editing. To insure that this
disjunctive shooting order would supply all the story parts, a prepared script was useful.
Moreover, to achieve a quality product, the director’s primary duty in his assembly process was to structure
a narrative in which an initial cause produced a chain of effects which ended in a satisfactory resolution.
This, the filmmakers believed, achieved a clear, logical, and realistic story. This conception of quality
product was no problem for filmmakers at first because if the film failed the manufacturer could either pay
to shoot the necessary plot linkage or could send out the film as it was—even if a bit jumbled by standards
of the best narrative.
This approach to production received a setback when around 1908 film distributors and exhibitors
adopted the 1,000-foot length as the standard size of the purchased product. (As the exchange system
developed and nickelodeon theaters proliferated, manufacturers turned out films which were priced by the
foot and sold in a standard length for convenient pricing and handling.) With this new constraint on the
film, the producers found themselves pressured to provide a narrative with the requisite beginning, middle,
and end. A 1911 trade paper critic pointed out that stories often ended up with abrupt connections and
sudden conclusions or seemed dragged out. Arguing that the length of the film should not be standardized
so strictly, the critic wrote: ‘There is too much evidence of “cutting up” and “cutting off’’ to the detriment of
the continuity of the pictures, and this slaughtering of the subject only increases the ambiguity of the
whole.’22 The problem for the producers, then, was to insure complete narrative continuity and clarity
despite the footage limitation.
The solution was to pay more rigorous attention to preparing a script which provided narrative continuity
before shooting actually started. In that way the director could make an initial estimate of the footage per
shot and add up all the shots to precheck that they would not exceed the footage limit. In the early teens,
directions to freelance writers repeatedly cautioned them to choose stories which could be presented within
one reel. Descriptions of shooting practices indicate that rehearsals served in part to check in advance the
shots’ lengths and that action would be compressed if necessary to meet the pre-determined footages. One
of the functions of the cameraman was to measure each take’s footage which was matched to the length
established by the script. If the shot ran over its limit, it might be retaken. Tricks to get more narrative
within footage limits included quickening entrances and exits of characters or ‘discovering’ them in the
scene; inter-titles and crosscutting were also used to eliminate or abbreviate action. Here is an instance in
which economic practices (the one-reel limit) directly influenced film style.23
Thus both shooting out of final continuity and the standard of clear, continuous action militated for a
script written prior to shooting. It is evident that the manufacturers transformed the theatrical and vaudeville
script into their working blueprint for the film. A 1909 trade paper article set out the format for the standard
script: the title, followed by its generic designation (‘a drama,’ ‘a comedy’), the cast of characters, a 200-
word-or-less ‘synopsis’ of the story, and then the ‘scenario,’ a shot-by-shot account of the action including
inter-titles and inserts. This scenario script could insure that the standard of continuous action would be met
within the footage requirement. It also listed all the story settings so that shooting out of order was faster,
easier, and safer, and, hence, cheaper. With this method of production, the manufacturer achieved both
efficient production and a quality product. As we noted in Chapter 10, playwright Edward Townsend who
was writing picture plays for Edison in 1909 mentioned that all the stories at that firm were put into just
such a shooting format for the firm’s directors.24
Although descriptions of and advice about this working procedure were common in trade literature,
shooting from a scenario script was not a requirement. Some directors still followed the outline approach.
Griffith even composed the story as he went along. Since at this point, each narrative event was almost
always equivalent to a shot, and since the one-reel film was a linkage of fifteen to thirty shots, it was
possible for the director to carry the parts of the story in his head throughout the length of the three- to six-
day production schedule. If the director was able to meet the footage requirements and to handle the
nonsequential shooting order, connecting each of the story parts was no difficult matter.
Had the films produced by the US manufacturers remained in the style of the tableau, with general
lighting, and only moderate attention to continuity and authenticity, it seems probable that work practices
might have remained this way, with some planning in advance through simple scenario scripts. However,
two major changes occurred: first, the practices of quality stylistic representation changed between 1909
and 1917; and second, the standard length of the film increased during the same period. Both of these changes
caused the manufacturers to shift from the scenario to the continuity script, a script which carefully detailed
every shot of the film.
12
The central producer system: centralized management after
1914
The next change in the mode of production can be traced to profit maximization goals and to the shifting
and coalescing standards of quality filmmaking. This new system centralized the control of production under
the management of a producer, a work position distinct from staff directors. The producer used a very
detailed shooting script, the continuity script, to plan and budget the entire film shot-by-shot before any
major set construction, crew selection, or shooting started. This system, while part of a major shift in US
business practices to ‘scientific management,’ was also due to two specific changes in the film industry:
first, the techniques for achieving continuity, verisimilitude, and narrative dominance and clarity coalesced
to create what we call the classical Hollywood film; second, the films lengthened from an average of
eighteen minutes to seventy-five minutes or more. Both of these factors required production planning. A
continuity script insured the quality of the film, and it permitted budget control, becoming the design
blueprint for the film and all of the work. Since the lengthening of the film is integral to this, we shall look
at multiple-reel film’s innovation and diffusion before examining the new production system and script
practices.
The diffusion of longer films

The shift to the multiple-reel film was part of an intentional attempt to improve profits by making the film
appear to be a quality product. The exhibitors created such an image by improving their theaters and service,
and, consequently, they sought a film which could be effectively advertised as a ‘feature.’ One of the ways
to insure that a film would succeed was to adapt a prior success—a play or novel. But because the producers
wanted to claim that they were true to the source (the standard of fidelity operated here), a problem
developed: these adaptations, sometimes starring famous players from legitimate theater, could not easily be
crammed into the constrictive one-reel length. As a result, the adaptation of famous works became a major
cause in the lengthening of the film into the multiple-reeler.
Dirty little dumps and quality theaters

Producers and distributors sold films; exhibitors sold entertainment.1 With a theater and a marketing area in
a specific physical space, the exhibitor could vary and enhance the makeup of the entertainment package to
achieve maximum profits; he, too, emphasized the novelty and quality of the product as its exchange-value.
Vaudeville was the first site of projected film exhibition and with it came a contemporary standard of quality
theater. For Keith’s Union Square Theater in 1895 that meant—besides the rotation of variety acts and
continuous shows — ushers in uniform, leaf fans and ice water in the summer, and a cool, palmed grotto.2
The first all-film theaters (which started around 1905) have been described as dank, dark, dirty, and
disreputable. These theaters were small (often with fewer than two hundred seats to avoid the need for an
amusement license). Part of this seediness may be due to the conversion from stores and to the initially low
capital with which the exhibitors started. Rather than seeing the growth of the nickelodeons as a chaotic
mushrooming, however, the research of Russell Merritt, Douglas Gomery, and Robert Allen has found that
the theaters’ early locations functioned to promote the best chance of profits. Generally, the exhibitors
established the nickelodeons along commercial thoroughfares, near mass transit routes, and by and in
established shopping and entertainment areas. Such locations could take advantage of the passing consumer
of any economic class who might stop in for a short period of relaxation before continuing on her or his
way.3
The period of the impoverished theater must have been relatively short, just long enough to increase
capital, because by 1907–8 some exhibitors were already emulating high-class vaudeville and theater
techniques of service and style with the product. This tendency may also have been exacerbated by
competition between film exhibitors. If there were three or four nickelodeons within a shopping area and the
only product came from a small set of producers, how could the exhibitor compete? One method was
advertising a quality product: brand names were an important asset since the exhibitor could announce he
always had the latest Vitagraph drama or Essanay Western.
Another way of competing was to offer extras. Such an early technique was the recombination of live
acts interspersed with the films. William Fox introduced small-time (lower-cost) vaudeville into his New
York City theater in 1908 and by 1910 had a circuit of fourteen houses with long programs, seven or eight
live acts, a policy of comfortable surroundings, and an admission price of 10 to 25 cents. In late 1907, a
magazine writer claimed: ‘the tendency is clear toward fewer, bigger, cleaner, five-cent theatres and more
expensive shows.’4 (See figs 12.1 through 12.3.) By early 1911, Moving Picture World wrote:5
To-day things have changed, the dirty little dumps, with small seating capacity and poor ventilation
are fast passing away to make room for large, palatial houses, and the moment that the exhibitor
called the attention of the public to a much better class of houses, a new class of spectators appeared
and are now eager for motion pictures.
Of course these theaters hardly approximated the extravagance of the edifices of the 1920s, but the
underlying causes of those palaces were already in place.
As the Moving Picture World passage implies, the representation of the quality status of the product was
important in the shift. One significant way to create an image of a respectable theater was to raise the
admission price. By mid-1911, the 5-cent theater was facing a potent rival: the theater whose prices ranged
from 10 to 25 cents, a cost still below other entertainment offerings, but a theater which offered the aura of
respectable middle-class entertainment. Many trade paper writers advised exhibitors to raise the price to at
least 10 cents (which even the poor could afford) to avoid the appearance of a ‘cheap and common’ show.
Justifying the raise did require, however, presenting an appearance of greater entertainment value.6 (Many
small theaters stayed with the nickel price even up to 1915, however.)
With an exhibition image at stake, the theater location, construction, and presentation had to be planned
with care. Advice poured in; one writer in 1911 suggested: ‘Study every point of difference which can be
found between the theater in question and its competitor or competitors: The color of the front; the
decorations of the front; the announcement signs for number, attractiveness, and general desirability; the
poster service used for the films; the style of the ticket window’ and on and on. Architects who had been
building theater and vaudeville houses for years advertised they would plan the film exhibitor’s newest one;
218 THE CENTRAL PRODUCER SYSTEM: AFTER 1914
examples in the trade paper columns of outstanding theaters provided models for future houses; and the
exhibitors exchanged little techniques to improve the atmosphere or increase house control. Throughout all
this, the exhibitors also looked for quality films to go with their quality theaters.7
The feature film

Promulgating the feature film depended upon creating the sense of a greater exchange value. Before 1908,
advertising by posters, on billboards, and in newspapers was standard practice, but differentiating the
individual films was difficult. Faced with several short varied subjects, a daily change, and unpredictable
supply, the exhibitor could not advertise much more than good films and entertainment at low prices.
Borrowing a technique from vaudeville, however, he might try promoting a ‘headline’ or ‘feature’ attraction
in his program. That is what Kleine Optical Company proposed in 1904:8
The exhibitor who purchases a small quantity of films, say from 300 to 500 feet, is necessarily
compelled to confine himself to short subjects. But if the purchase is 1000 feet, we advise one feature
film of 400 to 500 feet, the balance from 50 to 100 feet each; if 2000 feet, there should be at least one
long feature film, such as The Great Train Robbery, 740 feet, or Christopher Columbus, 850 feet.
These long films admit of special advertising, that is to say, special emphasis on one subject, which is
more effective than equal emphasis on a number of shorter films. The public has been educated to
appreciate these long films which tell an interesting story, and need few words of explanation.
Applied to moving pictures, the term ‘feature’ implied a film which could merit special advertising and
billing because it was different from the other films. As one trade writer emphasized in 1912:9
In the matter of scenarios, in the direction, in the selection of scenery, in the preparation of big
spectacles, in the choice of artists, from the leading player down to the super, the feature film must
bear distinct characteristics of its own which at once differentiate it from an ordinary release.
The feature film as it began depended not on length but on a conception of its anticipated exchange-value
and its place in an exhibitor’s entertainment package.
The shift in 1908 to a regularized production and exchange service helped the exhibitor with his
advertising. Once systematic mass production set in, producers could disseminate information about
upcoming releases, and with such preparation the exhibitor who did the local consumer advertising could
plan an advertising campaign emphasizing the feature film. In effect, the feature film was part of the overall
campaign to improve profits.10
Bigger pictures, bigger prices

The quality film (as Chapter 9 mentions) publicized its source in famous works and authors, including, for
instance, the adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903. Producers sporadically used such adaptations in
hopes of a carry-over of quality from drama and fiction to the filmed version. Drawing on Ben-Hur’s enormous
literary and theatrical success, Kalem in 1907 filmed an unauthorized version of it and advertised: ‘Sixteen
magnificent scenes with illustrated titles, positively the most superb motion picture spectacle ever made.’11
With little attention to copyright, directors and others in the companies ‘borrowed’ plots from the masters,
but their massive exploitation occurred after one producer set an example. In 1906–7, Pathé released a three-
reel version of the Passion Play in France and the United States. A success in both places, it stimulated
several films and, in France, the formation of Film d’Art, a production company. Film d’Art purchased
stories from famous French writers—Anatole France, Jules LeMaitre, Henri Lavedan, Jeanne Richepin,
Victorien Sardou, and Edmund Rostand—and employed some of the famous players from the Comédie
Française, scenic artists, and musicians. The firm’s successes included a production of the Assassinat du Duc
de Guise, directed by Le Bargy and Calmettes, play by Lavedan, music by Saint-Saëns, and acting by Le
Bargy, Albert Lambert, Gabrielle Robinne, and Berthe Bovy. The appeal was to values of established
literature, music, and theater. Following Film d’Art’s lead, French Gaumont signed up some of Film d’Art’s
writers, and Edison followed the practice in the United States by 1909.12
About the same time, feature films started coming more often in longer-than-one-reel lengths. These
multiple-reelers were almost all adaptations. In October 1909, Pathé released The Drink, a two-reel drama;
Vitagraph released a four-reel version of Les Miserables over three months, September to November 1909,
and then a three-reeler of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in July 1910. In 1911, the number of these features increased:
in June, the Moving Picture World listed the productions which were being filmed in two- and three-reel
lengths: The Fall of Troy, A Tale of Two Cities, Enoch Arden, The Battle of the Republic, The Maccabees,
and Faust—all adaptations. ‘We cannot do justice,’ the article commented, ‘to the subjects especially worth
while in a thousand feet of film. The play, even with the aid of the spoken word, takes from two to three
hours to present, and cannot be condensed into a pantomime, which must be rushed through in generally
less than thirty minutes.’13 In August the trade papers noted than two-reelers had become more common and
sometimes drew the audience back to see them again:14
The filming of some great opera or a popular literary or dramatic or historical subject requires more
than a reel…. The larger production likewise makes a deeper impression on the memory and to that
extent advertises itself much better than the shorter one-reel affair…. [The best way to raise prices] in
the general run of moving picture houses is the two and three and four-reel production. With better
and bigger pictures the public will readily see the fairness of bigger prices.
In September in the regular column reviewing notable films all those selected for special attention were
multiple-reel adaptations: Foul Play (Edison, novel by Charles Reade), David Copperfield (Thanhouser,
Charles Dickens), and The Colleen Bawn (Kalem, play by Dion Boucicoult). The successful importation of
Dante’s Inferno (five reels), The Crusaders (four reels), and Jerusalem Delivered (four reels) in the same
year encouraged a view that length was no inhibition to profits. At this point, too, companies started hiring
stage stars to appear in films of their famous performances. In 1911 Cecil Spooner played his The Prince
and the Pauper (Edison), Sidney Drew directed and acted in his When Two Hearts are Won (Kalem), and
Mabel Taliaferro appeared in a three-reel version of her Cinderella (Selig). The independent Powers hired
Mildred Holland who performed her play The Power Behind the Throned15
While there may be exceptions to his generalization, one commentator gave a plausible summary in
October 1911: ‘No feature [multiple-reel] film, of which we have any knowledge, has been produced from
an original scenario.’16 The evidence overwhelmingly supports a connection between the famous play, novel,
and story adapted into film and the increasing length of the product. The longer film enabled a more faithful
reproduction of these classics well-known to a middle-class audience, a ploy in step with contemporary
exhibition practices. Although the advertising and status advantage of the adaptation was probably
dominant in the events which took place, another element must, however, be considered as part of the shift.
Copyrights and sources of fictional narratives

While the move to established literary works was an attempt to transfer their perceived value into the film
product, the new legal status of the film story as subject to federal copyright laws reinforced the changeover
to these narrative sources. Before 1911, crediting sources was an economic tactic to improve profits;
afterward, crediting sources, at least by purchasing rights, was legally necessary.
Writers had been hired for some time to provide plots, and firms increasingly sought freelance
contributions when production output increased after 1907. Up to this point, manufacturers had freely
adapted anything, but then Kalem’s Ben-Hur ran into legal trouble. Harper and Row, publishers of Lew
Wallace’s original novel, and Klaw and Erlanger, authorized producers of the stage version, sued Kalem for
copyright infringement.17
Copyright laws, like patents, were meant to insure that the monopoly profits from invention returned to
the original inventors, thus stimulating creativity. The history of US copyright law is in part a history of the
expansion of the term ‘published writing,’ as technology and methods of mass producing works increased:
maps and charts (1790); engravings, etchings, and prints (1802); performances of copyrighted drama
(1856); paintings, drawings, chromolithographs, statues, models, designs, photographs, and negatives
(1870).18
The Kalem suit became a test case for the status of filmed versions of copyrighted works, and, as such,
the Motion Picture Patents Company helped underwrite Kalem’s defense. In 1909 the lower court held: 1
that when films were projected, they became a dramatization, with drama being defined as a succession of
events, and 2) that historically copyright laws had included in the term ‘writings’ things which were other
than printed matter; thus, moving pictures were subject to copyright laws. The US Supreme Court upheld
that decision in 1911. This also meant that an original film narrative could be protected from
infringement.19
The decision affected filmmakers in at least two ways. Anticipating such a decision, Edison’s lawyers
had already instituted for any freelance submissions an ‘ironclad release form’ in which the writer of the
scenario asserted that he or she was the original creator. Such releases had become standard in the industry
by 1911. The other major reaction was the turning to already published works because of the assurance of
the source of the plot, and the gingerly handling of any freelance submission that displayed ‘earmarks of
being niched from the columns of some readily accessible magazine or book.’20
In summary, about 1911, two practices were in operation which contributed to a shift to film narrative
sources coming from published literature and drama. First, advertising, which stressed the value of prior
literary and dramatic successes, promoted the adaptation of famous works, sometimes played by the stars
who had made them a success. Secondly, adjudication of copyright laws necessitated acquiring the rights to
narratives to be filmed—and as long as those purchases had to be made, the companies might as well
advertise any valuable ones. Negatively, manufacturers began declining freelance plots, and within a
decade, freelancers either published their work in print first or worked through agents.
Common news in the trade papers thereafter was the announcement of the latest acquisition of
copyrighted work. In March 1911, Selig signed a contract with magazine publishers Street & Smith for the
‘exclusive scenario rights’ to all stories in its publications which included Popular, Ainslee’s, and People’s
Smith’s; Reliance, Edison, Selig, Bison, Nestor, and Vitagraph were noted as turning to magazine material
in mid-1912; and Eclair picked up the ‘exclusive rights’ to O. Henry’s stories in early 1913. Besides short
fiction, the adaptation of plays and novels proceeded at a rapid pace: in early 1913 Lubin bought the film
rights to Charles Klein’s successful muckraking plays for a series of multiple-reel films. Famous Players
Film Company hired theater producer Daniel Frohman to stage manage the company’s policy ‘to
immortalize the most noted characterizations of the famous players of the day’; a trade paper called Famous
Players’ president Adolph Zukor ‘the Benefactor of Posterity.’ And a coup de maître was the Jesse L.Lasky
Company’s securing of film rights in mid-1914 to David Belasco’s productions.21 (See figs 12.4, 12.5.)
By the mid-teens the interchange between copyright fields had become systematic. A trade paper writer
commented in 1916 that five photoplay writers had had dramas purchased for stage presentation, and the
dramatic rights to the screen success The Cheat had been sold. To handle this increase in possible auxiliary
profits from sale of rights, publishing houses had from about 1912 tried to secure film rights when they
purchased a story. By 1918 they had film rights departments and agents who sold the firm’s novels as they
came off the presses.22
To handle the competitive bid for rights, a film producer as early as 1915 offered to finance stage
productions with the stipulation that he controlled the film rights. By 1920, one theater critic warned that
Famous Players-Lasky with Wall Street backing had invaded Broadway and was ‘actually controlling the
production of spoken drama.’ The critic’s fears were that soon only plays thought suitable for subsequent
filming would find room in Broadway’s theaters.23
The standardization of the multiple-reel feature film

By 1916, the multiple-reel feature film had prevailed. While its increasing dominance in the output of the
industry was in part due to the perceived exchange-value of the feature’s narrative sources and its ability to
be differentiated in advertising, another factor needs to be taken into account. The film industry’s institutions
played a role in standardizing the longer film as the dominant exhibition practice. Trade advice continually
reminded the exhibitor that the longer film offered something ‘extra and of more importance than the
ordinary single reels’ and that the distribution and exhibition of these films required some changes in present
standards. The films needed to be presented in a unit to reap the rewards of the advertising. Although
producers began distributing the films one reel at a time following the single-reel practice, that procedure
had fairly well ceased by late 1911, early in the period of the changeover to multiple-reel films. And, again,
to take advantage of advertising and to increase the length of runs, the trade papers reported the successes of
exhibitors who tried runs of two or three days or a week.24
Multiple-reel films intensified the trade papers’ disseminating of exhibition techniques. An example is
the mid-1911 Monopol Film Company release of Dante’s Inferno, advertised as ‘the greatest spectacle in
exhibition history’ with ‘one night stands transformed into week stands’; Gustave Doré’s illustrations
accompanied the ads (see fig 12.6). Road-showed in first-class theaters and with prices between $.25 and $.
75, the film completely sold out its opening at the best theater in Baltimore. Stephen Bush enhanced it with
a simultaneous lecture, and the music had ‘careful and well rehearsed effects.’25 The Moving Picture World
commented:26
The presentation of this film marks truly an epoch in the history of moving pictures. It has added…
prestige to the moving picture art. It will win most desirable friends for the photoplay everywhere. It
has destroyed the absurd idea, that people will not pay high prices for a moving picture entertainment,
regardless of its high character.
Repeatedly, the analysis of exhibition was: ‘There are hundreds of persons who will gladly pay twenty-five
cents to see a feature who would refuse to enter the smaller houses simply because the price is cheap.’ For
special films, the Moving Picture World printed lectures for oral presentation and music cues (see fig 12.7).
When Selig released a three-reeler in 1912, General Film promised special advertising materials to ‘boom
the films’ and appropriate music prepared by S.L. Rothapfel, ‘the widely known manager of the Lyceum
Theatre, Minneapolis.’ Rothapfel’s techniques had already become familiar to exhibitors. In 1911, an article
on him entitled ‘The Belasco of motion picture presentation’ described his managing and unifying control
of the entire show—like the director in legitimate theater.27
For the hesitant exhibitor who knew that the one-reelers were good for secure profits, the trade papers
assured him that longer films had even better stories than his single-reelers. One reviewer wrote that Great
Northern’s early 1912 two- and three-reelers had no lags in the stories: ‘Rather, the extended picture makes
possible a more connected and logical narration of the story.’ The Bison two-reel Westerns did not seem
padded: ‘They merely contain the many intermediate and connecting scenes that are so often omitted from
the one-reel subjects for want of space, but are really valuable in properly carrying the story along.
Furthermore, none of the scenes are [sic] dragged out.’28 The main difference these analysts saw was in the
narrational structure of the reels. A critic noted:29
The scenes are curtailed always at a point of keenest interest in just such a manner as are the different
portions of a serial story—just when the suspense is greatest and the imaginative system is keyed up
to the highest, the vision is cut off, leaving the onlooker at a tension of irresistible curiosity.
Such narration was, of course, an aid to the exhibitor who wanted a fascinated audience who would return
for more such exciting features.
Part of the reason for this plot construction with minor climaxes may be exhibition practices. It could be a
carry-over from the separate-day release system or the model of the acts of the theater play. Also important
was that at least for theaters with small-time vaudeville the reels were separated by live acts, retaining the
continuous, varied show from vaudeville exhibition. Some smaller theaters also used only one projector. It
was worth special note in the trade papers when a theater exhibited in February 1913 a five-reel film without
interruption between the reels.30
By 1914, the economic potentials of the multiple-reel film had influenced exhibition to the point where
about one-fifth of New York City’s theaters were running them and people were paying $1.00, ‘Broadway
prices.’ In October of that year, Photoplay pondered the reason for the delay in total conversion to the longer
films and located it in exhibition practices: people entered at any time; if they came in in the middle of a
five-reeler, they had to sit through its end without knowing the beginning. With a one- or two-reeler, they
did not miss much and could go on to the next film. Also business still came off the streets during lunch
times and the consumer did not have time for more than one or two reels. This conservative trend slowed
the changeover.31
In 1911 entertainment journalist Robert Grau had asked hopefully, ‘Is the two-dollar-a-seat picture
theater in sight?’ Four years later, The Birth of a Nation opened on Broadway and ran at theater prices of $2.
00, for forty-four consecutive weeks, which was represented to the exhibitors as more than any attraction ‘in
the history of the American stage.’ The Birth of a Nation capped the rise of the longer film and encouraged
the longerrun, higher-priced special feature—since multiple-reel features were common by then.32
Thus, the diffusion of the multiple-reel film had two economic causes: 1) the extensive adaptation of
classic works, in part for advertising reasons (tie-ins to former successes and differentiation of the product)
and in part for legal ones (copyright laws), required longer films for faithful reproduction of the stories; and
2) the multiple-reel film allowed the exhibitor to increase prices and runs, which bolstered profits. These
were strong incentives. Assured that the film did not suffer but improved in quality with more logical
development and greater suspense, the exhibitor exploited it with more and more showmanship. By 1916,
the multiple-reel feature dominated the market and special features brought theater prices.
The ‘central producer’ system of production (1914–31)

‘Efficiency experts’ and ‘production-line’ practices appeared in the US film industry by 1912 and became
the order of the day around 1914. With this came the ‘central producer,’ the modern manager of a well-
organized mass production system which was now necessary to produce the quality multiple-reel film.
‘Efficiency’ was commonly valued by businessmen early in the century although wide-spread use of
practices which became categorized as ‘scientific management’ started a decade later. Two aspects of these
management practices are significant for what happened in film’s mode of production: the application of
scientific management to the worker in the production line and to the manager of the firm. Frederick
Winslow Taylor was the chief developer of work practices leading to these new tactics.
Participating in a general trend to improve the output of the worker, Taylor responded to a production
problem of wage payment. His ‘experiments,’ published in 1895 and 1903, led to his conclusion that a
manager must plan and control all decisions and steps in the work process so that waste could be
eliminated. For the production worker on the job, he urged the institution of time- and motion-studies so
that companies could set standards of performance and efficient labor. For managers, he advocated a
‘functional type of management,’ a military style ‘line and staff hierarchy, and the initiation of a planning
department which would determine in writing in advance of each job the instructions for each worker and
the cost of materials and labor. (David F.Noble points out that Taylor’s work can be seen as part of the
concurrent standardization movement: just as business standardized its product and technology, so it
standardized its labor force.)33 One promoter of scientific management wrote:34
One of the greatest problems of adjustment to this mechanical age is the coordination of the efforts of
large numbers of people under one plan. These people are sometimes widely separated in space,
producing different parts of an ultimate product in different parts of the world. Different elements
have to be assembled somewhere later on.… In order to coordinate the efforts even of two men who
work at different times, there must be some durable substance to connect the two…. You may do it by
memory, but then you are the physical substance. Yet individual memory cannot do all the uniting.
There must be something or other, some physical substance—it may be nothing but a book or
manuscript.
Planning departments and paper records would also improve economies in other areas. At the turn of the
century, companies commonly had decentralized purchasing and storage which meant over- and under-
stocking of raw materials. Accounting supplied double-entry profit-and-loss statements but few analyses of
waste and inefficiency. In 1898 universities formed several business schools, after 1900 books on business
management became much more common, and in 1908 the Harvard Graduate School of Business
Administration was founded and accepted Taylor’s ideas as its guiding management principles. It was not,
however, until Taylor received national notoriety in a 1910–11 Interstate Commerce Commission hearing
that his techniques spread into general use. It was only a very little later than another change within the US
film mode of production started.
A 1916 article, ‘Putting the move in the movies,’35 is worth summarizing in detail as an anecdotal
description of the shift from a director-unit system to a ‘central producer’ system in which planning by a
manager with a carefully prepared script controlled the design of the product. An anonymous director
claimed that, although others said it could not be done: ‘System and Efficiency have found their way into
the manufacture of motion pictures.’ To prove this he described the situation before and after the installation
of a new management system at his company a couple of years earlier. Before, everything was up to the
director. He hired his staff and found a scenario either from his own creation or from among those the company
had available. Because each director had his own staff, he kept people on salary, even when they were not
needed. Purchasing was erratic and so were set and costume accuracy. The property people took his oral
suggestions and either borrowed props from other sets, sometimes surreptitiously (thus wreaking havoc on
the other units) or rented supplies which no one remembered to return. He had at least three purchasing
agents at once, and bills did not always make their way to accounting. No one seemed to care about cost.
Then, the author writes, the company hired a general manager—but one from business, not the
entertainment field. The general manager established a production office in the center of the studio lot,
which became a clearing house for all departments. These departments ‘assumed definite duties and
responsibilities.’ The director left the production office alone, but he did notice that his assistant director
began to use the office to get everything he needed. One day, the manager of production had a conference with
this director. The company was going to plan and estimate the cost of the picture before it was shot. The
company wanted to know if the film would make a profit before funds were expended. The supply now
exceeded the demand, this manager told the director, and exhibitors could ‘pick and choose’ their films.
How would the cost be figured in advance? On the basis of the scenario the director had chosen to film,
estimates had been made: the number of sets and their cost, the number of characters and extras, the number
of days of wages, the approximate cost of ‘rented props, negative stock, laboratory work, lunches on
location,’ etc., and overhead. One-third of the estimate was added on to cover costs of stage space,
wardrobe, props, stage hands, carpenters, painters, artists, and administration. Overhead was calculated on
the number of shooting days; if the director brought the film in faster, less overhead would be added. The
director received his estimate sheet with authorized expenses. In addition, the production department helped
him in a new way. Prepared by ‘experts’ hired by the firm, detailed sketches of all sets were ready for his
approval. These sketches indicated the types of doors, floor paint, wall paper by pattern number, the
baseboard and moulding types, and what scenes would be seen through open windows. All the director had
to do was approve the plans, and he had no more worries. Crews worked at night; when he arrived to shoot,
everything was prepared as he had approved. The result? The director said he cut the time of making that
film from a normal twelve days to seven days and brought it in under budget. The director was pleased;
things were much less tense on the set, and he was now responsible only for shooting the film. Others took
care of the rest. The money expended for purchases by the single purchasing agent for the firm, he believed,
was now visible in the product.
This account illustrates important changes. For one thing, planning the work and estimating production
costs through a detailed script became a new, extensive, and early step in the labor process. This improved
regularity and speed of production, use of materials, and uniformity and quality of the product. The script
became a blueprint detailing the shot-by-shot breakdown of the film. Thus, it could function as a paper
record to coordinate the assembly of the product shot out of order, prepared by a large number of people
spread at various places through the world (location shooting, for instance, to be matched to an interior in
Santa Monica), and still achieve a clear, verisimilar and continuous representation of causal logic, time and
space.
The management organization also changed significantly. The functions of the producer and director
were split. More typically, the work of the producer was split further. Now the producer took over the
management of the pre- and post-shooting work for all the films in the studio while the new manager of the
production department coordinated the studio facility’s planning, budgeting and accounting, and the day-to-
day record-keeping. This system introduced a new set of top managers—producers such as Thomas Ince
and later Irving Thalberg who meticulously controlled the making of their firm’s films.
As a result, the management responsibilities and status of the director changed. The director still had
some managerial input into the entire product. The producer and staff solicited his ideas and approval on the
script, casting, sets, wardrobe, and editing, but the producer’s approval superceded his, and much actual
creation was now done by departmental experts. Although the director had complete charge over the
shooting activities, he lost the function of being a unit head. Instead, directors became, in a sense, a separate
department of technical experts in directing the actors and crew during the shooting. The producer chose a
director from that department just as he would select a writer or a designer or a cameraman to be combined
with a story and cast. In shooting, the director topped the hierarchy of workers, but the producer took over
coordinating production decisions. The producer became a top manager and economic agent for the firm.
He was responsible for the output of a specific number of quality films produced within carefully prepared
budgets; the producer selected and coordinated the technical experts.
The central producer system started in 1912 and became the dominant practice by 1914. For example, when
the Universal Film Manufacturing Company merger occurred in June 1912, Universal announced a
reorganization. Dropping a multiple-unit system, it centralized and specialized.36* Those firms with the best
facilities took over the work for all the companies’ films; Bison and Rex did the printing and developing; a
single scenario department supplied all scripts; scenarios were distributed to the directors who excelled in
particular types of subjects (another instance of increasing specialization); and a studio-wide pool of players
was formed. By 1916, H.O.Davis, Universal’s general manager, supervised a system which might well have
been that of the director in the anecdotal article. The production office estimated costs before the shooting
of any scenes, and within the most recent two months for one hundred films, the cost was ‘a variation of but
5 per cent.’ After the firm selected a story, it gave it to writers to put into continuity format and on that basis
the director, construction department, and art director discussed the sets. They chose props from a property
department which had been organized and indexed. Shooting time had been cut in half.37
At the New York Motion Picture Company, Ince had established the central producer as distinct from the
director by 1913. A writer described his efficient studio:38
With preparations laid out in detail from finished photoplays to the last prop, superintended by Mr.
Ince himself, far in advance of the action, each of the numerous directors on the job at Santa Ynez
canyon is given his working script three weeks ahead of time…. Filled with the theme and action, he
goes out and, with the cogs of the big Ince machine oiled to the smallest gear and the entire plant running
as smoothly as an automobile in the hands of a salesman, the picture travels from the beginning to end
without delays. To my mind this is the modern miracle.
Ince’s studio provides a good example of the process of an actual changeover in one company. Directing a
unit for the New York Motion Picture Company, Ince traveled to Edendale, California, in 1911 to take
charge of the Bison-brand films. In June 1912, Ince split his work staff into two production units because it
had become so large. This marked the move to a director-unit system with Francis Ford the second director.
To control Ford’s filmmaking, Ince used a detailed continuity script which carefully laid out the film shot-
by-shot. Ince gradually relinquished the directorial duties of writing and rewriting, and he stopped directing
and then editing. In 1913, he hired George B.Stout as a production manager. Stout was educated at Rutgers
University as a public accountant. Stout reorganized the studio into a functional, departmentalized system
which watched costs closely. With that accomplished and Ince acting as ‘Director-General,’ the studio
had moved to a central producer system.39
In mid-1913, the Lubin Company instituted a management hierarchy over the directors. According to the
firm’s publicity, it followed Biograph, Edison, and Vitagraph in removing script selection from the
directors’ prerogatives. Planning a reorganization along ‘modern lines,’ the firm insisted that the director
consult with the script department, which had now been divided into two parts. After a new split in writing
functions, one section handled incoming submissions; as for the other:40
a new section has been established to handle those scripts accepted and put them in perfect technical
shape before they are handed to the director for production, permitting the latter to give his full
attention to production without requiring him to handle the editorial and revision work that he has
hitherto performed, this work now being done by the trained staff writers whose literary qualifications
and technical training in combination better fit them for the work.
After the technical experts prepared the script, the director selected the cast to fit the story. If the plans met
the general manager’s approval, the director could proceed to ‘make the production without departing from
the lines laid down.’ Lublin explained a further aspect of its plan:41
In the business department careful cost data is kept, segregated for each picture, so that it is possible,
at any time, to ascertain what the pictures are costing and, by comparison, to tell which methods are
wasteful and which are profitable.
Efficiency techniques spread. Balboa announced that it received weather reports from the US Weather
Bureau so that it could plan the next day’s activities; it had a ‘location book’ with snapshots of locations; it
had indexed all the items (over 100,000) in the prop room; and it owned a complete stock of furniture so it
wasted no time or money in rentals. Another studio organized a manual with work regulations and
responsibilities for every position; the company then assigned each worker a number by which she or he
found her or his spot in the production schedule. In 1918 World-Pictures had color-coded the work clothes
of painters, carpenters, electricians, and stage hands.42
The separation of the former director-producer’s functions had become so common by 1917 that when
Jesse L.Lasky announced a return to a director-unit system it became noteworthy:43
Each director in our four studios will be absolutely independent to produce to the best of his
efficiency and ability. With the discontinuance of a central scenario bureau each director will have his
own writing staff and the author will continue active work on every production until its conclusion,
staying by the side of the director even when the film is cut and assembled.
The descriptions of the mode of production are generalizations: no individual company can be considered a
perfect instance of the pattern. At this point with the growth in size of the firms and the types of managerial
organizations possible, some mixture of these systems occurred. Some large firms had combinations: a
central producer who managed most of the product and a director-producer whose crew formed a fairly
distinct unit but who used the planning and centralized departments available to the central producer.
William S.Hart, for instance, maintained a separate unit in Ince’s Triangle studio. Such differences
depended on the size of the firm and the top management’s analysis of marketing conditions and of
strengths and weaknesses of its personnel. Another factor related to the employee’s marketability of his or
her own skills: those with greater marketability (e.g., Hart) could demand certain work conditions. None the
less, the central producer system remained the dominant system of production until 1931.44
Another change in script writing: the continuity script

Two factors contributed to a new type of script: the standardization of the multiple-reel film between 1911
and 1915 and the development of the central producer system. Another factor, the simultaneous movement
toward the classical style, also promoted the change.
As Part Three will show, between 1909 and 1917, the Hollywood film developed a specific set of stylistic
techniques and a particular arrangement of the systems of narrative logic, time, and space. These changes
now started complicating the method of production and assembly of the film. The representation of a
continuous time and space started to permit direct cuts between scenes not spatially and temporally
contiguous, as long as cues to the gaps were present. Cues included timing of the entrances and exits of
characters and the insertion of inter-titles. Techniques of matching action and maintaining screen direction
became conventions to signal continuing action and placement of adjacent spaces. Crosscutting increased,
serving a variety of purposes.
With a standard of continuity and conventions of achieving that continuity, the mode of production faced
greater demands on its system of memory. As the scientific management expert pointed out, a paper plan
and record was a lot more reliable and predictable than an individual’s memory, particularly in recalling
plans for assembling a multiple-reel film now containing hundreds of shots. Staging entrances and exits,
matching movements to adjacent spaces while maintaining conventions of screen direction, and correlating
crosscutting were more certain if workers kept a record of what was done. But records made on the spot
without consideration of potential difficulties in the next set-ups were hardly as efficient and reliable as a
work practice that arranged shot relations in advance. A written script which included descriptions of each
shot and its adjacent shots provided a long-term cost advantage. It was cheaper to pay a few workers to
prepare scripts and solve continuity problems at that stage than it Was to let a whole crew of laborers work
it out on the set or by retakes later. Because the scripts provided the means to ensure the conventions of
continuous action, they soon became known as ‘continuities.’ This work practice assured meeting the
standard of a quality film.
Maintaining the group style might have been simple with a one-reel film; with a longer film problems
multiplied. In fact, the continuity script made possible the increase in the films’ lengths and the retention of
the standards for a good film. The producer could use the script to check in advance the quality of the
product. The producer did not even have to be present at shooting or editing; the written instructions
organized the assembly of the film throughout the various separate phases and places of its creation. The
detailed continuity script was normal practice by 1914. Trade papers and ‘how-to’ handbooks helped
standardize its format. Since continuity scripts and associated paperwork varied little from studio to studio,
those from Ince’s productions can be taken as typical (see figs 12.8 through 12.19).45 The firm assigned
each of the scripts a number, which provided a method of tracing the film even though its title might shift. A
cover page indicated who wrote the scenario, who directed the shooting, when shooting began and ended,
when the film was shipped to the distributors, and when the film was released. The next part was the ‘Complete
Picture Report’ which summarized production information in more detail. Following that was a list of titles
and inter-titles and an indication as to where they were to be inserted in the final print. (Intertitles were usually
rewritten after editing and printed separately.) At the end of the set of associated paperwork was the entire
cost of the film, broken into a standard accounting format. Following ‘scientific management’ practices, this
history on paper recorded the entire production process for efficiency and control of waste.
The continuity script started with the location plot. This scene plot listed all exterior and interior sites
along with their shot numbers, providing efficient cross-checking and saving time and labor. Then came the
cast of characters. Typed portions listed the roles for the story and penciled in were the names of the people
assigned to play each part. After a one-page synopsis, the script followed. Each shot (with multiple shots
per narrative action) was numbered consecutively and its location was given. Temporary inter-titles were
typed in, often in red ink, where they were to be inserted in the final version. The description of the mise-en-
scène and action was very detailed. Since these scripts were used on the set, staff would mark with a pencil
each completed shot and sometimes would note on the side the footage. The continuities included
meticulous technical instructions such as special effects and .tinting directions and notes to the cutters. Most
importantly, these continuity scripts became the design blueprint for the workers in the central producer
system of production.
Alternatives within the mode of production

Such efficient production practices were dominant in Hollywood filmmaking between 1914 and 1931, but
there were also variations and alternatives. Three deserve special note. During the 1920s, some production
companies permitted a looser script than the shot-by-shot continuity. A contemporary described it:46
Frank Borzage is a champion for the continuity synopsis, a running account of the plot, undivided into
scenes [shots]. Many other directors prefer this method dividing their pictures into the desired and
natural number of scenes [shots] during actual work.
Since in many studios, changes after shooting could be extensive, the scene-by-scene synopsis preserved the
advantages of a script in setting up the estimated budgets, scene plots, and so forth without detailing the
individual type or number of cut-ins. Shooting scripts in the sound period generally followed this format
(the master-scene) rather than the more rigorous shot-by-shot continuity.
A director might also adhere to the older method of a script outline. D.W.Griffith provides an outstanding
example although Charles Chaplin and others also used it. Employing a more theatrical work procedure,
Griffith used the general outline script even in the multiple-reel era. During the teens and early 1920s,
through extensive rehearsals, he worked on and refined the action of the scenes. Griffith could follow such a
method for a couple of reasons. His style of assembling the material often overrode subtleties of matching
action and continuity. He used crosscutting extensively, and this produced fewer continuity difficulties.
Griffith’s cutter also recalled that Griffith shot the long shots, decided during rushes where he wanted close-
ups, and then went to a neutral background and did those for insertion. Both of these techniques,
crosscutting and order of shooting, needed less planning of a ‘continuity’ than in the standard system.47
Moreover, Griffith was atypical in another way:48
Mr. Griffith’s method of working has its advantages and, under certain circumstances, it would have
its grave disadvantages. Mr. Griffith, being his own employer, can take all the time he wishes on the
making of his productions. A director working on a schedule that makes some consideration of time
would be quite at a loss in working without a ‘script.
During this period, Griffith participated in the capitalization of the companies for which he directed films.
He also had enough weight from established box office successes to control his working conditions until his
move to Paramount in 1925. Paid by profits rather than time he had no necessity for efficient, quick
production; his films were not scheduled into a regular distribution deadline either. He was, accordingly,
not pressured to move to other systems of production. Descriptions of his companies, however, suggest that
in most other ways he and his employees participated in the standard mode of detailed division of labor. While
he often consulted his staff for ideas, for instance, they had little or no conception of the design of the entire
project, that remaining within Griffith’s control as he worked it over the course of the making of the film.49
Cecil B.De Mille’s method provided a further alternative (which his brother William also used): multiple-
camera shooting. De Mille chose during the 1920s to shoot a film in its dramatic order so that the actors
would build up characterization and psychological intensity as they would in a stage play. To do this and
still have efficient and economical production while maintaining the classical style, he varied the system
very slightly. First he prepared a story in continuity form so that only three or four sets would be needed at a
time, and subsequent sets would replace these as the staff progressed through the story. Then he used multiple
cameras, some for long shots and others for close-ups. Descriptions of this vary but it appears that he set up
one camera at a long shot, a second one right next to it with a longer focal length lens for a close-up, and
several other cameras at angles for more close-ups and two-shots. Thus, the scene could be played through,
the various shots could be edited together to provide the classical establishing shots and cutins, and the
action would match. This system did, however, provide several problems for the classical style. It was
difficult to light every part of the set equally well for the different cameras and to achieve any special
lighting for the closeups. In addition, the multiple-camera system required multiple cameramen and
equipment, which could be costly. On the other hand, Bert Glennon who shot for De Mille said that with
rehearsals in the morning and shooting in the afternoon, the team could do up to fifty shots per day—fast
work. The reduction in shooting time probably compensated for the increased labor costs. Besides, De
Mille, like Griffith, had great power at Paramount and in his own production firm.50
These alternatives were scarcely challenges to the dominant production practices, but the fact that some
variance was tolerated as long as satisfactory results came in is important in understanding Hollywood. It
allowed difference from the standard when that difference was minimal but brought in profits.
Legal control of the quality of the product

It was during this same period that the State intervened in production practices, assigning product quality
control to the hierarchy of a firm’s management rather than to any individual worker. This is of tremendous
importance to issues of product design. Anyone who has read stories about Hollywood has probably run
across instances of superiors changing the work of a subordinate. (For instance, Samuel Goldwyn appended
a ‘happy ending’ to Wuthering Heights against William Wyler’s wishes.51) In the next chapter, I will
analyze the hierarchy in the mode of production and show what positions controlled various aspects of
production. At this point, a more general question arises: what legal mechanism assured management’s
hierarchical control?
The case of Charles Chaplin vs Essanay (1916) became an industry precedent in this regard. After
Chaplin moved to Mutual, he sued Essanay and distributor V-L-S-E to prevent release of Charlie Chaplin’s
Burlesque on ‘Carmen.’ When he worked on it, its length ran about 2,000 feet, but he charged that after he
left, the company padded the film to 4,000 feet with material ‘of such quality as seriously to injure his
fame.’ Chaplin lost the case. The courts reasoned, among other points, that unless a contract stipulated
otherwise, a firm, not a particular employee, controlled the product. The courts were clearly following legal
and economic precedent that in an employer-employee relationship, the contract of employment must
expressly indicate what rights the worker retains; otherwise, the company is entitled to the ownership and
profits of whatever the employee produces.52
That the firm positioned the managers of capital and the technical experts at the top of the hierarchy as
agents for the firm resulted in their legal control over all decisions in design. At least two factors, however,
qualified this. First, managers of capital usually dissociated themselves from direct involvement in making
the films, and technical managers (the studio heads and producers) took varying degrees of interest in
varying parts of the design. Secondly, a ‘talent,’ a star or writer or director or cameraman, with prestige in
the industry could parlay his or her exchange-value into securing agreeable contractual arrangements by
inducing the studios to bid for his or her services. If final control of a cut, for instance, was exceptionally
important to a valuable director, he could get it. When Ernst Lubitsch signed with Warner Bros in the 1920s,
he demanded and received a contract entitling him to complete control over rushes and negatives, final cut,
and all decisions regarding cast and subject.53 The problem was that only a few individuals had such power
within the industry, and setting precedents of giving up controls was not a move the company wanted to
make. At any rate, the State indirectly reinforced the hierarchy of the mode of production, and management
controlled the making of the films. Thus in future years, we hear stories such as that told by William Castle
about Columbia producer Irving Briskin’s re-editing of Castle’s The Chance of a Lifetime (1943):54
Briskin took the end of the picture and put it at the beginning, then spliced a section of Reel Four into
Reel Two, a section of Two into Four, and some of Five into Six. Reel Seven he took out entirely.
Eight he trimmed, and Nine he left alone. After his glowing contribution, Chance of a Lifetime
became even more muddled and screwed up than it had been originally, if that was possible.
Two transitions in the design of the product between 1909 and 1917 affected the mode of production:
changes in the standards of quality filmmaking and in film length required a detailed script. In addition, by
1914, with ‘scientific management,’ the firms started to utilize extensive management precalculation of the
films. Thus, the script served management both as an efficient blueprint, a paper record for the assembly of
the product, and as an effective precheck for quality. ‘Scientific management’ also intensified production
planning work so that the director’s tasks subdivided: the producer planned and coordinated the work while
the director specialized in managing the shooting activities. Finally, the State reinforced this by assigning
control of the product to the hierarchy of the firm’s economic agents rather than to specific work positions.
Control over parts of the film work, however, could be negotiated in contracts between the firm and the
individual worker (and later the labor organizations representing the collective rights of the workers). This
central producer system remained dominant until 1931 when the industry tried a new management
organization.
13
The division and order of production: the subdivision of the
work from the first years through the 1920s
By the mid-teens, the feature had established its dominance over the one-reelers, and production,
distribution, and exhibition practices standardized the product’s design and marketing. The production
system for which Hollywood would become famous was in full operation. The standard working procedure
involved a producer, a large, fully-staffed studio, a set of departmentalized technical workers and specialists,
all guided by a continuity script. This system is particularly manifest in the physical plant of a Hollywood
studio. As a major producer of multiple-reel films, the Lasky studio in 1918 (see fig 13.1) was described by
Photoplay as ‘a veritable city within a city.’ Following the numbers around the lot, we note whole buildings
devoted to properties (1, 2, and 11), wardrobes (4 and 30), casting (5), management (6, 7, and 26), direction
(8), story selection and screenwriting (9), art direction (13 [Wilfred Buckland’s office]), scene docks and set
construction (15, 20, 27, 29, 31–4). Besides open stages (12 and 19), there were glass-enclosed ones (17,
18, and 23) and even a ‘dark stage’ (22). A large back lot with standing sets (37) and a sailboat in a tank (21)
provided massive, three-dimensional exteriors—close to the rest of the studio. Also included were hospital
facilities (24) and a full service system with ‘police, fire, street cleaning, water and electrical departments.’
Photoplay reported that the studio used so much lumber that it had bought a tract of timberland in Oregon
and a private sawmill and steamers to transport the wood to Southern California.1 If there was a ‘golden
age’ of the studio, it is in full operation by 1918. The last three chapters have focused on the management
hierarchy; now we need to review how the work was executed and how it became systematized during the
central producer period.
In the early years of filmmaking. the cameraman for all intents and purposes created the entire product on
his own In later years. the firms split the work into more and finer suodivisions and achieved a set regime.
One might think of the subdivision of the execution of the work as a tree with its trunk in an earlier period
and its branches at later points. The trunk contained all the work functions unified in one worker. At one
historical juncture, a set of subdivisions, main branches, appears. Later, these branches subdivide again.
These subdivisions can be attributed to several causes, two of which are most pertinent. For economic
reasons, subdividing the work into small segments allowed expertise and increased speed and efficiency.
Moreover, the standards of the quality film caused certain work positions to appear. It is true that production
practices, on occasion, caused certain stylistic techniques. But overall, Hollywood’s production practices
need to be seen as an effect of economic and ideological/ signifying practices. In some instances, as we have
seen, a production practice affected the film’s style, but in general, we have to look elsewhere for
explanations of why films looked and sounded as they did.
About 1907, with the increased production of narratives and the ascension of the director system of
management, the first set of subdivisions appeared. The second set occurred in the mid-teens, simultaneous
with the move to the central producer. At this point, the new standards for the quality film created greater
attention to continuity, verisimilitude, narrative clarity, and spectacle. As design and quality standards
232 THE DIVISION AND ORDER OF PRODUCTION: FROM THE FIRST YEARS THROUGH THE 1920S
become more complicated, film companies established jobs to handle the specialized parts of the work. In
addition, the move by distribution alliances such as Paramount, World, Triangle, Warners, and V-L-S-E to a
full schedule distribution of multiple-reel films produced profits and a competitive standard of hiring
experts from outside the moving picture industry. These experts from legitimate theater, painting, music,
architecture, and fashion design separated specialities still further. Technological innovation within the
industry resulted in experts in special effects, make-up, and materials and tools of production.
This chronology and periodization are based on the changes in the management system, but the
subdivision process, an effect of the detailed division of labor, might have occurred in the same order
whatever the management system. Whether a studio used a director-unit or a central producer system, the
research department or the continuity clerk would probably have developed. Standards of authenticity and
continuity would still have created a need for this work. By the late teens the major subdivisions and work
procedures had a set pattern. In Part Five, noteworthy additions to the structure will be mentioned, but, as
will become apparent, the changes were minor modifications.
The conception of the production
Direction of capital
Generally, managers functioned either as directors of capital, guiding investment and purchasing raw
materials and labor power, or as technical specialists, coordinating, supervising, and maintaining production.
In the management hierarchy, technical managers were subordinate to the directors of capital. The
ownership function was separate from these.
Most of the people who owned the first film production firms worked in both management capacities,
although some owner/managers concentrated on one or the other. Some subcontracting also occurred, with
technical specialist responsibilities given those workers (e.g., cameramen with a contract to provide films).
Such subcontracting, of course, predated the commercial introduction of the moving pictures, the instance in
point being the experimentation period at Edison. These cameramen/managers often chose what to film and
almost always how to film it; their own levels of quality were dependent only in a general way on the
owner/managers’ acceptance of the finished product. Thus, the initial separation between ownership and
management occurred when owners hired separate technical managers. Not only was this a parting of
ownership and management but it was a sectioning of management between the two types, capital direction
remaining united with ownership. Significantly, owners did not hire non-owner capital-direction managers.
Capital direction remained exclusively the owners’ prerogatives until the firms went public and ownership
spread.
Initial decisions about the product and production process

In the periods dominated by the cameraman, director, and director-unit systems (1896–1914), the director
and cameraman made the major decisions in filmmaking. With the introduction of the central producer
system about 1914, however, division of responsibility started in earnest. The producer (or studio head or
supervisor) arid the production department took over what had been the director’s and cameraman’s
responsibilities for selecting the type of product type of production processes, level and integration of
production, and maintenance of production performance. The director and cameraman were given the latter
two responsibilities for an individual film, but at a subordinate level to the producer. Such a splitting of
responsibility also produced a collective activity by the workers. As cinematographer Lucien Ballard said
many years later: ‘Another thing you learn is that a cameraman cannot do a picture the way he wants to,
because he’s not the boss. It’s a collaboration of the director, the art director, and the cameraman.’2 As we
noted in Chapter 8, in serial manufacture, craftspeople are gathered into a central workshop, labor is divided,
and a hierarchy of management occurs. But as Marx points out, complex collective work is possible in this
mode of production.
By the end of the teens, production planning was standardized. At the start of the production season, the
producer (usually located in Los Angeles) would consult with the president and various board members (the
directors of capital) in New York City. There, the group would calculate expected income for the year. With
that figure as the overall budget, the group then determined how many of what types of films at what levels
of financial investment the firm would make.
These decisions were based on experience in the business and a forecast of next season’s market. Both
considerations entailed marketing analyses. One source of information was the opinion of exhibitors as to what
the public was buying, but the use of more rigorous marketing research seems to have started with the move
to scientific management.3 In 1915, Paramount instituted a film rating system to tabulate the opinions of its
distributors and exhibitors, and Essanay in 1917 established an ‘Investigation Department’ ‘to discover not
only what the sales organizations and theater managers desired but to keep a record of critics’ reviews and
secure all available information from the public direct.’ In subsequent years the industry tried other
methods, but the general attitude seems to have been that film cycles moved too fast to allow decisions to be
based on present buying trends, and directors of capital relied mostly on informal analyses.4 (In the late
1920s, Universal tried a few other market analysis techniques including audience questionnaires and a
psychologist to analyze public response.)
The calculation at the yearly budget meeting included not only the budget and some product
determination but also the precise number of films at certain cost brackets of expenditures. The directors of
capital and the producer made, in addition, some initial decisions as to casting and story. Generally, once
feature fiction films were the principal product, the companies separated them into two and (after 1930)
three cost levels with brackets within each group: the specials (those which would ‘roadshow’ before going
into the regular exhibition circuit), the programs (those which filled out the company’s contractual
commitment to provide so many films at such and such costs to the exhibitors), and after 1930 the low-cost
B films (films for the second spot in the double-feature). The firm would then choose whether to spread its
costs across a wide number of films or to count on fewer films at higher prices or some variation of both.
The company also planned various shorts, comedies, serials, and newsreels to fill out the exhibitor’s
program needs.5
With the budget and decisions from that meeting, the producer returned to the studio and with his staff
set in motion the actual production operation. The producer oversaw all of the departments, and depending
upon his proclivities, he gravitated toward various degrees of involvement in the routine work on individual
films.
The production department

Assisting the producer in his planning was the production department which handled all the day-to-day
management and economic coordination for the studio. This department estimated costs, organized studio
physical facilities, and kept production records. It also relied on the continuity script as the source of its cost
estimates: once the producer, director, and writers had a story in continuity format, the production
department and the assistant director for that film broke the script apart into a scene plot, a costume plot,
and the number of players and scenes in which they appeared. With this design ‘breakdown,’ the individual
departments did initial plans and cost estimates, cutting expenditures if necessary to meet the story’s
assigned budget.
The assistant director’s breakdown of the script is a logical historical development of his role. The
position of assistant director had separated from the director’s as production rates increased, and by the
early teens he generally took care of routine, pre-shooting organizational work. This might include checking
out locations, finding authentic properties, and reviewing the rushes of the previous day’s work. As
elaborate planning developed, the assistant director took over laying the work out, determining how many
shots would be taken daily, deciding which shots would be grouped together on which exteriors and
interiors, hiring extras, organizing location shooting, and prechecking sets, costumes, and lighting. His work
relieved the director of details, and he acted as the director’s liaison with the people on the set and those in
the production office.6
Besides its planning function, the production department also had overall responsibility for an efficient,
economical work process. Controlling costs demanded intensive use of labor-power and the means of
production. Paying film workers by time was of enormous significance: as Fortune put it, ‘the chief expense
in producing a motion picture is time’—expenditures for labor-power. Somewhere between 70 and 80 per
cent of direct costs were salaries and wages. The fewer ‘unnecessary’ people working in planning the film
and the better the department could group daily-or weekly-paid technicians or players, the lower the costs.7
The allocation of costs seems to have affected the work practices during shooting. In 1916, Price,
Waterhouse prepared an accounting procedure memorandum for film accountants. Optional methods of
charging expenses might have been set up, but Price, Waterhouse (possibly following then-current
practices) advised charging as much as possible to an individual film. Then, what could not be attributed on
an individual basis became overhead—such as salaries for administrators and department heads and the
studio’s physical costs. Although Price, Waterhouse suggested several methods of distributing overhead, it
preferred dividing it by the number of feet of exposed negative on the assumption that wasteful directors
exposed more film. They also argued that rehearsals were cheap in comparison to many retakes because
shooting involved many more laborers, more raw film, and higher consumption of electricity for lights.
Such an accounting practice, or ones similar to it, discouraged multiple takes, improvisation, extensive
rearranging of the script on the set, and long takes. How much impact such accounting practices had upon
the ‘star’ directors is questionable, but for those working around them and for those with less secure
reputations, the pressure to control shooting was more intense.8
Accounting and efficiency practices influenced other aspects of filmmaking. Bookkeepers wrote the cost
of all sets and costumes against the film for which they were made; as a result, any subsequent uses were
free. This encouraged the re-use of sets and a return to the same genres. After Selig purchased an entire zoo
in 1908, the company made a series of animal pictures. Paramount built a ship in 1927 which through its
lifetime (until 1935) was used in Special Delivery (1927), Fireman Save My Child (1927), Anybody’s War
(1930), Morocco (1930), Luxury Liner (1933), Four Frightened People (1934), Now and Forever (1934),
and others.9
The development of ‘experts in efficient set construction was also an effect of economy measures.
Studios, even with large stages, had limited physical space for the several films in production so the
production department had to prepare carefully the most efficient use of the facilities. Sets could not be erected
on those stages until just before use and afterwards had to be stored until any retakes had been shot. On set
construction at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer many years later, Cedric Gibbons wrote:10
But let me emphasize one point—our object in set construction is not to fool the public, as so many
people seem to think. As a matter of fact, it often costs us more to improvise a house than it would to
build the real thing. Time is the essential factor. Time, and transportability. As a result, we have
developed a corps of skilled technicians who, in the space of a few hours, can build a cottage and ‘age’
it so that it will appear to have stood for centuries. Or a ship, or a jungle, or whatever we may need.
By the mid-teens, sets were built in a factory area and then stored or moved to stages to save time and
physical space and, in the long-run, costs.
To keep track of its operations and to provide data which would suggest the efficiency (or lack thereof)
of any film and its laborers, the production department created elaborate routine reporting systems.
Paperwork traced the cost of every stage of production. In 1918 one firm kept daily track of the number of
production stills, scenes shot, total footage, net footage, number of scenes to complete the film, estimated
days to completion, and the day’s labor hours. On a large wall diagram-board (see fig 13.2), the production
manager had a systematic description of where each director’s film stood in its shooting schedule, how
many players were working, and where the unit was shooting. Generally, the assistant director supplied the
daily shooting reports to the production office. In such a planning system, different individuals assumed the
responsibility for producing reports which kept track of the details necessary to guide the assembly of the
film.11
Pre-shooting work
Script writing
We have already seen that the early divisions among writing tasks occurred when one person contributed
stories and the cameraman or director reworked the material for shooting. The story writer may have been
another member of the firm, a freelancer who was paid a nominal sum for the story, or a writer hired
specifically to supply material. The companies followed the latter course more frequently once demand for
new narratives intensified, around 1907. At that point, the firms began actively soliciting freelance material
either through the purchase of copyrighted plays, novels, and stories (particularly after the Ben-Hur suit) or
from unknowns who sent in stories. The firm delegated to editors and readers the selection of stories. By at
least 1911, firms had a story reading/writing department with a head, readers, and writers.12 Reliance on
freelance submissions from unestablished writers decreased after studios began to draw regularly upon
stories from adaptations and from employees’ originals and after protection against plagiarism suits became
important (there was little chance of discovering an outstanding scenario from an unknown). By the
mid-1920s, agents were go-betweens for non-studio-generated plots.13
The emerging classical Hollywood style and the adoption of multiple-reel films in the early teens caused
the new major separation in the writing process: the technical expert who specialized in translating a story
into a continuity script. As the script became more important for planning and coordinating the work and as
continuity conventions became more complex, this technician took over the preparation of the script. The
scenario editor for Lubin said in 1913 that while formerly the editor supplied ideas to the director, ‘now the
director does not see the scenario, until it is handed to him for production, complete in every detail…. Four
or five experts of our staff have read and discussed every phase of the script and every effort has been made
to eliminate any flaws of structure.’ Since the continuity writer also adapted all purchased copyright and
freelance work, the material in its original form went through a standardizing process to meet the criteria of
the quality film and format. The technician not only knew the continuity format and stylistic demands, but
she or he also knew the studio’s particular needs with respect to costume and set cost, standing sets, star and
stock personalities, directorial and staff areas of skill, and so on. Such a practice provided the studio with a
standardized script designed to take the best advantage of its physical capacities and labor force. Thus, a similar
blueprint confronted the workers time after time, making its use routine and fast. Such a standardizing
process undoubtedly controlled innovation and contributed to the overall solidification of the classical
Hollywood style.14
The splitting of writing expertise around 1913 —some workers excelling in creating stories, others in re-
writing—produced experts in further subdivisions. Although atypically early, Vitagraph’s scenario
department in 1912 had another speciality area: ‘In addition to the Scenario writers, title and sub-title
draughtsmen are an adjunct.’ In 1915 the call for such inter-title specialists increased, with one writer
suggesting as a source ‘the trained newspaperman or woman, one preferably skilled in the difficult art of
writing head lines’ (which suggests one function of the inter-titles). Thereafter, firms hired those specialists
and others (such as gag-men for comedies).15
Two final developments in the subdivision and order of the writing process worth noting occurred in the
1920s. Although the Lubin firm used team-writing by mid-1913, it was customary by the early twenties for
scripts to travel through several writers or groups of writers. (One writer in 1922 said Pathé once had a
group of twelve writers on a story; the infamous teams at MGM had precedents.16) Seldom did one person
do all the work all the way through. In addition, the studio added an intermediary step between the
purchased original story and the continuity script: the ‘treatment.’ After the producer and staff selected a story
for production, the treatment writer broke the story into sections and character plot, ‘[viewing] it with an
eye to the special requirements and conditions of his own studio’ and to the present market. This treatment
would be in lengthy prose form. The principal decision-makers, including often the star for which it was
intended, responded to it. Several treatments might be done before the project would receive a go-ahead to
be put into a shooting script format by a continuity writer. The advantage of the treatment was several trial
constructions of the film’s blueprint without the extensive and expensive detail of the continuity script.17
Direction
With the subdivision of the labor process and the creation of the work position of the central producer, the
director’s range of work and technical management decisions decreased. The amount and type of control by
a director depended on several factors: his interests and background, production needs of the firm, and the
director’s contractual power. The varied backgrounds allowed the studios to take advantage of any
specializations these men provided—those with art backgrounds, for instance, might contribute to set
design, as did William Cameron Menzies.18 Those with more experimental tendencies (e.g., Maurice
Tourneur) were sometimes given more leeway with the style (e.g., The Bluebird). After the diffusion of the
central producer system, the major responsibilities of the director were his input into pre-shooting decisions,
now a group system of decision-making, and his control of the staging of the action during shooting.
Research
The critics’ and public’s attention to details of accuracy (induced in part by the company’s advertising)
caused first the director and then the assistant director and often the set manager to spend time in research.
By the mid-teens, this work resulted in firms employing a ‘technical expert’ to work on ‘archaeological
references.’ Joseph Henabery recalled doing extensive research for D.W.Griffith and Intolerance, ending up
with 15 feet of books on Babylon and Assyria. By the end of the decade, the expert had his or her own
research department, and the staff would ‘collect all available material and information that may be of value
to motion picture production. These libraries have now become very extensive.’ Clippings and files on all
sorts of subjects and subscriptions to magazines filled out the reference materials for writers, costumers, and
art directors.19
Art direction
The construction of sets involved several work functions which subdivided the director’s work into two
positions: the art director and the property manager, each with a staff. Following contemporary theatrical
and vaudeville precedents, the early interior sets for films were backdrops painted by theatrical scenic
painters. These artists included in their responsibilities using materials corrected for the properties of
orthochromatic film stock. As David Sherrill Hulfish explained in 1911: ‘The scenery used for setting the
[film] stage differs from the dramatic stage by the absence of color. Plain black and white and neutral tints
are most desirable, for color is objectionable in that it may be misleading in tone values when
photographed.’20
By the early 1910s, theaters were using more three-dimensionality in their sets, film producers’ became
similarly interested in verisimilitude and depth, and production rates were increasing. As a result, the film
companies started collecting permanent properties and building three-dimensional sets under the direction
of a ‘stage manager’ or ‘technical director.’21 Using the script, the technical director and his assistants drew
up scene and property plots, reducing the inefficiency and inaccuracies attendant upon unplanned
construction. As early as 1913, these plots included pre-construction diagrams of the sets with camera set-
ups precisely marked so that only the necessary portions of a set and props would be prepared. A 1914
discussion of the technical director mentioned that he needed to consider how a set would photograph with
the camera at varying distances (an effect of closer framing and analytical editing), and Arthur Miller has
recalled that in the mid-teens Anton Grot did drawings which considered the camera lens length. Set models
started to be used by at least 1914: the director okayed their dramatic use while the technical director
handled their artistic, photographic, and authenticity requirements. (See figs 13.3, 13.4, 13.5.) These
technical directors were also responsible for preventing anachronisms in the sets, with which the research
staff helped them out. The technical directors needed to understand aspects of the crafts of construction and
cinematography, particularly the properties of the film stock and lenses; they obviously used that knowledge
in their work.22
By the mid-teens, the studios started calling this position the ‘art director.’ The terminology may reflect
the new source of some of these experts from painting and architecture and the current interest in ‘new
stagecraft,’ the American version of recent European theatrical staging and lighting trends. These new art
directors started taking over some of the cameraman’s and director’s decisions regarding lighting and
composition. Will H.Bradley, ‘art editor of the Century Magazine, the artist who has done so much for the
poster in America’ advised firms on ‘correct lighting of interiors, artistic variations of chiaroscuro, and
dramatic effect to be produced by psychological handling of color notes.’ Besides Bradley and Grot,
Wilfred Buckland, Robert Brunton, Hugo Ballin, Everett Shinn, William Cotton, Cedric Gibbons, and
others began working for firms. Buckland, a former Belasco designer who worked for Famous Players-
Lasky, followed the most recent theatrical lighting styles; Brunton,23* art director for Ince productions, had,
according to a period description, ‘a rich dramatic lighting’ style; and Ballin provided sets to the Goldwyn
Company containing a ‘suggestion of Gordon Craig and Sam Hume.’ The introduction after 1915 of these
new art directors set up precedents of lighting for more than realistically motivated illumination and depth
and of composing for more than visibility of action.24
By the late teens, sets had become complex constructions, with rooms in rows. One writer explained:25
This adds more realism and permits the artistic camera shots through vistas which could not be
obtained if a single room were constructed at a time…. and when, in the further development of the
plot, these rooms are shown more completely, we recall them and the memory serves as another means
of knitting up the unity of impressions.
Architects were hired. Robert Haas was with Famous Players-Lasky by 1919, and Hans Dreier worked for
its European branch from 1919 to 1923, when he came to Hollywood. Haas constructed sets which included
ceilings visible in the film.26 Such complications required cooperative planning among the craftspeople.
One aid was even more extensive use of models. Jerome Lachenbruch described the process of set design for
Theodora (1921):27
But in the case of this picture, a procedure that is sometimes employed in American productions was
followed. It consisted in erecting miniatures of every set that was to be constructed. For this alone,
separate sets of blueprints had to be made. In a spectacle conceived on so magnificent a scale, the
models were essential for the directorial staff to work out the pictorial grouping of thousands of
players to define the various angles from which scenes [shots] were to be made, to test in miniature
the effect of light at disparate heights, and finally to decide upon and record for future reference the
exact action of the various players in the different scenes and sets.
The art director had influence over all aspects of the mise-en-scène’s design, but he had a large number of
subordinate experts who carried out individual (detailed division) segments of the construction and dressing
of the set. The choice of exterior locations had passed by 1913 from the director’s concerns into the hands
of the assistant director, or more often thereafter to location men.’ By the mid-teens with the increasing
organization and in-depth research practices within the industry, the companies collated photographic files
of hundreds of locales. In the same period, the firms launched massive indexings of the props which they
had started purchasing much earlier. By 1915, the work of supplying properties had subdivided to the
property department head who also had staffs of experts to make what was not available for purchase or
rent.28
Finally, composite photography became part of art direction. Although cinematographers developed most
of the technology for composite work, the use of miniatures, glass shots, and mattes overlapped with areas
of concern to the art director (see fig 13.6). Patents for the technologies and techniques predate the
beginning of the industry, but standardization of precision registration around 1914 was particularly
important in permitting certain special effects. This technology developed in the late teens and spread into
general use in the 1920s. The firms employed these effects to create mise-en-scène—beautiful mountains
instead of the tops of an adjacent set, multi-storied castles, and locales not available for mass transportation
of hundreds of staff and players and tons of equipment. Experts in cinematography worked under the art
director to create special effects. As a result, throughout the 1920s and in some cases through the 1930s
and 1940s, the firms split special effects between the art and the cinematography departments rather than
combining them into a separate unit or delegating all of the work to one department. As these techniques
proliferated, individual staffs specialized in each process.29 (The advantage to the split of the work is the
spreading of technical knowledge across various sectors of the firm; the disadvantage is possible lack of
communication and competitive rather than cooperative moves on the parts of the separate groups of
workers.)
Costuming
From the earliest period of filming, the firms divided costumes into the modern and the historical. When
modern dress was required, the players were supposed to furnish their own wardrobes, and reminiscences of
the early period of casting often include hiring decisions based on the dress a woman wore to that studio
that day. Special historical costumes, of course, were expensive, and firms renting such supplies to theater
companies were glad to pick up the film business. After the narrative production increase in 1907, the
individual firms began purchasing and making their own wardrobes as well as renting them, and out of this
need came another theatrical carry-over, the position of the wardrobe mistress, common by the early teens.
Besides preparing the costumes, she was responsible for considering the photographic effects of the textures
and colors of her materials.30
With the advent of the employment of other experts around 1915, companies started adding fashion
designers to costume the leading ladies; Ince announced his firm’s hiring of Melville Ellis, ‘designer and
fashion expert of International reputation’ that year. By 1922 at Famous Players-Lasky, the wardrobe
director headed two sections of special costuming: character and women’s fashions. From a wardrobe plot,
the research department supplied photographs and descriptions of period clothes, and the character section
reviewed its 50,000 costumes for appropriate ones and started construction of new designs. In women’s
fashions, a technical expert, the designer Ethel Chaffin, specialized in the gowns for the female leads. She
supervised over one hundred women in five subdivided branches of costuming: dressmaking, stock
materials, finished wardrobe, millinery, and fancy dress. Chaffin designed the major pieces by draping and
pinning and turned the actual construction over to assistants. In that way, she was able to create three
thousand dresses in 1920. Speed and originality, she claimed, were the most important considerations in
designing for films.31
Casting
When the director controlled all of his casting, he selected the leads from his stock company and the extras
from anyone who appeared at the studio ‘bull pens.’ Gradually, around the early teens, the assistant director
took over casting extras, and major players followed the theatrical practice of hiring agents. In late 1915,
one firm announced its new plan for ‘casting efficiency’: it hired a theatrical agent to make a file of data on
character types. The phrase ‘type-casting’ has literal implications within this mode of production. In order
to set up such a system, the casting director, an expert who replaced the more casual approach which the
firm had employed, needed some method to classify the potential players for his system. As Mary Pickford
put it several years later, the casting director ‘divided humanity in sections—young men, old men,
comedians, tragedians’; the selected classification became somewhat permanent as it went down on a card
with other statistics and into the casting director’s indexed and cross-indexed files. With this procedure, the
producer and director would choose the leads, and the casting director filled out the rest of the cast subject
to their approval.32
In 1925, the industry as a whole, working from the advice of the trade association (the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors Association), tried to stop the exploitation of the extras. Multitudes of star-struck
people had descended on Hollywood, most with little prospects of employment, and agents secured large
percentages of these extras’ fees in return for finding them one of the few openings. The firms formed the
Central Casting Corporation to serve as a single hiring agency for all producers without the intervention of
agents. Central Casting was also highly systematized. By 1930, 17,500 extras were registered.33
Make-up
As in theatrical traditions, film make-up was the responsibility of the individual player into the 1920s. ‘How-
to’ books and company handouts explained the problems of the use of reds and whites with orthochromatic
film stock and suggested how to avoid ending up with black eyelids and lips and halating complexions.
Because of this, the cinematographer found himself checking out the various players’ results and insisting
on consistency (for continuity and verisimilitude) within an individual film. One standardizing aid was the
support firm of Max Factor which had located in Los Angeles in 1908 and supplied make-up, wigs, and
hair-pieces to stage and screen. By the mid-1920s, many studios had department heads and staffs of make-
up artists to assist the players. First National created its department in 1924 with Perc Westmore in charge.
Paramount placed Wally Westmore as head of its staff in 1926, and he remained there for forty-three
years.34
Cinematography
Although the cameraman of the very early years may have made most of the management decisions, after
the advent of the director system in 1907, his primary responsibilities were setting up lighting, placing
boundary lines to signal the edges of the set area visible in the image, handling the camera, and providing
special effects photography. After shooting, he turned his negatives over to the laboratories with
instructions as to development.
As the style of the films employed more crosscutting and analytical editing and as their length increased
in the early teens, there were greater problems in keeping records and order among pieces of film. In these
years, the cameramen devised tactics to keep track of the individual shots. One report on the work process
in 1913 said that the cameraman’s assistant held up a scene number before each take was photographed; the
purpose: ‘in handling the film the developers know how to make their reports concerning any photographic
deficiencies and the assemblers use the scene numbers as a guide.’ Karl Brown, Billy Bitzer’s assistant,
supplies an example for this period in which he recorded for reference the place, lighting, special effects,
camera stop number, and footage. By the 1920s, Hal Mohr said, ‘we had charts all made out as to what [the
laboratory workers] were supposed to do.’ Thus, the cameraman’s notes supplied another paper record to
coordinate with the continuity script, helping in the assembly of the film by various workers at different
times and places.35
When longer films increased the cameraman’s duties, his work became subdivided. By 1913, some
cinematographers had assistants. By the early 1920s, three individuals handled camerawork with the
subordinates as apprentices.36* The assistant’s duties were to clean and repair equipment, to carry it to
locations, and to assist the first cameraman in routine matters such as holding the slate, marking the playing
area, and making the shooting notes. The second cameraman handled more responsible work and usually
shot the second negative, which was an insurance negative and the one used for European prints. The first
cameraman supervised the placement of lighting equipment, shot the primary negative, and advised the
director in ‘the composition or artistic arrangements of the photographic scene.’37
Owning twenty-six cameras, most valued between $3,000 and $4,000, Famous Players-Lasky in 1922
was apparently a bit atypical in that it supplied the cameramen with their cameras. Around 1915,
cameramen began to purchase their own equipment because the studios’ mechanical repair departments
were bogged down with other work and could not fix company-owned cameras fast enough. The firms were
also slow in purchasing accessories which the cinematographers wanted. Cameramen’s personal ownership
of the equipment probably lead to invention of accessories, although the general craft situation and an
ideology of ‘progress’ also stimulated interest in technological development.38 (Studios started owning the
cameras again after sound technology increased their cost and studio synchronizing methods required
uniformity in equipment.)
Shooting work
Assistant direction
Much of the preceding job descriptions has touched on the shooting segment of the work, but several other
parts of the actual process of filming ought to be mentioned. If the assistant director played a key role in
planning the work, he remained in the same essential supporting function during shooting. As liaison among
the production department, the director, and the rest of the crew, the assistant director had the major
responsibility of keeping everything running smoothly and efficiently. In a 1924 memo at Thomas Ince’s
studio, the assistant general production manager cautioned that the assistant director should have each set
checked out the day before scheduled shooting. He should have present at that inspection the first
cameraman, the head of the property department, the company [unit] property man, the chief electrician,
and the company [unit] electrician as well as the director. Assistant directors also oversaw on the day of
shooting the availability of the players, make-up, properties, and so forth. If a number of extras were in a
scene, he directed their actions. (For big scenes, there might be several assistant directors.) For location
shooting, he supervised the players’ and crew’s transportation, food, and lodging. Finally, he was supposed
to keep costs down. Good assistant directors seldom became directors; they were too valuable to lose. Their
normal promotion was to production supervision.39
Rehearsals
The number and type of rehearsals seem to have varied greatly throughout all periods, studios, and directors.
When the director was making up the script as he went along, the players could not know in advance what
the characterizations would be; rehearsals in those cases involved much improvisation and direction during
shooting. After 1908, however, to get a story within the allotted footage of the one-reel film, the director
had to make shots more concise, and rehearsals were used to time the action. Rehearsals also allowed the
cameraman and electricians time to check the placement of lights. Probably earlier, but certainly by 1922,
the studios had created another subdivision of work: stand-ins with the same coloring replaced the leads for
the final checkups before shooting.40
Music during shooting

Once rehearsals were satisfactory and equipment was in place, the workers began shooting with directors at
times coaching off-screen. The use of music during the shooting first occurred at least by 1907; a
phonograph played during posing ‘to add to the reality of the moving pictures.’ In October 1915, the
Moving Picture World recorded that George K.Spoor, an owner of Essanay, had a full orchestra play during
an afternoon shooting of part of The Raven in order to raise the actors’ work to the required emotional pitch.
The paper noted: ‘this is the first time [sic] in film history that music has been used in the production of
photoplays.’ As a publicity stunt, it worked. Several months later Equitable announced it had live music
during all of its productions to enhance the acting, and the practice had become standard by 1918, some
directors being satisfied with phonographs or a couple of musicians, others requiring orchestras. Here is an
instance of the studio’s willingness to spend money on an extra job function in the belief that it would
enhance the performances and hence the film’s quality.41
Order of shooting
The order of the taking of the shots was partially dictated by availability of locations and sets, but fairly
early (by 1910) the procedure was to take the exteriors first, since interiors could be arranged to
accommodate the idiosyncracies of the actual locations. This became more necessary when films relied
upon frame cuts, direction-matching, cut-ins, matches-on-action, and sets staged so that exteriors were
visible through windows. Other considerations also determined shooting order. The ‘big set,’ the most
complicated construction, would be delayed until the end of the schedule to allow the art department the most
time to complete it. Also the most dangerous scenes would be scheduled last, on the logic that if anything
happened to the leading players it would not delay the film going to the distributor.42 and 43*
Multiple cameras
Another method of saving money was the occasional use of multiple cameras during shooting. Using two or
more cameras occurred on and off from at least 1907. The Show World records Essanay filming with two
‘as one film may not be a success, but if both turn out perfectly, there is always a chance to use them.’ The
extra footage, for instance, might be used in another film. So one usage of multiple cameras was to protect
against needing retakes of a shot. When exports of American films increased after 1910, a second negative
also served as the master for foreign prints. As the costs of spectacular scenes increased, multiple cameras
helped in another way: the studios could stage a scene once but cover the action from different points and
distances. A 1918 writer pointed out that more than twenty cameras might be used in a battle scene in which
the set or locale would be destroyed during the take: ‘the cameras are posted at advantageous positions, some
on the ground level and some at an elevation, in order to get varying and unusual views.’44 Cecil B.De
Mille’s shooting practice in the 1920s can be seen as an outgrowth of this procedure. And the practice as a
whole is a result of keeping costs in hand while satisfying needs for spectacle, continuity, and differentiation
of the product.
Continuity clerk
By the mid-teens, analytical editing and matching of action were common. Also by the late teens, effects
lighting on the stars included backlighting and the beginnings of diffusion through lenses and gauzes in
imitation of still photography and theatrical conventions of beauty. After an establishing shot was made,
lighting and equipment had to be adjusted before the cut-in was taken. Consequently, the staff had to pay
close attention to make sure details of action and mise-en-scène matched. Although continuity and
verisimilitude had always been a responsibility of the director, of the cameraman, and of their staffs, the
demand for accuracy increased the need for a paper record. By the mid- to late teens, a new sort of worker,
a ‘script assistant’ or ‘continuity clerk,’ usually a woman, worked as an aide to the assistant director. Her duties
were to take notes on continuity during shooting ‘for future reference when carrying out the connecting
scenes [shots].’ She was also to check on all properties and costumes and notate every change a director
made from the prepared script. These notes became part of the paper record sent to the film editors.45
Post-shooting work
Negative development and rushes

By the early teens, the cameraman no longer developed his negatives, and laboratory assistants were in
charge of that under his direction. After the cameraman exposed the film, he tagged it with his notes for
developing the individual shots and sent it to either his studio lab or an independent lab for development.
The lab prepared a print within twenty-four hours so that the staff could check the film for any ‘minute
flaws of detail, business or photography.’ If there were multiple takes, the director or producer chose which
ones he wanted.46
Editing
Before the system of analytical editing was formulated, assembling the film was a matter of joining the
separate shots and adding permanent inter-titles, but as crosscutting, cut-ins, matches, dialogue inter-titles,
etc., became standard, cutting became more time-consuming. By the early teens, cutters had taken over part
of the director’s work and assembled a rough cut following the continuity script, the camera assistant’s slate
numbers, and the directions from the review of prints. In later years, the cutters also used the continuity
clerk’s notes. Mohr recounts that when he joined Universal in late 1914, he and eight other cutters worked
for fifty-four directors. Sometimes the director actually did the first cut but the written instructions usually
relieved him of that routine task. Generally, however, he did a final cut. After the advent of the central
producer system eliminated some of the director’s responsibilities, the cutters often handled the final cut and
titling even though the director and producer might still choose the scenes for the first cuts. By the late
teens, the cutter had become the ‘film editor,’ a technical expert who refined the film from the rough cut to
the final one. Working with the film editor during the drafting of the final version, an expert title writer
polished the inter-titles.47
Previews and revisions

Besides censorship, the major reason for revisions of the film at this point was the firm’s decision that the
film did not meet its standards of a quality product. One way to determine whether it was adequate was to
try it out—like opening a play out of town. Previews with actual audiences occurred at least as early as
1914, when Mutual studios in Los Angeles would check the reception of a film before doing the prints for
distribution. Previews could trigger a whole series of revisions including rewrites and retakes. That, of
course, became expensive. Sometime after 1925, Irving Thalberg made retakes a permanent part of the
MGM procedure and budget, but that was an exception among the studios.48
Musical accompaniment
After the firm completed the film and while positive prints were made, musical accompaniment would be
prepared. After 1909, Edison supplied cue sheets to pianists, and this became standard service for the
exhibitors in the early 1910s. Pathé did an adaptation of the operatic music for its Il Trovatore in 1911, and
musicians occasionally wrote original film music. Because of the length of features, this cost and effort was
expended only for very special films.49
The film companies assigned work functions to particular job positions and created new positions for two
chief reasons. First, the standards of continuity, verisimilitude, narrative clarity, and spectacle significantly
affected Hollywood’s production practices. Jobs such as continuity writer, art director, costumer,
researcher, and continuity clerk were in part their result. Secondly, detailed division of labor facilitated
mass production; in particular, ‘scientific management’ resulted in producers, planning departments, and
craft experts in shooting the film, casting, executing special effects, and so forth. Assistants and speciality
staffs increased. These positions, the work order, and the mode of production were in many instances the
effect of the economic and ideological/signifying practices. In turn, the production practices often affected
film form and technique. Most certainly, these practices provided the conditions for the existence of a group
style. Moreover, production routines not only had to prove themselves efficient, they also had to enhance
quality filmmaking. When both conditions were met, these routines became normative. Innovations could
be effected but within the constraints of the overall standardized system.
Thus, what we think of as the Hollywood ‘studio system’ was in effect by the mid- to late teens.
Although we shall see some important modifications later, the period dominated by the central producer
(1914–31) contains the elements we have traditionally associated with the Hollywood mode of production.
Part Five will show that the next management system, the ‘producer-unit’ system which begins in 1931, is a
movement away from the strong central producer system into an era of management specialization. Before
that change can be discussed, however, the development of the classical style of filmmaking must be
considered in connection with this study of the organization of the mode of production. That is the work of
the next part.
Part Three
The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28

KRISTIN THOMPSON
We are the last who grew up with the movies. We saw Nazimova’s films as they were made,
not when they were revived, Academically; we sat in draughts and put up with fire, flicker,
breaks, scented disinfectant—for what? For delight, magic, pleasure. Early Swedish and
Sennetts and Italians were not early then. Rooms were naturally orange at night, and the country
deep blue. It was part of the magic. Our companions were men who got rolled into doormats by
fire engines. We heard of cinema first, and Chaplin came after. We are the last, as we were the
first, to grow with it unprejudiced. We experienced something that will never be possible again.
We gave to it and took from it, and we know that its secret is pleasure.1
Robert Herring, 1932
14
From primitive to classical
The cinema knows so well how to tell a story that perhaps there is an impression that it has
always known how.1
André Gaudreault, 1980
In looking back to the silent cinema, it is all too easy to consider the period as remote, alien, and crude. The
addition of sound, color, widescreen, and a panoply of recent developments seems to have hopelessly
outdistanced the achievements of the early films. Yet it is remarkable that one must go back very far to find
films which are so fundamentally different as to be incomprehensible today.
Historians have called these very early years of film production the ‘primitive’ period. This period is
generally assumed to have begun with the cinema’s commercial origins in 1894 and lasted until somewhere
between 1906 and 1908. During most of the primitive period, films appealed to audiences primarily through
simple comedy or melodrama, topical subjects, exotic scenery, trick effects, and the sheer novelty of
photographed movement. Non-fiction films outnumbered narratives, at first, and the latter were usually
imitations of popular theatrical forms of the day. According to the traditional account, the primitive style
began to disappear as individual innovators like Edwin S.Porter and D.W.Griffith introduced devices such
as crosscutting, the closeup, and so on. These devices are said to have influenced other filmmakers.2*
Most historians would agree that between the primitive period and the sophisticated studio production of
the twenties, the US cinema moved from a narrative model derived largely from vaudeville into a
filmmaking formula drawing upon aspects of the novel, the popular legitimate theater, and the visual arts,
and combined with specifically cinematic devices. I do not propose here to challenge that general notion.
Clearly there was a profound shift in both narrative and stylistic practices. But this shift did not come about
because a few prominent filmmakers happened to decide to move their camera in or to break their scenes
into more shots. When they did such things, these men and women were not creating isolated strokes of
genius, but were responding to larger changes within a developing system. Not all of the many experiments
that were tried in the early teens became part of Hollywood’s paradigm. Only those solutions which held
promise to serve a specific type of narrative structure caught on and became widely used. The
predominance of narrative structure over the systems of time and space within the classical film can thus be
seen as one result of early attempts to harness cinematic time and space to a storytelling function.
Filmmakers quickly came to share certain assumptions about films, narratives, techniques, and audiences
that guided them in their experiments.
I shall be suggesting that the formulation of the classical mode began quite early, in the period around
1909–11, and that by 1917, the system was complete in its basic narrative and stylistic premises. During the
FROM PRIMITIVE TO CLASSICAL 247
early and mid-teens, older devices lingered, but classical norms began to coalesce. The stylistic patterns
which characterized the primitive period eventually disappeared. This was in part due to the fact that
innovation was not simply a matter of a few daring filmmakers influencing others. It occurred within a set
of institutions which were capable of controlling new ideas, fitting them into an existing model, and making
them into normative principles. As Part Two has shown, trade journals, handbooks, and reviews
disseminated and developed the norms of the classical model, while standardized studio organization was
putting those norms into effect. Individual innovations were certainly important, but people like Griffith and
Maurice Tourneur changed production practices and filmic techniques in limited ways, governed by the
overall production system.
Nor was the shift from the primitive to the classical cinema a matter of either a growing sophistication or
a discovery of a natural ‘grammar’ of the medium. The term ‘primitive’ is in many ways an unfortunate
one, for it may imply that these films were crude attempts at what would later become classical filmmaking.
While I use the word because of its widespread acceptance, I would prefer to think of primitive films more
in the sense that one speaks of primitive art, either produced by native cultures (e.g., Eskimo ivory carving)
or untrained individuals (e.g., Henri Rousseau). That is, such primitive art is a system apart, whose
simplicity can be of a value equal to more formal aesthetic traditions. The classical cinema, then, was not a
development directly out of the early primitive approach; the primitive cinema, as André Gaudreault puts it,
cannot be considered ‘the humus and the soil of which the sole virtue was to allow the germination of the
other form.’3 Rather, the classical cinema resulted from a major shift in assumptions about the relation of
spectator to film and the relation of a film’s form to its style.
As many historians have noted, the primitive cinema largely assumed that the spectator was equivalent to
an audience member in a theater. Mise-en-scene often imitated theatrical settings, and actors behaved as if
they were on an actual stage. The framing and staging of scenes in constructed sets placed the spectator at a
distance from the space of the action, looking into it. Devices like crosscutting, montage sequences, and
dissolves for elliding or compressing time were not in general use. The spectator witnessed either a
continuous stretch of time over a whole film or discrete blocks of time in one-shot scenes with ellipses or
overlaps between. Filmmakers provided few cues to guide the spectator through the action; there was little
of the redundancy of narrative information which the classical cinema would habitually provide.
The classical cinema, on the other hand, assumes that the narration places a spectator within or on the
edge of the narrative space. As we shall see, a variety of stylistic devices combined to extend that space out
toward the plane of the camera, as well as to move the spectator’s viewpoint periodically into the narrative
space. This increasing depth of the playing area, in combination with greater three-dimensionality in the
sets themselves, promoted that specific conception of verisimilitude which, as Chapter 9 has shown, was
valued in the early classical period. While presenting to the spectator a more three-dimensional narrative
space, however, the film now contained a set of cues to underscore the story action at all times. These two
demands, a verisimilitude and narrative clarity, helped create the classical style of Hollywood filmmaking.
Part One has already presented this system in its complete form. In this part, I shall be dealing with the early
formulation of the classical system and its refinements in the late teens and twenties. This will not be a history
of the ‘first times’ that given devices appear in the cinema. So many films from the silent period are lost or
inaccessible that such a project would be doomed. But more importantly, an emphasis on first usages does
not inform us about the wider impact of a device. To understand the classical cinema, we need to know
when its techniques became normalized on a wide scale.
Even more importantly, we cannot look at devices in isolation from their typical functions. Techniques
contribute to the creation of systems of causality, time, and space. A device already in use during the
primitive period may continue to be used in the classical system, but may change its function.
248 THE FORMULATION OF THE CLASSICAL STYLE, 1909–28
In a study of standard practice, a concentration on filmmakers traditionally considered major— Griffith,

Tourneur, Thomas H.Ince—would create a skewed impression of the norms. Rather, a variety of genres,
filmmakers, and studios should contribute to create a broad picture. I have included films of the early teens
from many studios—from the larger Patents Co. members, like Essanay, Vitagraph, and Edison, to the major
independents, like Imp, Bison 101, and Thanhouser, to the smaller independents, like Crystal, Rex, Solax,
Reliance, and Yankee. (Unfortunately some studios’ outputs have virtually disappeared, so a complete
sampling is impossible.)
A study that focused entirely on the most famous filmmakers and studios would run the risk of giving
undue prominence to certain devices which might in fact have been limited or idiosyncratic. For example,
most historians who study the early history of crosscutting devote their attention to the last-minute rescue
situation, since they derive most of their examples from Griffith. Yet I shall be claiming that once
crosscutting became standardized, it gained several other equally important functions. A cross-sectional
survey of the type attempted here provides a tool for judging the actual importance of any given technique
in the history of the American cinema.
An important question throughout will be the degree to which filmmakers and critics of the period were
aware of newly formulated film techniques. We cannot always be sure that a device’s appearance in a number
of films implies that filmmakers were beginning to consider it a standard way of doing things. Fortunately,
there exists a set of evidence paralleling the films themselves—contemporary discussions of filmmaking
practice in how-to columns and books and in various theoretical and critical writings. These materials
reveal that filmmakers and critics at the time recognized many of the changes in the continuity system, in acting
style, in lighting practice, indeed in most of the areas we are exploring in this book.
With these sources—films and contemporary accounts—we should be able to survey the formulation of
norms of narrative and stylistic structure in American filmmaking during the transitional years 1909 to 1917.
The primitive and classical periods were not, of course, entirely different from each other nor unchanging
within themselves. We may find at least two distinct phases within the primitive period itself: the earlier
(1895–1902) includes primarily one-shot films, with documentaries more numerous than fiction films; after
about 1902, multiple-shot films and the increasing use of staged narratives created a more complex
approach to filmmaking. Then, from about 1909 to 1916, the transitionary phase toward the classical
cinema occurred, with the classical paradigm in place by 1917. From that point on, silent cinema history
became mainly a matter of adjustments, not basic changes.
The primitive film’s relation to vaudeville

The early film’s economic dependence on vaudeville, discussed in Chapter 10, helped determine the genres
and formal norms of the primitive cinema. Exhibition circumstances, short length, and small-scale
production facilities dictated the creation of films which modeled themselves largely on types of stage acts:
the variety act, the fictional narrative, the scenic (views of interesting locales), the topical (presentations of
current events), and the trick film.
These genres were recognized as such in the primitive period; they reflect the type of appeal the
producers and exhibitors exploited in selling them—the trick film’s technical novelty, the variety acts’
presentation of famous vaudevillians to farflung audiences. In practice, however, many trick films and
variety acts contained brief fictional narratives, so the categories overlap somewhat. For my purposes here,
the most important groupings are general ones: documentary films versus fictional narratives.
Before 1903, most films shown on early vaudeville programs were documentaries. The early views were
usually a single shot, taken from a static tripod or involving a pan or track from a moving vehicle. Brief, in
black and white, and with little explanatory material, they seem of minimal interest today. The apparent
crudity of these early documentaries has helped foster the myth that films were used to drive patrons out at
the ends of vaudeville programs, or the notion that audience demand spurred the shift to narratives.
Before 1903, the typical film resembled a very simple vaudeville skit. The stage skit usually involved a
couple of comics performing verbal and sight gags in a relatively static situation.4 Early films are even simpler;
while the vaudeville skit usually leads to a pay-off, the brief, single-shot film usually employs a more static
narrative situation—a potential cause which never leads to an effect. For example, The Old Maid in a
Drawing Room (1900, Edison) consists entirely of a medium shot of an elderly woman in evening dress
seated and talking animatedly, facing a space off front; the film’s entire interest arises from her comic
appearance and gestures. There is no development. Some of these skit-like films are difficult to distinguish
from motion-picture records of actual vaudeville comedy performances —a circumstance that reflects the
indebtedness of the early narrative film to its stage mode.
Beginning about 1903, the film’s single action became part of a brief series of causally linked events.
This resulted in part from the increasing length of each film; there was also a greater complexity of
production methods, which might mix interior and exterior shots within the same film. But greater lengths
and heterogeneous material did not fundamentally change the narrative model derived from the skit. Films still
depended upon an initial, often accidental event, rather than upon character motivation. In 1903 and 1904,
the chase film, staged in a series of exterior locations, was becoming one of the most popular narrative
genres.5 Rather than confining itself to a simple, brief slapstick fight, the film might prolong its action by
having one combatant flee, with the other chasing and passersby joining in. A relatively complicated film,
like The Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S.Porter, 1903, Edison) or The Runaway Match (1903,
AM&B) would incorporate a chase as part of a larger series of events. Through the period 1903 to 1908,
simple narratives that follow one action—a chase, a rescue, a fight—in linear fashion dominate narrative
filmmaking.
The second major vaudeville form from which film derived narrative principles was the playlet. When
writers on this period assume that film imitated full-length nineteenth-century legitimate drama, they
overlook the fact that there was this more accessible form closer at hand. Vaudeville initially adopted the
playlet during a period of intense competition among entrepreneurs in New York in 1893–4. Wishing to
book famous attractions to enhance drawing power, a few producers hired stars from the legitimate theater,
who performed in condensed, twenty-minute versions of their original dramatic successes. This practice
eventually brought such stars as Sarah Bernhardt and Ethel Barrymore to the vaudeville stage in the early
teens.6 Authors began writing original playlets, and the form developed into one specific to vaudeville. At
the beginning, however, when film was most closely linked to vaudeville, the condensed plays were highly
episodic series of highlights from existing works. They were in a sense the opposite of the skit, since instead
of prolonging the effects of one initial cause, the playlet packed a great deal of causal material into a short
playing time.
When film producers began basing films upon lengthy literary works, they also tended to structure them
as series of selected scenes from the originals. Porter’s 1903 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edison) no
doubt imitated the popular stage productions of the novel, which had toured the country during the last
decades of the nineteenth century.7 But the condensation of the narrative into an episodic set of fourteen
tableaux suggests as well the playlet form. A series of tableaux, often with explanatory phrases between,
became a standard way of presenting a narrative in the later portion of the primitive period (e.g., The
Unwritten Law, c. 1907, Lubin).
The playlets and the plays upon which they were based were frequently melodramas, and familiar
melodramatic subject matter appears in primitive-period films. The 100 to One Shot deals with a man who
wins on a long-shot bet at the track to save his fiancee and her father from eviction. Other popular motifs in
primitive films were gypsies who steal a child and the father who disapproves of his son or daughter’s
choice of a marriage partner. Moreover, the episodic quality of the stage melodrama continues in films of
the primitive period (and into the teens as well). Coincidence was permissible at virtually any point in the
narrative, either to keep the story going or to provide a resolution at the end.
Neither the skit nor the playlet fosters the weave of causes from scene to scene which Part One has shown
to be typical of the classical narrative. The primitive scene does not usually begin by closing off dangling
causes or continue by creating new ones for scenes to come. Rather, the same cause lingers on, resulting in
more and more effects (the skit), or each scene sets up a new set of premises to be worked out in one
relatively self-contained stretch of action (the episodic playlet). As we shall see in the next chapter, this
difference is a crucial one for distinguishing the classical from the primitive cinema.
Between 1906 and 1908, the sudden nickelodeon boom made film in many cases vaudeville’s rival for
audiences. The enormous success and quick spread of nickelodeons, combined with vaudeville’s continued
use of films, created a demand for more releases from the producers. Robert C.Allen has shown that the
producers responded, increasing their output from 10,000 feet weekly in November of 1906, to 28,000 feet
by March, 1907; even this did not meet the demand.8 As a result, filmmaking followed a trend which had
begun about 1901–3: the production of larger proportions of narrative films in relation to documentaries.9*
Initially comedies formed the greater part of the fiction output. Allen has persuasively shown that this
increase was not in response to public demands—that in fact audiences regretted to some extent the
replacement of scenics and topicals by narratives. Indeed, Allen found that sales in magic lantern slides
showing exotic locales surged in 1908, at the point when producers went over decisively to narrative.10 But
with a steady demand established first by vaudeville theaters and later by nickelodeons as well, producers
had to find some way of guaranteeing a regular flow of releases. This, as Chapter 10 has explained, resulted
in a mass production of staged, narrative films.
The move to narrative was a key factor in encouraging a shift from primitive cinema to classical
filmmaking. Certainly the early vaudeville structures held on for some years, partly because filmmakers had
been trained under them, partly because films were still shown in vaudeville situations, and partly because
the classical paradigm took several years to be formulated and to be widely accepted as a norm. But why
was there a shift away from the approach to narrative prevalent in the primitive period?
The rise of the classical model
With the considerable elevation of public taste in the past two years and the still greater desire
to do better things on the part of the film manufacturers, the ‘trick’ film, and the merely
farcical, or horse play, pictures have taken a secondary place.11
Walter Prichard Eaton, 1909
One of the main causes in the shift from primitive to classical cinema involves a change in influences from
the other arts, from an initial close imitation of vaudeville, to a greater dependence on short fiction, novels,
and legitimate drama. But film narrative and style were not simply the sum of several inter-arts influences.
However directly film may have imitated existing devices from theater or fiction, we must always ask how
the device and its function changed when incorporated into works in the film medium.
Only in the first phase of the primitive cinema, when films were one shot long, were they nearly direct
imitations of existing forms. Topicals and scenics were very similar to magic lantern slides and photographs.
Records of vaudeville acts made little attempt to change the act for the screen. The abstracting functions
which films performed— reducing their subjects to black and white, rendering them for the most part
silently on a two-dimensional surface—were already familiar to audiences from other photographic media.
But with the steady demands by vaudeville and later by nickelodeons for more product came a tendency
for the manufacturers to increase the length of the films, usually by adding shots. This greater length had
two vital implications for the types of narratives used in the films.
On the one hand, greater length, whether in longer takes or in multiple shots, would allow more time for
characterization and the development of psychological traits. The filmmaker could have simply added more
characters and physical action to expand a skit-like situation, but this would tend to provide little change in
the course of the film—the longer the film, the more apparent would be the static quality of the situation.
Providing traits for the characters could motivate a changing situation; then it would be the characters,
rather than the situation, which remained stable, unifying the string of events. A few simple traits could
motivate a whole variety of circumstances, while at the same time providing a narrational thread to guide
the spectator.
On the other hand, while characters could be a unifying force, cutting could be potentially disunifying.
Yet technological restrictions like limited camera-magazine capacities and production circumstances like
the lack of a written script, might tend to discourage lengthy one-shot films. In fact, during the rise of the
narrative film, from 1902 to 1908, the multiple-shot film gradually became the norm, although film lengths
varied considerably during these years. At first, the association of shots with whole films was strong: ‘Above
all, the inventors of the cinema invented the shot, and this shot was at the time the alpha and omega of
cinematographic expression.’12 Indeed, sometimes producers would copyright every shot of a multiple-shot
narrative as a separate film. In this way the title of each film/shot could serve as an explanatory inter-title,
and the separate shots became self-contained tableaux. Producers also began to make series of scenic views
of a single locale, each of which could be copyrighted separately; these could be exhibited individually or as
a set.13* The initial reluctance to put several shots into a single film suggests a recognition of the potentially
disruptive qualities of the cut. Unless the filmmaker finds cues for conveying the spatio-temporal
relationship between shots, the effect of the cut is a perceptible break between bits of subject matter.
We have seen that the manufacturers realized how suitable fictional narrative films were for profitable
mass production. Because of film’s success, more footage was needed, and it proved more predictable to
manufacture staged films than documentaries. In addition, all other things being equal, a longer narrative
film was proportionately cheaper than a short one, since the same sets and personnel could be used to create
a greater amount of footage.14* So the trend toward longer narratives continued throughout the silent period.
The spatio-temporal problems innate in the construction of the multiple-shot film helped guide the
filmmakers’ formulation of a classical narrative model. This is in one way a somewhat traditional view of
film history—that the discovery and increasing use of cutting brought cinema from its initial dependence on
theater into a more independent, ‘cinematic’ period. Yet historians have usually treated this change as an
untroubled evolution—with editing freeing Porter, Griffith, and their followers to explore the ‘grammar’ of
film. What I am suggesting here is that cutting was not entirely a liberation; it posed tremendous problems
of how to maintain a clear narrative as the central interest of the film, while juxtaposing disparate times and
spaces. The continuity rules that filmmakers devised were not natural outgrowths of cutting, but means of
taming and unifying it. In a sense, what the psychological character was in the unification of the longer
narrative, the continuity rules were in the unification of time and space.
Filmmakers found themselves dealing with an increasingly disruptive set of devices as their films became
longer and their narratives more complicated. When no standard way of conveying narrative information
existed, experimentation was necessary. In the primitive period, films sometimes display anomalous
devices. The famous repeated action in the last two shots of Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (made in
late 1902, Edison) has caused debate among historians, as to whether Porter’s film indeed could have been
released with such a problematic repetition of an entire scene. To argue that the repetition could not have
been in the original assumes that the later norm of smooth story-telling was in existence by 1902 and that
Porter must have known that overlapping time would disturb an audience. But in fact such repetitions of
actions from different vantage points occur in other films of the period. These include A Policeman’s Love
Affair (1904, Lubin)—where the maid’s greeting to the policeman is seen both from the street and from
inside the house—and The Tunnel Workers (1906, AM&B)—where the foreman and the protagonist both
go through a door and are seen repeating this action from the other side of the door.15 The point here is that
disruptive devices abound during the late primitive period and occasionally crop up in the early teens.16*
Time, space, and logic did not fit together unproblematically at this early point. The relationships among
these systems were probably the same in the primitive period as in the classical—that is, narrative was the
dominant consideration, with time and space subordinate to it. And many of the same techniques were in
use during both periods—cut-ins, characters, inter-titles, linear causality, and the like. The main changes
that occurred in the shift from primitive to classical cinema took place within the individual systems of
causality, time, and space.
The main vehicle for the change was a radically different conception of narration. During the primitive
period, the narration usually remained omniscient, with actions placed in a block before the viewer—played
out in long-shot view for the most part. (Even dreams, visions, and memories were seen in superimposition
over only part of the frame, with the character still visible in the long shot, thus minimizing the subjective
effect and keeping the narration omniscient.) As Gaudreault suggests, ‘The narrator was not conscious of being
a narrator.’17 Inter-titles of neutral, non-self-conscious tone summarized action and introduced characters. But
the narration seldom attempted to guide the spectator actively. The rare early cutins or camera movements
which occurred stand out in this context as moments of more self-conscious narration aimed at shaping the
onlooker’s perception. (Later, when such moments became part of the norm, they would call considerably
less attention to the process of narration, with continuity principles foregrounding narrative flow and
making cutting unobtrusive.) In short, classical narration tailored every detail to the spectator’s attention;
the primitive cinema’s narration had done this only sporadically.
In the shift away from primitive cinema, filmmakers found ways to control the disruptive spatio-temporal
effects of multiple shots and locales; they accomplished this by constructing a totalized model, making a
unified narrative the top priority, and using guidelines within the model to control the spatial and temporal
problems created by the film medium. With such a unified structure as the grounding for the entire film,
cutting, ellipses, repetitions of events, could all come to serve a clear function. Such a film would not be
difficult for a spectator to grasp.
Directly or indirectly, the cinema found models of unified narrative in other arts—the unities of drama,
the single strong impression created by the classical short story, and the well-made play. But because the
film medium had its own demands as well, not one influence came through unchanged, and classical film
narrative was more than the sum total of the devices it borrowed.
Novel, short story, drama
The conditions for influence

As films grew longer, the status of the individual film on a program changed. Initially, eight or so short films
might fill a twenty-minute slot in a vaudeville program of several hours. The overall emphasis was on
variety, and the disparate films formed an act. As a consequence, no individual film was expected to stand
by itself. But with the advent of the nickelodeon and the standardized 1,000-foot reel, a program would
typically consist of only three or four films; each occupied a distinct place within the complete show, separated
by song-slide presentations and possibly other live acts. Internal coherence became a more central issue.
And when the feature film came to occupy virtually an entire evening’s program (with overture and other
entertainment often tailored to the film), it had to carry the burden of sustaining audience interest. Expanded
length and the change in viewing circumstances undoubtedly played a large part in turning filmmakers away
from a vaudeville model of narrative toward fiction and the drama.
In the early years, films had competed only with other vaudeville acts for a place on a program in an art
form that had an established audience. But with the phenomenal growth of the film industry, its product
began to vie with other entertainment commodities for customers. By the first half of the teens, films were
competing with inexpensive popular fiction—short-story magazines and novels, The Saturday Evening Post
and Collier’s, for instance, offered ‘one or two nights’ enjoyment of the best serials and short stories for
five cents.’18 To lure those readers in at a similar price for a shorter period, film producers felt they had to
raise the quality of their offerings. Thus, for the short film at least, the popular short story offered an
existing model to be emulated.
The feature film, on the other hand, offered a more expensive, often lengthier evening’s entertainment,
one directly comparable to that offered by a play, and entrepreneurs showed early features in legitimate
theaters with prices based upon live-drama admissions. The situation in the theater industry of the early
teens gave film a competitive advantage and probably fostered the industry’s move into features during that
period. That advantage derived from the organization of the theatrical business around the turn of the
century.
The legitimate theater in the early years of this century operated as a cluster of touring troupes, controlled
by a small number of entrepreneurs centralized in New York. This centralized touring system had replaced
the country’s earlier theatrical organization, the individual local professional repertory company, around
1870. Theater historian Jack Poggi sums up the changes in the theater industry:19
What happened to the American theater after 1870 was not very different from what happened to
many other industries. First, a centralized production system replaced many local, isolated units.
Second, there was a division of labor, as theater managing became separate from play producing.
Third, there was a standardization of product, as each play was represented by only one company or
by a number of duplicate companies. Fourth, there was a growth of control by big business.
The characteristics which Poggi lists have obvious parallels to the development of the film industry as
described in Part Two. Film was able to compete successfully with legitimate drama because it provided a
more efficient, more centralized system for staging a performance only once, recording it, and reproducing
it for the mass audience with minimal transportation costs.20* Because of its success in competing with the
drama, the film industry was able to standardize the multiple-reel feature, which in turn encouraged the
move to a classical continuity system. But again, in order to compete with the drama for its audience,
filmmakers realized the necessity of raising the quality of their offerings.
To a considerable extent, raising the quality of films to attract consumers of short fiction, novels, and
plays required drawing directly or indirectly upon these other arts. Chapter 12 has shown that the film
companies did this by adapting plays, stories, and novels. So for sources of subject matter, films turned
definitively away from vaudeville skits. Producers also wanted to lure personnel, particularly established
stars, away from the theater; adaptations of drama and literature, plus a general elevation of film’s status among
the arts, helped accomplish this.
But film drew upon these other arts in ways other than the direct appropriation of stories and personnel.
The original scenarios used by the companies, whether done by their own staff writers or by freelancers,
already felt the indirect impact of existing literary models. The film industry was fortunate in being able to
tap a huge marketplace for popular fiction and drama. The writers working in this marketplace were often
trained in popularized versions of traditional rules, and they could apply these rules to film scenarios as
well.
The large freelance market for novels and short fiction had arisen only a few years before the invention
of film. The development of a widespread native fiction had been discouraged by the lack of an international
copyright law. Publishers tended to bring out editions of European novels and stories, which they could
obtain without payment, rather than to pay American authors to write for them. Before 1891, when an
international copyright law took effect, there had been only a very limited output of American short
stories.21 From about 1824 into the 1840s, literary annuals, ladies’ magazines, and later gentlemen’s
magazines, fostered a brief flowering of the tale or sketch; these were generally considered hack work,
although at their best such periodicals brought out the works of Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe. The 1850s
were a fallow period for short fiction, but the tremendous commercial successes in America of Dickens’s
novels and of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) marked the rise of the popular novel in America. With the
founding during the 1860s of The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation, short fiction became increasingly
respectable, and by the mid-1880s, the writing of short stories was becoming lucrative. The number of writers
increased steadily.22
After the new international copyright law of 1891, popular fiction underwent a huge growth. Brander
Matthews, a leading critic of the period, commented in 1898: ‘This is perhaps the most striking fact in the
history of the literature of the nineteenth century—this immense vogue of the novel and of the short story.
Fiction fills our monthly magazines, and it is piled high on the counters of our bookstores.’23 Novels were
relatively easy to sell but took more time to write. Also, short stories were so popular at the time that a
payment for a single story often was as great as the total royalties on a novel. For the vast number of part-
time or casual writers, the short story proved attractive. By the late 1890s, there were so many weekly
magazines and newspaper supplements that the writing of short stories could be considered an industry. And
by 1900, syndicates existed to write, buy, and sell stories.24
There were also freelance playwrights, although this market was much smaller. A writer could not sell a
play nearly so easily as a piece of fiction; the financial rewards, however, were potentially greater:25
Although there is far more pecuniary profit to the author from a successful play than from the average
successful novel, and although in some countries, notably in France, the authorship of a play brings
more instant personal recognition, playwriting demands a long and arduous period of apprenticeship.
Even after years of familiarity with technical stagecraft, it is far more difficult to get a manuscript play
accepted than it is to secure publication for a manuscript novel. Most authors choose, or are forced to
follow, the easier path.
Authors could mail plays directly to managers or to stars, but many worked through agents. Chances of a
sale were relatively slim. One 1915 playwriting manual described how an author could expect to wait while
his or her manuscript languished for months on a manager’s shelf.26 Once a playwright succeeded in getting
one play produced, however, she or he usually would be considered a professional, receiving reasonably
high, regular royalties. There was also a small market for freelance writers of vaudeville playlets.27 Again,
the procedure involved royalties rather than outright sales.
The film industry entered the literary market in part by hiring established writers and in part by inviting
submissions of synopses and scenarios. Staff writers and scenario editors came to the studios from a variety
of backgrounds, but the most common previous occupations were journalism and popular-fiction writing.
Journalists were presumably well-suited to the task because they had professional experience in writing and
editing synoptic narratives. A trade journal noted in 1916: ‘The best school for the would-be photoplay
writer is the newspaper office. Many who were formerly newspaper men are now successful as writers for
the silent drama. They know life, a good story, and the value of a gripping situation.’28 Edward Azlant’s
examination of screenwriting before 1920 discusses several dozen prominent scenarists at the studios.29 The
largest number of this group came from journalism, followed by magazine-fiction writing, novel writing,
and playwriting. These divisions are not hard and fast, however. Many writers worked in several or all of
these fields. Given the huge, lucrative freelance story market, few writers of any type failed to submit
something to the magazines. Reporters, copy readers, and editors working for magazines and newspapers
wrote short stories. (Stephen Crane, Edna Ferber, Willa Gather, James Cabell, Irwin Cobb, and Sinclair Lewis
were among those who got their starts this way.)30 Writers who worked at the studios or sent in their
freelance efforts would usually have some experience with the popular fiction forms of the period.
Historians have dealt extensively with the impact of the drama and the novel on film form and style.31
The concomitant influence of the short story, however, has been largely overlooked. An examination of the
close relations between the freelance short story and scenario markets will demonstrate some of the
conditions which encouraged narrative principles from all of these arts to enter the cinema.
In order to make narrative films on a regular, efficient basis, producers began to use the detailed division
of labor described in Part Two. Narrative filmmaking necessitated a steady source of stories, a need which
eventually resulted in the scenario staff. These workers performed specialized tasks: among other things,
they wrote many of the original stories used and read the freelance synopses or scenario-scripts submitted to
the studio. Chapter 12 has suggested that the heyday of the amateur scenarist was actually brief (from about
1907 to 1914), but these were important years in the transition from primitive to classical filmmaking. Vast
changes took place in ideas about how a narrative film should be constructed. The backgrounds of both studio
and freelance writers, as well as the normative advice they received, helped shape those ideas.
By 1910, the methods of obtaining stories for filmmaking purposes resembled those of the popular fiction
magazines, which, as we have seen, had become popular in the 1890s. The prominent Black Cat magazine,
for instance, started a trend toward using contests to encourage submissions of short stories. Motion-picture
companies followed this strategy, and there were scenario contests conducted through the trade journals in
the early teens.
Whether encouraged by prizes or by flat-fee purchases, amateur and professional freelance writers
flooded the studios with scenarios. Usual estimates in the trade journals and scenario guides suggest that
only about one in a hundred scripts was actually accepted, and scenario editors frequently complained about
the poor quality of the material they had to plow through. Very quickly, the studios’ dependence on such
submissions declined. By 1912, copyright problems and the expanding production of multiple-reel films
made unsolicited stories less attractive; contract writers in scenario departments proved a more reliable,
efficient source, and the most promising freelancers could be hired. Amateur scenarios were used almost
exclusively for one- or two-reel films, the production of which declined as the feature became the standard
basis for production in the mid-teens.
Little direct evidence indicates what proportion of the freelance material came from writers who had also
tried their hand at short stories. Few films of this period credited their scenarists. But some indirect evidence
suggests the importance of popular short fiction as a model for film narrative. For one thing, some of the
books on how to write scenarios of the period came from authors who also provided advice on short-story
writing.32 In addition, a few major scenarists of the time have recalled their beginnings as short-story
freelancers. Frances Marion wrote fiction until requests for the screen rights to her stories led her to try
doing scenarios; she eventually became a staff writer for several West Coast companies. Clifford Howard,
who later became scenario editor for the Balboa and the American companies, wrote of having turned his
outlines for short-story plots into scenarios when he heard how easy they were to sell. Others who had
written short stories (usually in addition to work in other prose or dramatic forms) include: Roy
L.McCardell, Lloyd Lonergan, Emmett Campbell Hall, Epes Winthrop Sargent, James Oliver Curwood,
Eustace Hale Ball, Mary H.O’Connor, Beulah Marie Dix, and Clare Beranger.33 There were undoubtedly
others, but most freelancers remained anonymous, and their backgrounds are now untraceable. At least
some scenarists, however, had learned their craft from magazine freelancing, rather than from the stage.
Most explicitly, trade journals recognized a parallel between the scenario and popular short-story markets.
These comparisons tend to come a little later in the period, during the middle and late teens, but they
indicate an awareness that writers were often working for both markets. By about 1915 the industry began
to realize that it was competing with the popular fiction magazines for good stories. Motography noted in
early 1915: ‘An able and recognized short story writer can command from five to ten cents a word for his
manuscript. To such a writer an average short story of three thousand words brings a check for one hundred
to three hundred dollars.’ The article contrasted this with the average payment for a scenario, which ranged
well below $100, and pointed out that ‘at present the short story writer is only tempted to submit something
made over from an oft-rejected story manuscript.’ The author concluded: ‘The film producers can afford to
pay better prices than the magazines. Encourage the writer to try his ideas in scenario form first; he can
make over his rejected scenarios into magazine articles as easily as he can do the opposite.’34 A Motion
Picture News editorial pointed out that fiction magazines attracted a large middle-class audience and
educated it to appreciate good stories:35
They are sharp critics, these readers. They want pictures up to their established fiction standards.
It is regrettable, but it is a fact, that up to a few years ago, the large percentage of pictures released
were of the same ordinary adventurous, or sentimental or funny character of the fiction in our popular
publications of thirty years ago.
What is to be done then to get good stories?
Simply this: Pay the price….
Go directly to the best magazine writers and get their work by paying at least what the magazine
will pay.
Throughout 1915 and into 1916, similar articles in the trade press called for the producers to raise their fees
for scenarios, to attract something beyond the leavings of the fiction magazines.36
The possibility for influence from the short story, then, came in part from the contact with writers who
sold stories in both the magazine and film markets. In addition, many of the writers who were employed as
permanent staff members came from a similar background. Along with the novel and the drama, the short
story provided classical models upon which the early film could draw.
Narrative principles
The length of a text has a great deal to do with how critics and writers perceive that a specific literary mode
—a novel, a short story, a play— should be treated. The modern short story in a sense gained a distinct
identity when Poe pointed out that its basic difference from the novel was that the short story could be read
at a single sitting, and thus should convey a unified impression quite different from the principles of unity
governing the longer form. Ever since, theorists have repeated the idea that the short story is not simply a
story which is short.
In the same sense, the feature film was not simply an expanded one-reeler. The lengthier films —initially
1,000 feet, then two or three reels, then five—demanded new structural principles. In the other arts, full-
blown sets of classical dicta on formal matters already existed. By drawing upon drama and literature for
stories, the film industry also drew upon these dicta.
The short story, novel, and drama all had something to offer film. Like the short story and the drama, films
(excepting serials) were consumed in a single stretch of time; hence filmmakers could use ideas of unity of
impression, of a continuity of action rising to climax and falling, and so on. Yet films tended to move about
in space more than most dramas or short stories; they dealt with more characters and lines of action in many
cases, compressing a great deal of material into the brief span of two hours or less. Ideas of how to organize
this material were available from theories of novel construction.
Cinema emerged in the middle of a reformulation of classical notions of unity in the literary arts. The
very definition of the short story as Poe originated it (and as it has continued to the present day) was based
upon unity. In the nineteenth century, the novel began to be considered a set of carefully interwoven lines of
action. The drama, having passed through an emphasis on perfect structure in the nineteenth century, was
now adjusting this notion to accommodate the character psychology of new ‘realistic’ trends.
These issues might well have remained concepts only for scholarly discussion, had it not been for the
sudden rise in the 1880s and especially the 1890s of the huge literary market. With so many authors or
potential authors trying to sell their works, there began a dissemination of simple guidelines for literary
creation. We have seen already how in film, the freelance market of the teens gave rise to dozens of writing
manuals. The same was true in other literary arts. The biggest boom in manual-publishing was for the short
story, for here the market was largest. According to one literary historian, lesser critics seized upon the most
important discussions of short fiction and quickly made them into a set of rules for the novice writer: ‘These
laws they proceeded to codify and promulgate. The first decade of the new century was the era of the short-
story handbook.’ The first appeared in 1898, and many others followed.37 A number of other guides covered
fiction in general, and a few concentrated on the novel; there were also manuals of playwriting. Such works
reveal the popularization of classical aesthetic principles, many of which coincide with the traits of the
developing classical paradigm in film.
The handbooks’ discussions of drama and fiction invariably assume that ‘Of course the prime structural
necessity in narrative, as indeed in every method of discourse, is unity.’38 Unity was most stringently
demanded in the short story. The short story gained its modern definition in 1842, in Poe’s famous review
of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales; in a passage universally quoted by aestheticians and manual-writers alike,
Poe declared that the good short story, being designed to be read at one sitting, should be characterized by
‘the unity of effect or impression.’39 Although Poe’s discussion had little impact in America at the time, it
was revived in 1885 by Brander Matthews, a Columbia drama professor, whose writings on literature
contributed greatly to popularizing Aristotelian canons of classical structure.40 Thereafter writers, whether
scholarly or popular, referred to the Poe/Matthews view as the ideal.
In order to achieve a unified short story, the general assumption went, the writer arranged every element
of plot and character around the single strong impression which the story should create on its reader: ‘The
plot should revolve around a single, central, dominant incident, which in many cases will be the nucleus (in
the mind of the author) from which the story originally developed.’41 In 1904, another major critic, Clayton
Hamilton, refined the Poe/ Matthews formula: ‘The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative
effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis.’42 Everything in the
narrative must function to build up toward the climax, which comes close to the end and creates the strong
effect. This idea fed directly into the film scenario manuals; compare the following instructions, one from
the Home Correspondence School’s 1913 manual on short stories, the other from Phillips’s scenario guide
(1914):43
Steps: (1) Determine at the outstart [sic] what tone you wish to strike, what effect you wish to
produce. (2) Do not put into your story a single word, or action, or bit of description, or character, or
anything that does not in some direct or indirect way help to produce the effect you desire. (3) Do not
omit anything that may help to bring about the same result.
The climax resolves itself into a definite purpose to guide the playwright; for he writes every scene
with a view to its influence on the climax; if it has no influence on the climax, that is sufficient
evidence that it is not necessary for his play purposes.
Virtually any manual on story writing offered a variant of this same advice. This was particularly applicable
to the one- or two-reel films, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, short films tended to follow the short
story’s pattern of a steadily rising action leading to a climax late in the plot.
The short story was supposed to be unified in the extreme. Critics and theorists realized that the length of
the novel tended to preclude its having such rigorous coherence; yet they still assumed that this trait was
applicable and desirable in the longer form. ‘Unlike the short-story, the novel aims to produce a series of
effects—a cumulative combination of the elements of narrative—and acknowledges no restriction to
economy of means.’44 This does not mean, however, that the novel should be episodic, for unity implied
threads running through the whole that connected every part. Although the novelist might use more
characters, more incidents, and more lines of action than the story-writer, all these still had to bear upon the
entire plot. The novel should not fall into distinct episodes with separate climaxes, but should rise and fall with
an overall ascent toward a final major climax. Again, no extraneous material was permitted, such as the
stories interpolated into episodic novels (e.g., Don Quixote, Humphrey Clinker, Pickwick Papers).
These ideas about the novel were never as simply and distinctly codified as were the ‘rules’ for the short
story, and hence their influence on film was perhaps less direct. But as scenarists adapted lengthy novels
into feature films, they undoubtedly learned ways of sustaining multiple lines of action throughout an
extended story. And indeed the episodic feature-length film is rare, outside the particular mode of the
continuing serial. Films which deal with many characters and which cover lengthy time spans still manage
to keep a core of causal lines which bind the elements together.
In the field of drama, practitioners and critics alike were still strongly under the influence of the ‘well-
made play’ of the nineteenth century. The major French plays by Scribe, Sardou, Dumas fils, and others had
been translated and were frequently performed in the United States around the turn of the century.45 Dumas
fils and especially the leading German proponent of the well-made play, Gustav Freytag, were to the drama
of this period what Poe was to the short story; Freytag’s Technik des Dramas was translated in 1894, but
was quoted frequently before that by drama critics and theorists. Many of the most popular English-
language playwrights of the day—Pinero, Shaw, Wilde—had been influenced by the well-made play, as had
Ibsen. In the 1890s, books on dramatic structure typically reiterated Freytag’s rigid, pyramidal schema
(rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe), which would guarantee a perfectly unified play.46 This
schema would produce a symmetrical play with the traditional five acts forming mirror-image parallels across
the whole; Othello and Macbeth were considered excellent examples.
Critics of this period did not agree with the traditional French interpretation of the three ‘Aristotelian’
unities; the unities of time and space, in which the play’s story was supposed to take place within twenty-
four hours and in one locale, were dismissed. Instead, these writers focused on the unity of action:47
This has been variously interpreted, but the most sensible view is, that all the incidents of the story
must be made to cluster about a single central animating idea. One purpose must be seen to run
throughout the whole series of incidents. If there are two series of incidents, they must be so woven
together that, at the end of the story, it will be evident that one could not have taken place without the
other. This constitutes the unity of action.
This passage suggests that unity in the drama was conceived in terms somewhat similar to Poe’s ‘unity of
impression’ for the short story. But here ‘a single central animating idea’ is the basis for the whole; as we
shall see shortly, this ‘central idea’ became codified as the ‘theme.’
After the turn of the century, the rigid structure derived from Freytag was dropped by critics, and there
was a general reaction against the well-made play (and perhaps a tendency to underplay its continuing
influence). The well-made play was derided as shallow, with empty structure overriding considerations of
character psychology, realism, or social comment. One prominent expert on playwriting, William Archer,
refused to use the standard term dénouement (‘untying’): ‘The play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special fitness.’ Archer also poked fun at
Sardou for his overly complex exposition and situations.48 Archer and his contemporaries abandoned the
placement of the climax at the center of a play with a long falling action, or denouement, leading to a
‘catastrophe.’ Instead, for them the climax should come near the end, with all action rising generally in
stages toward this moment—a model much closer to the literary structure assumed for the short story and
novel of the period. Critics jettisoned the ‘catastrophe’ altogether. A 1915 playwriting manual gives the
typical listing of parts of a play: exposition, development and complication of the intrigue rising toward the
climax, the climax itself, and ending.49 Critics of this period go directly back to Aristotle’s requirement that
every play’s action must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.50
Like the unified novel, the play should not be episodic. Archer commented on the play without unity: ‘No
part of it is necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long or too short, an act might
be cut or written in without necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play is really
a series of episodes.’51 Here, as with the other literary forms, unity implies that all elements are necessary,
and no necessary ones are missing; all the elements pertain to the main line(s) of action, rather than to
separate incidents. Poe’s ‘unity of impression’ is not, however, the basis for the play’s coherence. Instead,
critics considered the core of a play to be its ‘theme’: ‘It appears reasonable that a play that is actually
developed from a definite theme is most likely to possess both the unity and the simplicity, to say nothing
of the freshness, which good drama requires.’52 But this thematic center served the same unifying function
as the single impression in short fiction. Everything in the play related to it, and hence could not be
superfluous.
Theories of playwriting stressed one additional aspect of unity which was relevant to the cinema:
thorough motivation and a resulting continuity of action. Plays, like films, occur in a steady temporal
progression. The reader of a short story or novel can go back or can pause to ponder causes and effects, but
the audience in a theater must understand the drama as it proceeds. Hence the importance of motivation.
Archer quotes Dumas fils: ‘“The art of the theatre is the art of preparations,”’ and advises dramatists to53
Place the requisite finger-posts on the road he would have us follow.… It is in nowise to the author’s
interest that we should say, ‘Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!’ We have no use for finger-posts that point
backwards.
This passage invites comparison with the classical cinema’s tendency to direct audience attention forward
by frequent ‘priming’ of future events in the plot.
The careful preparation for events throughout the plot would help eliminate coincidence. Coincidence had
been a staple of melodrama and the popular nineteenth-century theater in general; but with the growing
emphasis on realism around the turn of the century, coincidence became passé. A 1915 playwriting manual
stated:54
Time was when important coincidence was accepted in the theatre as a matter of course, or even of
preference. To-day, however, it has been for the most part consigned to that limbo of antiquated
devices and conventions which, for the present at least, has swallowed up the soliloquy, the ‘apart,’
and the ‘aside,’ along with eavesdropping behind portieres and letters fortuitously left lying about.
The elimination wherever possible of ‘important coincidences’—especially coincidences to resolve plots—

was desirable in the classical cinema as well.
Chapter 6 examined the scene-by-scene structure of the classical film, as causes are left dangling and
picked up in alternation; this effect guarantees that the action never slackens between scenes. This, too, was
noted as a desirable trait in drama; in 1912 Archer discussed how to maintain interest from act to act:55
The problem is, not to cut short the spectator’s interest, or to leave it fluttering at a loose end, but to
provide it either with a clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach onwards, or with
a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be
provided between one act and another, along which the spectator’s mind cannot but travel with eager
anticipation.
The ‘clearly foreseen point’ or the ‘definite enigma’ are comparable to the dangling cause; by setting these
in place at the ends of acts, the playwright avoided the episodic structure inimical to a unified whole.
Although conceptions of unity differed somewhat for the short story, novel, and drama, they boiled down
to a similar notion. The artwork was to be organized around a single central factor— an intended
impression, a theme. No unrelated elements were admissible, and the elements that were present should be
motivated. Such ideas were common currency by the time that studios began hiring professional writers
from other fields, buying the rights to literary works, and soliciting freelance scenarios from the public.
The same was true of the classical cinema’s concept of character; it derived in part from a growing
interest in the other arts during the same period in character psychology. Influenced by European Positivism
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially by studies of human behavior, writers were
increasingly interested in portraying realistic characters and their environments. Few were willing to go to
the extremes of Zola’s theory and approach their characters with a strictly scientific attitude, but critics and
theorists were certainly aware of the French naturalist’s work. In popularized form, they were willing to apply
it. A concentration on character psychology could provide the motivational material necessary to a unified
work. The two main issues concerning character revolved around character development and psychology.
In the short story, both were considered necessarily limited. The short story dealt with fewer characters
than the novel or drama. To gain the maximum effect, one or two central characters were held to be ideal.56
Since the story-writer had a limited time to create characters, they must be immediately striking and
colorful, developing swiftly if at all, and ‘that development must be hastened by striking circumstances.’57
Such strictures could be of use to the film, particularly the one- or two-reeler, and even a feature film had
far less time than a novel to develop character. In the classical cinema, our first impressions tend to be
lasting ones, and the characters seldom have a complex set of traits.
In the novel, on the other hand, character development was considered paramount; it, rather than theme
or impression, was often the major source of unity. Over the course of hundreds of pages, the author could
slowly acquaint the reader with a whole set of central figures and could change their traits in a leisurely fashion.
Character became the wellspring of the action, rather than an agent reacting to a series of incidents. Zola’s
naturalistic theory can be detected in Brander Matthews’s 1898 summary:58
The best fiction of the nineteenth century is far less artificial and less arbitrary than the best fiction of
the eighteenth century. Serious novelists now seek for the interest of their narratives not in the
accidents that befall the hero, nor in the external perils from which he chances to escape, but rather in
the man himself, in his character with its balance of good and evil, in his struggle against his
conscience, in his reaction against his heredity and his environment.
The novels of George Eliot, and in particular Middlemarch (1872), were considered exemplars of the
complex portrayal of developing characters.
Given an average feature length of five reels, the early classical film could hardly hope to create
characters as complex as those of the Victorian novel. At most, an epic film could bring together large
numbers of characters and events and suggest character development: Ben Cameron’s change in The Birth of
a Nation from a simple Southern gentleman to an avenging leader as a result of the war; Trina’s gradual
deterioration under the effects of her desire for money in Greed. On the whole, however, the quick,
relatively simple characterizations of the classical film resemble more closely those of the period’s drama.
The drama provided less time for character development than most novels would, and simplicity was
necessary: ‘Our people should be sufficiently rounded to appear human. Yet if they be developed with
anything like the completeness of a George Eliot treatment, no time will be left for the fable. Therefore the
need of economy. Character must be shown in swift and telling strokes.’ A ‘roundness’ in the characters
implied some complexity; characters with single traits were appropriate only to the broadest comedy or
melodrama.59 In general, then, the characters of a play frequently resembled those in a short story:
established quickly with a few clear traits, changing minimally in the course of the action.
Dramatists and critics realized by the 1890s, however, that by covering only a brief span of time in a plot,
the playwright could concentrate on character more closely and at the same time could promote unity: ‘The
greater emphasis…on the inner rather than the outer aspect of the dramatic situation may have something to
do with the simplification of setting and compactness of treatment that marks the work of at least some
groups of modern dramatists [e.g., Sudermann, Hauptmann, Ibsen].’60 Ibsen was perhaps the most extreme
instance of a severe compression of time-span and locale for the sake of character revelation; to some
critics, especially Archer, he was the ideal to which the playwright should aspire. (Here we find perhaps a
greater lingering influence of the well-made play, modified by contemporary conceptions of realism, than
some critics at the time would acknowledge.)
But again, the narrational means of the film did not encourage an imitation of such complex
characterization methods as Ibsen’s. Without spoken dialogue, detailed character revelation was difficult.
Instead, the film stuck to simpler classical features of dramatic characterization:61
1 The characters must be suited to the story— the story to the characters.
2 The characters must be clearly distinguished from one another.
3 The characters must be self-consistent.
4 The characters must be so selected and arranged that each one may serve as a foil to another.
(The last dictum reflects the strong influence of Brunetière, whose views were universally quoted in the
turn-of-the-century period. He had proclaimed that all dramatic conflict should result from a clash of wills.)
All four of these statements could be used unchanged to describe characterization in the classical cinema.
They indicate a complete balance between action and psychological delineation, with neither taking
precedence.
Besides unity and characterization, several other elements familiar in popular contemporary fiction and
drama reappear in the classical cinema’s paradigm. In both fiction and the drama toward the end of the
nineteenth century, an unobtrusive narration was increasingly considered desirable. Critics insisted upon a
distinction between direct and indirect character presentation, preferring the latter:62
The modern writer no longer makes pages of statements about his characters, but he much more
cleverly leads his reader to form his own opinions of them.
Characters in fiction may be made to reveal themselves in this more forcible and convincing, but
less direct fashion, by telling what they say and what they do, by disclosing their thoughts and
describing their acts and gestures.
What held for characterization was also true of other stylistic aspects of fiction: ‘In the art of the story-
teller, as in any other art, the less the mere form is flaunted in the eyes of the beholder the better.’63 In the
drama as well, stage effects would seem like mere tricks if not ‘intimately related to the main theme of the
play’; they should not ‘distract attention to themselves.’64 Unobtrusive technique tending toward the
suppression of the narration began to be a trait of the early classical cinema; as we shall see, this principle
guided changes in inter-titles, editing, and other devices.
In addition, beginning in medias res was a trait of both plays and short stories. The novel, with its more
expansive period for development, could use this device or not. But for those arts consumed in Poe’s ‘single
sitting’—the story, drama, and film —the quick opening allowed economy of means and created an
immediate strong impression. A 1913 story manual suggests that Poe’s tactic of beginning in the middle of
the action’s crisis was a strong one: ‘In whatever part of the plot the story opens, the first and chief
commandment for the short-story writer of today is to waste no time in beginning.’65 In a play, the opening
in the middle of events might provide a way of concentrating intensely on a complex psychological
situation: ‘The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards the end is really a device for relaxing,
in some measure, the narrow bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal with a
larger segment of human experience.’66 A film, too, by launching in at a point well into the story events,
could engage the spectator’s attention quickly, with the attendant benefits of concentrating and developing a
few characters and events extensively.
In sum, models for structuring a film came, not from drama and fiction in general, but specifically from
late nineteenth-century norms of those forms —norms which lingered on in popular stories, plays, and
novels of this century. The cinema tended to avoid the more innovative, contemporary forms of drama and
fiction. Strindberg, Ibsen, and Shaw, or Hardy, Conrad, and James figure very little in the formation of the
classical cinema, either as narrative models or as direct sources for scenarios.
But while the film took principles of unity, of characterization, and of narration from the other literary
arts, these principles were modified in actual usage by specific qualities of the medium. The film’s
classicism, while traditional, was unique.
For example, where prose fiction could provide a written narration to reveal internal states of the
characters, the Hollywood film showed mostly gestures and facial expressions. Inter-titles might briefly
characterize the figures, but the bulk of the action occurred in pantomime. As a result, the film created an
objective, omniscient narration, moving occasionally toward the points-of-view of the characters; this type
of narration is equivalent only to that portion of short-story narration which confines itself to descriptions of
appearances.
Again, the expansion into features stimulated the creation of more leisurely scenes that linger over character
traits. Some early features simply expanded the structure of the short film by adding more story material.
*The Scarlet Road (1916, Edison), for example, covers many years of an inventor’s life as he strays with a
nightclub singer, reforms, and finally makes good. Yet the individual scenes are nearly as brief and
condensed as if the film were a one-reeler; the characters are still the stock figures of melodrama. (The
protagonist’s fiancée is characterized at the beginning with a brief scene of her hugging some tame rabbits,
and we learn nothing more about her; we see her at intervals waiting patiently for her lover to return.) But
some films display what Chapter 2 calls a ‘balance between the fixed types of the melodrama and the dense
complexity of the realist novel.’ The Wishing Ring (Maurice Tourneur, 1914, World) and The Eagle’s Mate
(James Kirkwood, 1914, Famous Players) both linger over their characterizations. The first sequence of The
Wishing Ring shows the comic details of the hero’s drunken carousing with his fellow students—the
neighbors waking up, the heroine appalled at the group’s bad singing, a donkey braying along with the
song, and finally the arrival of the local constabulary. A one-reeler would be likely to show the carousing in
one shot, followed by a scene at the father’s home as he receives the letter expelling the son from school.
The Wishing Ring even finds time for tiny subplots among the villagers, helping to establish the quaint
Victorian atmosphere that realistically motivates the central story line. These are no doubt rare among mid-
teens films, but by 1917, many features were using stories with fewer, longer scenes and with fewer lengthy
gaps of time between scenes.
Aspects of the mode of production helped mediate the effects the literary arts had upon unity and
characterization in film plotting. The scenario script, and later the continuity script, with their
accompanying scene plot, encouraged the use of multiple locations; the filmmaker could make several shots
in one setting, then cut these in at intervals in the final film, at reasonable shooting costs. Hence throughout
the teens, films contained increasing numbers of shots and moved about freely among locations. Since
individual shots provided minimal chance for the various kinds of narration available to the fiction writer,
one assumes that the filmmaker would want to provide variety by cutting away from the static take.
Analytical editing and crosscutting could create an omnipresent narration, constantly guiding the spectator’s
attention to story events. In keeping with their compression of long time spans into a brief plot, one- and
two-reelers tended to move around more in space than a unified short story might. Increasingly, a
combination of circumstances—feature-length films, the star system, the ability of the script format to allow
this stylistic complexity— encouraged more cutting within and between scenes. This in turn gave rise to the
continuity editing system, explicitly formulated in the period 1909–17; we shall examine this system in
Chapter 16.
With the rise of the feature, producers turned increasingly to staff writers experienced in adapting all
sorts of material into film scripts. The scripts they turned out followed a standardized narrative form
specific to cinema. One would be hard put to look at The Eagle’s Mate (Kirkwood, 1914, Famous Players)
next to The Girl of the Golden West (Cecil B.DeMille, 1915, Lasky) and tell from internal evidence which
came from a novel and which from a play. The script format in itself would not guarantee such similarity, of
course; it basically broke the existing work into shots. But the adaptation process would help iron out the
differences in narratives taken from disparate sources in the other arts. Working from a synopsis rather than
from the original play or book would tend to rearrange events and isolate them from their dramatic or
fictional forms, while the devices of cutting and framing would create a specifically filmic mode of
narration.
Ultimately, the film medium used the influence from the literary arts for its own purposes. In spite of a
growing dependence on dialogue inter-titles, films presented most of the action visually. This meant not
only pantomime, but the transmission of information through objects, figure placement, lighting, and
camera techniques. The classical system increasingly relied on editing, so that, by 1917, films often used
separate shots for virtually every item of narrative information. This rapid juxtaposition of views differed
significantly from either fiction or the drama; the film’s narration could constantly shift in relation to the
action, as in the novel, but the action could be visual, as in the drama. The resulting omniscient,
omnipresent narration differed from all other art forms, for none could assemble disparate moving images.
And as a result, the material that needed unifying was different for film than it was for other media. Based
originally upon nineteenth-century conceptions of unity, the classical system remained consistent—
answering on the one hand the need for efficient large-scale production and on the other the desire for a set
of norms easily assimilable to a broad audience.
15
The formulation of the classical narrative
Cause and effect

During the primitive period (1894–1908), films tended to present narratives in such a way that they were
minimally intelligible. Given a camera fixed for the most part at long-shot distance, actors simply
performed with large gestures, holding up relevant objects briefly to give the spectator a better view. So
long as an action was performed within the frame, its narrative function was apparently considered to be
fulfilled.
Primitive framing and action did not always aid intelligibility, however. Sometimes a less important
gesture at another part of the screen might cause the audience to miss the main action. Tom, Tom, the
Piper’s Son (1905, AM&B) contains an elaborate first shot full of moving people, in which the relevant
action—the theft of the pig— is all but unnoticeable; this now-famous example is an extreme one, yet other
films of the pre-1909 period show a tendency to present several actions at once. Even a brief, one-shot narrative
like The Dude and the Burglars (1903, AM&B) keeps all its actors constantly gesturing, effectively
dividing the small playing area into three centers of attention. In The Pickpocket (1903, AM&B), one shot in
a chase structure places the fugitive in the background, with a minor character in the foreground looking on.
By accident, the foreground woman blocks the central actions—the pickpocket knocking a policeman off
his bicycle and the ensuing struggle (see fig 15.1). Then the woman turns front, obviously responding to the
cameraman/director’s warning that she is in the way, and she moves left to give us an unimpeded view (see
fig 15.2). The fact that this shot was not redone for the finished film indicates the early assumption that as
long as the events were on the screen, it was up to the audience to follow them. As late as 1909, Griffith
uses a busy, illegible bustle of action for the stockmarket shot in A Corner in Wheat (Biograph). Indeed,
Griffith was later to refine this chaotic mise-en-scene into a characteristic framing with multiple points of
interest, as in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912, Biograph). There, when one gangster pours a drug into the
Little Lady’s drink at lower center, our eye is also drawn to her at the right reading the postcard and to
Snapper Joe’s cigarette smoke puffing suddenly into the upper left. In the teens, Griffith was somewhat
atypical in his tendency to avoid centering.
But with the general shift to the classical model, the status of narrative changes. Devices like editing, camera
distance, inter-titles, and acting function more specifically to narrate causal information as clearly as
possible. Cinematic technique, rather than remaining a novelty or means of recording, began to be
considered a way to convey narrative through careful manipulation of audience attention. David Hulfish
summarized this new conception in 1909:1
266 THE FORMULATION OF THE CLASSICAL NARRATIVE
To secure art in a motion picture, there must be an end to be attained, a thought to be given, a truth to
be set forth, a story to be told, and the story must be told by a skillful and systematic arrangement or
adaptation of the means at hand subject to the author’s use.
By this point, a narrative is not something to be placed in front of an audience, but something to be ‘given’
or ‘told.’ A coherent narration must hold the film together—a narration usually not presented by an explicit
narrator, but implicit in a specific, systematic combination of film devices.
In order to present a clear narrative, filmmakers turned away from the primitive-period device of building
a story around either an extended incident or an episodic series of tableaux. Chases did not disappear, but
they occurred only in the context of a larger narrative, after careful preparation. One 1913 scenario
guidebook offered this advice, derived from notions of unity in the novel, drama, and short story: ‘Each
scene [i.e., shot2*] should be associated with its purpose, which is to say that the outline of a play should
comprehend: First, “cause” or beginning; secondly, development; third, crisis; fourth, climax or effect; fifth,
denouement or sequence.’3 This structure led away from both the extended incident (essentially a single
drawn-out effect following an initial cause) and the episodic narrative. Now the ideal required a unified
chain of causes and effects, varied by complicating circumstances (the development), concluding with a
definite action which resolves the chain into a final effect (the climax) and which lingers to establish a new
situation of stasis at the end.
Aside from slapstick comedies, many films in the early teens follow this pattern. Her Mother’s Fiancé
(1911, Yankee) is a relatively low-budget, unexceptional one-reeler, yet it is quite unified in its plot: 1)
‘Cause,’ the mother’s fiancé, whom she has not seen in years, arrives to marry her; 2) ‘development,’ the
mother’s attractive daughter comes home from school; 3) ‘crisis,’ during a garden party the daughter and
fiancé are in a rowboat caught in a storm and are marooned for the night; 4) ‘climax,’ they fall in love; and
5) ‘denouement,’ the mother forgives them both.
By the early teens, a compressed set of causes and effects of this type had replaced the primitive narrative
structure almost completely. Eileen Bowser has concluded that comedies were the most popular fiction
genre of the years 1900 to 1906, and that ‘A very large number of them consisted of practical jokes.’4 A
how-to scenario column in a 1912 Photoplay dismissed the earlier form:5
The moving picture play has altogether outgrown themes of single individuals in a series of incidents
that have no relation to one another except for the presence of the main character. For instance, the
mischievous small boy in a series of pranks; the victim of sneezing powder in various mishaps, the
near-sighted man, etc. They are all passé.
To some extent the advent of the feature film necessitated finding a means of constructing a lengthy
narrative, one which could extend beyond such simple events. But the move toward causal unity was well
under way already in the one-reel film. The feature film simply intensified the need which arose with the
advent of the multiple-shot films in the early years of the century—to find a means of unifying an extensive
series of disparate spatial and temporal elements in the plot in such a way that the spectator could grasp the
story events.
The chain of separate events linked by causes and effects provided the answer. Again, this was
recognized quite early; a 1912 scenario guidebook suggested that a scenario begin with a central idea and
add ‘a series of causes on the front end of it and a series of consequences on the other end.’6 The chain of
cause and effect would be so tightly constructed that no extraneous event could enter the film’s plot. The
basis of the American classical cinema’s narrative aesthetic was compositional unity rather than realism.
THE FORMULATION OF THE CLASSICAL STYLE, 1909–28 267
Reality might be full of random events and coincidences, but the filmmakers sought to motivate as much as
possible causally. A contemporary review of Raoul Walsh’s 1915 feature The Regeneration (Fox) was in
general highly favourable about the acting and other aspects of the film; the reviewer was therefore inclined
to forgive a fault he found: ‘the fact that the ship is burned for no definite reason whatsoever. It was a series
of wonderful scenes [shots], staged with the utmost realism, but it would have taken better effect if a cause
had been given.’7 For the reviewer, realism was not a matter of chance events; rather, it consisted of little
‘touches,’ bits of business or props added to scenes. But for the classical mode, even this realism must
always be subordinate to a thorough-going compositional motivation.
Causality and motivation became especially important as fiction films became longer and more complex,
with multiple lines of action. Most one-and two-reelers tended to follow the same characters fairly
consistently with an omnipresent, objective narration. Crosscutting among several groups might occur, but
often because of spatial separation, not because the characters were involved in separate lines of action. In
The Lonely Villa (Griffith, 1909, Biograph), we never see the father engaging in any activities unconnected
with his family after his departure— he simply goes away and then starts back on his rescue mission.
A few short films do introduce at least minimal second lines of action, however. In The Loafer (1911,
Essanay), the drunkard protagonist has two aims. First, he vows revenge upon the leader of a masked mob
that has beaten him up; secondly, after he has been given some plow-horses by a neighbor, he determines to
reform. These lines come together when it is revealed that the leader of the mob was the same man who
gave him the horses. A Friendly Marriage (1911, Vitagraph) involves a newly rich miner’s daughter who
enters into a marriage of convenience with an impoverished English nobleman. The two lines of action
involve the husband’s growing love for his wife and his secret attempts to earn a living by writing. At the
end, it turns out that the wife also loves her husband and that her father’s mine has failed, leaving them to
live happily on the proceeds from the husband’s successful novel. These two films and others like them
stand out as having more complex narratives than the standard one-reelers of the day. Some of Griffith’s
most complicated Biograph shorts combine several story lines through crosscutting.
The dual line of action becomes common in the multiple-reelers. The Cheat (Cecil B.De Mille, 1915,
Lasky) deals both with the husband’s struggle to make a fortune and with the irresponsible wife’s flirtation
with the Japanese businessman. In The Case of Becky (Frank Reicher, 1915, Lasky), our concern lies both with
the young doctor’s attempt to rid a woman of a split personality and with the villain’s efforts to exploit her
condition in his hypnotism act.
Aside from encouraging the addition of lines of action, the multiple-reel film militated against a simple
linear construction in another way. For a few years, exhibition practices bolstered this change. As
Chapter 12 has shown, multiple-reelers were released one reel at a time, so that the parts would often be
shown a week apart. Even after the studios began releasing all the reels as a unit in late 1911, theaters would
typically show the second reel after a pause, and this custom continued into the mid-teens. Standard wisdom
for scenarists at this point was to maintain an overall story, but to structure each reel with its own point of
highest interest at the end, to maintain audience attention. Scenarios longer than one reel were considered more
difficult, and advisors often warned beginners to avoid them. In 1913, experienced scenarist Capt. Leslie
Peacocke described the difference: ‘The plot of a two-reel must necessarily be stronger than that of a one-
reel story and must carry a big “punch” to close the first part of the story and then work up stronger and
stronger toward the climax.’8 This practice held even into longer films. In general, this emphasis on
structuring strong lines of continuing action into a series of climaxes would tend to make film narratives more
complicated. With features comes a move away from the compressed ‘single impression’ narrative style of
many one-reelers.
During the mid-teens, these multiple lines of action begin frequently to involve a romance plot. The
young doctor in The Case of Becky (1915) falls in love with his patient, giving him the determination to
cure her when others fail. One-reelers had usually included romantic relationships, but unless the love
interest was the main action, it was simply assumed and given little attention. With little time for an
epilogue, many short films resolved the entire plot in the final shot, with only a few seconds at the end
reserved for the conventional embrace. But the greater length of multiple-reelers gave the romance more
prominence. A separate shot or even sequence might be devoted to the final clinch (a device which became
considered clichéd by the second half of the teens).
The classical narrative settled into a pattern of linear causality with multiple lines of intertwined actions.
But there was at least one alternative narrative model which filmmakers could theoretically have adopted—
a model based upon parallelism. A film may follow several lines of action which are not causally related,
but which are similar in some significant way. American filmmakers of the silent period did occasionally
experiment with parallelism. Porter’s The Kleptomaniac (1905, Edison) and Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat
(1909, Biograph) and One is Business, the Other Crime (1912, Biograph) all use contrasting lines of action
to create a conceptual point. The fact that all three of these films involve social criticism may suggest why
parallelism proved such an unlikely option in the classical paradigm: it lends itself readily to ideological
rather than personal subject matter. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) revived the parallel narrative, which
proved too abstract for widespread use. The causal chain with an interweaving of lines of action won out
easily over parallelism as the basis for the classical film.
The growing complexity of the plot reinforced the tendency toward a system of narration which could
present information clearly. In general, films of the transitional period attempted to integrate narration into
every aspect of the film— self-consciously at beginnings of films and scenes, unself-consciously within
scenes. This was a departure from primitive-film practice.
Many primitive films did use expository titles at the beginnings of scenes to summarize what would
happen in the upcoming action. But often other things happened as well, and the spectator was left to notice
those unaided. Within the shot, framings and staging did not always single out the salient actions for the
spectator. The exposition of primitive films often depends on presenting a situation which is apparent at a
glance. The masked gunmen in The Great Train Robbery are obviously the robbers, the telegraph man’s
identity is equally evident, and so on. At the opposite extreme are films which are virtually unintelligible,
because little narration of any sort aids our understanding. The Unwritten Law (c. 1907, Lubin) presents an
enigmatic series of events without identifying characters or situations; an audience of the day could
presumably grasp it only by being familiar with the Stanford White murder case upon which it is based.
And there are mixed instances, where some events are obvious, yet the films leave certain information
unclear. The Policeman’s Love Affair (1904, Lubin) is a simple story of a policeman calling on a maid and
being chased out by the lady of the house. The bulk of the action occurs in a long shot depicting the kitchen
and an adjacent room where the lady sits. Yet only the edge of the wall between the two rooms is visible;
we cannot see either side of it, and it appears as a stripe on the backdrop. As a result, the two rooms appear
to be one, and the audience might be puzzled as to why the lady sits calmly reading as her maid gives food
to the policeman and kisses him, apparently right under her eyes. Only when the lady opens the door
between the two rooms does the wall become apparent. A slightly different framing would have made the
space clear from the start, but we are left on our own to figure out the scene’s layout.
The primitive film’s presentation of narrative makes things both simple and difficult for the viewer. The
stories are simple because causality occurs on the level of external action; we usually need not infer
characters’ motives in order to understand what it is happening. Summary titles sometimes help make things
clear. The difficulties arise from the fact that framing, staging, and editing play only a minimal narrational
role. These films are not saturated with narration the way the classical cinema is.
With the transition to classicism, narration gains a distinct structure. The classical film begins in medias
res. This helps distinguish it from the primitive film. In the early films, there is virtually no difference
between story events and the way they are presented in the plot. We seldom learn of any event we have not
seen—characters do not recall events earlier than the film’s opening scene. (Flashbacks generally repeat a
shot seen earlier in the film.) By contrast, the classical film adds a limited dependence on events in the past,
the ability to refer to the past verbally, and especially a sense of habitual actions. In the primitive film, we
seem often to have stumbled on characters we know little about, and we witness their actions out of context.
The classical film sets up characters by positing that they are certain types (they have lived in a certain
environment, have done certain kinds of things habitually), then goes on to begin the action.
Character psychology, then, forms the basis of numerous changes that distinguish the classical from the
primitive cinema. It serves both to structure the causal chain in a new fashion and to make the narration
integral to that chain.
Traits, visions, and desires: the psychologically based character
Once you have created an appealing, heroic central character there will naturally spring up in
your mind other characters with whom he or she comes into conflict. In that relationship lies the
genesis of your plot.9
Frederick Palmer, 1921
In seeking models of characterization, the classical cinema turned away from vaudeville, with its stock
figures, toward the short story, the novel, and the drama; in these media, characters had multiple traits from
which actions could arise logically. In most genres, random incident became an unacceptable way of getting
a plot moving or of resolving it. In 1911, The Moving Picture World declared that ‘In farce-comedy alone
can characterization be subordinated to incident and action,’ adding that the most interesting stories were
those which lead ‘to some readjustment of the characters in action.’10
Director James Kirkwood wrote in 1916 about the desirability of basing narrative on character rather than
situation:11
I believe that the most desirable sort of play today is modern and American, whether a swift-moving
drama with strong, human characterization, or a comedy devoid of extravagance, its incidents growing
out of the foibles of human nature rather than produced by one of the characters smiting another with
what is commonly called a slapstick.
So, for example, a one-reel film, The Girl at the Cupola (1912, Selig) begins rather elaborately, setting up
the fact that the heroine Jessie’s fiancé is returning to her and that he is now known as ‘the Business
Doctor’ for his skill at reorganizing failing businesses. Further, we discover that Jessie’s father’s steel mill
has received a spate of cancelled orders. After the fiancé helps reorganize the business, we see the workers
receive lower wages and decide to go on strike. Jessie sympathizes with the men and supports the strike; the
bulk of the film depicts her and the men’s conflict with the fiancé. Finally she succeeds in getting her father
to restore fair wages. Although the characterization in this film is not elaborate, every action arises from the
characters’ traits and desires, and the ending involves a change of heart on the part of the father.
Yet, as this example shows, characters were not typically given traits beyond what was necessary to the
drama. Again, the use of realistic motivation in the classical model is severely limited, serving the workings
of the story. As Henry Albert Phillips wrote in 1914: ‘Characters are subservient to climax. We have no use
for any manifestations of their character outside the needs of properly developing the big moment of the
story. Character is the most effective means to our photoplay end.’12 In the mid-teens, American filmmakers
became adept at disguising dramatically necessary actions as realistic touches. An apparently casual or
random gesture occurring in one scene will most likely turn out later to have been ‘planting’ an important
bit of motivation for a later scene. In The Wishing Ring (Maurice Tourneur, 1914, World) the heroine’s little
dog appears in several comic scenes, seemingly peripheral to the plot; but later in the film it plays a key role
by leading the search party to the heroine lying injured after she has fallen from a cliff. Less prestigious films
also ‘plant’ material. An Ill Wind (1912, Universal, one reel) begins with a party held by some office
workers; the hero Tom frightens the heroine with a toy mouse. Later a jealous co-worker arranges for Tom
to be falsely accused of stealing a check from his employer. Tom spends three years in jail; upon his release
he becomes a thief, breaking into the home of the heroine, who is now rich. She screams upon finding a
man in her room, and police respond to the sound. But the heroine has learned of Tom’s innocence in the check
theft; she saves Tom by holding up the toy mouse and telling the police it was what caused her to scream. After
the police depart, the brief epilogue shows Tom kneeling and thanking her for saving him. (In a later
classical film, the fact that she had kept the mouse for three years would be used as a sign of her secret love
for Tom; as it is, the film ends with no definite suggestion of renewed romance.) In these and other films,
realism in character is primarily a means of reinforcing compositional motivation.
In the early transitional period, the move toward character psychology manifested itself mainly in the
assigning of additional traits. The compressed action of the short films and early features did not permit the
extensive use of repeated gestures and subjectivity. Instead, films continued to depend on stock characters,
developed somewhat more fully than in the primitive period. Donald Crisp’s The Warning (1914, Majestic)
presents a character study, with the introductory inter-title describing the central figure as a ‘wilful, indolent
country girl.’ The heroine is tempted by a salesman to go with him to the city, but a dream in which she sees
herself abandoned provides ‘the warning’ she needs. At the end, she tells her mother she will not be wilful
again. This use of the ‘wilful’ trait at beginning and end suggests that a film could occasionally be unified
entirely by character. Even a film which would have been considered a minor effort in its day, a Lubin split-
reel13* called The Gambler’s Charm (G.Terwilliger, 1910) makes an effort to characterize the gambler
briefly. At the beginning, the gambler Randall is attracted to a small child and gives it his lucky charm;
later, in the saloon he shoots the child’s father when the father tries to gamble with the charm as stakes. This
film, only about seven minutes long, depends on the strongly contrasted traits of kindliness and
vengefulness in Randall’s character. With the rise of the feature, both acting and the repetition of
characteristic gestures had more time to develop. An early scene in Wild and Woolly (John Emerson, 1917,
Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp.) lingers over the comic business that establishes the hero’s fanaticism for
things Western.
But the growing dependence on character psychology went beyond external signs of traits. Films
sometimes represented mental states visually. Dreams, visions, and memories became narrative staples
around 1915. There had been isolated visual representations of mental events from almost the beginning of
narrative filmmaking. The sleepwalking incident that ends with the heroine falling off a building in The
Somnambulist (1903, AM&B) turns out to have been a dream; in the final shot, the heroine is back in bed
and wakes up, gesturing in reaction to the nightmare. Porter used vignetted superimpositions for the vision
scene in The Life of an American Fireman (1903, Edison) and separate shots for the dream in The Dream of
a Rarebit Fiend (1906, Edison; in this film, superimpositions and whip pans suggest the mental condition of
the drunken hero). Similarly, in The Unwritten Law (c. 1907, Lubin), the jailed protagonist has a dreamed
flashback to earlier events, represented by a vignette superimposed on the cell’s window (see fig 15.3).
Visions and dreams continued to appear in occasional films throughout the primitive period and early teens:
in The Girl in the Armchair (1912, Solax) a young man dreams of his gambling debts, and superimposed
cards whirl around his bed (see fig 15.4). But the compressed structure of the one- or two-reeler was
perhaps an inhibiting factor in the use of subjective effects. They tend to appear either when the subjectivity
is the basis for the whole film (The Somnambulist, Dream of a Rarebit Field) or when the narrative absolutely
depends on showing the character’s inner state. (In The Girl at the Armchair, the hero must undergo a
considerable change of character as a result of his gambling experiences.)
Feature films permitted more leisurely characterization and hence more extensive use of subjective
effects. Of the fourteen ES films examined from 1914, five contained dreams or visions, and three of these
were features. By 1915, just over half of the ES films examined contained a vision, dream, or flashback.
After this year— approximately the point at which features became the standard—short films tended more
and more toward slapstick comedy; hence the visual representation of subjectivity crops up mainly in
features. Some flashbacks do occur without subjective motivation, but most are prefaced by a character
pausing to recall an earlier event.
Aside from subjectivity, a variety of other devices helped individualize the classical character. In the
primitive period, few figures receive names, unless they represent historical personages or famous fictional
characters. But the various central characters after 1909 do receive this additional touch. They do not,
however, gain distinctive motifs, or ‘tags,’ until the mid-twenties: the tattoo in *A Woman of the World
(Malcolm St Clair, 1925, Famous Players-Lasky), which identifies the heroine as a sophisticated woman; or
Harold Meadows’s stammer in Girl Shy (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1924, Harold Lloyd
Corporation); or Chico’s repeated declarations in Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927, Fox) that he is ‘a
very remarkable fellow.’ Chapter 2 also discussed how the star system aids in distinguishing characters in
the classical cinema. The parallel rise of that system and the classical cinema itself indicates the importance
of stars for early characterization. In 1914 it was already unthinkable for Theda Bar a to don Mary
Pickford’s golden curls or for ‘Little Mary’ to play a vamp. Stars were to a considerable degree the basis for
the personae they played. In 1927, Jesse L.Lasky estimated that ‘three-fourths of the material is picked to suit
the personality of the star and one-fourth is picked for the material of the story itself and cast to suit that
material.’14 Even in the early teens, trade journals frequently advised freelance scenarists that studios were
looking for stories for particular stars. These factors—subjectivity, proper names, ‘tags,’ and star
personalities—all contributed to the increasing individualization of central characters.
But no matter how many traits they might possess, isolated characters were inadequate to initiate and
sustain a unified, developing narrative line. Early in the transition toward the classical model, characters’
goals began to be motivated by their traits. This was a considerable change from many early films, where
characters simply react to situations that occur around them. (If a man’s pocket is picked, he chases the
thief.) No doubt some films of the primitive period present characters with goals, but these don’t typically
arise from a clear-cut trait of the character; it is given that a character-type wants something. In The Widow
and the Only Man (1904, AM&B), we see that the man and the widow want to marry, but we get little sense
of their backgrounds or motivations for their actions. The fact that he is really a poor clerk seeking her
money is only revealed in the last shot, as the punch line of the comedy.
By the early teens, scenarists seem to have been aware of the goal-oriented protagonist, if not by that name;
a 1913 guidebook advises writers:15
It should be remembered that ‘want,’ whether it be wanting the love of a woman, of a man, of power,
of money or of food, is the steam of the dramatic engine. The fight to satisfy this ‘want’ is the
movement of the engine through the play. The denouement is the satisfaction or deprivation of this
desire which must be in the nature of dramatic and artistic justice.
Early goal-oriented protagonists tended to have rather simple, direct desires—marriage, paying off
gambling debts, and so on. In A Race With Time (1913, Kalem) a railroad president and his son need to
deliver a pouch of mail by a certain time in order to win a contract. Since they desire the contract, they
proceed, hindered by the traps set for them by a rival line.
Goal orientation was common in early adaptations and historically based narratives. This suggests that
the idea came from existing literary models, and Chapter 2 has shown that the late nineteenth-century
dramatic theory of Brunetière had formulated goal orientation for characters. The protagonists of Cinderella
(1911, Thanhouser), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912, Thanhouser and 1913, Imp), Damon and Pythias (Otis
Turner, 1914, Universal feature), and The Coming of Columbus (Colin Campbell, 1912, Selig feature) have
obvious goals, all suggested by the source material.
Soon protagonists with strong desires were central to many films. The young doctor in The Case of Becky
(Reicher, 1915, Lasky) falls in love with his patient, giving him the insight and daring to cure her split
personality when others had failed. In The Social Secretary (John Emerson, script Anita Loos, 1916,
Triangle-Fine Arts), the heroine sets out initially to get a secure job, then to prove that her employer’s
daughter’s fiancé is a scoundrel. To some degree, certain star personalities helped to popularize the goal-
oriented protagonist. Charles Ray, Douglas Fairbanks, and their imitators tended to play young men with
clear-cut aspirations. In his comedies—especially those written by Anita Loos —Fairbanks typically played
a character with an obsession of some sort. In The Matrimaniac (Paul Powell, 1916, Triangle-Fine Arts), he
uses a variety of modern technological devices to reach his fiancée when her father spirits her away to avoid
their marriage; in Wild and Woolly (Emerson, 1917, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp.), he wants to be a
cowboy. With a less comic tone, in film after film Ray played the same earnest country boy with dreams of
higher things. The beginning of The Hired Hand (Victor Schertzinger, 1918, Ince) characterizes the hero Ezry
quickly: he pauses while working in the field and gazes off into the distance (see fig 15.5). A title (fig 15.6)
speaks of his ‘vision’ of’bigger, finer things.’ After the mid-teens, it becomes difficult to find a film without
a protagonist striving for something.
Without obstacles, the goal could not sustain the film, and so classical narratives also set up conflicts. As
one screenplay manual puts it:16
A story is the record of a struggle—a history of a conflict which has occurred or that might
have occurred. Man’s never-ending conflict with nature; the conflict of one man, as an individual
animal, against another; the struggle of the individual against society as an institution; man’s inner
conflict of the ‘good nature’ against the ‘bad nature’—of conscience against evil inclination—these
and other general classifications embodying innumerable variations, contain the history of Life itself.
Yet character conflict was typically favored, since it gave priority to goal orientation. In The Hired Hand,
for example, the hero’s goal is to attend the state agricultural school; early in the film he finishes earning the
$500 he needs for his freshman year. He also falls in love with the farm-owner’s daughter. But her brother
Walter, a wastrel bank employee, pressures Ezry into loaning him the money to replace a sum he has
embezzled. This leads, as an inter-title puts it, to ‘The broken bridge of dreams,’ and Ezry goes back to
working as a hired hand on the farm. Eventually, through his heroism, Ezry wins the daughter’s hand, and
at the end is well on the way to the career he had been striving for.
Character conflict was not a device created by the classical system. Primitive films, with their chases,
comic romances, and robberies, had dealt in clashes of will. But as the transitional period went on,
characters were increasingly individualized—through the names, traits, associations arising from their stars’
personalities, and opposing goals. The greater complexity of character relationships that followed could
sustain a multiple-reel film with a considerable variety of action.
Character and temporal relations
Each scene should be a step forward in the story, for there can be no such thing as going back.17
John Nelson, 1913
The advent of the feature film intensified the problem of temporal relations. Few films after 1908, aside
from the simplest chase and trick narratives, would make plot time identical to story time, presenting an
uninterrupted stretch of time across the whole. In proceeding from one high point in the causal chain to
another, certain intervals would be eliminated, repeated, or reordered in the plot.
Similarly, temporal gaps between scenes needed distinct markers. This was relatively easy in the silent
period, since inter-titles could specify the passage of time and set up the situation of the new scene. During
the teens, time-covering inter-titles became something of a cliché, as we shall see. The narratives of early
features often covered great spans of time; some compressed their action as much as a two-reeler would,
rather than spreading it out and spending more time on individual scenes. As a result, the films added more
story material, covering many years rather than days or weeks. Some features of the mid-teens would have
gaps of years’ duration at several points. But the increasing tendency was toward narratives covering briefer
time-spans and containing lengthier scenes with more character development.
By attaching causality—and hence the spectator’s attention to the flow of events—to the characters, the
classical film gained a method for insuring a clear temporal progression. For example, character memory
could motivate flashbacks. And by concentrating so thoroughly upon character actions, the film could make
its narration less self-conscious as well. In contrast, unexplained ellipses or overlaps in time, such as the
repeated rescue scene in Life of an American Fireman (see p. 162), would tend to call attention to the
process of narration. In the primitive, and to some extent in the transitional period, situation was paramount;
hence overlaps and gaps in the characters’ movements were unimportant so long as the individual incidents
fitted together into a comprehensible sequence. The spectator’s continued expectation of a forward
progression of action would lead him or her to overlook small discontinuities.
The classical cinema began to dictate that any deviations from chronological order be clearly marked as
such. The early signal for a flashback was a superimposed vignette, as in The Unwritten Law example above
(see fig 15.3). After One Hundred Years (1911, Selig) uses a superimposition over the entire frame for a
flashback. All the 1912 ES films with flashbacks present the past events as separate shots. In both The Cry
of the Children (Lois Weber, Thanhouser) and The Deserter (Thomas H.Ince, Bison ‘101’), for example,
single-shot flashbacks are bracketed by dissolves; in each, there is a character present who may be recalling
the earlier scene—the subjective cues are not clear. The High Cost of Living (1912, Solax) frames its
protracted flashback as the hero’s courtroom testimony, marking its beginning and end with dialogue titles.
(This film has dialogue inter-titles throughout the flashback, forming a sort of ‘voiceover narration.’)
After 1912, visions continue to be shown mostly as vignettes, but flashbacks and dreams are separate
shots. Both fades and dissolves function interchangeably to introduce and end flashbacks; sometimes both will
appear within the same film for this purpose. The Regeneration (Walsh, 1915, Fox), for example, has two
flashbacks, a brief one set off by dissolves, a longer one by fades. In any case, however, flashbacks figure in
the classical cinema as distinct interruptions of the chronological flow; motivation by character memory, as
in The Regeneration, minimizes flashbacks’ disruptive effects.
Chapter 4 has shown that deadlines are an important way of limiting and structuring the temporal span of
a narrative, as well as of creating suspense; characters are almost invariably the source of deadlines. The
deadline seems to have come into occasional use from the beginning of the transition to the classical mode.
In The Dynamiters (a 1911 Imp split-reel), a drunken man joins an anarchist group and is given a time bomb
to plant, set to go off at noon. When he sobers up, he races around trying to get rid of the bomb, finally
leaving it in the anarchists’ own hideout. Inter-titles punctuate the action, informing us that it is ‘20 minutes
to 12,’ ‘10 minutes to 12,’ ‘5 minutes to 12,’ and ‘12 o’clock.’ A one-reel drama of the same year, A
Daughter of Dixie (1911, Champion), handles a deadline situation somewhat more subtly. During the Civil
War, a southern woman’s Yankee boyfriend is caught by Confederates. The heroine holds the soldiers at
bay with a rifle and promises her lover to delay them until four o’clock while he escapes. There follows an
intercut scene, with shots of the fleeing soldier alternating with views of the heroine and soldiers watching a
clock approaching four (see fig 15.7). The intercutting considerably compresses the passage of time, and the
unknown director suggests the omitted intervals by rearranging the group’s positioning in the room at each
return (see fig 15.8). Finally, as the clock reaches four, the Confederate soldiers point suddenly to it, and the
heroine lets them leave (see fig 15.9). Cinderella (1911, Thanhouser) has a built-in deadline structure,
carried through in this case with cutaways to a clock tower.
In the early teens, the occasional deadlines that appear are used to motivate an entire film. A Race With
Time (1913, Kalem) sets up its deadline thoroughly, then works clocks into the setting of the scenes in a
more casual way. A railroad owner receives a telegram: ‘Test for mail contract to be held Dec. 17, 1912.
Pouch must be in Stevenson at two o’clock or you forfeit in favor of Union Central.’ When Union Central
tries to sabotage the run by knocking out the engineer, the girlfriend of the owner’s son leaps into the engine
and takes it to Stevenson. Crosscutting builds suspense, as we see the officials and the son at Stevenson
awaiting the train’s arrival. The intercutting begins as follows:
1 Title: ‘Stevenson’
2 LS: Group of men on platform, all with watches (fig 15.10).
3 MS: Man with stopwatch and pistol to signal end of race (fig 15.11).
4 LS: The moving train (fig 15.12).
5 MCU: Inside the cab, the heroine looking at the clock, which reads three minutes to two (fig 15.13).
6 MS: She stokes the fire.
And so on, alternating these elements, with the train clock later showing nearly two o’clock; a title
announces ‘On time,’ just before the train pulls into the station.
By the time the principles of the classical cinema become fully established in the late teens, deadlines are
an occasional local device within the longer structure of the feature. In His Mother’s Boy (Schertzinger,
1917, Ince), the deadline is established only in the twelfth of thirteen scenes, when the villain, Banty, tells
the hero, Matthew, to leave town by seven the next morning or face him in a shoot-out. Matthew has been
characterized as a mama’s boy, and he agonizes over whether to flee or get a gun. His fiancée, deploring his
apparent cowardice, returns his engagement ring and the scene ends. The next, final scene irises in on a
close-up of a clock, reading 6:44, and the scene continues in a boarding-house diningroom. Soon, the
drunken Banty comes in, announcing that Matthew has ten minutes left. Matthew is finally driven to fight
Banty, and after he wins, the heroine puts on his engagement ring; two lines—the cowardice problem and
the romance—are resolved at once, and the film ends.
By the mid-twenties, the deadline was standard enough to be parodied. Exit Smiling (Sam Taylor, 1926,
MGM) centers around a theater troupe performing a cliché-ridden melodrama in which the play’s heroine must
disguise herself as a vamp, seduce the villain, and keep him with her. As the play ends (in the second scene
of the film) the heroine declares: ‘Ten o’clock! My lover is saved!’ Later on the film’s heroine, Violet,
imitates the play and uses the same trick to save the man she loves, with comic consequences, as her
vamping turns into a tussle to prevent the villain from leaving before midnight. As the deadline passes,
Violet poses dramatically, says, ‘Twelve o’clock! My lover is saved!’ and pulls a set of curtains in a
doorway to imitate the stage finale. The gesture fails as the curtain rod falls on her head. This film not only
makes fun of the deadline device, but acknowledges its origins in nineteenth-century popular theater.
Narration: the functions of inter-titles

The shift in the early teens toward a more psychologically based narrative also affected the types and uses
of inter-titles. The two basic types of inter-titles were expository and dialogue. An expository title would
either describe the upcoming action—a ‘summary’ title—or would simply establish the situation and allow
the action within the images to present causes and effects. Moving away from the primitive period’s
considerable dependence upon summary titles, filmmakers gradually began to employ a higher proportion
of establishing expository titles and dialogue titles. The dialogue title was one of the many devices which
made narration less self-conscious and less overtly suppressive in the classical period; it helped characters
take over more of the functions that expository inter-titles had performed.
The earliest films had no inter-titles. Their action was so simple that the main title could establish the
basic idea clearly enough to sustain the entire film. Films with titles like The Dude and the Burglars (1903,
AM&B), Hold-up in a Country Grocery Store (1904, Edison), and A Policeman’s Love Affair (1904, Lubin)
need no further explanation. But even at this point, some titles indicate the need for more expository matter.
The officially copyrighted title of a Lubin 1905 chase comedy, A Dog Lost, Strayed or Stolen $25.00
Reward Apply Mrs. Brown, 711 Park Ave. must be one of the longest in American film history. In effect, it
serves as a summary inter-title to set up the action of the first few shots, as we see the dog stolen, Mrs Brown
placing a want ad, and the resulting crowds of people bringing dogs to her home. Other films of this period
copyrighted each shot separately, and the titles that preceded each could serve as expository inter-titles.18*
For example, Parsifal (Porter, 1904, Edison) has eight shots, with titles such as ‘Interior of the Temple’ and
‘Return of Parsifal.’
But most films were copyrighted as a whole, and in these the summary inter-title eventually became
standard. Kemp Niver, who has surveyed the entire collection of films preserved as paper prints, concludes
that Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Porter, 1903, Edison) is the earliest such film to have titles between shots.19 In
Uncle Tom’s Cabin the title, ‘Tom Refuses to flog Emal’ine,’ is followed by a lengthy tableau shot of this
action. By about 1910, the text of summary titles had expanded. In Her Mother’s Fiancé (1911, Yankee),
one title states: ‘Home from School. The Widow’s daughter comes home unexpectedly and surprises her
mother.’ By this point, however, these titles are not appearing between every shot, but often set up the
action for a series of shots. Griffith’s film Fate’s Turning (1911, Biograph) has brief summaries (‘Smitten
by the waitress he neglects his fiancée’), but has only nine titles to thirty-four other shots. Summary titles of
this sort are an extremely overt and redundant form of narration. They often present the spectator with an
explicit hypothesis for upcoming action, rather than guiding him or her to form hypotheses on the basis of
the actions themselves.
During the early transitional period, inter-titles came to have other functions than setting up action to come.
Most importantly, they could cover temporal gaps between scenes, indicating a specific length for the lapse.
In 1911 and early 1912, two scenario columns gave similar advice, using the current terms ‘leader’ and ‘sub-
title’ to refer to the inter-title:
Leader is also used to ‘break’ scenes where required. It may happen that two scenes are to be played
in the same setting with an interval between. Without the leader the two scenes would follow with
nothing to show the lapse of time. The action would appear continuous and the characters would
either leave the stage to reappear immediately or another set of characters would fairly jump into the
scene. A leader stating that it is ‘the Next Day. The Quarrel is Renewed.’ serves as a drop curtain to
separate the scenes.20
It may be employed to indicate the lapse of time, as ‘Two Years Later.’ It may be used to define the
relationship between two characters, as ‘The Jealous Husband.’
But it is not the legitimate function of the sub-title to tell the whole story in anticipation of the
characters’ movements. Write no such leaders as ‘Helen, detecting and understanding her lover’s
falseness, resolves to teach him a lesson by breaking their engagement.’21
The first passage recommends using the inter-title to avoid an elementary continuity error later to be known
as the ‘jump cut’ (and indeed the author describes the problem using the word ‘jump’). Jump cuts of the
kind described occurred occasionally in primitive films, but they disappear once the transitional period
begins about 1909. The second passage deplores lengthy summaries that give away action to be shown
visually; in effect, the author advises against the use of overt narration, preferring to let the characters
present information directly. Such advice was necessary; early teens films frequently use complicated titles
of the type quoted.
But while expository titles came into narrative cinema quite early, dialogue titles were extremely rare in
the primitive cinema. The Ex-Convict (Porter, 1904, Edison) uses one (without the quotation marks which
would become standard as indicators of characters’ speech). There are undoubtedly other such films.
Dialogue titles do not appear consistently until around 1910, and from this point the functions previously
performed only by summary expository titles become divided between expository and dialogue titles.
In a silent film, character dialogue can be cued by any of three factors: placement of the dialogue title, lip
movements of the characters, and quotation marks in the title. While the early transitional years
experimented with various alternatives, by 1915 usage had hardened into a redundant schema. Some early
instances insert the dialogue titles where they are spoken (always returning to the same framing). In The
Unexpected Guest (1909, Lubin), for instance, we see a woman in long shot pacing after reading a letter
which reveals that her fiancé has fathered an illegitimate child. She does not move her lips and the title that
follows lacks quotation marks (‘I must know the truth’). Griffith’s Faithful (1910, Biograph) also inserts a
title at the moment of speech and lacks lip movements, but uses quotation marks. Other films from 1910 use
quotation marks and lip movement, with the dialogue title placed at the point in the shot where it is spoken:
Brother Man (Vitagraph) and The Gambler’s Charm (Lubin).
By 1915, filmmakers would settle upon a standard approach to all three cues—placement, lip movement,
and quotation marks. During the approximate period 1911–13, however, an alternative practice existed, in
which the title, with quotation marks, could appear before the shot in which it was to be spoken; then, partway
through the shot, a character would speak, with the lip movement and the narrative context cuing us that this
is the moment when the line occurs. Here the dialogue title not only takes on the function of the summary
expository title, but also occupies the same position, preceding the scene. Until 1913, both alternative
placements occur about equally.22* Some films stick to one or the other placement throughout, while others
use both.23*
This even mixture suggests that for a few transitional years, two different approaches were equally
acceptable, but it does not necessarily imply that filmmakers were unaware of principles of title placement.
Indeed, the delay in standardizing one placement arose from the fact that filmmakers saw different
functional advantages in each approach. Various reviews and screenplay manuals debated function and
placement of all titles, whether dialogue or expository.24* In a 1911 column, Epes Winthrop Sargent favored
explanation given later in the scene; his reference here is to expository titles:25
For one or two seconds following the return of the picture to the screen the mind of the spectator is
still busy with the import of the leader, and any important action ocurring immediately following the
leader is apt to be overlooked.
For this reason many directors hold the action slow for a moment following the leader, just as they
refuse to let in a leader in the middle of a scene [shot]…. Sometimes the line is flashed before the
scene opens, but this is objectionable in that it removes the element of suspense.
Another advisor on the writing of photoplays, A.R. Kennedy, gave other reasons for not breaking up a shot
by titles; he wrote in 1912:26
There is much to be said against throwing a leader into the middle of the scene [shot]. The spectator
gets the effect of the actors’ ‘holding the pose’ while he reads the leader. One often has a feeling of
irritation at having a scene interrupted, and when the scene is resumed, it often takes an appreciable
time to readjust one’s mind. The continuity of the scene is broken and the illusion is spoiled.
Kennedy favored the use of titles mainly for time lapses. Specific discussions of where dialogue titles
should go began at least as early as 1913, when a photoplay manual advises that ‘whenever such leaders are
employed, they should be made to follow the action and not to precede it.’27
In 1914, the dialogue title was increasingly placed at the point where the character spoke the line. The
prevalence of one alternative may have had several causes. First, as some of the aforementioned scenario
advisers imply, the anticipatory dialogue title would impair the suspense of a scene. Secondly, a cut from a
speaking character to the written dialogue would make it easier to discern who was speaking and when the
line occurred; this furthers the psychological individualization of characters. Thirdly, such a cut would
make the character’s lip movement motivate the title, which would in turn create a less self-conscious
narration. Fourthly, by placing the title at the moment when it was spoken, the film could preserve the
temporal flow of the actions uninterrupted. Placement before the shot would present a story event (the line
of dialogue) out of order (before its actual delivery within the shot), and this unmotivated rearrangement of
chronology would prove unacceptable under the classical system. There were probably other reasons as
well. The dialogue title is an interesting example of the classical cinema’s having two possible devices
which could become standard and weeding out the one which fits less well into its overall system of
relations among causality, time, and space.
The eventual elimination of the dialogue title at the beginning of a scene follows a general movement
toward suppressing excessive summarizing of action. ‘The Reviewer’ wrote in a 1912 New York Dramatic
Mirror:28
The insertion, therefore, of titles explaining something is about to be done and then following with a
scene in which the characters do the action indicated, is not only ridiculous to the average spectator,
but a procedure which spoils the dramatic sense and strength of the plot, since it ultimately destroys
suspense and possibly the making of a dramatic climax.
Through the early teens, paralleling the rise of the dialogue title, the expository title tends to become less a
summary of action. Instead, it introduces characters, gives an indication of the situation, and tells how much
time has elapsed between scenes. The classical expository title does not preview action, but provides the
concentrated, preliminary exposition described in Chapter 3. For example, The Fatal Opal (1914, Kalem
two-reeler) sets up the initial situation with an expository title: ‘Frank, Judge Morton’s nephew, is in love
with Alice Grey, an actress.’ This laconic attempt to introduce as many facts as possible reflects the effort to
begin the film’s forward action in medias res. Titles in this film avoid summarizing, resembling instead
chapter headings in fiction: ‘The crowning insult’ or ‘An opportunity for revenge.’ Even longer titles try to
avoid giving away the events to follow: ‘Not wishing to further antagonize his uncle, Frank says nothing of
his marriage.’ Here the title suggests Frank’s thoughts and points out what is not done (something difficult
to convey visually) in the following shot, in which Frank enters a room where his uncle is reading. From
this, however, the film cuts directly to an escape scene at a nearby prison, avoiding altogether an expository
title, since we can infer the situation from information given in earlier scenes. Finally, The Fatal Opal contains
time-lapse titles like ‘The following morning.’ This sort of title had become a cliché by the mid-teens.
The title beginning ‘Not wishing to further antagonize his uncle…’ suggests the increasing use of
expository titles to aid the presentation of psychological material, rather than simply to summarize action. In
1914 a scenario guide commented: ‘Captions are not labels, but means of suggesting beyond the visible
action and of furnishing deeper motives than those on the surface.’29 Thus from about 1913 on, writings on
film construction increasingly emphasized the reduction of the expository title to only those bits of
information which could not be conveyed visually. Standard limits began to come into play. Photoplay
critiqued a sample scenario in 1913: ‘We have 53 words on the screen already, and 50 is about the limit for
one reel.’30
Indeed, during the period from 1913 to 1916, there was a widespread belief that the film with no inter-
titles was the ideal. Scriptwriters seemed to assume that every title in a film betrayed a weak point where its
author had failed to convey the situation properly through images. In 1913, Famous Players’ president
Adolph Zukor was reported to be working toward eliminating titles from his company’s films:‘“We are
trying to let the story tell itself so far as possible,” said he; “to do this we are introducing more scenes and
connecting links.” ’31 There were indeed some films that contained no titles, such as Broncho Billy and the
Greaser (G.W. Anderson, 1913, Essanay).
But while a one-reel Western might be simple enough to follow unaided, filmmakers began to be
convinced that the feature film necessitated at least occasional inter-titles. From 1916, when the feature film
was standardized, the desire for titleless films yielded to an approach that emphasized cleverly written inter-
titles. Anita Loos helped popularize the idea that inter-titles could actively contribute to the film. Having
written scenarios for Griffith shorts, she did only the inter-titles for Intolerance (1916). In that film, little
jokes, elaborate descriptions, and asides to the audience make the narration more overt—as when the Boy is
‘intolerated’ away into prison or in the famous ‘When women cease to attract men they often turn to reform
as a second choice.’ Loos went on to write many of the witty scripts and titles of Douglas Fairbanks’s
comedies. In such films, the inter-titles come to represent a narrating voice which goes beyond the neutral
stating of facts. Loos utilized the possibility that certain genres— especially comedy—could motivate
highly self-conscious narration. One transitional title between sequences in Reaching for the Moon (John
Emerson, scripted by Emerson and Loos, 1917, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp.) states simply ‘But things
are always darkest before the dawn.’ This title adds no tangible information, but guides the viewer to expect
both climax and resolution. Another Fairbanks film of the same year, Wild and Woolly, seems to come to an
end as the hero gets on a train for the East, leaving the woman he loves standing tearfully on the platform. A
title breaks in: ‘But wait a minute, this will never do. We can’t end a Western romance without a wedding.
Yet—after they’re married where shall they live? For Nell likes the East, And Jeff likes the West. So where
are the twain to meet?’ This leads into a brief epilogue where we see the couple leave an eastern-style house,
stepping out into a western landscape. The specific appeal to genre—‘a Western romance’— combines with
the film’s comic tone to justify a playful narration that bares the device of the happy ending.
Loos-style inter-titles quickly became the fashion. They were, in a sense, the incorporation into the film of
a narration, such as that in Dickens and Thackeray, which could flaunt its omniscience. Hoodoo Ann (Lloyd
Ingraham, 1916, Triangle-Fine Arts) inserts this into the middle of one scene: ‘A casual and mysterious
stranger, whom we advise you to remember.’ In The Ghost of Rosie Taylor (Edward Sloman, 1918,
American), a title intervenes at one point to flash the action back to the point in time when ‘The story, as it
really happened, begins.’ The tendency to use cleverly written titles is especially apparent in the comedy
features of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; there almost every expository title that begins a scene also
makes a verbal joke of its own.
Still, the narrational intrusion through titles usually comes at codified moments—such as the openings of
sequences, for a preliminary, concentrated exposition. Inter-titles making poetic generalizations often act as
brief preludes in features of the late teens and the twenties. Hoodoo Ann prefaces its narrative with this
statement: ‘The greatest heart throbs of life are not always quickened into being by violence, sensation or
thrills. Laughter, bitter tears and even tragedy frequent the humblest paths and create drama in the most
obscure and peaceful corners of the earth.’ The opening of a Mary Pickford feature, Suds (Jack Dillon, 1920,
Mary Pickford Co.), sets up comedy with a plethora of inter-titles:
1 Title: Oh, this is no tale of gay romance,

Of storm-swept shores, adventure-girt,
Of bold, heroic circumstance,
Of daring deeds, of luck, of chance,
Of purple pain, of hectic hurt—
2 Title: No! no!
NO! NO!
3 Title: No hero here with passion pants—
This is the tale of a shirt!
4 MS. Pixillation: Shirt in laundry wrap
stands up and bows.
5 Title: What ho!
Let’s go!
This prologue in turn leads to two additional, more neutral inter-titles that establish the London locale of the
action. Lois Weber begins her film The Blot (1921, Lois Weber Productions) more succinctly: ‘Men are
only boys grown tall.’
The Loos-style title, what we might term the ‘literary’ inter-title, became the norm for both comedies and
dramas by the twenties (when it was commonly poked fun at as the ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ style of title
writing). Although this style made the narration of the inter-titles more overt, it also provided an advantage
that overrode that small problem. Apart from simply conveying information, such titles seemed to
contribute something extra to the film; they were more than tacked-on labels. This appearance of double
functioning helped motivate inter-titles. Filmmakers no longer aimed at title-less films. When Charles Ray
made one in 1921, The Old Swimmin’ Hole (Joseph De Grasse, Charles Ray Productions), it was met with
indifference by reviewers and public.
Another means of motivating expository titles was adopted in 1916. Rather than printing the white letters
on plain black or bordered cards, filmmakers painted scenes over part or all of the background, thus creating
the ‘art title’ card (see figs 3.2 and 15.6). Triangle was one of the earliest companies to use this device; in
keeping with the central producer system’s methodical breakdown of labor, the company had a department
for painting the cards (fig 15.14; the same department supplied the paintings that hung on the walls of sets).
A 1916 review of The Aryan (William S.Hart, 1916, Triangle) remarked that: ‘The subtitles of Triangle
productions have been worth attention for some time. At first they were pleasingly decorative; later they
aided in interpreting the mood of the play. The text of the subtitles not only advanced the story, but when
conversation was used, helped the characterization; and the skillful word pictures aided and completed the
scene.’32
Art titles added considerable flexibility to the written texts. With a painting of a building or locale as if in
‘long-shot’ distance, the title could serve to establish the space of the scene to come. This might even mean
that a set would not have to be built; the next shot could more directly to an interior. Victor Fleming’s When
the Clouds Roll By (1919, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp.) shows few long shots of buildings or
exteriors, but conveys a sense of various parts of New York City through art titles. One title shows the
Washington Square arch, then cuts to a shot of Fairbanks walking along a path that could be in almost any
park; similarly, a painting of a Greenwich Village street leads directly to interior shots of the heroine’s
studio apartment.
The art title could also contain a symbolic, sometimes non-diegetic object to convey an idea. Spiders,
cupids, flowers, and all manner of clichéd imagery adorn the titles of silent films in the late teens and
twenties. A 1916 commentator recognized the new function of the inter-title: It has grown even in its logical
and consistent place, from a simple explanatory note, to a cleverly fitting link in the given chain of events,
presented with a decorative background that conveys the force of the immediate situation in unmistakable
symbols.’33 The art card in effect made the inter-title into an extra shot, providing visual material as well as
verbal. This additional material either supplemented or reinforced the information coming from the words
and surrounding shots. Both art cards and ‘literary’ texts made inter-titles seem less disruptive to the
narrative’s flow. They also helped the narration go beyond the simple neutral summaries of the primitive
period.
But during these same years (1914–17), filmmakers realized the advantages of motivating inter-title texts
as lines spoken by the characters. One advisor critiqued a sample scenario in 1916, concluding: ‘Note the
strength gained by inserting the subtitle in the action and having it a speech by one of the characters.’34 In
general, filmmakers worked to replace expository inter-titles with dialogue wherever possible. A Lubin
serial of 1915, Road o’ Strife, reportedly had only one expository title in its fifteen episodes—reading ‘A
Week Later.’ Its director, Emmett Campbell Hill, described how he tried to blend in the dialogue titles to
minimize any interruption of the action: ‘Some dissolve in and out, others appear abruptly and slowly fade,
still others merely flash on and instantly disappear, as a sharp, explosive “No!” seems to do. We have
undertaken to visually approximate sound effects.’35 The use of type size and other means to simulate sonic
qualities was not uncommon, by the way; many silent films have small letters to suggest whispers and large
ones for shouts. In ‘Beau’ Revel (John Griffith Way, 1921, Thomas H.Ince), words with their letters out of
line suggest a drunken man’s speech. With or without such effects, dialogue titles were motivated as coming
from a source within the scene, and hence were preferable to expository titles. Partly because of this,
filmmakers seldom used art cards for dialogue titles.
Certainly by the late teens, dialogue titles outnumbered expository titles. Typically, expository titles
come between scenes to set up new situations, but most titles within scenes tend to present dialogue.
Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp.) has seventeen scenes, four of
which have no expository titles at all, and seven of which have only one or two. In all, of the 216 inter-titles
in the film (not counting credits and end titles), only thirty-three are expository. In James Cruze’s
Hawthorne of the USA (1919, Artcraft), every scene has at least one expository title, but 80 per cent of all
the titles are dialogue.
In the mid-twenties, many films limit expository titles severely. Almost every film would use at least a
couple at the beginning to introduce characters and situations. But frequently later scenes would contain one
or no expository titles.36* By the middle and late twenties, the predominance of dialogue titles combines
with the general handling of scenes to create films which were prepared for the introduction of sound.
(Sound was far from a surprise to filmmakers and writers. Throughout the teens and twenties, the almost
universal assumption was that sound, color, stereoscopy, and widescreen processes would eventually be
adopted.) Dialogue titles also insured that most of the spectator’s understanding of the narrative came
directly from the characters themselves—from their words and gestures— rather than from an intervening
narration’s presentation.
A similar effect of placing verbal narration within the story space resulted from a related device—the
insert. Inserts were not, strictly speaking, inter-titles; they were any written material in the space of the
action which was shown in a separate shot—‘inserted’—within the main long view of the action. Letters,
photographs, and newspaper headlines were commonly used for inserts. Inserts appeared occasionally in
primitive-period films, but began to occur with greater frequency in the transitional period. Of the ES films
from 1909 to 1916, 62 per cent have inserts. Many one-reelers begin with a person receiving a letter, which
we then see in close-up in the second shot. Letters were a convenient way of beginning in medias res:
‘Inserts should never be used in front of the first scene.’37 After a short initial view of the main character
and situation, the writing rapidly fills in past events and sets up causes for action to come.
Letters made versatile inserts, since they allowed the characters to give a variety of information about
personal traits and travels, and to set up appointments. But newspapers proved useful as well, in conveying
more general and public events. As Part One pointed out, the newspaper became a universal device in
Hollywood, motivating written texts realistically and compositionally as coming from the world of the story.
This advantage was realized by Sargent in 1911: ‘A deal of information may be conveyed in a headline and
the spectator seems to read the item over the character’s shoulder rather than to have been interrupted by a
leader.’38 Numerous other scenario guides of the next few years recommended the use of headlines or short
clippings for conveying information.39 Other written texts could serve similar functions. In Stella Dallas
(Henry King, 1926, Samuel Goldwyn), passages from a diary repeatedly appear in places where an expository
inter-title might ordinarily be used. As with the dialogue inter-title, the insert seemed to come from within
the story, helping make written narration less overt.
The ‘American’ style of acting

Few aspects of silent films seem so alien to the modern viewer as the performances of their actors. Yet all
‘silent acting’ was not the same. A more discriminating look reveals striking differences. Consider, for
example, two films released almost exactly two years apart.
Figures 15.15 through 15.17 are frames from The High Cost of Living (October, 1912, Solax); the second
example, figures 15.18 through 15.22, comes from The Warning (September, 1914, Majestic). The earlier
film illustrates the pantomime style of silent acting. In this shot, the younger workers want to strike, and
they invite the hero, Old Joel, out for a drink to talk over the situation. The man at the right gestures
‘drinking’ to him (see fig 15.15). Joel points to his own body, then to his grey hair (fig 15.16), as if to say,
‘I’m too old for such things.’ The other man then holds up a single finger and smiles persuasively (‘Just
one?’); then Joel also holds up a finger (fig 15.17), smiles, and agrees to go. No inter-title explains this bit
of action.
The Warning is a one-reeler directed by Donald Crisp and starring Dorothy Gish. In a mediumlong shot of
a small apartment, the heroine receives a note from her lover telling her he has left her. In despair, she sits,
and there follows a cut-in to a medium shot (fig 15.18). She sits staring numbly for a moment, then glances
up at the gas lamp fixture at the upper left (fig 15.19). Her eyes widen as she realizes that she could commit
suicide (fig 15.20). She reaches over and turns on the gas (fig 15.21), gets up, and exits right. Off-screen,
she sits in another chair, with her face reflected in the mirror at the center rear (fig 15.22). Played in the
long-shot framing of The High Cost of Living, Gish’s performance would hardly be discernible.
The difference in acting styles and framing distance in these two films is considerable. Between
approximately 1909 and 1913, acting styles in the American cinema underwent a distinct change: an
exaggerated pantomime gave way to a system of emphasizing restrained gestures and facial expression. The
High Cost of Living is typical of its period, yet by 1914, the year of The Warning, the telegraphic style
usually occurs in combination with the facial style (except in slapstick comedies). This change was to a
large degree responsible for the development of a broader range of camera distance, which in turn
contributed to the development of continuity editing.
The codified pantomime style is readily apparent in films of the very early teens. Stock gestures that rely
only minimally upon facial expression, and then only for reinforcement, are everywhere. Indeed, these
films, which may seem to be somewhat confusing at first, become comprehensible once one watches for these
gestures. In the three-reel A Tale of Two Cities William Humphreys, 1911, Vitagraph), the second sequence
introduces Dr Manette, who has been called in by the evil Marquis to examine a peasant woman whose lover
has been killed. Manette comes into the room, kneels by the woman, then stands and makes several brief
gestures: he points to the woman, places the tips of his fingers, with palms open, to his own forehead (see
fig 15.23), moves his hands out about a foot in front of his head, flutters them, then lowers his hands in a
helpless gesture while shaking his head. No dialogue title accompanies this, nor was there a summary title
at the beginning of the scene. We rely entirely upon these gestures to interpret something like, ‘Her reason
is gone’ (hand gestures) and ‘There is nothing I can do’ (shaking of head). One could catalogue many
standard gestures in films before 1913. For example, when characters place an open hand palm down about
three feet from the floor, that indicates ‘child.’ The child’s growth can be shown by raising the hand to an
appropriate point higher off the ground. In Tangled Lives (1911, Kalem), the hero, who had rescued the
heroine years before in an Indian massacre, tells her he has fallen in love with her now that she has grown.
There is again no inter-title, but he makes the ‘child’ gesture, raises his hand to about her height and then
places it over his heart, while speaking emotionally to her. (Even here, the gestures are often smaller and
more restrained than they would have been in a film five years earlier, and one must be on the lookout to
catch them.)
During the transitional years of 1912 and 1913, the pantomime style was in the process of modifying into
a more naturalistic approach to gestures. Still framed in long shot or plan américain, the actor used facial
expression and non-conventionalized gestures, but with enough exaggeration that they would be visible.
The increasing dependence on dialogue inter-titles aided in the formulation of this new acting style by
taking over some of the informational functions of the codified gestures. The feature film would also
promote it, by allowing, even encouraging, more time for character development. There may have been a
small genre of character-sketch films, exemplified by The Warning and some of Griffith’s early-teens work
like The Painted Lady (1912, Biograph). By 1914, the new acting style had combined facial expression in
closer shots with muted pantomime in the more distant framings. Technical improvements in lighting
equipment, focusing devices, film stock, and make-up practice aided in the process by making it easier for
the spectator to see details at a distance.
The change to closer framings and facial acting was apparently a two-step process. In the early teens,
some critics noted a new style in Vitagraph productions; a French filmmaker, Victorin Jasset, described it in
1911:40
The Americans realized the interest that could be given to the play of the features in foreground shots
and they served it, sacrificing the decor, the whole of the scene when it was necessary in order to
present to the audience the figures of the characters who stay a bit more immobile.
Rapid acting horrified them, and the acting was calm, exaggeratedly calm.
James Morrison, an actor at Vitagraph, recalled the closer framings:41
We were the first to use the nine-foot line. When I started, they would frame the scene as in a theater,
a long shot with everyone shown full length. We were the first ones to bring people up to within nine
feet of the camera. The nine-foot line was a line of tape on the floor; if you came any closer, you’d go
out of focus. The next innovation in the movies was when Griffith did the close-up. We thought of the
nine-foot line, but we didn’t think of the closeup.
The ‘nine-foot line’ would yield a framing with the actors cut off at the knees. This would hardly be enough
to ‘sacrifice the decor,’ as Jasset claimed, but the effect on the figures was striking enough that the French
termed this the ‘American foreground’ shot. The larger figures would make possible a more restrained
pantomime—a first step toward the facial style of acting.
It has become a commonplace of film history to admit that D.W.Griffith did not invent the closeup, but to
claim that he used it better than those who came before, thereby establishing it as a basic part of filmmaking
practice. This may be the case, but the standardized close shot can be considered a by-product of a true
Griffith innovation, the new acting style. With the advent of the multiple-reel film, better actors were drawn
to the cinema because the firms could now afford to pay competitive salaries. Griffith drew together a
repertory company of actors, in particular very young women, beginning with Pickford in 1909, and adding
the Gish sisters, Dorothy Bernard, Blanche Sweet, and others. With them, he worked out a method of
sustained performance centering on the face, the shot being held while a series of muted expressions come
and go. Griffith himself described the process of ‘learning’ this method with his actors, in a 1914
interview:42
It is this learning step by step that brought about the ‘close-up.’ We were striving for real acting.
When you saw only the small, full-length figures, it was necessary to have exaggerated acting, what
might be called ‘physical’ acting, the waving of the hands and so on. The close-up enabled us to reach
real acting, restraint, acting that is a duplicate of real life. But the close-up was not accepted at once.
Griffith’s new method was not, of course, a duplicate of life. It was a stylized system, like the one before it;
but it did involve restraint—the transmitting of feelings and thoughts through a series of facial suggestions.
The new approach to acting was widely recognized at the time and even labeled as specifically
American. Exaggerated pantomime, although used in virtually all American primitive films, was considered
to be of European origin. After all, European films, primarily French, Italian, and Danish, were numerous
on American programs before World War I. As early as 1911, however, a reviewer found the influence
beginning to run the other way; in discussing a Danish three-reeler, Great Northern’s The Temptations of a
Great City, a Moving Picture World reviewer commented on its lack of a ‘foreign style of acting.’ He
compared the film’s acting to ‘the palmy days of the Biograph Company, when tense situations were
worked up entirely with the eyes and slight movement.’ The Europeans were, the review claimed, beginning
to use the ‘American style of acting.’43 Many commentators of the 1911 to 1915 period speak of pantomime
as the older style and of facial expression as more modern.
With the new acting style came closer framings. These were not actually close-ups; at this point, a
distinction existed only between close and long shots. Any shot that cut off part of the human figure would
be considered ‘close.’ Griffith’s ‘close-ups’ were actually medium and medium-long shots. Films shot
consistently using such framings, in addition to The Warning (1914), include The Painted Lady (1912) and
The Mothering Heart (Griffith, 1913, Biograph).
Griffith’s comments that the close shots were resisted at first are not without basis. There were a number
of published attacks on framings which cut people off at the knees or waist. But such attacks did not, as
historical myth would have it, accuse the shots of incomprehensibility. Instead, some contemporary critics
felt that the closer framings violated traditional aesthetic principles. The Moving Picture World carried on a
controversy over the subject. In 1911 the scenario columnist, Epes Winthrop Sargent, defended ‘bust
pictures’ (as these close shots were sometimes called in the early teens): ‘Many points may be cleared in a
five-foot bust picture which would require twenty to thirty feet of leader to explain, and the bust picture
always interests.’44 But another writer of that same year attacked close shots, since the actors’ figures
‘assume unnecessarily large and, therefore, grotesque proportions.’45
Another participant in the Moving Picture World controversy was H.F.Huffman, who wrote a diatribe
against close shots in 1912. Here he specifically attributes these shots to the shift in acting styles and gives a
description of the two styles which is worth quoting in full:46
Facial expression—that seems to be the dominating influence that brings about this inartistic result.
The American producers, after they learned the rudiments of their craft, uncovered an entirely new
school of pantomime. In the heyday of the business, when exhibitors were making fortunes out of
small investments, the European picture had the call. Pantomime to the old world was an exact
science. Every known gesture and expression had for years been labeled and catalogued as definitely
as the rows of bottles in a chemist’s shop. With the play-going public of America, the European school
of pantomime at one time found favor over our crude home-made productions. Exhibitors clamored at
the exchanges for foreign films. This was disheartening because it really did seem that the American
product would never catch up. But at last the American producer found himself. He evolved a school
of pantomime that swept away the antiquated formulas and proved to be such a revelation as to
eclipse the Europeans themselves.
The difference between the two schools is broad and plain. The European school is based more
upon bodily movements than upon the mobility of the face. The American school relies more upon the
expression of the face and the suppression of bodily movement. It remained for the Americans to
demonstrate that more dramatic emotion is the keynote of American pantomime.
Again, this shift is not a matter of a new and better style entirely replacing a crude style. During the teens,
pantomime acting primarily in long shot shifted its function; with modifications, it became generically
motivated in the work of silent comedians such as the Keystone company, Charles Chaplin, and Keaton.
The ‘European’ style was too telegraphic to remain the dominant acting method as films became longer
and more psychologically based. Far from being cruder than the later style, ‘European’ pantomimic gestures
briefly conveyed a good deal of information to the audience. One striking aspect of the early one-reelers is
how much action they managed to pack into about sixteen minutes. This was in part due to those films’
considerable dependence upon physical rather than psychological causality; causes were immediately
obvious from the situation. The films also compressed the duration of the story events, either by using
ellipses between most shots (with a one-shot-per-scene structure in many cases) or by presenting several
actions simultaneously or in quick succession. But during the transitional period, filmmakers learned to
sustain plots based upon fewer events, with less compression of story time, within or between scenes. At
that point, a more leisurely acting style became desirable. If the camera could linger on the mobile face of a
Lillian Gish or a Blanche Sweet, individual incidents, and especially psychological states, could now
provide major causes and sustain whole segments of the film.
Unity and redundancy

The crystallization of these various temporal, causal, and character-oriented devices into a classical model of
narrative in 1917 suggests the considerable impact that the feature film had on their development. Virtually
all the traits I have discussed here appeared in short films during the transitional period. But one- and two-
reelers usually built their narratives around a few key devices; a deadline, or incident, or character study
could dominate the film. As features became the norm, however, individual devices were integrated into the
whole; they could serve a localized function, permitting other devices to come in as needed. A feature
might contain elaborate character exposition at the beginning, with visions, and flashbacks, and a deadline,
and a chase, and so on. This is not to suggest that features were simply strung-out one-reel narratives. Rather,
the story’s tight causal chain would create a more complex weave of events, motivating each new device in
its place. While the chase in Personal (1904, AM&B) starts simply as the result of too many women
answering an ad placed by a rich man,47* in The Birth of a Nation (1915), the ride of the Klan results from a
lengthy and dense weave of events—the death of the little sister and the formation of the Klan, the southern
family’s proud defiance of the carpetbaggers, Stoneman’s encouragement of Lynch’s aspirations, and so on.
Similarly, the flashback in the next-to-last scene of Hoodoo Ann (Lloyd Ingraham, 1916, Triangle-Fine
Arts) brings to a climax two separate lines of action. The main line concerns Ann, who has been established
in a series of scenes as a naive girl fond of play-acting. She fires a pistol while imitating a Western movie
she has seen and thinks she has accidentally killed a man living next door. The subplot involves this man, a
drunkard henpecked by his wife. He has been missing since Ann fired the shot, but he returns and describes
how he ran away and hid from his wife—with his story shown as the flashback. This clears up the mystery,
and the epilogue depicts Ann’s wedding.
The feature film also permitted a greater amount of redundancy. A narrative might be easy to follow if
the procedure for laying it out presented each event and trait clearly. But in its effort to help the spectator
understand completely, the Hollywood cinema repeats information. The feature’s length allowed time for
developing parallelisms and motifs of behavior; it could linger over information and encouraged the shift to
the new acting style.
By the 1920s, redundancy and thorough motivation were fully in place. His People (Sloman, 1925,
Universal-Jewel) involves a Jewish couple and their two sons living in the ghetto of an American city. The
father, David, favors Morris, who is a lawyer; but Morris has secretly concealed his ghetto origins from his
rich Jewish boss, Judge Stein, and from his fiancée, Stein’s daughter, Ruth. David rejects his other son,
Sammy, when the latter becomes a boxer, even though Sammy remains loyal to his family.
This narrative is motivated in a prologue when Sammy is seen as a boy, winning a street fight and
bringing home groceries he buys with the money given to him by an onlooker. David, established as a
peddler with a street stall, beats Sammy for fighting. Initial impressions formed in these scenes are crucial
in determining the pattern subsequent events will take. After a ten-year interval, the film stresses the
contrast between the two grown sons’ actions by repeatedly juxtaposing their behavior: Morris courts Ruth,
while Sammy has a romance with Mamie, the daughter of an Irish neighbor. (As with the choice of careers,
Sammy transgresses family tradition by choosing a non-Jewish woman, yet he does not become a social-
climber, as Morris does.) Morris asks for money to buy a dress suit, while Sammy fights for prize money to
help his ailing father. The film also provides causal motivation for its effects. When Morris asks for money,
David takes his own overcoat out to pawn; when David goes to his stall in the snow without his coat, he
falls ill. This in turn leads Sammy to win the money so that his father can recuperate in a warmer climate.
Ultimately Sammy’s selflessness, in combination with the revelation of Morris’s secret rejection of the
family, leads David to realize the relative worth of his two sons and to reconcile with Sammy. The careful
balance among elements and the thorough motivation evident in His People were common by the twenties.
The classical narrative, then, came to place more emphasis upon character, and to construct tightly
organized causal chains. The 1917 cinema had not eliminated every disruption of time or causality
throughout every film. But the basic principles had become dominant. In early 1918, actor and director
Henry King summed up the changes he had observed in filmmaking:48
There was a period when nearly every producer thought that action made a photoplay. Every scene
and incident was full of restless movement. Then came the day of characterization, as opposed to and
superceding the ‘action’ period, and this method has come to stay.
Nearly all of the melodramas and westerns of two years ago raced through from two to four reels of
film and there was little reserve force or character acting brought out. The hero was always distinctly
heroic and good looking, the heroine was just that, and the supporting cast, as a rule, acted all over the
shop, and if you will remember the general run of photoplays ran to periods, with the title ‘several
years later’ showing up with tiresome frequency.
In other words, we were satiated with swiftly moving action and did not really get acquainted with
the characters of our stories. Nowadays the directors ‘place’ their characters so that an audience
actually knows who and what they are and what sort of lives they lead, which makes what they do and
how they do it understandable and real. You will also notice that many of the most entertaining stories
cover comparatively short intervals of time.
Note that King even uses a specific term, to ‘place,’ in describing the more thorough establishment of
character traits and background. All through the transitional and into the classical periods, the idea of a
film’s unity centered around the narrative—and, more specifically, character psychology.
16
The continuity system
If you have a diamond in the shape of a plot, give it the proper setting of continuity. Do not sink
it in the tar of unmatched action.1
Epes Winthrop Sargent, 1915
The concept of continuity

We have seen how the move to longer multiple-shot films and later to multiple-reel films brought about a
shift in narrative models. Filmmakers used the short story, drama, and novel as sources for new conceptions
of causal and temporal unity. At the same time, they needed to find means of creating a unified spatial
structure in which story events could take place. To a limited extent, these means could also come from the
other arts: the film frame is analogous to the proscenium of a stage; the sudden leaps of time and space
achieved by editing resemble the freedom of movement enjoyed by the novel’s narrator.
But again, the filmic medium imposed its own unique demands. The filmmaker juxtaposes a series of
disparate spaces, building from them an overall narrative space. That space is concrete, not the verbal
construction of the novelist. Hence the filmmaker must be able to guide the spectator’s understanding of
spatial relations if the film’s causal actions are to be clear. Editing, with its instantaneous changes of
vantage point, presented a new aesthetic challenge, and filmmakers had to a considerable degree to thrash
out their problems on their own. The resulting guidelines became the continuity system.
The formulation of the continuity editing system was not a direct development of devices from the
primitive period. Classical films of the teens did not involve more complex, more correct usage of the same
devices available to earlier filmmakers. Rather, fundamental changes in the systems of causality, time, and
space brought about a profoundly new approach to filmmaking, and the functions of individual stylistic
devices changed as well. Some techniques used infrequently in the primitive period—the cut-in, point-of-
view and eyeline structures, dialogue inter-titles, and so on—became central means of constructing space
and conveying narrative information in the teens. Key devices of the primitive cinema changed in their
function. The lengthy tableau shots became establishing shots; expository titles which formerly anticipated
action now merely established situations. The classical system is a change from the earlier one, not necessarily
an improvement upon it.
With the growing emphasis on calculating how a film could be understood came new normative systems
within the production sector. The growth of a trade press after 1907 (brought about by the nickelodeon
boom and regularization of production) contributed to making these norms uniform across the industry.
Almost from the beginning trade papers and instruction books emphasized a specific conception of what
288 THE CONTINUITY SYSTEM
constitutes a good film. In one of the earlier scenario books, Herbert Case Hoagland, of Pathé Frères, gave
this advice to writers:2
Let one scene [shot] lead into the next scene wherever possible. Motion picture theater goers don’t
yearn for mental gymnastics and shouldn’t be kept guessing as to who the characters are or why they
are in the story at all.… Keep your scenes in a sequence easily followed by the onlooker.
Increasingly, the conception of quality in films came to be bound up with the term ‘continuity.’ ‘Continuity’
stood for the smoothly flowing narrative, with its technique constantly in the service of the causal chain, yet
always effacing itself. Later, ‘continuity’ came specifically to refer to a set of guidelines for cutting shots
together, but the original implications of the term lingered on. The ‘continuity system’ still connotes a set of
goals and principles which underlie the entire classical filmmaking system.
One of the best descriptions of continuity was written before the term was being applied commonly to
film. In 1910, a commentator in The Nickelodeon outlined what constituted great films:3
Their greatness has been established through the medium of a strong story, interpreted by artistic
players and illuminated by splendid photography. Invariably the stories have been easily defined and
followed and every gesture correctly interpreted. The director who knows his dramatic technique, that
subtle, indiscernible thread or mesh, binding and blending scenes [shots] and parts into a harmonious
whole is, perhaps, the greatest influence in making the story thoroughly convincing; thrilling us when
we should be thrilled, making us laugh or cry at the appointed times, and leaving us, at the end of the
film, in a beatific frame of mind, without a doubt to be cleared, without the jar of a false gesture.
The basic principles of Hollywood film practice are here already: the story as the basis of the film, the
technique as an ‘indiscernible thread,’ the audience as controlled and comprehending, and complete closure
as the end of all. Moreover, these ideas soon came to be accepted as a set of truisms. This remark might
have appeared in virtually the same terms at any point in Hollywood’s history since 1910.
This is not to say that the continuity system was conceived of by 1910. Most of its principles were set
forth and tested in the years up to 1917. But given this set of goals for narrative filmmaking, each new
technique or device could easily take its place within an overriding formal system.
The term ‘continuity’ itself soon came into common usage. Initially it occurred in the scenario columns
and books. Filmmakers assumed that if a scenario were correctly constructed, shot by shot, they could
simply follow it literally in production, and their film would automatically have a continuously coherent
narrative. So, until the late teens, references to ‘continuity’ are usually addressed to scenario writers and
refer to a flow of story across changing shots. Compare these bits of advice:4
[From a 1912 Photoplay scenario column:]

Continuity of events is a feature of the best pictures ever made. Avoid these ‘twenty-year after’
stories.
[A 1913 definition of ‘continuity of action’:]
While unity of action is one of the fundamentals of a model dramatic action, this unity must be
visibly continuous to render it distinctly and easily perceptible.
[A 1914 scenario book:]
Unbroken continuity or perfect cohesion of story unity—of which every intelligent audience is ever
conscious—that knows no such things as gaps, breaks or retrogressive movement.
[And a 1917 essay on the topic in Photoplay:]

It is the placing of the many scenes that go to make up the photoplay in a logical sequence, so that
the play may run perfectly smoothly, without breaks or jumps which otherwise would have to be
covered by wordy and explanatory subtitles.
Some of these advisors were themselves also scenario editors for the production companies; their guidelines
would help determine the kinds of material accepted for filming. In late 1913, Epes Winthrop Sargent’s
column in The Moving Picture World informed freelance writers that Phil Lang, at Kalem, wanted
‘continuity’ in the scripts submitted to him; these should have no ‘jumps,’ where the character in one shot
appeared in the next one in a new locale.5 By about 1915, trade journals like Motography began publishing
‘how I did it’ articles signed by filmmakers. In one of that year, William Desmond Taylor modestly
characterized his direction of a serial, The Diamond From the Sky, saying that ‘Its continuity is as near
perfection as it is possible to obtain.’6 In 1917, Ince described how films from his studios were always
viewed many times, ‘with the one idea of avoiding inconsistencies in continuity and technique.’7
‘Continuity’ quickly developed from a general notion of narrative unity to the more specific conception
of a story told in visual terms and continuing unbroken, spatially and temporally, from shot to shot. This led
to the word’s being applied to the shooting script itself. As Chapter 12 has described, the continuity was a
numbered list of shots used as a means of planning the entire production. Thus the shot became not a
material unit but a narrative one (as evidenced by the almost universal use of the word ‘scene’ for a ‘shot’).
The implication here is that filmmakers took the narrative of a film to equal the sum total of all its shots.
This procedure of decoupage precludes any notion of using segments of time and space for their own sake,
of elevating them above the narrative at any point. A scenarist at Huffman-Foursquare Pictures described
good continuity scripting in 1917: ‘No scene [shot] which does not advance the action can be allowed to
have a place in the script. Every scene must be in its proper place.’8 Most of the rules or guidelines that
were gradually formulated during the teens had as their common purpose the subordination of devices to a
dominant narrative. Not just shots, but everything, had to serve its narrative function. In 1914, Phillips
wrote: ‘We employ nothing—property, actor, scene [shots], spectacle, spoken word, insert, incident or
device —in the perfect photoplay that has not a bearing on the climax of the play.’9 In this chapter, we will
see how editing rules were introduced during the teens and assimilated into the dominant filmmaking
system.
Establishing shots
The long framing was the earliest device for creating and maintaining a clear narrative space. When other
spatial devices were introduced— cut-ins, multiple spaces—the long shot ceased to present virtually all the
action. Instead, it acquired a more specific function, that of establishing space. (The long shot can also have
other functions, such as displaying spectacular mise-en-scene or suggesting a character’s isolation in a vast
space, but these usually occur in addition to the basic establishing function.) Multiple spaces involve cutting
together shots that show entirely different locales, whether at a distance from each other or contiguous;
analytical editing cuts to portions of a single space. In the classical system, the establishing shot is so
important that these other devices usually are organized around it. A film can have multiple spaces without
analytical editing, and vice-versa; but to maintain ‘correct’ continuity according to the classical system, both
multiple-space cutting and analytical editing depend on establishing shots.
The earliest staged films of 1893 and several years thereafter were tiny scenes, single events hardly long
enough to be narratives. Edison Kinetoscope films usually ran less than a minute; one 1893 Kinetoscope
film shows a drunken man in medium-long shot, stumbling in a park; a policeman approaches and they
struggle. In such films, there is automatic narrative continuity— one event entirely visible throughout.
With the increasing length of films, an extended narrative action might be played out, still within a single
locale; historians have termed this one-shot scene the tableau. A one-shot film, Street Car Chivalry (1903,
Edison), for example, shows a row of men sitting in a street car; they move to accommodate a pretty
woman, then refuse to do the same for a homely woman until she tricks them. Here we have several events
forming a brief narrative, but still played in long shot within a single space; without cuts, shifts in space and
time do not occur, and hence continuity is not yet a factor.
But occasional films in the years 1897 to 1903 introduced multiple spaces. In most cases, such films
string a series of tableaux together, with each scene acted out completely within the space of the image and
without any movement of the action into a contiguous space. In some cases, each is preceded by an inter-
title, as in the most famous example of this type, Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edwin S. Porter, 1903,
Edison). There was no clear-cut progression from one technique to another during the primitive period.
Single-shot films (Street Car Chivalry) and series of tableaux (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) continued to exist side
by side, lingering into the phase of films involving multiple spaces and cut-ins.10
Later, in the teens, when scenes were regularly cut up into multiple shots, the single long shot showing
initial spatial relations became one portion of the scene, usually coming at the beginning. Its function then
became specifically to establish a whole space which was then cut into segments or juxtaposed with long
shots of other spaces. Early cut-ins to closer framings were rare and always came after longer views of the
same space and before a return to the same long view— a re-establishing shot. There was thus little need for
filmmakers to specify the placement and function of the establishing shot.
But in the mid-teens, close-ups were becoming standard: only a third of the ES films from 1912 had cut-
ins, and only one had two of them; of the 1913 films, slightly over half had cut-ins (several with two or
three, and a couple with cut-ins involving a distinct change of angle); by 1914, every ES film had at least
one cut-in.
Now that filmmakers were regularly dealing with more than one shot per scene, they formulated
guidelines specifying the placement of the establishing shot, cut-in, and re-establishing shot. Sargent
commented in 1914 on the increasing use of close-ups: ‘Lately we saw a subject in which a setting room
was used. At various times three portions of this room were used for close-up pictures, instead of always
using the full set.’ Sargent approved the close view, but cautioned that ‘it should be used sparingly, where
the close-up is but a part of a scene, the opening and closing of which uses the full stage.’11 This advice
suggests that filmmakers in the early teens still thought of the long shot as the basis of the scene, with the
cut-in an occasional, effective variant.
But in the second half of the teens, Hollywood’s discourse sometimes assigned a more limited, specific
function to the long view. Now it became a part of an overall scene consisting of many shots, and it served
to establish spatial relationships. A 1918 trade-paper review of Lois Weber’s For Husbands Only
recommends ‘a long shot placing the locations of the various situations during the time Miss Harris
overhears the conversation between Cody and Miss Kirkwood.’12 In the four years between Sargent’s
statement and this review, the conception of cutting had changed considerably. Earlier, a scene consisted of
long shots, book-ending one or more close shots. After 1917, filmmakers would build scenes up from a
variety of different angles, with the long shot often no more important than any other. Around 1920,
Hollywood usage dubbed the long shot’s function as that of ‘establishing’ characters’ relations in space.13*
By the mid-teens filmmakers had so normalized the establishing shot’s function that they could
systematically vary its placement within the scene. A film might begin its first scene on a close shot of a
character’s face, then later show an establishing view. Often an inter-title precedes the close shot, describing
the character we are about to see for the first time. The first shot of The Fatal Opal (George Melford, 1914,
Kalem) frames a man in medium shot, then cuts back to a long shot of him in a courtroom, revealing the
man to be a judge. Some films insert a brief series of analytical close shots before establishing the whole
space. In the opening of The Case of Becky (Frank Reicher, 1915, Lasky) we see the villainous hypnotist
Balzano in medium close-up after a title introduces him; a cut to a plan américain shows him to be onstage
doing his act. Only later in the scene does a long shot frame both the audience and the stage. Another 1915
film, The Woman (a one-reeler, production company unknown) starts with a shot/reverse-shot conversation
between a couple, before a plan américain shows that they are at a party. We quickly learn the situation, while
seeing the two characters’ appearances. In all these cases, the function of beginning on a close shot is to
show the appearance of the characters and create first impressions about them. An initial close view would
also support the new acting style and would emphasize character as a source of narrative causality. None of
these films, however, begins on a close shot in any scene after the opening, and all move to an establishing
shot fairly soon.
In the later teens, filmmakers occasionally delayed the establishing shot for other purposes. A scene may
mislead the spectator for comic effect, as in the second sequence of Wild and Woolly (John Emerson, 1917,
The Douglas Fairbanks Corp.). The scene begins with a medium shot of Jeff seated in cowboy clothes by a
teepee; a track back to long shot shows us that the ‘campsite’ is actually inside his bedroom. Here we get not
only a clear view of a new character, but the delayed establishing view humorously undercuts our first
impression. Another function of beginning on a close shot is to emphasize important details which reveal
the narrative situation of the scene more clearly than a long shot would. In all these functions of the
delayed long shot, compositional motivation justifies the use of the less predictable schema; the variation on
the standard opening is not arbitrary.
Many films of the 1920s make subtle use of the delayed long shot. The opening of Mantrap (Victor
Fleming, 1926, Famous Players-Lasky) provides an example of a quick revelation of narrative situation
through detail. Without any introductory in ter-title, the credits lead directly to a medium close-up of a
woman’s foot touching a man’s, which he moves away (see fig 16.1); a tilt up shows the woman speaking to
a point off right front (fig 16.2). The dialogue title that follows gives the situation: ‘—and he said I flirted. A
clever lawyer like you should get me heaps of alimony!’ After the title, we see a medium closeup of the
woman, who raises a make-up case to cover her face (fig 16.3). The next shot shows her point-of-view of
her own face in the mirror, which she then lowers to reveal the lawyer, with an annoyed expression on his
face (fig 16.4); we later discover that his experience in handling divorces has led him to mistrust all women.
Finally a tight long shot establishes them at his desk, with law books prominently visible to confirm that
this is a lawyer’s office (fig 16.5). The delayed establishing shot, while not the most probable schema,
would remain a common alternative to the analytical breakdown of the scene.
Analytical editing
An insert is filmed matter which is inserted in appropriate place in a scene, the film being cut
for this purpose. This matter must appear and be known as an insert to the writer and
manufacturer only; to the audience, it becomes the normal, logical, and only natural phenomena
that could be presented under the circumstances.14
Henry Albert Phillips, 1914
In primitive films, cut-ins occurred rarely and served a number of different functions. Most frequently, the
move to a closer framing allowed the viewer to see facial expression more clearly,15* although the
expression might be broad comic mugging rather than the later ‘American’-style acting discussed in the
previous chapter. Another common function for the closer shot would be the revelation of a detail not
sufficiently visible in the main tableau shot. But the cut-in could also simulate the point-of-view of a
character within the scene, and occasionally it aided in the creation of a trick photographic effect.
Some of the closer shots to show facial expression were not, strictly speaking, cut-ins. Following the lead of
The Great Train Robbery, quite a number of films of 1903–5 begin or end with medium shots of the
characters; these may introduce the characters before the action proper begins, as in The Widow and the
Only Man (1904, AM&B), where we see the two title characters in separate shots posing against a white
background. The Bold Bank Robbery (1904, Lubin) begins similarly with a medium shot of the three
smiling robbers in evening dress and ends with a cut-in within a prison scene; now the three are in convicts’
stripes, frowning. Here the close shots structure the beginning and ending, providing a ‘crime doesn’t pay’
moral for the whole. Some close shots for facial expression may constitute the entire action of a brief film,
with no long shots to frame them, as in The May Irwin—John C. Rice Kiss (1896, Edison) and The Old
Maid in a Drawing Room (1900, Edison). So the close shot for facial expression could either comprise a
whole scene or come before a longer shot of the same action.
From its earliest occurrence until the early teens, the cut-in for detail comes between two long shots taken
from the same camera set-up. Barry Salt has pointed out an early cut-in in The Sick Kitten (1903?), which he
identifies as a rerelease of The Little Doctor, a 1901 British film.16 (Urban’s 1903 catalogue in fact
describes The Sick Kitten as an abridged version of The Little Doctor, offering both versions for sale. The
Little Doctor, possibly originally entitled The Little Doctor and the Sick Kitten, was apparently made c.
1901. Only the shorter version is known to survive, but the Urban catalogue specifically mentions the cut to
a closer view in The Little Doctor.) This brief film begins with a medium-long shot of two children
preparing to administer a dose from a bottle marked ‘Fisik’ to a kitten sitting in the girl’s lap (see fig 16.6).
The cut-in to a medium close-up of the cat (fig 16.7) shows clearly the action of the cat lapping at the spoon’s
contents. Such small actions would have been indiscernible in the original framing. The Sick Kitten ends
after a cut back to the medium-long-shot framing. A similar pattern occurs in The Gay Shoe Clerk Porter,
1903, Edison), in which the central medium close-up emphasizes the detail of the customer raising her skirt
to reveal her ankle; the cut-in thus explains to the audience why the clerk impulsively kisses her in the third
shot, a reestablishing view of the store. In both these cases, the motivation for the cut-in is compositional,
for without the closer view, we could not follow the action adequately.
Some early films motivate cut-ins as subjective shots. The subjective shot almost invariably is at least
partly motivated realistically, since the camera lens is assumed to be imitating what a character’s eye would
see. In Grandpa’s Reading Glass (1902, AM&B), a series of long shots shows some children examining
objects with a magnifying glass. These shots alternate with close framings, masked as if from the children’s
point-of-view through the glass, of unmoving people or objects. In The 100-to-One Shot (1906, Vitagraph),
there is a long shot of a grassy area in which horses are being walked before a race; the hero enters and
finds a paper dropped by a rich bettor (see fig 16.8). A cut to a medium close-up, point-of-view shot shows
his hands unfolding the paper (fig 16.9).
The earliest examples of point-of-view cut-ins occur in films which depend almost entirely upon the
novelty effect of the close view. Grandpa’s Reading Glass contains no other action and minimal causal
progression; the whole thing consists of the children’s series of examinations of objects and people. The cut-
ins are motivated realistically (the children would see the objects from these points in space) and artistically
(the close views are of interest in themselves), but not compositionally (they give us no new story
information). But The 100-to-One Shot embeds its subjective shot within a larger narrative chain,
motivating it compositionally by giving it causal functions; the paper in figure 16.9 contains a tip on a horse,
which the hero reads and uses to win his bet. This compositionally motivated point-of-view cut-in later
becomes the norm in the transitional period 1909–17.
Besides enlarging facial expression, providing details, and representing optical subjectivity, cutins during
this period could construct a more limited space within which special effects could be created. Two
American Mutoscope and Biograph films which use extended and intricate pixillation shots are The Tired
Tailor’s Dream (1907) and The Sculptor’s Nightmare (1908). In each, the basic space of the scene is
established, then cutins eliminate the human figures in order to facilitate the lengthy stop-motion process of
animating objects. Vitagraph’s Princess Nicotine J.Stuart Blackton, 1909) cuts in numerous times to tiny
figures cavorting on a table. Here the special effects were mainly accomplished by building over-sized
matches and cigarettes, with actresses playing the parts of the princess and her friend. When trick films
declined after about 1909, so did the use of cut-ins for this purpose. But certain special effects would always
depend on cutting to a new view of the scene’s space.
Through most of the pre-1909 period, films seldom matched action or position between the long and
close views. At the end of the first shot of The Sick Kitten (fig 16.6 is the last frame of this shot), the girl
reaches for the bottle of medicine; at the beginning of the close shot (fig 16.7 is the first frame), her hand is
already holding a spoon to the cat’s mouth. There is no attempt to match on action or position, since the girl
had not even begun to pour the medicine before the cut. A similar mismatch on her arm’s position occurs at
the cut back to the third and final shot. In the cutin from The 100-to-One Shot (see figs 16.8 and 16.9), the
close shot shows the hands and paper against a light, neutral background; given the surroundings visible in
the long shot, the paper should be seen against grass. Here the mismatch is one of setting rather than
position or action. The Gay Shoe Clerk does match the clerk’s hand movement at one of the cuts. This may
have been an accident, but at least the film successfully conveys a continuous event over the cuts by
matching on position; The Lost Child (1904, AM&B) does the same thing on a cut-in to a pursued man holding
up a guinea pig. The only other example of a match on action in the early years of the ES occurred in a
much later film, The Unexpected Guest (1909, Lubin). In long shot, a man moves to a desk; then a cut to a
medium close-up has an imprecise match on his hands cutting the PS away from a letter. There are
undoubtedly other cut-ins with matches, but the usual use of a cut-in in the primitive period was to a static
object or character. The Unexpected Guest is moving toward a conception of skilled matching which would
become one sign of a well-executed classical film.
On the whole, however, before 1911 or so, cutins were not common for any purpose. Even when closer
shots became more acceptable, most filmmakers initially sought to avoid cuts within a space. Frequently
staging could render a cut-in unnecessary. If a filmmaker wanted to insure that facial expression was
visible, the actors simply moved closer to the camera. In the first shot of After One Hundred Years (1911,
Selig) a group of characters stand outside an inn; the innkeeper comes out to greet them (see fig 16.10). One
man and the innkeeper come forward to talk, thereby identifying the film’s central character (fig 16.11).
This practice contrasts sharply with the more decentered framings of earlier years; compare the stock
market shot from A Corner in Wheat (Griffith, 1909, AB) in which the bustling characters all claim equal
attention. No framing or staging device guides the spectator’s eyes to the most relevant actions in that shot.
Similar framings with the characters stepping forward occur frequently in the early teens. In Cinderella
(1911, Thanhouser), the Prince picks up the lost slipper in long shot, carries it forward, and extends it
toward the camera, then goes back up the palace steps. A Tale of Two Cities (William Humphrey, 1911,
Vitagraph) opens with a long shot of a party at the Marquis’s home, with the Marquis in the depth of the
shot (see fig 16.12). He comes into medium-long shot to give orders to a servant (fig 16.13). At Old Fort
Dearborn (1912, Bison ‘101’) contains a more elaborate example, with a long shot framing a soldier who
comes out of a saloon and accosts an Indian woman (see fig 16.14). As an officer and the woman’s father
enter to stop him, the whole group moves forward (fig 16.15). After the Indians go out, the two men take one
more step forward into plan américain as the officer berates the soldier (fig 16.16).
The practice of moving characters toward the camera has never entirely disappeared. But by the mid-
teens the cut-in had become an equally important way of providing a closer view of the characters. At the
same period, movement toward the camera was handled in a less obvious fashion, with a deeper setting
extending the acting space forward. Movement toward the camera became part of the realistically motivated
staging of the scene, rather than a movement made solely to allow the spectator a better view. In The Cheat
(Cecil B.DeMille, 1915, Lasky), for example, the husband and his friend stroll slowly and casually forward
in the parlor after dinner. Here the movement is motivated by their desire to discuss their investment plans
out of the earshot of guests in the depth of the room. There is no sense here, as there is in the earlier
examples just described, of the actors crossing an empty foreground space simply to get closer to the
camera. As with other devices, realistic and compositional motivation combine to make the mechanics of
film style less noticeable.
In spite of attempts to use staging to avoid cutins, after 1910 filmmakers increased their dependence on
closer shots. Sometimes the narrative situation necessitated a view of a detail which for some reason could
not be brought forward to the camera. In the first scene of After One Hundred Years, as we have seen, the
actors move into closer view. Later, in the last scene, the hero discovers a bullet-hole in the mantelpiece of
his inn room (see fig 16.17). As he inspects it, there is a cut-in with a match on action (fig 16.18). Shamus
O’Brien (Otis Turner, 1912, Imp) contains a plan américain in which the fugitive Shamus’s family read a letter
from him. Barely visible outside the slatted window is listening a treacherous neighbor who will turn
Shamus in (see fig 16.19). There follows a close-up of the neighbor (fig 16.20), partly in order to catch his
gleeful expression, but primarily to guarantee that we see this important bit of narrative information, which
is partly hidden by the window in the long shot. In each case, the cut-in emphasizes a detail associated with
a fixed portion of the set.
The Shamus O’Brien example shows how set construction could also necessitate a change of angle at the
cut. But once the cut-in had come into general use, filmmakers did not always need such a pretext to vary the
vantage point on the scene. The Girl of the Cabaret (1913, Thanhouser) establishes the hero, at foreground
right, sitting at a table watching a cabaret violinist (fig 16.21). A cut-in catches his reaction, moving nearly
180° to the other side of the table from the long shot (fig 16.22). But most cut-ins still moved straight in to
capture detail.
By the mid-teens, cut-ins routinely function not only to guarantee the visibility of narrative action, but to
aid characterization as well. We saw in the previous chapter how the new facial acting style encouraged
closer framings. This style may have been a major cause of the steadily increasing cutting tempo during the
teens. Cecil B.DeMille, commenting in 1923 on the increase in the number of shots over the past ten years,
attributed it to an increasing emphasis on character psychology:17
In the old days we would have ‘shot’ a struggle scene in a ‘long shot,’ showing, perhaps, two men
fighting on the floor with a woman at one side. In the long shot we could get only a suggestion of the
emotions being experienced. The physical action, yes, but the soul action, the reaction of the
mentalities concerned, the surging of love, hate, fear, up from the heart and into the expressive
muscles of the face, the light of the eyes, that, indeed, is something you can only get by a flash to a
close-up or semi-close-up.
And it is these flashes, short but telling, that have caused some scenario writers to increase scene
numbers.
A more regular use of crosscutting and contiguous spaces would also tend to increase the average number
of shots per reel during this period. Along with the acting shift, the rise of the star system also encouraged
the use of closer framings. Filmmakers moved in upon the famous faces in order to allow spectators to gaze
upon their favourites. These closer shots were not the lingering glamor shots of the twenties and thirties, but
they served somewhat the same function. Pickford’s first appearance in her early feature The Eagle’s Mate
(James Kirkwood, 1914, Famous Players) epitomizes this usage. We see her first in a medium-long shot,
emerging from the forest (see fig 16.23). Even though she is clearly recognizable from this view, a cut-in to
a medium shot follows (fig 16.24). Here Mary plays with a bird on a branch—an action which helps to
characterize her, but which also allows the camera to dwell on her. These actions could have been handled
in one shot, but the division into two prolongs Pickford’s entrance.
During the mid-teens, the cut-in quickly changed from an occasional necessity to a standard device in
creating an omnipresent narration. For a few years, from about 1914 to 1917, practitioners seem to have
conceived of cutins as a way simply to add variety and interest to a scene. Scenario guidebooks advised
using cutins to speed up a scene, whether or not there was any specific reason to change framings. Consider
the following statements:18
[1914] The close-view has no rival for breaking dangerously long scenes in a manner so natural and
potential that oftentimes it makes a brilliant presentation of something that would in all probability
have become tedious.
[1917] Main scenes must not be too long. If they threaten to be so, they must be broken up by close-
ups or flash-backs [i.e., cutaways].
The cut-in thus contributed to the increasing tempo of editing in the teens. But after 1917, most writers
advocated the use of close shots for specific narrative purposes—not just to liven up a scene’s rhythm. A
1921 scenario manual echoed the earlier writers, saying: ‘Occasionally the close-up is used to “break up” a
sequence that would be too long and monotonous were the action therein contained shown in one lengthy
and sustained long-shot’; however, the same writer specified that the usual uses of the close-up are ‘to show
a close, detailed view of that which is not sufficiently clear or which lacks emphasis in a more distant and
general scene. In the case of a human face, it is occasionally necessary or desirous to show the details of
expression, conveying an emotion.’19 After 1914, no UnS or ES films lacked cut-ins, and about 1916, the cut-
in with a match on a moving object was almost as frequent as the static match. Certainly by 1917, the advent
of the classical period, filmmakers had formulated the analytical presentation of a scene through
establishing, cutting in, and re-establishing.
Moreover, by 1917, the cut-ins could be taken from a variety of angles, as the films of Fairbanks, Ray,
and Pickford show. A scene from a 1918 Ray film, The Hired Hand (Victor Schertzinger, Thomas Ince
Corp.), begins with an establishing shot of mother, daughter, and servant in a kitchen (see fig 16.25). A medium
shot of the mother follows; she looks off left and speaks (fig 16.26). This leads to a reverse medium shot of
the daughter looking right, listening (fig 16.27), and then to a re-establishing shot from a new angle,
emphasizing the servant as she comes forward to speak with the mother (fig 16.28). Here the back wall
provides a spatial anchor from shot to shot (note how the three lanterns on a shelf recur in each shot), but
the filmmakers no longer conceive of the space as a flat, frontal tableau. Rather than simply cutting straight
in, the filmmakers have created a new angle on the space for each shot. Guiding spectator attention through
frequent shifts in vantage point, analytical editing became a familiar schema that aided easy comprehension
of all classical films.
The introduction of the cut-in as a standard device and the resulting breakdown of a single scene into
multiple shots bring up the question of screen direction (later to be called the ‘axis of action’ or ‘180°
rule’). The maintenance of screen direction from shot to shot is one of the basic principles which American
filmmakers would use to orient the spectator to the story action. There never was a period in the history of
the US cinema when screen direction was random. Originally the tableau staging and framing precluded the
need for any question of direction; space was presented whole. Furthermore, early cut-ins failed to disturb
the clarity of this space. There was seldom any question of moving to the other side of the action. The
standard painted sets had only a backdrop and perhaps two small segments of other walls at the sides. In
order to keep the setting in the background of the closer shot, the camera had to stay on the same side of the
characters. Since filmmakers usually did close-ups directly after the long shots, by simply carrying their
cameras forward, problems seldom arose, even in exteriors done without sets.
Occasionally, in later films, there are closer shots, especially of characters, taken from the side of the
action opposite to the vantage of the establishing shot. Such breaks in continuity are rare, and probably
result from successive shots being done at different times from the long shot. (We have seen how shooting
‘out of continuity’ was necessary to maintain efficiency in the production process.) In Girl Shy (Fred
Neumayer, 1924, Harold Lloyd Corp.), close-ups of Harold’s typewriter after each fantasy scene, a close-up
of the villain stroking the maid’s hand, and a medium shot of Harold pulling the lever to dump a workman
from the back of a wagon, are all filmed from the opposite side to the establishing shot. Only one of these
disjunctive cuts is compositionally motivated: since the villain conceals his gesture with his hat, we can see
it only because the camera crosses over the axis of action. In the other two cases, we must assume either
that the staff confused the direction when making the close shots or were willing to overlook a few
irregularities. On the whole, however, violations of screen direction were so rare that contemporary writers
did not refer to screen direction as a problematic aspect of cutting in, but only in relation to scenes of multiple
contiguous spaces.
There can be little doubt that the concept of screen direction stems from the primitive period, when the
spectator viewed the action from a distance, as if in a theater seat. In a play performed on a proscenium-arch
stage, one does not suddenly see the action from the other side; stage right and left remain consistent. Later,
as analytical editing became more common, the film spectator ceased to see the bulk of the action from a
fixed point. The shifts created at the cuts by the narration do not imply that filmmakers conceived of the
spectator as a disembodied spirit capable of moving anywhere within the space.
Analytical editing, Hollywood commentators tell us, follows the ‘natural attention’ of the spectator. First
the onlooker surveys the scene (establishing shot); as the action continues, he or she focuses upon a detail
(cut-in), or glances back and forth at the participants in a conversation (shot/reverse shot), or glances to the
side when distracted by a sound or motion (cutaway). But while the attention may flit here and there, it
never departs from the physical ties of the spectator to the degree that it crosses the line to view the opposite
side of the action. Arbitrary as this conception of the spectator is, it has governed Hollywood practice from
the earliest years.
By 1917, analytical editing was used consistently through whole films. And as early as 1915, Sargent
offered a remarkable summary of the closer shot’s use in a hypothetical scene:20
It is worth while noting the growing tendency to use the close-up. This was very intelligently handled
in a recent Kalem when, to borrow an expression of a writer, ‘they shot all over the darned room,’ and
got strongly effective results.
For an illustration let us say that the scene is laid in the Senate Chamber in Washington. Hawkins, a
newcomer, is trying to force through a bill ‘for the relief’ of his sweetheart’s father. Jorkins, one of
the old Wheel horses and senior senator from the same state, seeks to defeat the bill because of his
dislike for the girl’s father. Hawkins is to make his big speech.
To show the matter adequately would require a tiresome stay in the same big set. One or the other of
the leading players would be too far from the camera to show up well. In this case the large scene
would show the floor of the chamber, but instead of holding the action there it would flash back and
forth between the two men, to the girl and her father in the balcony, and perhaps to the press gallery
where Hawkins’ friend, a correspondent from the home paper, helps to swing the tide. All of the
players would be seen in the occasional big set, but there would be a succession of close-up pictures
of the principals, with an occasional return to the big scene. It would be perhaps a threehundred-foot
scene, yet divided up into perhaps twenty-five or thirty sections, avoiding monotony.
Sargent’s description could almost apply to the filibuster scene of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank
Capra, 1939, Columbia). His reference to ‘the occasional big set’ advocates the periodic return to a re-
establishing shot, but no longer does Sargent consider the close-up as a brief interruption of the basic single
long shot comprising the scene.
Analytical editing breaks a single locale into different views; cutting to create multiple spaces expands
the narrative space outward. There are two basic patterns for editing multiple spaces together: joining
contiguous spaces and crosscutting (i.e., joining non-contiguous spaces). I shall examine the former first,
since it was the first to develop into a standard way of constructing space.
Multiple spaces
Movement between spaces and screen direction
The film cutter must know continuity, have a slight knowledge of directions, and an eye keen and
embracing.21
Frank Atkinson (cutter at Universal), 1924
When a film presents contiguous spaces in separate shots, it needs some method for showing the viewer that
these spaces are indeed next to each other. There are different ways of providing cues: a character or object
moving from one space to another might link them together; or a character looking offscreen in one
direction might lead the viewer to surmise that the next shot shows the space that character sees.
Character movement was the most common cue for linking contiguous spaces in the early cinema; it
appeared widely from about 1903. In The Somnambulist (1903, AM&B), we see the interior of a bedroom
and three shots of various parts of a rooftop outside as a woman gets up and sleep-walks across the roof.
There is a match on the action of her coming through the door that gives a strong cue for contiguous spaces;
at the other cuts, she exits to and enters from offscreen. A Search for Evidence (1903, AM&B) presents
several segments of a hotel corridor, shifting laterally two doors at a time, as a woman and man move
through from right to left, peeking through each keyhole. The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903, Edison)
contains a pair of shots in which the robbers move from their hold-up of the passengers by the side of the
train to the engine, in which they make their escape.
The year 1903 also saw the release of some early chase films. The chase, with its characters moving from
shot to shot, became one of the standard ways of using multiple spaces in subsequent years. The Pickpocket
(1903, AM&B) begins with a long shot as a thief robs and beats a man. The thief runs out at the foreground.
Other people run in to help the victim; then this group runs out at the foreground as well. There follow
thirteen more shots of various spaces, with characters in different combinations running through, usually
toward the front and from left to right (the main directional variation being that sometimes they exit to the
right of the camera, sometimes to the left). The multiple spaces even include locales above and below each
other as several policemen chase the pickpocket over high stacks of lumber.
The movement from shot to shot in such films is usually fairly comprehensible, as long as the characters
are recognizable. This is true whether or not they keep constant screen direction. In the case of The
Pickpocket, screen direction is not always strictly maintained. But again, films tended from the start to keep
the characters moving from space to space in a reasonably consistent direction. These chase films were
probably the earliest to standardize a dependence on screen direction to link multiple contiguous spaces. As
in The Pickpocket, all the characters in such films would exit entirely, and a cut would reveal a new space
nearby, with the characters entering after the cut. In most outdoor chase shots, the characters moved
diagonally from the rear to exit in the foreground, just to one side of the camera. Examples occur in the first
film to popularize the chase genre in this country, Personal (1904, AM&B). Here a group of women pursue
a man through each of the eleven shots; they exit variously left and right, but always move toward the front,
passing close to the camera. Similar chases occur in the same company’s The Lone Highwayman (1906),
Her First Adventure (1908; see fig 16.29), and Trying to Get Arrested (Griffith, 1909).22* During the
decade, movements through contiguous spaces appeared more frequently in non-chase situations as well.
As with analytical editing, the conception of screen direction between contiguous spaces probably derives
in part from the fixed position of the spectator in proscenium theater. In the later decades of the nineteenth
century, spectacular productions sometimes employed a series of perspective backdrops to change locales
quickly; at times, characters might move across the stage repeatedly through several represented settings,
suggesting a progress through contiguous spaces. For instance, Nicholas Vardac describes an 1887
production of David Copperfield which staged the famous shipwreck scene in which Steerforth dies. A
series of three settings, all changed without the curtain being closed, moved the characters through space:
beginning in ‘The Ark Interior,’ as the characters rush out to the rescue, moving to an area ‘Near the Beach’
as the rescue party runs across the stage, and finally to ‘the Sea in a Storm’ with the ship sinking and the
characters rushing in to attempt the rescue. According to Vardac, the changes of backdrop were
accompanied by ‘sound effects, offstage noises, and the action itself running continuously.’23 For Vardac,
the three scenes resemble a series of film shots, with ‘dissolves’ between. But beyond this, one significant
aspect of this staging is the fact that the actors run across the stage to the left, exit, run across toward the left
again, and so on. Were they not to maintain this constant direction, it is not clear that the spatial
relationships among the Ark, Beach, and Storm backdrops would be apparent. There is but a small step from
such a series of contiguous spaces on the Victorian stage to the series of shots in a primitive chase film.
The early use of screen direction depended on the fact that there were few shots, and that the same
framing seldom recurred elsewhere in the film. But filming numerous shots which would later have to fit
together with other shots done in different locales, on different days, made screen direction harder to
control. After 1909, with the introduction of the shooting script and its attendant scene plot, it became more
convenient to shoot out of continuity. In 1911, Frank Woods commented upon inconsistent screen direction
and its possible production causes:
Attention has been called frequently in Mirror film reviews to apparent errors of direction or
management as to exits and entrances in motion picture production.… A Player will be seen leaving a
room or locality in a certain direction, and in the very next connecting scene, a sixteenth of a second
later, he will enter in exactly the opposite direction. Now it may be argued quite logically that this
need not necessarily be inartistic, because the spectator himself may be assumed to change his point
of view, but (oh, that word!) the spectator will not look at it that way. Any one who has watched
pictures knows how often his sense of reality has been shocked by this very thing. To him it is as if
the player had turned abruptly around in a fraction of a second and was moving the other way.
Woods suggests that: ‘It is probable that the trouble is due in some instances to the fact that interior scenes
are made first and exteriors cannot always be made to accommodate themselves.’24 Indeed, most changes in
screen direction in films of the early teens seem to result from shooting in different locales, then trying to
match up the results. Particularly problematic are movements between interior and exterior locales. There
are also instances where the different interior sets were not planned to take entrances and exits into account,
so that the character repeatedly changes direction between the two settings. Allan Dwan’s The Fear (1912,
American) shows an instance of a reversed screen direction which must have resulted from out-of-
continuity shooting. Throughout the film, we see shots made on a rocky beach; in one such shot, a character
exits toward the left front (see fig 16.30). In the next shot, he should approach from the right side of the
frame, but he comes in left (fig 16.31). Since these two spaces are never seen in a single framing, we can
assume that Dwan’s unit probably filmed in two locations far separated from each other and that no one kept
track of this particular movement. As a result, several movements and eyelines between these two spaces
are regularly mismatched in the same way.
Despite such occasional inconsistencies of screen direction, both films and contemporary writings
indicate that most filmmakers considered it an important factor. Of all the ES films for the period 1910 to
1915, inclusive, about two-thirds contained structures of multiple contiguous spaces through which
characters moved. Of these, less than one-fifth contained any violations of screen direction. Charles
G.Clarke, who became a cameraman in 1915, confirms that screen direction was a rule in force when he
began to work. He describes the belief current at that time: ‘If they exit left and enter left, they’re bumping
into themselves.’25
A 1912 Vitagraph one-reel film, Alma’s Champion, exemplifies the standard adherence to constant screen
direction. At the end of one shot the hero runs out front left (see fig 16.32), leaving the frame entirely. The
cut reveals a nearby space, into which he runs from the right (fig 16.33). Note here the carefully balanced
reverse angles, with the camera at the same basic mirror-image vantage in relation to the railroad tracks in
each shot. In The Warning (Donald Crisp, 1914, Majestic), the heroine runs out left, again exiting entirely
(see fig 16.34); in the next shot she runs in from the right (fig 16.35). This pattern is typical of the use of
movements to cue contiguous spaces in the early teens.
In 1914, an occasional film avoided the complete exit and entrance by using frame cuts (that is, cutting
with the character passing over the frameline itself). This sort of match is more difficult technically than
simply cutting when no figures are visible onscreen. The Eagle’s Mate has a cut as the Pickford character
moves away from the sick man she has been tending. The cut comes exactly as she is halfway out of the
frame (fig 16.36); in the next frame (fig 16.37), the new shot begins with her already halfway into the
image. (As we shall see, these shots lead directly into a shot/reverse-shot conversation; this, combined with
the sequence’s initial establishing shot, constitutes a fairly complex construction of the scenic space.)
After 1915, quite a few films continued to violate screen direction in relation to movements, but often
only once or twice in an entire feature film—no more than might occur in a film of the thirties or forties.
One reason that violations of screen direction occurred at all is that there was no established method for
avoiding them until the late teens, when the ‘script girl’ began to be a regularly assigned position. In the
early teens, there seems to have been some attempt to solve the problem by specifying screen direction in
the continuity script, extending its function as a blueprint guiding all aspects of production. Two 1913
screenplay advisers give the following instructions:26
Describe where each character enters or exits when necessary and how and with whom, i.e., tell where
he enters or exits—whether from the house, garden, or door—tell how he enters or exits—whether
arm-in-arm, frightened, walking, running, mounted, breathlessly, etc.
Describe when and where the characters are to enter the scene, giving the entrance, or the direction.
If they are to be in the scene at the beginning of the film, state that they are ‘discovered’ and give
their position.
In each case, the authors seem anxious to get the scenario writer to specify as much as possible about the
characters, not only to maintain screen direction, but also to aid in matching on action.
This attempt to make screen direction part of the written plans apparently did not work, however. While
some published specimen scenarios of this period mention directions of entrances, most fail to do so. And
set designers went on making an occasional set that did not allow for the matching of exit and extrance from
one locale to another. The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915, New York Motion Picture Co.), for example,
consistently mismatches movements from the outside of Gallia’s house to the inside. Planning, then, did not
always ensure proper screen direction.
In the mid-teens, the task of watching for directions of entrances and exits fell to someone on the set
during shooting. A 1913 account suggests that it was perhaps partly the cinematographer’s job; he ‘must
keep accurate account of every motion made during the run of the film. In this way he is also an assistant
stage manager.’27 When asked who was responsible for keeping track of the directions of the actors’
movements in the mid-teens, Clarke also credited the cinematographer: ‘I knew what the next shot would be
and kept track of exits and entrances.’28 Cameraman Hal Mohr confirms that at least some
cinematographers watched for screen direction. Mohr had worked as an editor during the teens, but was
behind the camera by 1921. Asked if his editing experience had helped him as a cameraman, Mohr
replied:29
It helped me a lot. Script girls used to get kind of mad at me, because they’d never have a chance; I’d
put pictures together, so I knew instinctively that the man had gotten off the horse and gone into the
saloon on camera left, so he had to come in the next scene from camera right, or from center down. So
I’d set up accordingly.
Clearly some cinematographers would be better at keeping track of continuity than others; all would have
other duties that would preclude their devoting complete attention to screen direction.
As Chapter 13 has pointed out, directors and assistant directors also tried to watch for this. When the number
of shots increased and screen direction became a normative rule, firms added a specific production role—
the ‘script girl,’ or continuity clerk—to keep continuity notes during the shooting. Apparently the role of the
script person emerged between 1917 and 1920.
By the late teens, not only did filmmakers watch for screen direction in shooting, but editors had
developed tactics for correcting problems when they arose. Helen Stair’s major 1918 Photoplay article on
editing discusses screen direction:30
The matter of progression is most important. If an actor is seen in a dining-room set and if he goes out
a door on the left of the set, it is obvious that when we next ‘pick him up’ in the parlor he must be
seen entering the parlor at the right of the screen. But sometimes the cutter finds that the director has
made a mistake in this regard. If so he can turn the film negative over.31*
Note Starr’s assumption that the need for maintaining screen direction is ‘obvious.’ William Hornbeck, an
editor who began as an assistant cutter at Keystone in 1917, discusses other ways of covering a problem; in
describing how an editor would cut together two shots in which the screen direction was reversed, he
recalled:32
You’d try to get a movement that would excuse it, a turn of the head or something—there were various
tricks that you could try. You’d go to a closer shot or a longer shot. Oh, there’s dozens of things you
could devise. Make an insert even; if they were handling something, put an insert in.
In some cases, editors might even arrange to have shots redone—especially a close shot which would cost
little to make and which could cover an error.
By the late teens, filmmakers counted on audiences’ ‘reading’ screen direction in specific ways. Starr
discussed how an editor could save money on a production; using a recent battle scene as an example, she
quotes the editor’s description of how the sequence was done:33
‘There were only seventy real soldiers in that scene,’ explained the cutter. ‘We cut the picture so that
it seemed as if thousands took part— first a long shot of the seventy fighting amid battle smoke on
one side, then closer shots of a dozen or two soldiers running in from the right, another dozen running
in from the left, another long shot of the seventy soldiers but now wearing the uniforms of the enemy
and fighting on the opposite side, then back to a shot of the hero and his forces and so on throughout
the picture.’ It was just a matter of reverse camera shots and joining them together so carefully that
any audience would be deceived.
In spite of Stair’s casual conclusion, the passage (with its use of the term ‘reverse camera shot’ to mean
basically what it means today) indicates an extensive grasp of the principles of continuity editing. The
filmmakers understood and were putting into practice the effects of opposed screen direction and eyelines
that the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov was to study in his famous experiments on editing conducted
during the early 1920s. Screen direction, we may assume, had virtually reached the status of a rule by 1917.
The eyeline match

If character movement can cue contiguous spaces, so does character glance. Quite early, around 1902,
filmmakers began using glances to create optical point-of-view (POV) shots, placing the camera in the
spatial position of the character. Then, during the early transitional period, after about 1909, eyeline
matches appear in films; in this device, the character glances to a point offscreen in one shot, and a cut
reveals the seen space, but not from the spatial position of the character.
The POV shot can show either a portion of the space seen in the establishing shot, or it can show a
contiguous space. Filmmakers who first employed the POV shot used it in both ways. In the early years, the
POV shot was usually indicated not only by position but also by a mask. Grandpa’s Reading Glass (1902,
AM&B) uses a series of round masks to represent a magnifying glass; the POV shots show details of the
larger space of the establishing shot. Similarly, the hero’s view through binoculars in The 100-to-One Shot
(1906, Vitagraph; see figs 16.38 and 16.39) shows a space already seen in the first shot. But in A Search for
Evidence (1903, AM&B), POV shots done through a keyhole mask reveal a contiguous space, a series of hotel
rooms behind closed doors.
In rare instances, an unmasked POV shot might be used in these early years. The Runaway Match (1903,
AM&B) even contains a POV tracking shot. When the pursuing father’s car breaks down, the camera
continues tracking back from him along the road; he stands angrily gesticulating toward the camera as it
moves to extreme-long shot. A reverse medium-long shot tracks forward following the car containing the
eloping daughter and her fiancé, who wave and laugh directly into the camera; the preceding view of the
father is revealed as their POV shot. The Runaway Match provides a good example of a device which was
later to become a recognizable part of Hollywood’s repertory of devices, but which at the time was more
likely an isolated experiment.
The unmasked POV shot occurs more regularly from about 1911. Since most camera angles were at this
point nearly horizontal, they were not particularly serviceable as POV cues. Nor had filmmakers developed
a set of other cues for indicating that the camera occupied the character’s place. The glance through a
window provided virtually the only such cue, since the window frame within the image placed the character
spatially. Thus A Friendly Marriage (1911, Vitagraph) contains a shot of the wife stopping by a church and
looking off left front (see fig 16.40), followed by a view of her husband through the rectory window
(fig 16.41). A Tale of Two Cities (1911, Vitagraph) also contains a window POV, with the bank clerk
looking out a window in plan américain, followed by a plan américain of the mob outside. Lois Weber’s
The Cry of the Children (1912, Thanhouser) ends with a scene of the factory owner and his wife looking out
a window, followed by an extreme-long shot of the factory. Other spatial cues soon began to appear. In
Kirkwood’s American Biograph drama, The House of Discord (1913), the heroine stands by the gate of an
estate and watches her daughter ride past with a groom; there follows a POV shot of the pair going away
down the road. Here the position of the road and the direction of movement of the couple on horseback tell
us that the camera has been placed in the heroine’s position in the second shot. In Behind the Footlights
(1916, Vim Comedies), the hero looks out from behind the curtain of a vaudeville stage (see fig 16.42) and
sees his girlfriend in the audience (fig 16.43). Here camera angle as well as the placement of orchestra
members in the lower part of the frame signals POV. By 1917, most of the UnS and ES films use POV at
least once, usually employing continuity cues of spatial relations from shot to shot to indicate POV, only
occasionally including windows and binocular or keyhole masks.
By the late teens, the masked POV shot returned, but not with shapes suggesting binoculars or keyholes.
Instead, masking became a conventional means of marking POV shots as such. In *Love and the Law (Edgar
Lewis, 1919, Edgar Lewis Productions), one scene contains a lengthy series of POV shots as the hero stands
by a parked wagon, turns slowly around, and sees a series of shop signs; there are five shots of him looking
in various directions, each followed by a masked shot of a sign (see figs 16.44 and 16.45). The
sophistication of POV usage by the late teens is apparent in this series: each sign is at the precise angle and
distance it would be in relation to the character’s position, those on his side of the street being closer than
ones across the street or further down the street. In accordance with Hollywood’s growing use of
redundancy, the spatial and masking cues supported each other in indicating POV. In later years, additional
POV cues reinforced the principles formulated in the teens.
The eyeline match, where the second shot shows a space seen, but not from a character’s spatial position,
came into occasional use about 1910–11. In The Gambler’s Charm (1910, Lubin), the gambler runs to the
door of a saloon and fires his gun at a man running away outside, offscreen right (see fig 16.46). The cut
leads to a shot of the man falling, with the gambler’s stare offscreen giving us one important cue as to where
this second space is (fig 16.47).
Of the 1912 ES films, one-fourth had eyeline matches. Only one violated screen direction: Dwan’s The
Fear, in the same situation described on page 205. At the end of the film’s first shot, the father looks off
front left (see fig 16.48) and sees his daughter by their house (fig 16.49). We assume at this point that in the
second shot the father is offscreen right. As we discover later when the other character moves between the
two spaces (see figs 16.30 and 16.31), the father really had been offscreen left. In contrast, The Girl at the
Cupola (1912, Selig) maintains screen direction in a scene of a labor strike: the first shot shows the workers
and the sympathetic boss’s daughter looking off front left (fig 16.50), with the cut revealing her fiancé, who
is trying to keep the factory running with scab labor (fig 16.51). This second shot suggests that the group
looking on is offscreen to the right, and indeed they are, as we discover when characters move between the
two spaces.
Of the 1913 films examined, nearly half used eyeline matches, with only one across the line. By 1914, the
majority of films have them, and by 1917, only an occasional film is without an eyeline match. Weights and
Measures (1914, Victor) has a scene in which a man in a car is being followed by a woman in another car;
he stops to get a drink at a well, with his car in the background facing left (see fig 16.52). The cut to the
woman, who has stopped her car and is watching from a distance, matches correctly on the direction of her
gaze. Being behind him, she should be off right in the first shot, and the direction of her gaze—off left—
confirms this (fig 16.53). In The Wishing Ring (1914) the couple looks off right (fig 16.54), and the cut
reveals that they see a gypsy camp (fig 16.55). They should be off left here, and indeed they are, as their
subsequent entrance from that direction proves. These examples are typical of eyeline usage in the teens.
Shot/reverse shot
Scene 202—Close-up of John’s face, smiling at the wrongful accusation. He casts a glance
toward the jury box. Scene 203—Fairly close-up of the members of the jury looking fixedly in
the direction of John.34
Capt. Leslie T.Peacocke, 1917
If a single eyeline provides a strong spatial cue, then a second eyeline on the other side of the cut should
create an even stronger spatial anchor for the spectator. This principle is commonly used to create the shot/
reverse-shot (SRS) schema, one of the most prevalent figures in the classical Hollywood cinema’s spatial
system. The SRS also depends on screen direction.
As we have seen, the concept of the eyeline match existed by 1913–14. Cuts that change screen direction
after a glance were distinctly in the minority. The same is true of the shot/reverse-shot pattern. (It is true
that several early SRSs in the ES crossed the line, but these are from 1911 and 1912, when writers were just
beginning to refer to screen direction.) No doubt one can find occasional violations throughout the teens.
But this does not indicate the absence of a guideline— filmmakers in the thirties occasionally crossed the
line on SRSs as well.
SRS was introduced near the beginning of the transitional period. Early instances of this technique show
it already performing its classical function of presenting a conversation situation; balanced pairs of shots
form the centerpiece of a scene that contains other contiguous cuts as well. Barry Salt has pointed out35 an
early example of SRS in Essanay’s The Loafer (1911), a film which is generally remarkably advanced in its
application of classical principles. The shots he describes come in the middle of a classically constructed
sequence which opens with an establishing shot of the hero by a buggy (see fig 16.56). He has been a
drunken loafer, was given a loan, and now is a respectable farmer. After the shot begins, the camera pans
right to reframe a stranger approaching the hero to beg for money (fig 16.57). After the hero refuses him,
the tramp goes out right (fig 16.58). A cut reveals a grassy stretch of ground, and the tramp comes in from
the front left, turns, and begins to berate the hero (fig 16.59). In the next shot, we see the hero’s reaction
(fig 16.60); then he runs out right threateningly. Cut to a shot of the beggar (as fig 16.59), as he runs out
right. There follows a long shot of the field, and both men dash in from the left. The scene continues with the
hero running out left after the struggle. Next we see a shot of a farmhouse door, and the hero comes into
frame from front right. This relatively extended sequence of nine shots (including a dialogue title and return
to the same framing as fig 16.59) combines several movements to contiguous spaces maintaining screen
direction, plus a SRS framed three-quarters on each figure, again obeying screen direction. An establishing
shot and two reframings give further indication of careful planning along the lines of continuity principles.
SRS is rare in the early and mid-teens, typically used when characters are so far apart that an ordinary
two-shot is not feasible. Here SRS serves to indicate that characters are close enough to see each other. In Old
Madrid (Ince, 1911, Imp Co.) has a scene in which two groups converse across a river. The shots of both
are plan américain, and in each the characters face off left. (The movements through contiguous spaces in
this film do obey screen direction, however.) In Solax’s 1913 A Comedy of Errors, a wife waves to her
husband as he departs for work (see figs 16.61 and 16.62).
SRS became more frequent around 1914, now occurring in some cases between people who are close to
each other; a two-shot could easily have been used in these cases, but the director cut in for a pair of closer
shots to catch reactions during conversations. The Eagle’s Mate (Kirkwood, 1914, Famous Players) has a
couple of SRS patterns. In one, a plan américain establishes the heroine taking care of an injured relative. A
cut-in to medium-long shot shows her by the bed; she then moves to the foot of the bed in the frame cut
illustrated in figures 16.36 and 16.37. Returning to a medium shot of the man, the film sets up a SRS
between the two, with two shots of each (figs 16.63 and 16.64).
SRS was still minority practice in 1914, but many films use it more than once and in ways which are
quite sophisticated in terms of the continuity system. The Wishing Ring has several instances of SRS, one in
the comic first scene as two old men lean out different windows of the same building to talk to each other.
Here the medium shot of the man in the higher window is taken from a low angle (fig 16.65), that of the
man on the ground floor from a high angle (fig 16.66). Later SRSs involve the young couple in situations
where they are not spatially separated, as the figures in this example are.
A remarkable scene from a 1914 film, Detective Burton’s Triumph (a Reliance two-reeler) shows how
subtle some filmmakers could be by this point in their application of eyeline directions in SRS. The scene
occurs near the end of the film, when Burton and two other detectives go in disguise to a bar to spy upon the
three robbers they have been trailing. An establishing shot (see fig 16.67) shows the robbers at the rear table,
Burton alone at the center left, and his colleagues at the foreground table. In the medium shot that follows,
Burton looks front, then glances off right at the crooks (fig 16.68). Next we see the two other detectives, one
of whom glances off left, at Burton (fig 16.69). The cut returns us to the framing of Burton, who looks front
at his friend and covertly signals to him (fig 16.70). In the next shot, the same framing as figure 16.69, the
man at the right returns the signal. A shot of the robbers follows, with the one at the right glancing front and
left at Burton, then drawing the center crook’s attention to the signals; he, too, looks front and left
(fig 16.71). There then follows an extended SRS series of fourteen additional medium shots with these
framings, as the detectives glance at the robbers and at each other, exchanging signals, while the robbers
look at both other tables and become more suspicious. Finally, after a total of nineteen medium reverse
shots among the three tables, there is a return to the establishing shot, and a gun battle breaks out
(fig 16.72). This sustained control of six eyeline directions is certainly not typical of its period; yet it is
difficult to imagine the creation of such a scene if the basic principles of the eyeline match and SRS were
not known by this point. Their widespread use would soon follow.
By 1915, SRS had become majority practice, and I found no film from 1916 and 1917 that lacked it. Films
of 1915 that use the device range from the most prestigious features (The Cheat [Cecil B.DeMille, Lasky])
to extremely clumsy comedy shorts (Cupid in a Hospital [an L-KO Chaplin imitation]), indicating the
widespread adoption of the SRS pattern. Not a single one of the SRS patterns in 1915 ES films violated
screen direction.36* There are probably films from the late teens which avoid SRS, but certainly the pattern
is almost universally accepted by this point. Figures 16.73 through 16.77 show other examples from the late
teens, demonstrating how uniform this device had already become. Feature films were now using SRS
throughout, and not only for distantly separated characters. These examples show characters who are within
a few feet of each other and who have previously been seen together in establishing shots.
There is one striking difference between SRS in the teens and SRS as practiced in the 1930s. Sound films
often place the camera behind the shoulder of one character when framing the other; shoulders provide one
more spatial cue to orient the spectator. Occasional silent films do use shoulders or other portions of the
body for such a function, although this remains minority practice until the sound period. Maurice
Tourneur’s *Victory (1919, Tourneur) provides an early example (see figs 16.78 and 16.79), and Mantrap
(Fleming, 1926, Famous Players-Lasky) uses compositions very similar to those of sound films (figs 16.80
and 16.81). Such framings show up not infrequently during the twenties. Thus SRS became one of the most
basic devices of the late teens and twenties classical cinema, appearing in most scenes. We may be surprised
to find this particular device so common in a cinema in which characters’ speech could not be heard, but
passages built around dialogue (only partially conveyed through dialogue inter-titles) were an important
basis of many silent films. By the late twenties, the handling of conversation situations was schematized in a
way which would barely differ from that of sound films.
The classical cinema’s dependence upon POV shots, eyeline matches, and SRS patterns reflects its
general orientation toward character psychology. As Part One stressed, most classical narration arises from
within the story itself, often by binding our knowledge to shifts in the characters’ attention: we notice or
concentrate on elements to which the characters’ glances direct us. In the construction of contiguous spaces,
POV, the eyeline match, and SRS do not work as isolated devices; rather, they operate together within the
larger systems of logic, time, and space, guaranteeing that psychological motivation will govern even the
mechanics of joining one shot to another. As a result, the system of logic remains dominant.
Crosscutting
Part One has defined ‘crosscutting’ as editing which moves between simultaneous events in widely
separated locales. ‘Parallel editing’ differs in that the two events intercut are not simultaneous.
Interestingly, crosscutting was seldom used before 1910. In The Great Train Robbery, Porter’s narration
returns from the robbers’ flight to the situations at the telegraph office and dance hall, but he does not
alternate shots in these locales. Similarly, in The Kleptomaniac (1905, Edison), Porter first shows the rich
woman’s actions and then the poor one’s, in order to contrast the treatment of the two when they are
arrested for stealing, but he does not alternate between them. In A Corner in Wheat (1909, AB), Griffith
suggests cause and effect by cutting between the Wheat King and the poor people in the bakery.37 Here the
time scheme is unclear; Griffith’s editing device could be crosscutting or parallel editing. But as Chapter 15
discussed, the classical narrative seldom depended entirely upon parallel construction; A Corner in Wheat is
one of the rare exceptions. On the whole, parallel editing, with its non-simultaneous lines of action, was also
rare in American filmmaking from its earliest years.
The more conventional ‘rescue’ pattern of crosscutting, involving two persons or groups who eventually
meet, occurs at least as early as 1906, in The 100-to-One Shot (Vitagraph). In this film, the hero goes out
and wins money on a long shot to aid his fiancée and her father, who are about to be evicted. As they are
being thrown out of their house by the landlord, the following brief series of shots creates suspense:
29 ELS: A street. A car in the distance drives straight forward and out right fore-ground.
30 LS: Interior of the house, as earlier, but with furniture gone. The landlord enters from the right,
and, with the help of two officials, starts to lead the father out right.
31 ELS: A road. The car comes in from the background, drives forward, stops, and the hero gets
out and runs out right.
32 As 32: The hero enters from the right (a violation of screen direction), tears up the landlord’s
paper, and pays him. The villains leave, and the film ends with rejoicing and an embrace.
Another example occurs in Her First Adventure (Wallace McCutcheon, 1908, AM&B), which is generally
handled as a conventional chase until toward the end. Then a few shots alternate between pursued and
pursuers. From 1909 on, Griffith begins to use the device occasionally and was probably responsible for
popularizing it.
Crosscutting did not become widespread immediately, however. By 1912, slightly fewer than half the ES
films used any crosscutting. Some of these include chases, as in The Bandit of Tropico (1912, Nestor) and
The Grit of the Girl Telegrapher (1912, Kalem). Others simply use crosscutting to show two related events
occurring in separate spaces. In The Haunted Rocker (1912, Vitagraph), there is one instance of crosscutting
when the disapproving father goes to his club while his daughter’s lover visits her secretly at home. The
following sequence occurs:
13 LS: The steps outside the house. The father goes out, then the lover goes to the door.
14 MLS: The parlor. The heroine sits in the rocking chair. Her lover enters and they embrace.
15 MLS: Interior of a men’s club. The father comes in, has a drink, and leaves.
16 MLS, as 14: The heroine sits on her lover’s lap in the rocker.
17 MLS: The front gate of the house. The father comes in, drunk.
18 New MLS: The rocker. The lovers stand hurriedly and hide behind a screen. The father enters,
sees the moving chair, and is puzzled.
One noticeable trait of this sequence is the considerable compression of time made possible by the
crosscutting. At each return to the previous action, a move forward in the narrative has occurred. The
crosscutting represents simultaneous events, but also creates large ellipses which are less obvious because
of the move away to another line of action. As crosscutting became more common, this ability to shorten
plot duration remained one of its most important functions.
Contemporary writers recognized that cross-cutting could condense narrative material, as well as create
suspense. A 1914 scenario manual referred to the ‘cutback’ (as crosscutting was known at the time) as being
‘employed to accelerate action and maintain suspense.’38 In 1923 the American Cinematographer described
how an editor could reduce an excess of footage to a finished film:39
By careful cutting and recutting the editor can establish all the preliminary motivation necessary and
yet do it in a simple manner both entertaining and retaining the full values. This is usually handled by
‘splitting sequences’ or in other words, handling two sequences at one time, hitting the highlights or
important parts of each one yet telling it in the same amount of film required to handle one of them if
cut individually.
Thus by elliding the relatively inessential moments of each story line, the omnipresent narration guides the
spectator’s attention through a string of the most salient actions.
In a sense, this compression through crosscutting carried on the basic approach of the early teens, when
short film lengths led to highly condensed presentations of action. At that point, summary titles, telegraphic
pantomime gestures, and other devices had combined to pack a great deal of action into a short span. Now
crosscutting could create a similar effect, but in a less obtrusive way.
With the feature film, such extreme condensation of action was not always necessary. Sometimes the
opposite problem arose: how to sustain an action through a whole sequence. Some filmmakers found
crosscutting to be the solution. Crosscutting permitted the action of a single sequence to be drawn out,
where showing the actions in separate short scenes might make the film episodic. Cecil B.DeMille’s feature
The Whispering Chorus (1918, Artcraft) is an example. This seven-reeler has thirty sequences, eleven of which
employ crosscutting between two lines of action which do not come together within any one sequence (as well
as two others which juxtapose action in two locales without cutting between them). The story covers a long
time span and involves a large number of separate locales and incidents. Without crosscutting, the film
would consist of a string of brief scenes; with it, there is less sense of choppiness.
By 1914, most ES films used crosscutting, and after 1915, only a few films avoided it. Once crosscutting
had been established, filmmakers continued to add more and more lines of action, the most famous
instances being the multiple simultaneous rescues near the ends of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
Griffith, who was universally assumed at the time to have invented the cutback, was the prime experimenter
in this. But apparently even he went too far; a review of his 1918 feature The Great Love (now lost)
comments:40
With the genius that Griffith alone commands, three almost separate stories have been carried through
this picture. And in this point we think he went a trifle too far. In several places he is carrying as high
as six different situations along simultaneously by means of cutbacks.
Crosscutting became standardized as the interweaving of two or three lines of action— seldom more.
The crosscut scene had become a staple of the silent cinema by the late teens and twenties. More often
than not, crosscutting provided a simple way of constructing an exciting story without the script writer’s
having to sustain a single line of action. It seems to have reached its most frequent usage for this purpose in
the few years after 1915. By the twenties, script writers had gained more experience at creating situations
which could sustain themselves for whole sequences. Crosscutting did not disappear, but became a more
localized device, occurring mainly in scenes where the narration demanded the juxtaposition of multiple
lines of action.
Parodies of continuity
Contemporary writings and stylistic usage in the sample films suggest that the continuity guidelines were
known and widely accepted by 1917. But beyond this, there are a small number of films from the teens and
twenties which parody various continuity guidelines and ‘mistakes.’ Artists are not likely to parody
something which is not already established and familiar. Hence the existence of such films helps confirm
the idea that the continuity system was in force at this early stage.
The earliest continuity-parody among the ES films is the extraordinary 1915 split-reel comedy, Ye Gods!
What a Cast! Made by a very minor independent company, Luna, this film is an extended joke on the
eyeline match. In the opening scene, the impoverished Hardluck Film Co. assigns the various roles in its
new film to a woman and a man: she is to play the heroine, while he takes all six male roles. The man tries
on all six costumes in this first scene, in order to establish the various characters’ appearances in the
audience’s mind. The bulk of Ye Gods! What a Cast! consists of the resulting film, with the male actor, as
six different characters, chasing himself, looking at himself, and conversing with himself in SRS. Ye Gods!
What a Cast! contains 103 shots, all of which maintain screen direction. Here not only does the whole film
depend on the eyeline match, but the humor in the situation would be incomprehensible unless we assume
the audience could understand the play with eyelines.
Other films make fun of inconsistent mise-enscene over the cut. In Hoodoo Ann (Lloyd Ingraham, 1916,
Triangle-Fine Arts), Ann and her boyfriend attend a Western, Mustang Charlie’s Revenge, at their local
cinema. The film is a parody of old-fashioned, New-Jersey-made Westerns (its producer is The Hoboken
Film Co.’), done in a deliberately crude style that contrasts sharply with the remainder of Hoodoo Ann. At
one point, a title announces ‘Father’s Dear old tin pale’ (a reference to the not infrequent misspellings of
early-teens inter-titles), followed by a shot of the heroine inside a shack, going to the door while swinging
the pail. A cut to the well outside follows, and the woman comes in carrying a wooden bucket, which she
holds up prominently. Later, when she runs back into the shack, she has the tin pail again. This delightful
film-within-a-film demonstrates Hollywood’s awareness of its own changes in the space of a few years.
Other films made similar jokes. In 1918, Photoplay described Nut Stuff, another story about a filmmaking
establishment, the ‘Hardly Able Feature-Film Company’; this comedy short parodies ‘the careless direction
that permits a player to enter a room in one costume and leave it in another.’ The film also contains
exaggeratedly stock character types and canted framings which simulate bad cinematography.41 Finally, a
1923 comedy short, Uncensored Movies (Hal Roach, 1923, Hal Roach) has Will Rogers imitate various
movie stars of the day. As Tom Mix, he repeatedly tramples, rips, or dirties his elegant white hat, yet puts it
on again in pristine condition after the cut.
There are undoubtedly other such parodies. Clearly filmmakers felt that at a simple level at least,
audiences could notice and appreciate the humor of continuity errors.
The ready-made center of interest

The various continuity rules—establishing and re-establishing shots, cut-ins, screen direction, eyelines, SRS,
crosscutting—served two overall purposes. On the one hand, they permitted the narrative to proceed in a
clearly defined space. On the other hand, they created an omnipresent narration which shifted the
audience’s vantage point on the action frequently to follow those parts of the scene most salient to the plot.
Two statements from the twenties summarize these purposes succinctly and demonstrate that Hollywood
practitioners understood their editing system as fully then as have practitioners ever since. A former editor
for Ince wrote in 1922: ‘The value of every scene and sequence must be carefully weighed and the man who
attempts to do this must most surely be able to prepare and smooth the production for audience
consumption.’42 The second statement comes from a lecture given by actor Milton Sills in 1928; he begins
by discussing how developing methods limited the length of shots:43
This limitation proved desirable. It was found that by telling the story in flashes [contemporary term
for very short shots], flitting from spot to spot in the fields of action, eliminating irrelevancies,
isolating and emphasizing the significant moment, the film could do what the eye does naturally;
namely, select and focus on the quintessential drama. The eye of the spectator did not have to seek the
center of interest. It was there ready-made for its pleasure…. This practice spelt economy in attention,
vividness of effect, and dramatic intensity. The close view, the medium shot, and the long shot could
be intermingled by the skill of the director and the mechanics of the cutting room in such a way that
the narrative was constantly moving from high light to high light.
Thus continuity editing constantly organizes the spectator’s attention. In doing so, it acts in concert with other
principles of the classical cinema— principles of depth and centering that guide the eye within shots.
17
Classical narrative space and the spectator’s attention
The knot hole in the fence

In the shift from primitive to classical film practice, the spectator’s implicit spatial relation to the action
changed significantly. During the primitive period, the camera usually remained at a distance from the
action, framing it in a way that suggested a stage seen by a spectator in a theater seat. Later films also have
long shots, of course, that place at least some elements of the mise-en-scene far away from the camera. But
primitive films combine this distant view with a relatively flat playing space which creates a gap
immediately in front of the implicit viewer. Even when a crowd is supposedly milling about, jammed
together, the figures typically do not stray into the foreground zone (see fig 17.1). In chases and other
similar situations, the characters may move diagonally forward and exit close to the camera; but they appear
in the foreground space only briefly at the end of the shot, usually after we have watched them move in from
the extreme background. On the whole, the primitive cinema keeps the spectator looking across a void into
an action in a separate space. A few exceptions, like cut-ins or track-ins, occur in rare situations where
either essential narrative information or novelty dictates the closer view.
Classical film practice, on the other hand, removed the empty foreground between the spectator and the
space of the narrative action. During the transition period (1909–16), several changes placed the spectator’s
vantage point directly on the edge of the playing area: the staging of the action in depth, changes in set
design, considerable depth of field, and directional lighting. No longer was the action played out before the
spectator in a shallow, removed area. Rather, the space extended outward. Like editing, cinematography,
and other devices of the classical system, the boundaries of narrative space became unnoticeable. Primitive-
period mise-en-scene created a flat playing area within a box-like space, seldom suggesting space behind
the set or to the sides. But classical staging and sets suggested space receding into the distance, and cut-ins
foster a sense of additional space on the sides, by showing only portions of the whole area. Space now
apparently stretched out indefinitely, appearing to include the viewer.
As we have seen, the primitive cinema’s placement of the spectator at a distance did not always provide
the best view for grasping important narrative information. But the omnipresent narration of the classical
cinema situates the spectator at the optimum viewpoint in each shot. Staging, composition, and editing
combine to move that viewpoint instantly as the action shifts. There arose the enduring Hollywood image of
the spectator as an invisible onlooker present on the scene; filmmakers and theorists have invoked this idea
to the present day in explaining the shot/reverse-shot pattern (an onlooker at a conversation turning the head
back and forth), the cut-in, reframing (both of which follow the ‘natural’ attention of the onlooker), and
virtually any other standard technique. This notion of the invisible spectator provides a neat reversal of the
actual reason for the whole continuity system; while the classical cinema claims to follow the attention of
the spectator, it actually guides that attention carefully by establishing expectations about what spatial
configurations are likely to occur.
Although this idea came up only occasionally in the silent period, the basic idea of creating the spectator
as an invisible onlooker at the ideal vantage point underlies the development of the classical system. One of
the best formulations of this idea appeared in 1913; the author is des cribing the difference between the
loose causality of comedy and the tighter structure of drama:1
In the tragedy-form of the drama there is always a cause, a deed, and an effect. In the photo-drama,
the film must create the impression among the audience that they are witnessing the three elements of
the action, unknown to the characters of the play. They should be put in the position of being at the
‘knot hole in the fence’ at every stage in the play.
The ‘knot hole in the fence’ irresistibly brings to mind the concept of linear perspective; according to
Renaissance perspective theory, the spectator could see the depth effect created by a painting’s vanishing
point by looking at it with one eye, from a single point in space. The space of the scene, both in the painting
and in the classical film, is organized outward from the spectator’s eye. But the knot-hole image specifies
other aspects of the classical approach as well—the spectator looking directly into a space from its edge,
unseen by anyone within that space. In the continuity system, however, the knot hole is not stationary, but
moves to the ideal place for viewing. The displacement may be gradual in the case of camera movement, or
instantaneous at a cut. The author’s conception of the audience being ‘put in the position’ in relation to the
narrative’s causal events would be inconceivable in the primitive period, for it implies a fundamentally
different approach to narration. The change helps define the basis of the classical cinema.
Staging in depth
Part of the impulse to place the action closer to the camera resulted from a desire to show the facial
expressions of the actors. As we have already seen, filmmakers tended initially to have the actors move
forward into plan américain or medium-long shot, avoiding cut-ins (seefig 16.10 through 16.16). This
expanded the shallow playing area and utilized the empty space between set and camera. Increasingly,
filmmakers avoided the awkwardness of such unmotivated movements; instead they placed the figures in
several planes between the back of the set and a spot closer to the camera. In 1911 The Moving Picture
World claimed that 10 to 15 feet was the standard camera-subject distance, or 8 feet ‘with those who
amputate the lower limbs to show us facial expression.’2 The main motive for moving the actors forward
was probably to provide the spectator a better view of facial expression; incidentally, however, the practice
of utilizing the foreground also brought the narrative space out toward the viewer. A 1912 review drew
upon the ‘invisible spectator’ notion in defending the close shot; it is ‘natural, as in life one does not see the
entire form of a person with whom he is in close relation.’3 Thus the close framing places the spectator on
the edge of a deep playing space, looking primarily at the actor, but aware as well of a setting beyond.
But the ‘American foreground,’ as this closer framing came to be known, was not simply a matter of
single figures moving forward. Several characters who might have stood side by side in a primitive staging
would be likely, from the early teens on, to occupy several planes. The Loafer (1911, Essanay) opens with a
shot of a drunkard arguing with his wife in a cabin (see fig 17.2). The set is a flat wall behind them, but the
placement of the wife at the right foreground creates a conversation at a slight diagonal into depth away
from the camera. The result does not display facial expression to the best advantage; in fact the actress
playing the wife must turn a bit away from the camera to address the man. But it does eliminate to some
312 CLASSICAL NARRATIVE SPACE AND THE SPECTATOR’S ATTENTION
degree the sense of an empty space in the, foreground. Another, more striking example occurs in A Friendly
Marriage (1911, Vitagraph). In one shot, a woman sits in the foreground as another woman brings a man
into the scene (see fig 17.3). The two standing figures come forward and sit, forming a triangular grouping.
At no point do we see the foreground woman’s face; again, the motivation is realistic rather than
compositional—to create a more three-dimensional playing space rather than to reveal expression. The
grouping imitates how people would sit in a room, but the result impairs the scene’s clarity. Later,
analytical editing would permit the realistic motivation of groupings in space, combined with an optimum
view of all narrative action.
Films of the early teens are full of examples of staging in depth; it would be hard to find a film done
entirely in shallow tableaux. The Bandit of Tropico (1912, Nestor; fig 17.4) has a shot with the bandit
waiting in the foreground and a stagecoach appearing suddenly in extreme depth through a gap in the trees;
in Weights and Measures (1914, Victor; fig 17.5), the protagonist sits close to the camera at the left as the
woman he awaits enters at the rear. By the late teens, staging in depth appears frequently; with deeper sets,
the placement of the figures has come to appear casual (*Love and the Law, 1919, Edgar Lewis; fig 17.6).
Staging in significant depth began at the period around 1910 when scenes still usually avoided analytical
editing. But cut-ins added a sense of moving right into the space. The combination of multiple planes of
action with multiple views from different distances was a powerful means of absorbing the viewer within
the action. Mae Marsh’s 1921 acting guide discusses the standardization of this approach by the late teens:4
Most of the dramatic action is now played at three-quarters length; that is from the face to the knees.
As we weave in and out of a scene, very often the entire body is shown…but the majority of the
intermediate shots through which the dramatic action is conducted cut off the lower part of the body.
As this passage suggests, in the post-1917 classical period the establishing (and reestablishing) shot is the
only point in the scene at which the viewer is at a distance from the totality of the narrative space. Once we
have a view of the overall situation, analytical editing moves us inside, where the ‘dramatic action’
primarily occurs in a medium-distance view. The Hollywood cinema seldom used close-ups or extreme
closeups; but by the late teens and twenties, the medium close-up (showing shoulders and face) was
common. Used for details, reactions, or intense emotions, the medium close-up often isolates the single
figure from both the setting and from other figures. Depth, after all, implies that the spectator sees several
objects in different planes. When only one item is dramatically relevant, a tight framing prevents our
noticing the surrounding space, sometimes in combination with a mask at the edges of the frame to cut
down the prominence of the background (as in fig 17.7, from A Temperamental Wife). In the analytical
editing system, the close shot becomes the extreme degree of the viewer’s placement within the narrative
space. Aware of the surroundings from the establishing shot, the viewer nevertheless sees the character
filling most of the frame.
Thus each shot scale in the early classical period gained its own general functions not only for laying out
narrative space, but also for drawing the spectator into and out of that space. This expansion from back to
front tended to force a change in the shape of the set itself.
Settings and depth

Until about 1909, sets in narrative films resembled those of the legitimate theater and vaudeville. A painted
backdrop stood perpendicular to the camera, with perhaps a few pieces of real furniture for use in the
action. Figure 17.8 shows such a backdrop in use, with fireplace, doorframe, corner, window, sunbeam, and
flowers all painted. Only the chair and table are three-dimensional. Such sets contrasted considerably with
the depth of location shots, which would often be cut in beside them in the same film.
Since the characters remained at long-shot distance, in front of the backdrop, the resulting playing space
was shallow, but wide, stretching the width of the frame. Let us assume that the Moving Picture World
figures quoted earlier are accurate, and that the actors stayed about 10 to 15 feet away from the camera for a
standard long view.5 The backdrop in figure 17.8 is perhaps 14 feet wide. Thus in this case the actors have
14 feet in which to move back and forth, but only about 5 feet forward from the backdrop. A larger
backdrop, placed further from the camera, would enlarge the playing space into depth. Such expansion,
however, was limited: ‘When a large stage setting is required the figures of the actors are made small upon
the screen, which is objectionable.’6 To understand why, one need only watch the 1904 Parsifal (Edison),
where tiny figures move about, dwarfed by huge backdrops. Both this statement and Parsifal suggest that the
actors would play directly in front of the back-drop, however far back from the camera it was situated.
The stage also used backdrops, although in combination with wings at the sides to mask the backstage
area, to hide lighting instruments, and to suggest depth. (The film’s frame served similar purposes and
eliminated the need for wings.) In vaudeville, the depth at which the backdrop was placed defined the
playing area, from a shallow space downstage for comic skits, to a deep, full stage for playlets and more
elaborate acts.7 Theaters had a stock set of backdrops for use in all situations. The box set had gradually
become more prominent from the 1840s on, but as one theater historian put it in 1928, ‘This present
progressive century was well begun before all theatres had relinquished the old practice of representing
closed rooms with open wings and borders.’8 Large playhouses could afford to convert their setting
practices, but smaller ones had little choice about retaining existing equipment. Vaudeville acts and touring
legitimate troupes needed simple, portable scenery which could fit on any provincial theater’s stage. Box
sets finally replaced drops and wings on a widespread basis in the first decade of this century.
The cinema, with its initial close links to vaudeville, used its own version of the backdrop method. In
addition to their conventional familiarity, flat drops offered economic advantages; they were cheaper than
solid sets and took up less room on the small studio stages. Producers continued to use backdrops only as
long as the film industry remained relatively small. Economic growth and stability followed in the wake of
the nickelodeon boom and the formation of the MPPC. As soon as filmmakers were financially capable of
introducing more elaborate, three-dimensional sets, they did so. The rising fortunes of the film industry are
paralleled by the increasing importance of set design, until the heyday of the art director in the early
twenties. The film industry’s conversion to more threedimensional sets also came at about the same time
that the smaller theaters were converting to the use of box sets. Although not in the forefront in this change,
neither did the film industry lag seriously behind the popular theatrical practice of the day.
By the time that the transition to the classical cinema had begun, around 1909, there are signs that
commentators were becoming discontented with painted sets. Compare these three remarks from the period:9
(1909) Is there any verisimilitude or truth in a picture of a woman weeping amidst the ruins of her
home, when the canvas door evidently shakes and the flood of light which surrounds her obviously
cannot come from the all-too-obviously papier mâché chandelier above her?
(1911) Artificial stage methods have been discarded by every successful company. Everywhere the
tendency is toward truthful and compelling simulation of real life [i.e., building of actual sets and
going on location].
(A 1911 review of The Scarlet Letter [Herbert Brenon, Imp]) The scene of the public street
showing the stocks seemed rather flat and shallow. A street scene, above all others should convey the
idea of depth or distance, which this scene did not. It is very obviously a painted drop upon which
shadows fall, and it was also very easy to see the line of connection it made with the stage.
During the same years that these expressions of dissatisfaction appeared, filmmakers were beginning to
alter set design in several important ways. Walls became more solid and now appeared at an angle to the
camera. Three-dimensional trimmings were attached to the walls. Furniture was moved forward toward the
camera. Moreover, whenever possible sets were built on location, so that real landscapes rather than painted
flats frequently appeared outside windows in the early teens. All these devices give a greater sense of depth,
and some also move the playing space out toward the camera. In conjunction with the placement of the
actors in the foreground, this new approach to setting helped to place the spectator within or on the edge of
the narrative space.
Even in using backdrops, filmmakers of the primitive period had sometimes attempted to create depth by
the suggestion of a second wall. By placing a corner at the side of the frame and showing a bit of a wall
extending forward, they avoided the completely flat drop effect. See figure 15.3 for an example. As should
be clear from this shot, however, the second wall did not extend the playing space forward substantially.
One of the most famous early examples of a deep playing area is the banquet scene in A Corner in Wheat
(D.W.Griffith, 1909, Biograph), where the long table juts directly forward; as a result, the group of well-
wishers face the Wheat King at the right foreground, creating a dynamic composition. But other less
startling examples occur in that same year. Lubin had abandoned the busy painted drops that characterized
his earlier studio product. He put out several films in 1909 that faced the camera into a corner: She Would
Be an Actress (the opening scene in the couple’s dining room) and An Unexpected Guest (both the nurse’s
home and the young doctor’s study). Another example is Griffith’s Faithful (1910, Biograph), in which the
hero’s dining room has a centered corner, functional French windows, and several real pieces of furniture
against the wall, as well as the dining table and chairs at the center (see fig 17.9). All three of these examples
use painted flats rather than backdrops, to achieve a three-dimensional corner (as opposed to the painted
corner in fig 17.8 above). The set in She Would Be an Actress contains a real china cupboard which is
present purely for realistic effect; it never figures in the action. The Faithful set is substantial enough to hold
a mirror. It is still possible to see the canvas rippling in the breeze in some films done in the open air during
the teens, but this distraction soon disappears.10*
During the early teens, filmmakers began consistently placing furniture in the foreground, often
extending out of sight at the lower frameline. This practice has several advantages: It could motivate a
character’s move forward, and it could maintain the sense of deep space even when the characters remained
at a distance. In one shot from The Bells (1913, Edison), the characters are not close to the camera, but the
cluttered desk, the hat on the chair, and the table with its bowl, all convey a sense of the room extended
forward (see fig 17.10). Note also that the back wall has several corners, placing the actors more firmly
within a three-dimensional locale.
In addition to expanding the action forward from the back wall, there were attempts to suggest depth
beyond that barrier. Real trees and vistas outside windows and doors were one solution, created by
constructing the set outdoors, in front of the appropriate landscape. The multiple-room set was another
solution. In the primitive period, the small size of stages would prevent the construction of a second room
beyond the main one. But as larger permanent studios were built and outdoor filming became more feasible
(due to the moves to warmer climates and the acquisition of studio lots), some filmmakers in the early to
mid-teens began to place a large doorway at the rear of the set. Beyond, a substantial portion of another
room would be visible.11* This enhanced the representation of spacious homes and made for a greater
variety of staging possibilities. The Girl in the Arm-Chair (1912, Solax) contains a set with a parlor in the
foreground and a hallway with staircase at the rear (fig 17.11). This set creates several distinct major
playing spaces in depth, with the armchair at foreground right figuring in several key scenes, the safe at the
left of the door doing likewise, and the hallway beyond providing dramatic entrances and exits (as in the
frame shown). In fact, this set appears in many shots in the film; possibly its greater expense limited the
total number of sets the film could use.
Expense was certainly a prime consideration in the early teens. Scenario guidebooks cautioned their
readers that a narrative calling for too many sets could lead to a rejection slip. In 1913, one writer suggested
that six was the usual limit, and another gave a formula: ‘No one-reel picture should require more “sets”
than would approximate one-third of the total number of scenes, feature and out-door pictures excepted.’12
(One-reelers of this period contained perhaps fifty to sixty shots. Given that some of these were titles and
exteriors, a figure of six sets is reasonable.)
By about 1913, it is likely that producers had reached the maximum expense for sets that could be
supported by one-reel filmmaking. Longer films, however, made it possible to spend more lavishly on at
least one set per film. Warning scenarists against narratives that demand expensive sets, one columnist used
the cabaret set of The Mothering Heart (Griffith, 1913, Biograph) as an example; he explained that
Biograph could afford such a set because it habitually sold a larger number of prints, and because ‘it is a
multiple-reel, so that the cost is partially distributed through two reels.’13 The same principle would hold
true for longer features. Fox reportedly built a six-room set for a Theda Bara feature in 1916. An estimate of
that same year suggests that the cheapest sets would cost several hundred dollars, while ‘a good restaurant or
cabaret scene may cost from $2,000 to $5,000, depending on its elaborateness and size.’ Chapter 9 has also
noted that publicity played up the extravagant costs of the sets as ‘production value.’ Promoters claimed
that the Babylon set in Intolerance cost $50,000 and that $35,000 was spent on one set in Civilization
(1916, Ince).14
The growing expense of set-building went not simply into general enlargement but specifically into
greater dimension in depth. Figure 17.12 from The Eagle’s Mate (James Kirkwood, 1914, Famous Players),
shows a typical teens ‘box’ set for a feature film. Such a set is like a rectangle with the invisible wall placed
at one of the short sides. The principle is a functional one, since in a very large, wide set the side walls
would not be visible within the frame, and the set would resemble a flat backdrop placed at a distance. The
result is a deep playing area rather like an Italian Renaissance stage, but with solid walls replacing the
layers of flat wings at the sides. As Chapter 13 points out, contemporary designers recognized that they
were creating sets to suit the perspective limitations of the motion-picture lens. One of Hollywood’s top art
directors, Hugo Ballin, wrote in 1921: ‘A lens represents one eye, it may be the right or the left. Therefore it
is important in sets to get depth, not width. The depth of a motion picture is infinite, its width finite.’15
Aside from the deep rectangular box set, there was the L-shaped set with two walls. The longer wall
extended toward the foreground, and the camera filmed obliquely along it into the corner. This method also
creates a sense of depth, while eliminating the need for building the third wall.
By itself, deep set design would not be enough to place the spectator within the playing space. But in
combination with multiple planes of action and deep focus, the deep set contributed to the extension of that
space forward toward the camera. Thus the set’s depth perspective would be visible mainly in the
establishing shot, while analytical editing would place the spectator’s vantage point within the set. Set
designers took the camera’s placement into account; a 1922 commentator described the planning stages:16
Once the requirements of the sets have been established, the art director instructs members of his staff
as to those requirements, the approximate size, the placing of such buildings as will be used, their use,
the angle at which the camera will view the set and the distance at which it will be placed from the
foreground in the long shots.
Planning promoted efficiency, preventing the crew from building more of the set than would appear within
the frame. But it also helped create the optimum view. The camera would still stand outside the front
boundary of the set in the establishing shots, but the front edge would extend just far enough to be outside
the camera’s field. (Such planning also encouraged standardization of lens lengths, so that the set designers
could easily calculate the lens’s exact field.) The spectator’s vantage point is located on the scene’s edge,
poised to move into the space on the cut-in.
Studio set design in the mid- and late teens in a sense attempted to reconcile the split between painted
backgrounds and location shooting that had existed during the primitive period. Primitive films often cut
together shots done in shallow interior sets with those shot in the unlimited depth of real exteriors; for a
classical film, such a disjunction would create a break in continuity. So classical design for the most part
tried to suggest that settings had the depth of real locations and buildings.
The studios’ ideal for authenticity and depth was location shooting itself. With no backdrop to cut off the
spectator’s view, the location shot could create a considerable sense of depth. In Rory O’More (Sidney Olcott,
1911, Kalem; filmed in Ireland) one framing places British soldiers in the foreground taking aim at the tiny
figure of Rory, visible in the depth of the shot on the next ridge (see fig 17.13). In the location shot, there is
less sense of looking across a neutral zone and into a delimited, rectangular space. Instead, the camera
seems to be picking out one section of an expanse that goes on in every direction. The depth of most
location shots helped place the spectator almost automatically at the edge of the narrative space.
But location shooting at great distances from the home studios proved excessively expensive. By the mid-
teens, the elaborate construction of foreign locales was taking place habitually in the studios. Scientific
American treated travel abroad as a thing of ‘years ago’; it found that: ‘To-day, in marked contrast, the
producers find it easier to bring the foreign or distant spots to the studio, literally speaking. Accuracy
enables them to convince the audience that the scenes are laid in the country called for by the story.’ The
advantages in studio shooting are that ‘the producers have better laboratory facilities, understand the light
better, can secure experienced players—and save time.’17 Chapter 12 has described the increasing
breakdown of the studios into specialized departments, including the art department. By using their own
facilities, the producers could get better quality and more efficiency. With longer films, more actors, sets,
and crews were involved in the shooting process; any savings of time saved commensurately large amounts
of money in salaries. Add to this the traveling costs themselves, and the economies of all-studio-made
shooting became considerable.18
From the mid-teens on, the switch from location shooting to large, deep studio sets was made possible by
the acquisition of back lots and the erection of standing sets. Sets representing interiors were typically built
either on indoor studio stages (especially in the eastern studios) or on outdoor stages (in the West and other
sunny climes; see figure 17.14, Universal’s stages c. 1915 in Universal City, near Los Angeles). But larger
buildings would not fit on such platforms; filmmakers built them on plots of land adjacent to the studio
buildings—the ‘back lot.’19*
The introduction of the back lot, in combination with the growing prosperity of the larger companies, gave
rise to some lavish settings. In the early teens, historical epics imitated the successful Italian features. The
palace set in The Coming of Columbus (Colin Campbell, 1912, Selig three-reeler; fig 17.15) was considered
by Motography to be the largest interior ever constructed for a film.20 Later films contained sets that
dwarfed this one. Figure 17.16, a production still from The Queen of Sheba (J.Gordon Edwards, 1921,
Metro), shows the kind of spectacle which could be achieved on the studio back lot (note the echo of the
Cabiria temple in the building at the right). Such large sets served all of Hollywood’s aims, adding novelty
through spectacle and placing the spectator on the edge of a playing space much deeper than that possible
on a theater stage.
It is worth noting that during the mid-teens, Hollywood set design decisively parted ways with theatrical
practices of the period. At that point, the ‘new stagecraft’ of Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, Adolphe Appia,
and other European producers and designers was having a major impact on American theater. The
naturalistic design which had dominated for several decades under such people as David Belasco, gave way
to a simplified, more stylized and atmospheric approach. Yet one could scarcely infer that this major change
was going on by watching the films of the teens. Maurice Tourneur made an isolated pair of films using
painted, stylized sets—The Blue Bird and Prunella (both 1918, Famous Players-Lasky)—but their dismal
box-office showing ended his attempt to align Hollywood with the current theatrical scene. In general,
Hollywood set design has developed its own methods, remaining true to its origins in the turn-of-the-
century realist approach.
Chapter 13 has described the addition of staff members to design and supervise settings for film studios.
First, during the approximate period 1907 to 1915, there was the stage manager, a role replaced by that of
the art director. Art directors were expected on the one hand to create designs of great beauty or spectacle,
and on the other to be expert enough to insure historical and geographic accuracy.
But as with other elements of the classical Hollywood film, beauty, spectacle, and historical accuracy
were generally subordinate to narrative function. Harold Grieve, art director for the Marshall Neilan Studios,
summed up this belief in 1926:21
The day of sets for sets’ sake is passed. For a successful picture, there must be coordination of a most
intimate nature between sets and story, for the sets must help get over the feeling of the story. Mere
realism or beauty alone is not sufficient. The sets must be built to harmonize with the intention of the
director. They must always remain in the background, but they must fit the plot just as exactly as
paper fits the wall of a room.
In order to coordinate set designs with the narrative, the art director had to be aware of other aspects of the
planning. As even the California studios began increasingly to use artificially lit interior stages in the late
teens, the art directors came to concern themselves with the total visual look of the shots. These art directors
were coming from backgrounds in theater, in art, and in architecture; they would be accustomed to
controlling or considering the effects of lighting. The art director would be likely to encourage his company
to use studio interiors for greater flexibility of composition. The perpetual Hollywood comparison of setting
and lighting design with painting (specifically, the Old Masters) came into being in the mid-teens.
Increasingly, the art director collaborated with the director and cinematographer to plan the effects of lights
and lenses. Famous Players-Lasky’s art director, Wilfred Buckland, who had been trained as an engineer
and architect, wrote in 1924:22
By approaching screen settings from the standpoint of the pictorial artists and not the architect leading
art directors are revolutionizing the building of photoplay backgrounds.
Heretofore, the majority of art directors have been architects rather than artists. The setting has
been made all-important and constructed with no thought of the action to take place within it….
In building our settings around our characters, instead of first constructing our setting and then
forcing the players into it, we are substituting for the old method an arrangement which aids and
intensifies the movements of the actors—we concentrate the attention on the dramatic interest.
We also study our backgrounds, not only for pictorial composition, but for the relation of the tonal
values to the figure….
We are applying to our screen pictures the same laws and principles that the old masters applied to
their paintings—laws which are as definite as those of physics and mechanics.
Our new school of screen artistry in settings considers also the lighting of our pictures, for on the
camera’s sensitized film we can paint with light and shade as an artist paints with pigment upon
canvas.
This approach reached a high level of sophistication by the late silent period, with the work of William
Cameron Menzies. Menzies made numerous sketches of shots, incorporating lighting, camera angle, and
even lens length into the drawings (as in fig 17.17, from The Beloved Rogue [Alan Crosland, 1927, Feature
Productions]).
By the late teens, as classical film practice had become standardized, deep sets containing multiple planes
of playing area were the norm for American films. They aided in the general process of placing the
spectator within the narrative space. The final touch in this process was the clear presentation of these
planes using deep focus cinematography.
Deep focus cinematography

Through much of the silent period, filmmakers assumed that a considerable photographic depth of field was
desirable for most shots. Critical attention to depth of field was evident as early as 1908:23
Motion-picture people will tell you—some of them—that you can’t have foreground sharp with the
distance. And they use lenses of a couple of inches in focal length! The trouble is they sometimes use
lenses of too long focus with too large openings, and do not distinguish enough between a bright day
and a cloudy one, a well-lighted spot and a dim one and consequently, do not diaphragm their lenses
enough when, as it is frequently possible to do, in bright lights a prominent foreground is to be
included.
The principles of achieving depth of field were certainly known from still photography. A fan’s review of
Essanay’s 1910 The Price of Fame remarked in The Nickelodeon: ‘Here the makers have secured a good
depth to the picture without a loss of detail.’24 Throughout the teens and twenties, the numerous guides to
cinematography almost invariably assume that the greatest possible depth of field is the proper goal. They
give clear instructions for achieving deep focus through the manipulation of f-stops, lens lengths, and
lighting conditions.25
Many films from the teens suggest filmmakers were aware of such principles and could apply them. In
most shots with multiple planes of action, the foreground character will be in medium shot, with the
background kept in sharp focus. In 1913, Kalem’s A Race With Time contains a shot (see fig 17.18) taken
from behind a telegraph operator as his daughter appears in the distance and walks up to the window to give
him his lunch. All planes are kept in focus throughout. There are several compositions in an early feature,
Damon and Pythias (Otis Turner, 1914, Universal), that place characters near the lens, with other characters
in planes beyond (fig 17.19). The Case of Becky (Frank Reicher, 1915, Lasky) shows how characters could
be juxtaposed against rather busy backgrounds, which still remained in clear focus (fig 17.20). A similarly
cluttered background appears behind the shot/reverse-shot passage in Field of Honor (Alan Holubar, 1917,
Butterfly; figs 16.73 and 16.74). Such background objects, kept in sharp focus and brightly illuminated, tend
to compete with the main figures for attention; a few years later, such background planes would be lit more
dimly to minimize their distracting effects. A dance scene in *Love and the Law (1919, Edgar Lewis)
contains a shot with the camera moving close to one couple, while the band remains in clear focus beyond
(fig 17.21).
As these examples show, the depth of field achieved in this period would not be of the type later
associated with Gregg Toland, with the foreground character or object placed very close to the lens. But the
characters could be in medium-shot framing, with the background kept sharply in focus. The avoidance of
extreme depth of field may have resulted as much from aesthetic considerations as from technical ones.
Most cutins still framed the actors in medium shot at this point; tight facial close-ups seldom appeared in
films. In addition, some commentaries of the period suggest that the distortion caused by short focal-length
lenses was considered disturbing and undesirable. A 1911 Moving Picture World article advised:
‘Experienced photographers know that to get naturalness of effect in a picture a short focus lens should be
avoided, otherwise you get distortion, that is unnecessary enlargement in parts of the pictures.’26 Three
years later a British cinematography guide suggested that foreground figures would seem grotesquely large
in relation to the background:27
The use of too short focus lenses and the consequent excessive nearness of the camera to the scene is
the cause of those unpleasant pictures that we sometimes see, which are apt to suggest to the flippant-
minded Gulliver among the Pygmies.
The suggestion here is that the distorting properties of the wide-angle lens—which enlarges foreground
objects and diminishes those in distant planes—would make Toland-style deep focus distracting for
audiences in the teens.
By the late silent period, however, exaggerated depth was appearing occasionally. The increased use of
occasional tight close-ups, added to the greater variety of lens lengths in use, combined to make the large
foreground object less incongruous, as figure 17.22, from The Magician (Rex Ingram, 1926, MGM)
demonstrates. The villainous hypnotist looks down through an upper window, at the heroine in the
courtyard below, visible in crisp focus. Depth functions narrationally here to suggest the hypnotist’s mental
control over the heroine. In general, an obvious separation of planes of action with deep focus was rare in
the silent period, nor do whole films use the technique throughout. Yet the basic technology was clearly
available, and filmmakers drew upon it occasionally for specific narrative purposes.
Aside from contemporary accounts and the films themselves, we know that the technology had to be
available. Cinematographers began using glass shots in the early twenties; these involved placing a large
glass sheet with a partial painting on it in a frame or clamp between the lens and the scene to be filmed. If
properly aligned and lit, the painting blended in with the scene beyond.28 But less attention has been given
to the fact that glass shots implied a command of depth of field. A 1922 account describes how they depend
upon the fact that:29
with a 2-inch lens working at f-5.6, an average operating condition, the depth of field is so great that
objects placed at close range and far away are all rendered sharply enough for practical purposes. The
hyperfocal distance (based on a 100th inch circle of confusion) of a 2-inch lens at f-5.6 is 6 feet. In
practice all objects from 5 feet to infinity are rendered sufficiently sharp.
We must dismiss, then, any lingering notion that the silent period used only a crude, unintentional deep
focus resulting from ‘contrasty’ orthochromatic film or from crude, slow lenses.30* If filmmakers did not
place great stress upon deep focus, it was because such a basic assumption of their practice did not need
reiteration: that one would seek as great a depth of field as shooting conditions permitted. In Chapter 21, we
shall see that even after the growth of a soft style of filming, depth of field remained a concern.
Deep focus cinematography worked in combination with staging in multiple planes and with depth in set
design. The spectator would not look across a space toward distant figures and setting. Instead, the larger
foreground figures or setting elements would give an impression of nearness— the spectator would look
past them into the deeper layers of the scene. Some shots would employ deep focus and multiple planes;
other shots in the same sequence would not. The cut-in could seem to move the spectator’s vantage point
past the foreground elements, toward a portion of the space that had been clearly visible in a previous shot.
Together, staging, set design, and depth of field contributed to the extension of narrative space forward,
with all its planes kept clearly visible. But without a change in lighting styles, the effect could be
problematic. If a deep-focus composition keeps the background plane brightly lit, objects of minimal
narrative significance may draw our eye away from the central action. We have already seen how in figures
16.77, 16.78, and 17.20, the busy walls at the rear attract an undue amount of attention. One additional
technique, that of directional, selective lighting, was necessary in order to downplay the less significant
areas of visible space within the frame.
Lighting for clarity and depth

During the teens, the adoption of arc equipment moved American film lighting practice away from a
dominant use of diffused, overall illumination toward a concentration on ‘effects’ lighting. Effects were
generally directional patches of light realistically motivated as having a specific source within the story.
During the primitive period, diffused lighting had been a part of the mise-enscene which did not function
narratively. It was the same whatever the narrative situation (excepting the occasional cases of fireplaces
and windows). But with the classical drive to subsume every technique within the overall motivation of the
narrative, there came an interest in varying lighting to suit the situation—to have the lighting issuing
realistically from narrative space and varying with circumstances.
A 1918 article defined light effects:31
A sign of the increased artistry on the part of motion picture producers was the introduction, some
years ago of ‘light effects’ in their interior scenes, a ‘light effect’ being broadly defined as that
manner of lighting a scene which would produce in the resultant photographs the appearance, or
effect, of the various objects or characters in the scene being lighted to an extent which would be
expected under the natural conditions which the scene was intended to represent, and with the light on
any given object coming from the direction which, likewise, would be noted under the natural
conditions supposed to be duplicated in the scene.
Figures 17.23 and 17.24 show a light effect from Shamus O’Brien (1912, Imp). Shamus is hiding in a loft
from his British pursuers. As he raises a trapdoor, a beam of light from below picks him out starkly. He
raises the door further and, through a stop-motion effect, dim fill light falls on the wall behind. This is an
early application of the principles described in the above definition.
With the technical improvement in arc lighting during the teens, light effects became easier to execute. In
1917, Kenneth MacGowan commented favorably upon the growing tendency toward effects lighting, citing
an Ince production called Chicken Casey:32
Light becomes atmosphere instead of illumination. Coming naturally from some window, lamp, or
doorway, it illumines the center of the picture and the people standing there, with a glow that in
intensity, in volume, or in variety of sources has some quality expressive of the emotion of the scene.
Lighting still retained its invariable function of illuminating the scene enough for it to be photographed, of
course. But as MacGowan suggests, ‘natural’ light sources and atmospheric enhancement of the narrative
came to be important considerations as well.
As an illustration of the kind of lighting MacGowan is talking about, consider a four-shot segment from
The Clodhopper, a 1917 Ince-produced feature (directed by Victor Schertzinger). In the first shot of the
scene (see fig 17.25), we see the hero’s shadow on the wall as he sits sewing late at night. An eyeline match
shows his mother looking at the shadow; a stark light falls on her face, motivated by the candle she holds
(fig 17.26). She looks around, and another eyeline match reveals the hero, also starkly lit, the lighting now
motivated by the lantern at his elbow (fig 17.27). The fourth shot is an establishing shot of the whole, with
more general lighting (fig 17.28). Here much of the effect of the mother discovering her son sitting up late
to repair his old clothes is created by the use of light effects, which not only create the sense of lateness, but
also help prolong the moment by motivating the mother’s gradual discovery of her son’s activities.
Light effects initially served a novelty function as well. Occasionally during the teens, advertisements in
trade journals stressed special light effects in films, sometimes using illustrations from relevant scenes.
Figure 17.29 shows an advertisement for an early 1912 Imp release, stressing the fireplace effect in the still
as the main selling point of the film. In 1917, Reel Life ran an advertisement for the Signal Film Corp.’s
production, A Lass of the Lumberlands (a Helen Holmes serial released through Mutual); the description in
the advertisement mentions the film’s ‘unusual lighting effects’ and says:
In Lighting effects, the new Mutual chapterplay, ‘A Lass of the Lumberlands’ is as unusual and
superior to other serials as it is in plot, action, and enactment. Some of the wonderful night ‘effects’
are positively startling. It is almost uncanny to behold flashing headlights, brilliantly lighted Pullmans
and tremendous bonfires, depicted on the screen with such reality.
This advertisement contains a still of three men in a car at night, picked out against the black background by
a single low light source within the car.33 Thus light effects fulfilled both stylistic and economic functions—
verisimilitude, atmosphere, and product differentiation.
This tendency toward the motivation of light effects from within the diegetic space was not the only impulse
behind the creation of a classical lighting style, however. Paralleling this tendency was a move away from
diffusion toward modeling of figures and objects through selective lighting. These two tendencies go hand
in hand, since selective lighting could draw upon naturalistic sources within the story space for its
motivation. Yet the specific purpose of selective lighting was not so much an impression of naturalism as it
was an aesthetically pleasing image and an illusion of greater depth.
Because filmmakers sought more and more selectivity in illumination, different lighting types gradually
emerged. A 1915 writer indicates that a distinction between key and fill lights was common knowledge: ‘It
may be laid down as a safe rule in studio practice that there shall be, first, a primary source of light…and in
addition a secondary source, used to accentuate portions of the scene or action which it is desired to bring
out in sharp relief.’34 After 1910 the principles of back and side-lighting were employed to enhance the
beauty of shots and to separate figure from background. In figure 17.30 from The Loafer (1911, Essanay),
the camera has been placed in an exterior so as to keep the sun to the left and rear, behind the figures,
outlining them partially with backlight. (See Appendix D, Diagram 2, for a contemporary illustration of how
sidelighting could be done.)
Several types of lighting were in at least occasional use, then, before the mid-teens. But a great shift in
American lighting practice started in 1915, with lighting effects and selective lighting becoming widespread
in the various studios in succeeding years. There can be little doubt that the change is in large part due to the
practices of the Cecil B.De Mille unit at the Lasky studio. In 1915, De Mille and his cinematographer, Alvin
Wyckoff, used spotlights provided by art director Wilfred Buckland to produce low-key lighting effects in
several productions: The Warrens of Virginia (released February), Carmen (November), and, most
noticeably, in The Cheat (December). Jesse L.Lasky used the lighting as a means of gaining publicity for
his films; he wrote to Motography just before the release of The Cheat, saying: ‘The picture should mark a
new era in lighting as applied to screen productions.’35
Contemporary sources invariably credit this innovation to De Mille and his colleagues, and motivated
low-key lighting arrangements soon came to be known as ‘Lasky lighting.’ One review of The Cheat
commented on ‘the development in the Lasky school of the purely photographic part. No school has
attained greater achievements in this respect. We would have to admire the purely photographic part even if
it were not subordinated to the plot. When it is thus subordinated the lighting effects may well be called a
new dramatic force.’36 This review articulates clearly the developing classical conception of lighting usage.
Selective lighting adds a pleasing aesthetic quality to the image, but can be justified as having a source
within the scenic space. Hence it enhances the narrative effect while providing a modicum of spectacle in its
own right.
Figure 17.31 is from the famous opening scene of The Cheat; placed against an entirely dark background,
the figure stands out in a single-source spotlight motivated as coming from a window offscreen right.
Several major scenes, usually involving the Japanese businessman, use effects depending on directional
spotlights. Other films from 1915 and 1916 copy Lasky lighting in a fairly direct way. In His Phantom
Sweetheart (April 1915, Vitagraph), there is a shot with a figure illuminated starkly from the side by light
coming from the next room (fig 17.32). Dolly’s Scoop (Joseph De Grasse, 1916, Rex) has a scene with the
heroine and her mother eating at a table lit by a single source, motivated as a hanging lamp; the rest of the
room is in total darkness (fig 17.33).
Yet such extreme contrasts of light and dark, highly praised though they were at the time, did not become
the standard way of creating a selective lighting set-up. The majority of films that used selective lighting
after 1915 mixed key and fill, often adding a touch of backlight. De Mille’s composition of one shot from
The Girl of the Golden West (1915, Lasky) typifies the softer modeling of faces that became standard; the
shot also shows a subdued lighting on the background that renders it unobtrusively visible (fig 17.34). Other
directors at Lasky used light effects less dramatically than De Mille had in The Cheat, demonstrating a
combination of motivated sources and selective illumination (see fig 17.35).
Within a few years, other studios had adopted the two principles of motivated light sources and selective
lighting, making these the basis of the classical approach to lighting. In 1917, studio head Edwin
Thanhouser declared the changes in lighting practice over the past few years to be an innovation second in
significance only to that of the feature film:
A subdued shadow for an unimportant background, the accentuating of some individual face or
expression or some particular action, the reflection of sunlight or moonlight through an open window,
the definite sphere of radiation from an electric light, the soft glow of a fireplace, and hundreds of
effects of light and shadow, all these have been perfected now, although but a few years ago, they
were still in the category of crude experiments. By centering lights at different points, and subduing
or omitting them altogether at others, the entire science of motion picture photography has been
revolutionized.
By the end of the teens, films often extended and refined backlighting by using it to surround the entire
figure—creating what was called ‘rim’ lighting. The accompanying frames from The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921, Metro) and A Cumberland Romance (Charles Maigne, 1920, Realart
Pictures Corp.) demonstrate how figures were carefully picked out against a subdued background by a set of
lights pointing in from a variety of directions (figs 17.36 and 17.37). As Thanhouser concludes:37
For the old style of diffusing light evenly over an entire scene has given place to the newer and better
method, and it is now not uncommon to see a succession of Rembrandt-like pictures, the light effects
of which rival, in that respect, some of the best conceptions of the Old Masters.
Filmmakers and writers were aware of the ability of selective lighting, and especially backlighting, to
produce a greater impression of depth. By outlining figures in light, the filmmaker could make them stand
out against a subdued background. This in turn was desirable because it kept the eye from wandering to the
set and away from the main narrative action. In 1921, Frederick S.Mills, Lasky’s electrical illuminating
engineer, wrote:38
By focusing a spotlight on the back of the heads of the principals, the image or images are caused to
stand out from the background and the figures are more pronounced and thus better depth is obtained.
If this were not done, the figures would go dead against the background, no matter how far out they
stood in the perspective.
Later, in 1925, a presentation to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers demonstrated the effects of
backlighting. The lecturers compared two stills from Night Life of New York (Allan Dwan, 1925, Famous
Players-Lasky; see fig 17.38), showing three actors in medium shot against a dark background. In the first,
backlighting is used:
Note how the spotlight has been used to bring up each of the characters. These highlights on the heads
of each of the two men separate them from the dark background at the same time revealing the
position of Mr. Kelly’s left arm. The dark coat of Miss Gish has been revealed in the same manner.
The second picture is the same composition, but with all the lighting coming from the front:39
Here the dark heads of the men disappear into the background and there is no suggestion of the left
arm position. Obviously spotlighting of this kind is necessary…. This effect and more especially that
obtained from back lighting has been done in the last few years.
This careful modeling was especially important for glamor lighting. A set-up with a key light from the left,
fill from the right, and a strong backlighting is evident in one medium close-up of Mary Miles Minter from
The Ghost of Rosy Taylor (Edward Sloman, 1918, American; see fig 17.39). The use of backlighting on
blonde hair was not only spectacular but necessary—it was the only way filmmakers could get blonde hair
to look light-colored on the yellow-insensitive orthochromatic stock.
Figure 17.40 shows how a close shot would combine a variety of lights, with arc floodlights at the sides,
mercury-vapors and a reflector for fill light in front, and an arc spot at the rear to highlight the actress’s
blonde hair. The same basic types of lighting were used for long shots. The lighting set-up for Mr. Billings
Spends His Dime (1923, Famous Players-Lasky; see fig 17.41) demonstrates the use of large floodlights in
the foreground for overall illumination, with a considerable amount of sidelight coming from arc broadsides
in stands. Note also the pairs of spotlights shining down from the tops of the set’s walls at the rear. This
combination tends to outline the figures in glowing light, as in figures 17.36 and 17.37.
The move away from diffused to selective light is apparent from lighting plots published in contemporary
accounts. (The lighting plots and descriptions in Appendix D show shifts in approach through the period
1914 to 1925.) These various lighting set-ups represent the basic principles of arrangement; filmmakers
could of course alter them according to circumstances. But the arrangement of lamps was the single greatest
consumer of time during shooting; other personnel were paid for doing nothing while technicians changed
the lights. So practice would tend toward standardized lay-outs for lighting. Usually only the larger budget
films under imaginative directors, designers, and cinematographers, would display atypical effects.
As with other stylistic devices, lighting was ultimately judged by its contribution to the narrative. In spite
of the many claims that Hollywood had an aesthetic of realism, filmmakers would always sacrifice realism
if this was necessary for a clearer understanding of the story. In 1924, cinematographer Norton F.Brodin
summed up this distinction between realist and narrative functions:40
People often ask if eventually the screen lighting will not be exactly like natural lighting —people in a
room, for instance, being lighted through the one window of the room. It does not seem that this
condition will ever arrive. What the screen loses in voice it must make up in gesture and traveling as
it must always, at a steady, fast rate, there must not be anything lost that will aid the plot and the
development of it. Furthermore, it seems more important to photograph scenes advantageously from
the angle of the subject, and the audience, too, rather than to be just correct in lighting. Every day we
come closer to photographing scenes as they really are but never will we discard the art of photographing
people and objects in the backgrounds for certain pleasing effects.
Brodin touches upon one recurring rationale for the classical narration—to show things ‘advantageously’
for the audience. In the primitive cinema, lighting helped the spectator to see; later, filmmakers began to
consider light as it could function to help the spectator to understand more and more. By picking important
figures out more brightly than their surroundings, selective lighting could emphasize them and could
establish their position in the depth of the scene. Beauty and realism were additional functions, designed to
make the viewer’s understanding pleasurable and its technological sources in filmmaking unobtrusive.
Framing as a guide for the spectator

Depth placed the spectator on the edge of the narrative space and lighting helped pick out the salient objects
in that space. But lighting was only reinforcing another strong cue for the spectator’s attention—framing.
Centering, the balanced composition, and the mobile frame to follow or reveal action could all work with or
without selective lighting to guide the eye and to create expectations about the most important elements in a
scene.
The principles of composition Chapter 5 has described as characteristic of the classical Hollywood
cinema are in evidence from the early teens. Important characters and actions draw our eye because they
occupy the center of the screen. The area about one-third of the way down from the top of the frame is a
privileged one for faces; whether the framing is distant or close, the heads tend to line up there (see
fig 17.42). A glance through the other illustrations in this section will confirm that this practice was
widespread early in the classical period.
When two figures are present, they usually balance one another, standing about equidistant from the
center. (Again, fig 17.42 and other frames in this section demonstrate this.) In the primitive period,
important actions sometimes took place at the extreme sides or corners of the frame. In The Skyscrapers
(1905, AM&B), for example, the villain plants a stolen watch in the foreman’s house for revenge; the
foreman’s daughter watches this from a hiding place and later is able to confront the villain in court and
reveal his guilt. But in the planting scene, the daughter’s hiding place is in the extreme upper left of the
frame; even granting that original prints probably would have shown more than we see in modern ones, the
framing still emphasizes the villain’s gestures more than the daughter’s, because he is at the center of the
frame. The classical composition took care to guide the spectator’s eye to the pertinent actions without
effort.
One of the main impulses toward the mobile frame, or moving camera, came from the effort to maintain
centering. By far the greatest number of films that used camera movement before the mid-twenties used it
strictly to reframe rather than to track or pan with an extended movement. Jon Gartenberg has shown that
occasional primitive films use panning or tracking.41 Certainly the possibility of moving the camera was
well-known almost from the beginning of cinema. But in the primitive period, the moving camera was
associated more with scenics and topicals. These would often consist of shots in which the camera surveyed
a location by panning in a circle or by moving while mounted on a vehicle. In such films, camera
movement often created the main action or change by providing additional depth cues. Without camera
movement, such films as Edison’s series of views of Kicking Horse Canyon (1901) would show an
unmoving landscape; they would offer little novelty value beyond that of a simple lantern slide of the same
sight.
But the fiction film usually needed no such added motion. Figure movement provided the main interest,
and in most cases staging could be done within the limits of the camera’s range. Undoubtedly the static framing
of most early narrative-film shots arose from the camera’s imitation of a spectator in a theater seat. The flat
back wall of the set did not extend much beyond the edges of the frame, and hence panning was often
impossible—there was no new space to reveal. Certainly shots done out of doors use camera movements
more frequently than those made in studio settings. (They occur, for example, in The Great Train Robbery
[Porter, 1903, Edison], A Bold Bank Robbery [1904, Lubin], The Skyscrapers [1905, AM&B], and Her
First Adventure [1908, AM&B].) Brief reframing pans became common in the teens; they occurred in about
half the Extended Sample films from 1911, and they remained at about that frequency through the teens.
In spite of this common use of reframing, few films went on to employ lengthy pans or tracks. Some
writers found panning distracting. One 1914 script guide commented: ‘Theoretically, the eye of the camera
never moves, excepting in the disillusioning practice of some operators to follow the movement of energetic
characters by “panoram-ing.”’42 This opinion suggests that there was some resistance to camera movement,
just as there had been to close framings. A moving camera would call attention to the frame itself, rather
than the action within it. With the growing emphasis on centering the action, however, reframings were
inevitable; if a figure moved partially out of the frame, there was no way to make the action visible but by
re-centering. Commentators and practitioners soon realized that a small camera movement would be less
distracting than a figure partially concealed by the frameline.
Reframing was not always a matter of casual adjustment to the vagaries of figure movement. Many
reframings, especially from the mid-teens on, show strong evidence of planning. Figure 17.43 shows the
situation at the beginning of a shot in The Hired Hand (Victor Schertzinger, 1918, Ince). The actors sit with
their heads at the classical point, one-third of the way down from the top of the frame. Suddenly the camera
tilts up, to a position where there seems to be too much space above the characters’ heads (fig 17.44). In a
classical film, this can imply only two things. Either the characters are about to stand up, or another
character will enter the frame; whichever the case will be, the camera adjusts the balance of the composition
to anticipate the change. In this case, the characters stand up (fig 17.45). Such anticipatory reframings occur
occasionally in the silent cinema; usually, however, the cinematographer tries to coordinate the reframing
exactly with the figure movement, to make the camera shift less noticeable. In either case, the reframing
soon became common enough not to be distracting to an audience accustomed to the device.
While the main use of camera movement was to center action, cinematographers made limited use of
other functions for movement as well. Occasionally a film of the teens employs the mobile frame for a dramatic
or comic revelation of new space. This coincides with the transitional period, in which films began to
display more self-conscious narration; here the plot delays our knowledge of story events in order to
increase their impact on us. In At Old Fort Dearborn (1912, Bison ‘101’) a long shot shows a band of
Indians on a hill (fig 17.46), then tilts down to show the results of a battle that has just taken place—a
ruined wagon with dead driver and horses (fig 17.47). The second sequence of Wild and Woolly (John
Emerson, 1917, Douglas Fairbanks Corp.) introduces the hero in medium shot, apparently seated at a
campfire in front of a teepee; then the camera pulls back to reveal that the teepee is in fact in the hero’s
Manhattan apartment bedroom. Another common function for tracking or panning shots was to follow a
vehicle’s or figure’s extended movement. Griffith helped popularize placing the camera on a platform
attached to a car (as in Intolerance) or moving the camera back from racing horsemen (as with the galloping
Klan members in The Birth of a Nation). Following a moving subject was undoubtedly the most common
application of the tracking shot during the silent period.
Under the influence of the Italian epics that were popular in this country in the early to mid-teens, some
directors and cinematographers tried using tracking and even crane shots for still other purposes. Cabiria
(Giovanni Pastrone, 1914, Italy) especially caught filmmakers’ attention, and the slow track independent of
figure movement came to be known as the ‘Cabiria movement.’ Several directors used such tracking shots.
For Intolerance, Billy Bitzer recalled filming the Babylon set with the camera mounted on a pyramidal
dolly 140 feet high, with an elevator to move the camera up and down; in addition, the dolly was on a set of
six parallel railroad cars that moved it toward and away from the set.43 Lois Weber directed an intricate
tracking shot for a battle sequence in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1915, Weber). Figures 17.48 through 17.50
show how the camera tracks directly to the right along a row of pillars, past the action; then the camera
moves diagonally backward and to the left, across the room and away from the pillars. In both these films,
the camera moves independently of the action, displaying the epic proportions of the sets and the staging.
Movement is an important depth cue, and a mobile framing guaranteed that huge sets like the Intolerance
and Dumb Girl of Portici palaces did not appear as flat, painted surfaces. The studios would want to show
off the large volumes of the decor they had paid for. At least one observer of the period noticed tracking shots
as a trend:44
There is in vogue at some studios now a method of filming a large scene without losing detail that
may be adopted generally. This consists in mounting the camera and tripod upon a rubber-wheeled
platform, and moving camera and operator about the scene. Thus, first a corner may be photographed;
then the camera moves and more of the scene enters the field of vision. Finally the lens may point
only to the chief character in the scene.
In this there is the advantage of holding the connection between the different parts of the scene
without interruption. At present, however, there is a sense of mechanics which to some may destroy
the illusion of the picture.
There were no commercially made camera mounts for such movements, and each studio had to devise its
own when the occasion arose. Nevertheless, most seemed to hit upon the same solution—an automobile
frame and wheels with rubber tires to cushion the jolts occasioned by moving over rough ground. This
apparatus served to make tracking shots, either following action or showing off a set. Several filmmakers
have spoken of using such vehicles in the mid-teens,45* and by the end of the teens, the terms ‘truck-up’ and
‘truck-back’ were in use.46
Tracking, panning, and reframing movements remained in occasional use into the twenties. They were
relatively infrequent, however. Most films show such extensive planning that the mobile frame is not
necessary. One carefully balanced and beautifully lit composition follows another. The cutting rate was
typically so fast that each individual action had its own shot; there was little impulse to combine several
actions by adjusting the framing within a shot. Ernst Lubitsch’s films, such as The Marriage Circle and
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1924 and 1925, Warner Bros), offer good examples of how to avoid reframing.
The Marriage Circle begins with a tilt up to reveal a character’s reaction and contains a few later tracking
shots that follow action, but the camera never reframes. One of the most skilfully photographed films of the
early twenties, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, cinematographer John F.Seitz, 1921,
Metro), employs some impressive tracking shots during Valentine’s tango scenes, but otherwise has only a
couple of tiny reframing movements. On the whole, aside from tracking shots following chase scenes and
the like, camera movement was a relatively minor part of Hollywood’s stylistic repertory until late in the
silent period.
The influence of German films in the mid-twenties—especially Variety (E.A.Dupont, 1925, Ufa) in 1926
—was considerable. Some cinematographers began to move their camera as freely as they could, once again
devising many sorts of elevators, cranes, and elaborate dollies to imitate the German visual acrobatics. The
new freedom of movement fitted well into Hollywood’s existing practices. Mobile framing could function
to display character perception through point-of-view shots, to substitute for editing in the creation of an
omnipresent narration, to display the volume of large sets, or to aid in other specialized effects tailored to
the needs of a given narrative situation. In Hotel Imperial (Maurice Stiller, 1926, MGM), Bert Glennon
mounted his camera on an elevator which in turn hung from a set of overhead rails (fig 17.51). Charles
Rosher claims to have learned the technique of the dolly suspended from tracks in the ceiling when he was
observing the filming of Faust in Germany in 1926.47 He and Karl Struss used it to spectacular effect in the
famous camera movement through the swamp in Sunrise (F.W.Murnau, 1927, Fox). For Seventh Heaven
(Frank Borzage, cinematographer Ernest Palmer, 1927, Fox) the camera was mounted on a large elevator to
follow the characters vertically up several flights of stairs (fig 17.52). This sudden emphasis on mobile framing
undoubtedly contributed to the sense many observers had during the early sound period that the camera was
imprisoned in its soundproof booth. Actually, as Chapter 23 will show, early sound filming encouraged a
return to reframing.
Continuity editing and the various devices discussed in this chapter—staging, set design, deep focus,
lighting practices, and camera movement—combined to tailor space moment by moment to the demands of
the narration. In the primitive period, space had been presented in a series of large blocks which kept the
spectator at a distance, scanning the entire space to follow the action. By the late teens, films provided
multiple cues to guide the eye and the understanding. In effect, omniscient narration began to manipulate
the plot relations to a greater degree. The techniques of narration were unobtrusive because films thoroughly
motivated their mise-en-scene and framing and matched their shots to create an uninterrupted flow.
However strange or difficult silent films may appear to us today, we can still look at works from the late
teens and twenties and find a standard classical presentation of causally relevant space and time.
18
The stability of the classical approach after 1917
Standard form is not an arbitrary Detail of a passing Mood, but a composite Assemblage of all
that has proved effective in past Expression.1
Henry Albert Phillips, 1921
At the beginning of Part Three, I suggested that the classical cinema gained its full formulation in 1917. The
initial coalescence of all the elements of classical filmmaking came at that particular time because a variety
of practices in the industry had recently become dominant. New subdivisions in the work process created
production roles like those of the art director, the master cutter, and the assistant cameraman, leading to a
greater emphasis on specialization and denned procedures. Feature films forced more concentration upon a
variety of techniques and permitted more money to be invested in each film. The supervisory segment of the
studios fostered a division of labor and an attention to efficiency that would further support a systematic
approach to filmmaking. Finally, a wide range of industry institutions were disseminating a normative
description of the quality film.
I do not wish to imply that all films from 1917 on were complete or correct in their utilization of the
classical system. Many drew upon it in a tentative or clumsy way; others could easily be mistaken for mid-
twenties films. But few entirely fail to draw upon the system. And by the mid-twenties, classical
filmmaking had reached a relative stability.
Undoubtedly a film of the mid-1920s is likely to look somewhat different from one of 1917. During the
interval, filmmakers were assimilating the guidelines, which had reached the status of rules. Custom and
practice made it easier to match on action smoothly, to light every interior scene with the same overall look,
to motivate the movements of characters into various planes, and so on. Such practices were matters of
skill; the use of classical guidelines could be more or less correct, but films of the late teens and of the
twenties would appeal to the same basic principles. Films of the twenties frequently have a technical and
stylistic perfection and an apparent ease missing from most teens films. To some extent this may be due to
the fact that a new generation of directors and other filmmakers was already emerging. These people had
made their first important films during the mid- to late teens, when the continuity system, effects lighting,
and other central aspects of the classical style were being explicitly discussed as the way of doing things.
Among directors, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Edward Sloman, Victor Fleming, Clarence Brown, John Stahl,
James Cruze, W.S.Van Dyke, Alan Crosland, Henry King, King Vidor, Rex Ingram, Frank Borzage,
William C.deMille, Fred Niblo, and Malcolm St Clair were all expert in the classical system of the twenties,
and all made their first major films during the period 1915 to 1920.
By the 1920s, directors, cinematographers, and other filmmakers had a range of models of the classical
style to follow. As one 1928 commentator, referring to scenarists, suggested: ‘What the trained writer of
twelve years or more ago laboriously sweated over and figured out in continuity form, most young men who
grew up with the movies (using the screen’s evolutionary efforts for their main entertainment) know
instinctively today.’2 After 1917, a filmmaker’s attempts to give his or her work a distinctive look would
take place within well-defined limits. Filmmaking now was guided by a set of standards and norms often
codified in print. A budding filmmaker could be taught the system and would be likely to receive basically
the same advice from any experienced practitioner.
Learning standard style

There were no schools or classes held by the studios to teach newcomers how to make films, nor does there
appear to have been any formal apprenticeship program at any studio. Certainly the system of assistants to
directors, cinematographers, editors, art directors, and the like must have functioned as an informal
apprenticeship program. Similarly, filmmakers usually had to work their way up, starting on less important
films and moving on to the higher budget features. In 1920, Carl Laemmle described the system in force at
Universal:
Our directors and cameramen, and we hire only the most experienced, go through a new school when
they join our organization. They have to work up from the one-reel pictures. Then they graduate to the
serials and from there to the special attraction class. They are learning all the time. When they get in
the special attraction class they have profited by their previous work. As a result, a Universal special
attraction is not marred by a ‘serial-ish tone.’
Finally, according to Laemmle, filmmakers would ‘graduate’ to making Uni versal-Jewels, the studio’s
highest line of films.3
A variety of practitioners have recalled their early experiences, and, given the absence of primary
documentation from the period, these reminiscences are the best evidence we have as to how filmmakers
learned their crafts. Young employees were sometimes willing to work long hours, learning skills not called
for in their regular duties at the studio. Several have mentioned getting help from more experienced
filmmakers who guided them along. Karl Brown worked as an assistant to Bitzer and Griffith, eventually going
on to be a cinematographer and director on his own. Margaret Booth has recalled learning editing by
watching director John M. Stahl: ‘I used to stand by him while he cut, and he used to ask me to come in
with him to see his dailies in the projection room. This way he taught me the dramatic values of cutting, he
taught me about tempo—in fact he taught me how to edit.’ On her own time, Booth practiced editing
outtakes until Stahl promoted her to doing his first cut.4 Dorothy Arzner, a script typist at Famous Players in
1919, got similar help from a cutter, Nan Heron, who eventually recommended her for promotion to script girl
and editor. William Hornbeck tells a similar story about getting ‘advice and tips’ from F.Richard Jones at
Keystone; Hornbeck has also recalled that when he began as a projectionist at Keystone, he ‘kept watching
and each runthrough I’d see what had been done to the film. I would learn from the others that were ahead of
me.’ The similarity of these stories suggests a pattern that may have been common—with young hopefuls
either observing the procedures of more experienced filmmakers, or getting direct advice from them. The
same sort of thing apparently happened with writers. When Clarence C.Badger joined the writing staff at
Lubin about 1913, the head of that department taught him ‘how to split up a story into scenes, in other
words, how to write a shooting script.’5 This method of learning technique would promote standardization of
each specialized task. Such learning would be especially necessary in the areas most dependent upon
technological knowledge, such as cinematography and laboratory work.
THE STABILITY OF THE CLASSICAL APPROACH AFTER 1917 331
But aspiring filmmakers seem also to have learned the classical style quite simply by watching films.
Compare these two remarkably similar accounts of learning style from a theater seat. The first, written long
after the fact, is King Vidor’s description of his attempts to learn how to direct, the night before he was due
to shoot his first film, a freelance newsreel; this was about 1912. The second comes from a 1914 article in
which a freelance scenarist told Photoplay readers how she had succeeded in selling forty scenarios and
winning Vitagraph’s scenario contest:6
(Vidor) That evening I tried to increase my knowledge of motion-picture technique by going to the
movies. I sat with a stop watch and notebook and tried to estimate the number of cuts or scenes in a
thousand-foot reel, the length of individual scenes, the distance of the subject from the camera, and
various other technical details.
(Sterne) I went to the movies, pencil and paper in hand, determined to master the technique by
study at close range…. Before long I had a rough idea of how many scenes constituted a comedy—
how many a drama. I discovered what style of pictures various companies required. Even now I find
myself unconsciously counting inserts and scenes as a matter of habit.
The aspirants may have been more systematic than most, but their attention to precise and quantifiable factors
accorded well with the studios’ ideals.
Early scenario manuals sometimes urged writers to attend films to learn technique. A professional
scenarist wrote in 1917:7
Every scenario writer should practice continuity writing persistently and should follow carefully the
continuity of productions he sees upon the screen, and then he will readily pick the flaws in other
writers’ work and see where they themselves could better it if given the opportunity. Continuity
writing is largely a matter of practice and keen observation.
Professionals within the industry were advising amateurs to do much the same thing they habitually did
themselves. Various organizations encouraged filmmakers to gather and see each other’s work. In the
twenties, industry clubs and professional organizations often had projection rooms or special screenings.
The studios themselves had access to prints, which they might show to their employees. Charles G.Clarke,
who worked at Fox in the mid-twenties, recalls that the personnel regularly attended dinners which would
be followed by screenings of films that studio officials wished them to be aware of. In 1922, the Chicago
laboratory of the Rothacker company held a ‘cutters’ convention,’ where a number of editors screened the
films they were currently working on.8
Cinematographers saw each others’ films frequently and influences passed freely among them. Arthur
Miller recalled that ‘cameramen were copycats; one copied the other, I copied someone, someone also
copied me.’ Clarke agrees that cinematographers could learn more about lighting, for example, from seeing
other people’s films than from experimentation. Asked about visually influential films of the period, he named
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Broken Blossoms, and Way Down East ‘The only way that you could
know what was going on was to go to the movies and see.’9 The speed with which any innovation became
diffused across the industry tends to confirm these recollections.
Although the Hollywood production system favored a certain degree of innovation on the part of its
employees, it generally rewarded their conformance to its established filmmaking approaches. As we have
seen, an innovation had to be adaptable to the existing guidelines of narrative and stylistic construction
before it could enter the system. Even a relative nonconformist would have to know the basic filmmaking
paradigm in order to depart from it acceptably.
The contemporary recognition of stand ardization
All our directors are not great. There would be no fun for the picture audiences if they were.
Fans would be deprived of that greatest of all pleasures, writing to the magazines to point out
that Marie wore silk stockings going in the door and lace filigreed hose coming out of it.10
Peter Milne, 1922
Films and writings of the period demonstrate that certain devices and functions were consistent practice in
Hollywood. But beyond this, there is written evidence that Hollywood considered itself standardized.
Practitioners did not find the image of factory production detrimental; standardization was conceived as a
positive force.
By the late teens and twenties, Hollywood writings were separating off the early years of filmmaking as a
crude stage which had been surpassed. Although fond at all times of repeating the old saw that the movies
were still in their ‘infancy’ (and hence capable of continual, rapid progress), people within the industry seem
also to have believed that the art had reached a sort of plateau by the late teens. Writers referred especially
to the older chase and trick films as typical of the crude material that would be unacceptable to modern
audiences. Austin C. Lescarboura summed up this view in 1920:11
There is a vast difference between the photoplays of the present and those of a decade ago. But during
the past two or three years progress along this line has been somewhat limited and not so obvious. The
photoplay of today leaves little to be desired; motion-picture acting and story-telling technique and
photography appear pretty nearly perfect.
In a sense Lescarboura’s statement seems naive, for there were to be frequent changes in filmmaking
devices in the years to come—most notably the introduction of soft-style cinematography and sound during
the twenties. But he was also remarkably quick to pick up on the classical formula’s transition into a period
of relative equilibrium. The notions of rapid progress which writers had set forth in the midteens now took a
back seat to a more tempered approach to change within a standardized system.
Even as early as the late teens, many writers and historians assumed that Griffith had single-handedly
brought about the transition to the classical cinema. A 1917 account credited him with having ‘wrought out
the grammar of this new language in the world of art,’ and with having ‘established such well-defined rules
of technique that nearly all the works in motion pictures can be traced in some manner to certain
developments of his. The universal school of cutting, the closeup, the cutback…’ This account also traces
the formula used in comedy films to Mack Sennett, and concludes that ‘the rules invented by these men are
as inviolable as the rules of harmony, classified from the works of Mozart, Wagner and others.’12 One could
scarcely ask for a better summary of the Hollywood cinema as a ‘classical’ system.
There were numerous statements during the twenties, both praising and attacking Hollywood’s
standardization. Harold Lloyd recognized the balance of standardization and differentiation which
characterized Hollywood when he described his films in 1926:13
If they are designed from slightly different angles, so that in a series of three pictures we can offer our
whole bag of tricks and vary our appeal, then we have done what we aimed to do. And this will make
for a certain standardization of comedies. Of course by this I do not mean that we create a rubber stamp
or formula by which we make pictures. It is rather a standard of appeal from slightly different points,
or a blending of average tastes.
This description seems overly modest in relation to Lloyd, whose silent features surely rank among the
most polished and varied (and lucrative) works turned out by a single artist within the Hollywood system
during the twenties. Yet the passage also suggests the power of that system to allow someone as inventive
as Lloyd to turn out quality films quickly—films which would appeal predictably to a broad audience.
Hollywood practitioners and writers at least professed to believe that the system of norms was a response
to the desires of audiences. Contemporary accounts paint the viewer as quick to pick up on anachronisms or
inconsistencies of mise-en-scene from shot to shot. The ‘Why do they do it?’ letters column of Photoplay
encouraged readers to send in descriptions of errors they spotted. Invariably the letters referred to the
handling of mise-en-scene (an 1887 model gun in a Civil War scene, an object switched from right to left
hand at the cut). In 1916, Photoplay reported that fans also wrote in to the studios when they spotted
errors:14
The same discriminating public which is responsible for the creation of art and technical directors is
the bete noir of those officials, for technical flaws are quickly discovered by the ‘outsiders’ and some
of the more enthusiastic fans do not hesitate about writing the producer to ‘set him right.’ Then the art
director hears from the ‘big boss.’
Although fault-finding on the part of the audience sometimes appears to be a headache for the studios,
Chapter 9 has shown that Hollywood has a stake in promoting such an activity. By focusing spectator
attention on nitpicking, the industry could enhance the publicity value of the art director’s work; historical
and geographical accuracy became a saleable aspect of the films.
The Photoplay column and other popular sources give no hint that ordinary moviegoers noticed
violations of screen direction or other continuity rules. Yet practitioners still assumed that a spectator would
sense flaws. Compare these two accounts of spectator to continuity.15
(1917) Ninety-nine picture fans in every hundred can instantly tell whether the continuity in a picture
is good or bad. They will not stop to analyze it; that isn’t necessary. They feel instinctively whether it
is rhythmical or not; whether the scenes follow one another in proper sequence, and whether the
correct values of each to the other are maintained.
(1918, speaking of a fan who has found a film’s story hard to follow) But its faults were intangible.
Had an English house been flashed on the screen as an old Southern homestead, or a girl shown
playing tennis in an evening gown, then she could have explained the faults. The public are location
and wardrobe wise by this time but they are not yet ‘cutting wise.’
As a result of the idea that audiences were not consciously aware of cutting, the fan magazines tend to refer
to it seldom; the second passage quoted above is a rare exception. Usually Photoplay and the other popular
journals concentrated on art direction, costumes, special effects, and other techniques of mise-en-scene—
hence perpetuating audience interest in them and not in editing. This bias, which has remained in force to
the present, helps keep attention on spectacle while allowing editing to remain unobtrusive and unnoticed.
These opinions from the period leave little room for doubt that Hollywood was aware of its own
standardization as it occurred. There are references to the various techniques as ‘rules’ and appeals to the
norms of classical systems in other arts to justify those rules. Moreover, most practitioners saw the standard
style as an aid to filmmaking rather than as a restriction. (Those for whom the norms were constraining—
principally Erich von Stroheim, and to a lesser degree Rex Ingram, Maurice Tourneur, and Josef Von
Sternberg—eventually left the American industry proper.)
From the late teens on, Hollywood’s narrative and stylistic approaches would receive relatively small
adjustments. One issue may serve as an indication of the degree of sophistication the classical filmmaking
system had reached by the end of the teens. Beginning around 1920, a few contemporary writings discuss
strategies for avoiding ‘eye fatigue’ for the viewer. So clear were the basic rules concerning spatial and
temporal construction, that writers could turn their attention to such a minor problem. The solution was
more continuity—of tonality and of composition. In 1920, Lesqarboura summed up this solution; eye-
strain, he wrote, was caused by:
sudden changes on the screen, either in the composition of successive scenes or in the degree of
illumination. For instance, if in one scene the eyes have been drawn to a figure on the extreme left,
and in the next the point of interest lies to the extreme right, the onlooker is immediately disconcerted
and his eyes seek out the new point of interest only after suffering eyestrain and momentary
confusion. Again, if one scene has been made in the open, in bright sunlight, and the next is uniformly
dark, the quick change from a bright scene to a dark one and particularly vice versa is quite trying.
Already producers have given much attention to the matter of scene changes on the screen. The
more advanced producers at this moment have more or less overcome all sudden changes in either
light or points of interest. Where successive scenes do not match up sufficiently close to permit of
going directly from one to the next, the various devices such as the ‘fade-in’ and ‘fade-out,’ the
various vignettes, and so on are employed. In this manner the eyes are gradually removed from one
scene and introduced to the next.
Lescarboura adds that tinting, toning, and art cards for titles all aid in achieving an even visual quality from
shot to shot.16
A later observer in the Hollywood studios echoed these remarks in 1927, concluding:17
Pictorial rhythms must seem to sway from scene to scene, must pick up naturally from one to another,
and must vary enough to avoid monotony.
Consider three consecutive scenes, A, B, and C. If at the close of A the interest is placed on the
right, then scene B, although perhaps quite unconnected in subject matter with A, must begin with the
interest concentrated almost at the point which the eye was watching at the close of A, or it must
continue a movement suggested by A. Again, whatever the action may be that runs through B, scene C
must pick up the interest at the local spot where B ceases. So that the eye is danced about insensibly,
but is never steeplechased.
This concern with graphic continuity carries forward concepts upon which the classical system was based.
As with temporal and spatial relations, no breaks or shocks should jar the eye, lest attention be momentarily
shifted from the narrative to the film’s technical aspects. This notion is perhaps a minor one, but that is
precisely the point; the major changes had taken place by the late teens. In the twenties, filmmakers could work
at perfecting an existing system.
A summary example: Code of the Sea

In the course of Part Three, we have seen that by the 1920s the stylistic devices of classical filmmaking
were in use and that their range of functions was well-established. We have also seen to some degree that
the systems of time and space were subordinate to that of causality. But in examining Hollywood’s devices
in a somewhat atomistic fashion, I have not yet shown that classical silent films drew thoroughly and
exclusively upon these systematic relations. Only an analysis of a typical film can demonstrate that
Hollywood had indeed created a stable, pervasive classical approach by the twenties.
*Code of the Sea (Famous Players-Lasky) is in many ways a typical ‘A’ feature of 1924. Made by a
relatively major but non-auteur director, Victor Fleming (who had already completed a dozen films since
his switch from cinematographer to director), the film was a starring vehicle for Rod La Rocque.
Code of the Sea contains a unified cause-effect chain which reaches closure at the end, leaving no lines of
action unresolved. An event in the past— the earliest event referred to in the film— provides the main
cause. Bruce McDow’s father, John, had been in charge of a lightship which warned vessels away from a
rocky coast. During a storm, John had lost his nerve and sailed the lightship into shelter, thereby allowing
an ocean liner to crash and its passengers to drown; John subsequently died, branded a coward. This all
happens before the film’s action begins. Bruce has grown up believing himself to have inherited his father’s
cowardice, and, as the film opens he loses his first job on the crew of a ship by being too scared to climb the
mast. His girlfriend Jenny Hayden urges him to try again. Her father is the owner of a line of steamships,
one of which had been in the fatal accident caused by John. Captain Hayden forbids Jenny to see Bruce, and
favors another suitor, Stewart Radcliffe. This basic situation leads Jenny to help Bruce obtain a post aboard
the same lightship his father had commanded. During a gale, Bruce proves his courage by saving the
passengers aboard Captain Hayden’s sinking yacht, including Jenny and Radcliffe. Bruce falls into the sea
as the yacht goes under, but he is washed ashore unconscious the next morning, where Jenny finds him.
This story line is extremely simple; the film fills it out through variations on the elements of Bruce’s
despair and Jenny’s urging him on. The characters provide the basis for most of the film’s action. Each has
a severely limited number of traits which we learn at his or her first appearance. An inter-title introduces
Bruce by saying that this is his first sea voyage, and the shot that follows this title frames Bruce’s
apprehensive face. The captain orders him aloft, but he is too frightened to go and instead ends up peeling
potatoes in the galley. Everything emphasizes Bruce’s cowardice, and he behaves in a consistent fashion
until he overcomes his fears. First impressions of the other characters are also valid and lasting. We initially
see Jenny as she greets Bruce on the dock at his return. She obviously is in love with him, delighted at his
return, and disappointed when he reveals his failure. Jenny will be the main causal impetus behind Bruce’s
character change. The inter-title that introduces Captain Hayden declares that he hates the name McDow,
having lost his ship years before through John’s cowardice. Within a few shots, Hayden forbids Jenny to see
Bruce; later, after she fails to accept Radcliffe as a suitor, Hayden sends her on a yacht trip to forget Bruce.
Radcliffe first appears taunting and bullying Bruce, and he continues to be a cad throughout. Except when
some change of traits is clearly motivated, the characters remain true to our initial impressions of them.
Chapter 2 has mentioned that the star system reinforces the rapid construction of consistent characters
and can prepare for ‘plausible’ character change. The only real star in the film is Rod La Rocque, who had
risen to fame during the years before the release of Code of the Sea. La Rocque was among the ‘Latin lover’
types who became prominent after Valentine’s success in 1921 with Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Like Valentine, La Rocque had a general image of glamor, with a slightly foppish or flighty quality. He was
more a sensitive than a he-man type, being quite capable of portraying weak or erring men who redeemed
themselves eventually. Although he had played the villain in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments the year
before, La Rocque was, by mid-1924, a leading man. At the beginning of Code of the Sea, his star persona
would lead the audience to believe in his doubts and fears, but to realize that Bruce McDow is probably not
‘really’ a coward. There is a strong hypothesis from the start that he only thinks he is, and this sets up later
scenes where he overcomes his weakness.
This problem with cowardice sets up one main line of action; the second, following the frequent classical
pattern, is a romance. The two lines initially are linked by the past connection between the two fathers. In the
film’s action, the romance with Jenny provides the incentive for Bruce to keep trying to overcome his fears.
In the second scene, Jenny tells Bruce she knows of a way for him to ‘conquer’ himself. Later, she says his
salvation will be to think of others. Although he has further doubts along the way, Bruce eventually does
behave bravely, risking his life to save the passengers aboard the yacht.
Along the way to this goal, most of the causal agents are human. Jenny aids Bruce, Radcliffe and Hayden
oppose him, and Bruce’s own hidden strength pulls him through. The storm that provides him with his big
chance is the only natural agent that intervenes, and it is there simply as a means of throwing Bruce into
action. He, not the storm, determines the outcome.
The film’s narrative is usually careful to provide motivation so that individual causes will not appear
coincidental. The storm, although described as ‘the worst gale within the memory of man,’ could be
expected in a geographical area that needs to keep a lightship on constant duty offshore. Bruce ends up
working on the same lightship that had proved so disastrous for his father, but again a reason is supplied.
The basic motivation is compositional; Bruce must reverse his father’s mistake, so Jenny provides the
assignment letter. And her ability to do so is in turn motivated realistically; as the daughter of a rich ship owner,
she knows the various maritime officials in the area, and she gets one of them to arrange for Bruce’s
assignment. Indeed, virtually the only cause not motivated in any way is the sudden placement of Bruce in
command of the lightship after two months on the job. An intertitle abruptly informs the viewer that the
captain has been transferred and that Bruce is now in charge. Classical unity would dictate some early
mention of this transfer; this minor lapse is the only irregularity in the film’s overall causal chain.
Not only is the narrative of Code of the Sea fairly simple and unified, but the film provides considerable
redundant emphasis on the most basic causal factors. Bruce’s cowardice is reiterated time and again. In the
opening scene, he is apprehensive before given the order to go aloft; he is unable to obey and ends up in the
galley peeling potatoes while the cook lectures him—‘Leap before you look.’ In this scene the sailors taunt
him, and in the second scene they come ashore and sing a song about the ‘boogeyman’ to him. (The inter-
titles reinforce this point still further with ‘shaky’ lettering.) Everyone who meets Bruce subsequently
mentions his cowardice in some way. Alone, he has visions of superimposed ‘Fears’ which taunt him similarly
with repeated references to his weakness (see fig 18.1).
Finally, several motifs function redundantly to reinforce this already obvious trait of Bruce’s personality.
Aside from the ‘Fears’ that appear in a couple of scenes, Bruce’s timidity becomes associated with the
potatoes he peels in the first scene. Later, seeing a bowl of potato peels in his mother’s kitchen, Bruce
becomes upset. But most consistently, the film uses Bruce’s dog as a parallel for him. The dog meets Bruce
on the pier in scene 2; an inter-title characterizes it as the only one who believes Bruce to be ‘all that was
good—and brave—and true.’ Later in the scene, Radcliffe’s fierce dog chases Bruce’s dog, which turns tail
and runs. Radcliffe then taunts Bruce as a ‘cur’ (stooping immediately after to pick a stray potato peel out
of Bruce’s cuff). Much later in the film, Hayden vows to take his daughter away from that ‘mongrel,’
Bruce. When Jenny assures Bruce she loves him, the dog apes Bruce’s determination, barking to banish a
superimposed phantom of Radcliffe’s dog (paralleling Bruce’s ‘Fears’). So important does the dog parallel
become that the epilogue continues after Bruce and Jenny’s final embrace. In the film’s final shots, Bruce’s
dog spots Radcliffe’s dog and chases it off down the beach.
The narration presents the film’s causality in a clear, straightforward fashion; the narration begins with
credits over a live-action shot of waves on a rocky shore confirming the title. Early in the first scene,
several expository inter-titles introduce characters and give information about them; the tone of these titles
is neutral, creating a minimally self-conscious narration even at the opening. These expository titles are able
to drop out of the scene quickly, since the film begins in medias res. We see Bruce behave in a cowardly
fashion; then one of the sailors taunts him: ‘Yer as yellow as yer father was!’ Thus the major relevant past
action—Bruce’s father’s cowardice—is introduced not by a self-conscious narrator, but by a character. Only
later, at the end of the scene, does an expository title step in to inform us what the father’s specific action
had been (and this title is compositionally motivated by Bruce’s glimpse of the lightship his father had
commanded). Several subsequent scenes have no expository inter-titles, and the titles that do occur tend to
come early in their respective scenes.
Code of the Sea contains extreme redundancy, but for the most part, repetition arises from the characters’
actions rather than from restatements of information by the omniscient narration. A variety of devices
repeatedly stresses Bruce’s cowardice: the sailor’s taunts, the cook’s lecture in the first scene, Bruce’s own
ruminations and visions of his ‘Fears,’ Jenny’s several exhortations to him to conquer himself, and
especially the parallel scenes of his dog’s timidity. Yet the expository titles barely mention this subject,
functioning primarily to name characters and situations, or to indicate at one point that two months have
passed. The narration remains essentially unself-conscious even at the film’s end. The final shot is
motivated as Radcliffe’s point-of-view as he watches Bruce’s dog chasing his along the beach into the
distance. Hence the narration subordinates itself to the actions of the characters.
But even though the characters present much of the causal chain, the film’s narration remains
intermittently omniscient. Bruce carries much of the action and the audience’s sympathy, yet we know
things that he does not. The third scene takes place in the Haydens’ home, concentrating upon Jenny’s
family and her father’s wish for her to marry Radcliffe. Later, in the party scene, Bruce tries to save Jenny,
whose dress has been accidentally set on fire. Just as he overcomes his fear and rushes to her aid, Radcliffe
pushes him down. Bruce hits his head on a rock and doesn’t remember that he had tried to help; instead he
sees Radcliffe take credit for the rescue. In this segment the audience sees Radcliffe toss the careless match
that causes the accident, even though Bruce and Jenny do not see this; and we know that Bruce did try to act
bravely, while he thinks he held back. The extra knowledge the audience gains in this scene is important in
motivating Bruce’s eventual heroism in the storm scene. Even from the second scene onward, the audience
senses that Jenny’s faith in Bruce is justified (he is, after all, the star). Yet nothing in the film tells us overtly
that Bruce is really brave; the omniscience of the narration is not apparent. Indeed, at times we seem very
close to Bruce’s subjective experiences. As with many Hollywood characters, he talks about his feelings
frequently —with his mother and with Jenny—and we even see his mental images (fig 18.1). Thus the film
keeps a balance between our sympathy with Bruce’s worry that he will fail and our basic belief that he will
succeed. In this way the film maintains suspense until the end, but also guarantees that the final triumph
will not seem unmotivated.
Code of the Sea is unexceptional in its maintenance of clear temporal indicators. Most scenes are
continuous, with fades between them to mark time lapses. The temporal relationship of each new scene to
the preceding one is made clear early on. The first scene shows the ship approaching land, and the second
takes place later the same day as Bruce comes ashore and meets Jenny. The third shows dinner at the
Hayden household, with Radcliffe blaming Jenny’s tardiness on her talk with Bruce; we can easily infer
that only a little time has elapsed since scene 2.
Appointments mark off several intervals. Jenny invites a friend to a party to take place the next night;
later she sets up a rendezvous for nine o’clock that same night. Although no durational limits are specified
during the storm scene, there is the constant suggestion that the. yacht will sink with Jenny aboard unless
Bruce gets there in time. Crosscutting compresses time in two different scenes: Bruce’s preparations for and
walk to Jenny’s party, intercut with the party’s progress; and the extended rescue scene during the storm,
which cuts among the yacht, Hayden’s liner, the lightship, Bruce’s launch, and the rescue party on the shore.
In addition, faster editing rhythm during the storm scene marks this as the climactic stretch of the film’s
narrative.
The film’s space remains true to Hollywood’s continuity guidelines. Code of the Sea employs analytical
editing in the conventional pattern, as in the shot/reverse shot from the opening scene (figs 18.2 and 18.3).
Here the frontality of the classical cinema is apparent, as each character’s body is turned toward the camera,
with only the face angled toward the offscreen character. Both heads occupy the privileged spot, two-thirds
of the way up the frame in the center. The same is true in figure 18.4, as Bruce talks to his mother. This shot
shows a depth effect, with rim lighting picking out the figures against a darker background plane; three-
point lighting models their faces. Overall there is little that departs from the various spatial rules of editing
or framing; the few cuts that violate screen direction are decidedly exceptional.
Decoupage in Code of the Sea is similarly exemplary. In a period for which Chapter 6 claims the average
number of shots was 750–900, the film has 871, with 133 inter-titles (15.2 per cent of the total—again
matching the average of 15 per cent). Its number of sequences is relatively small —eleven, as opposed to
the silent-period average of fifteen to sixteen. This disparity arises from the unusually lengthy rescue
sequence.
But such correspondences to the norm are to be expected—Code of the Sea is one of the Unbiased
Sample films from which these figures were derived. More importantly, the film’s internal scene-by-scene
organization already follows the pattern Chapter 6 has described as typical of the classical cinema as a
whole. The film shows that by 1924, filmmakers were constructing scenes with brief initial expository
passages, followed by developmental sections which close off an old dangling cause and set up at least one
new cause for a future scene. The important central party scene (number 7) begins with the party already in
progress, echoing the in-medias-res opening of the whole film. An inter-title briefly states that it is ‘party
time’; then a long shot shows the living room of the Hayden house where the party is occurring. After only
a few seconds of establishing material to set up the situation, time, and space, the action begins as
Superintendent Beasley (the friend Jenny had invited earlier) enters to give Jenny a paper. This is the
appointment for Bruce to a position aboard the lightship; at the end of scene 5, Beasley had promised Jenny
he would obtain it. This closes off one previous cause. An intercut scene follows, setting up Bruce at home,
preparing for the party. He reads a letter from Jenny arranging to meet him at nine o’clock; this prepares for
the main action which will form the bulk of the scene. After he meets her, the development section of the
scene occurs; Jenny gives him the letter, and the dress burns accidentally. The scene ends with two dangling
causes. First, Hayden threatens to send Jenny on a yacht voyage; we will see this happen in scene 9.
Secondly, Bruce sends the lightship-assignment letter back to Jenny, in despair over what he assumes is his
own cowardice; this becomes the cause taken up in scene 8, as Jenny comes to Bruce’s home and talks him
into taking the job. Scene 8 in turn ends with the unanswered question of whether Bruce will succeed, and
the two dangling causes come together in the climactic rescue sequence. Indeed, they represent the film’s
two lines of action—Bruce’s cowardice and the romance.
No one film is the classical cinema, for no one film can explore every possibility the paradigm allows for.
Code of the Sea is typical of classical usage in the mid-twenties, however, because it remains within the
paradigm, using its principles in varied and flexible ways. While it adheres to classical guidelines almost
entirely, we can find a couple of distinctive aspects about this film. Its climactic rescue-at-sea sequence is
lengthy, taking up a larger portion of the whole than most Hollywood films would allot to a single scene.
And the hero’s repeated visions of his ‘Fears’ take symbolism further than might be typical— although they
are by no means unique. Many films of the late teens and twenties show such inventiveness—often to a
considerably greater degree than does Code of the Sea. But by this point, unlike in the early teens,
inventiveness is a regularized part of the system—guided, limited, controlled. The classical cinema is now
firmly in place,
13.1 (above) The Lasky studio in 1918

13.2 (below) A firm’s production chart, 1918
13.3 Art designers started set production with detailed sketches (1918)
13.4 Models of the sets might be prepared before construction began (1918)
13.5 Sketches also supplied information for scene painters (1918)

13.6 Miniatures (1918)
15.1–15.2 (above) The Pickpocket (1903)

15.3 (centre left) The Unwritten Law (c. 1907)
15.4 (centre right) The Girl in the Armchair (1912)

15.5–15.6 (below) The Hired Hand (1918)

15.7–15.9 A Daughter of Dixie (1911)

15.10–15.13 A Race With Time (1913)

15.15–15.17 (opposite page and left) The High Cost of Living (1912)
15.14 Art backgrounds for inter-titles being made in the Ince Art Department in the late teens
15.18–15.22 The Warning (1914)

15.23 (below right) A Tale of Two Cities (1911)

16.1–16.5 Mantrap (1926)

16.6–16.7 (above) The Sick Kitten (1903?)
16.8–16.9 (centre) The 100-to-One Shot (1906)

16.10–16.11 (below) After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.12–16.13 (above) A Tale of Two Cities (1911)

16.14–16.16 (centre and below) At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)

16.17–16.18 (above) After One Hundred Years (1911)
16.19–16.20 (centre) Shamus O’Brien (1912)
16.21–16.22 (below) The Girl of the Cabaret (1913)

16.23–16.24 (above) The Eagle’s Mate (1914)

16.25–16.28 (centre and below) The Hired Hand (1918)
16.29 (above) Her First Adventure (1908)
16.30–16.31 (centre) The Fear (1912)

16.32–16.33 (below) Alma’s Champion (1912)
16.34–16.35 (above) The Warning (1914)

16.36–16.37 (centre) The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
16.38–16.39 (below) The 100-to-One Shot (1906)

16.40–16.41 (above) A Friendly Marriage (1911)
16.42–16.43 (centre) Behind the Footlights (1916)

16.44–16.45 (below) *Love and the Law (1919)
16.46–16.47 (above) The Gambler’s Charm (1910)

16.48–16.49 (centre) The Fear (1912)
16.50–16.51 (below) The Girl at the Cupola (1912)

16.52–16.53 (above) Weights and Measures (1914)
16.54–16.55 (below) The Wishing Ring (1914)

16.56–16.60 The Loafer (1911)

16.61–16.62 (above) A Comedy of Errors (1913)
16.63–16.64 (centre) The Eagle’s Mate (1914)

16.65–16.66 (below) The Wishing Ring (1914)

16.67–16.72 Detective Burton’s Triumph (1914)

16.73–16.74 (above) Field of Honor (1917)

16.75–16.77 (centre and below) The Ghost ofRosie Taylor (1918)

16.78–16.79 (above) *Victory (1919)
16.80–16.81 (below) Mantrap (1926)
17.1 (above left) The 100-to-One Shot (1906)

17.2 (above right) The Loafer (1911)
17.3 (centre left) A Friendly Marriage (1911)

17.4 (centre right) The Bandit ofTropico (1912)
17.5 (below left) Weights and Measures (1914)

17.6 (below right) *Love and the Law (1919)
17.7 (above left) A Temperamental Wife (David Kirkland, 1919, Constance Talmadge)
17.8 (above right) The 100-to-One Shot (1906)
17.9 (centre left) Faithful (1910)

17.10 (centre right) The Bells (1913)
17.11 (below left) The Girl in the Armchair (1912)

17.12 The Eagle’s Mate (1914)
17.13 RoryO’More (1911)

17.16 Production still for The Queen ofSheba (1921)

17.15 The Coming of Columbus (1912)
17.14 A row of outdoor stages at Universal at about the time of the studio’s opening in 1915
17.17 William Cameron Menzies’s design for the astrologer’s chamber in The Beloved Rogue (1927)
17.18 (above left) A Race With Time (1913)
17.19 (above right) Damon and Pythias (1914)

17.20 (centre left) The Case of Becky (1915)
17.21 (centre right) *Loue and the Law (1919)

17.22 (below) The Magician (1926)
17.23–17.24 (above) Shamus O’Brien (1912)

17.25–17.28 (centre and below) The Clodhopper (1917)

17.29 A 1912 Moving Picture News advertisement stressing light effects in the IMP release The Power of Conscience
17.30 (above left) The Loafer (1911)
17.31 (above right) The Cheat (1915)

17.32 (centre left) His Phantom Sweetheart (1915) 1917, Lasky)
17.33 (centre right) Dolly’s Scoop (1916)

17.34 (below left) The Girl of the Golden West (1915)
17.35 (below right) Forbidden Paths (Robert Thornby,

17.36 (above left) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
17.37 (above right) A Cumberland Romance (1920)

17.38 A comparison of the same composition from Night Life of New York (1925), with and without backlighting
17.39 The Ghost of Rosy Taylor (1918)

17.40 Norma Talmadge in the United Studios, around 1923
17.41 Filming George Fawcett (center, with epaulettes) in Mr. Billings Spends His Dime, at Famous Players-Lasky
(1923)
17.42 (above left) Her Code of Honor (John Stahl, 1919, Tribune-United)
17.43–17.45 (above right and centre) The Hired Hand (1918)
17.46–17.47 (below) At Old Fort Dearborn (1912)

17.48–17.50 The Dumb Girl of Portics (1915)

17.51 The camera elevator used for Hotel Imperial (1926)

17.52 A cutaway set and elevator permitted the camera to follow Chico and Diane during their ascent to Seventh
Heaven (1927)
18.1 (above left) Four gruesome, superimposed faces represent Bruce’s ‘Fears’ in Code of the Sea (1924)
18.2–18.3 (above right and below left) Bruce confronts the ship’s cook in shot/reverse shot (Code of the Sea)
18.4 (below right) Classical guidelines of composition and editing in a shot from Code of the Sea
Opposite page
20.1 (above) A publicity photograph of the cutaway set from The Hand of Peril (1916)
20.2 (below) Allan Dwan’s cinematographers at the American Film Co. in 1911: at left, R.D. Armstrong using a Moy
camera, and Roy Overbaugh with a Williamson
20.3 (above left) The Pathé studio model, with its distinctive placement of the crank on the back of the camera body.
The eyepiece for sighting through the lens between shots is to the left of the crank; its cover is open, but would be
closed during filming to keep light off the film
20.4 (above right) A 1920 illustration of the Bell & Howell camera, showing its cranking-speed indicator, footage dial,
and chart of shutter openings and f-stops
20.5 (above) Universal newsreel cameraman Norman Alley and his Akeley
20.6 (below) A Paramount Famous Lasky Western on location in the late twenties— probably for The Last Outlaw
(1927). First cameraman James Murray, at right with his Bell & Howells, is backed up by another Bell & Howell with a
long lens, as well as by an Akeley. Cary Cooper sits by the script clerk, behind Murray
20.7 (above) Charles Rosher and Mary Pickford pose by the prototype Mitchell camera in 1920
20.8 (below) Sol Polito, right, and director Albert Roper, with a Mitchell camera, at the First National Studio
20.9 A Mitchell advertisement shows the back of the camera, with the body in filming position in the right view and in
focusing position in the left view
20.10 The first Eyemo model, with handle attached for handheld shots
Opposite page
20.11 (above) The interior of the New York Biograph Studio in 1909. Banks of hanging and floor units of mercury-
vapor tubes provide the only illumination
20.12 (below) Diffusing cloth draped above an outdoor stage at Essanay in 1912; cameraman Jack Rose is in dark pants
and white shirt
20.13 A corner of the main outdoor stage at Inceville

20.14 Thomas Ince in the Triangle Studio at Culver City, 1916, showing off an array of Cooper-Hewitt units. The glass
studio roof and walls have been covered with cloth to facilitate artificial lighting. A floor stand of mercury-vapors is in
the center at each side, surrounded by a dozen wheeled goose-neck units
20.15 (opposite below) Cameraman Ned Van Buren filming in the Edison studio with a Moy camera, with director John
Collins seated on the bed railing talking to the actors. Diffusers hang below the glass roof, while hanging enclosed arcs
and broadside arcs on floor stands provide additional light
20.16 (right) The sunlight arc and its accessories

20.17 Transferring film from a rack to a drying drum at the Bloom Laboratory in Hollywood in 1918
21.1 (above) Cinematographer Joe La Shelle wears a blue glass around his neck, using it here to set up a shot of Colleen
Moore. His camera is a Mitchell
Opposite page
21.2 (above left) A film editor at MGM, c. 1928, poses for a publicity shot. The small machine with the rounded top
between the rewinds on his table is a Moviola Midget
21.3 (above right) The 1918 model Bell & Howell automatic splicer, with foot pedals to run the film through and
clamps to apply pressure to the splice.
21.4 (below) Shooting a scene with Joan Crawford for Duke Steps Out (James Cruze, 1929, MGM). The Bell & Howell
camera at center has a long lens and has been moved back to get a soft look, in combination with the diffusion disk
overhead and diffusion screen behind the couple
21.5 Henrik Sartov’s portrait of D.W.Griffith

21.6–21.7 Way Down East (1919)


Opposite page
21.9 (above) Henrik Sartov, at the camera, sets up a shot of Lillian Gish for La Bohème (1926), while director King
Vidor and producer Irving Thalberg look on
21.10 (below) The camera crew for Sparrows (1926): Charles Rosher stands at right (white shirt, dark tie) with his
Mitchell, with Karl Struss (in glasses) at center behind his Bell & Howell, with gauze box attachment. Hal Mohr (with
glasses and mustache) is behind Struss, and director William Beaudine sits in the lower center (holding a megaphone)
21.11–21.12 (above) Foolish Wives (1922)

21.13 (left) Sparrows (1926)
21.16 Way Down East (1919)

21.17 Foolish Wives (1922)
21.14 (above left) Clarence White’s 1905 landscape photograph, ‘Morning’

21.18 (right) A gum bichromate process was used to give texture to a turn-of-the-century photograph—‘Cigarette Girl—
A Poster Design’—by Robert Demachy
21.15 (below) ‘Mrs Eugene Meyer,’ a portrait by Edward Steichen

22.1 Lighting Warners’ Singing Fool (1928) with incandescent lamps. Al Jolson is on stage
23.1 (above) Several cameras and booths in Warners’ Vitaphone Studios, Brooklyn (1926)
23.2 (below) A posed shot showing multiple cameras and a single microphone for Gentlemen of the Press (1929) in
Paramount’s Astoria, Long Island studio
23.3–23.10 (this page and opposite above) The Lights of New York (1928)
23.11–23.12 (centre) *Downstairs (1932)
23.13–23.14 (below) *The Show (1927). Cock Robin is on the left side of the room, Salome on the right. When he
throws a record to the lower left, Salome turns to look sharply to our right. We are thus between the two, with the action
occurring ‘around’ us. This volumetric space would become rare in early sound films
23.15–23.16 (above) Shot/reverse shot with multiple cameras: Moby Dick (1930)
23.18 (below) The 28-ton steel crane used to film Broadway (1929). The arm was over 30 feet long
23.17 Blimped cameras on various carriages for filming First National’s Sunny (1930). Note the rolling tripod attached
to the camera on the far right
24.1 A 1912 Reliance advertisement credits the author of the story
25.2 Scriptwriters for Juarez included John Huston, Aneas MacKenzie

25.1 Two pages from the final script for Warner Bros’ Juarez (1939) Wolfgang Reinhardt, and Abem Finkel
25.3 (above) Max Factor’s new building (1929) for research in make-up
25.4 (below) A 1937 make-up chart at Warner Bros
25.5 An optical printer matted in the ceiling on this set (1932)

25.6 In a November 1939 American Cinematographer article, Byron Haskin described matte shot work at Warner Bros.
The bottom photograph showed the set as built; the middle photograph was the negative with its matte line; and the top
photograph illustrated the completed matte shot
25.7 (above) In 1929, Warner Bros claimed that its Scientific Research Department worked in ‘the largest building in
the industry devoted exclusively to special process and miniature work.’ The 150 × 300 foot stage included optical
printers and enough room to shoot up to two dozen miniatures
25.8 (below) The floor plan of the Casbah set for Algiers (1938). After art director Alexander Toluboff designed the set,
camera angles and movements for every scene were carefully planned
25.9 Several production stills from publicity about Juarez

25.10 Part of Warner Bros’ 1939 staff of cinematographers with their ten new Studio Model Mitchells. Front row, left to
right: E.B. McGreal; Charles Rosher; Ted McCord; Arthur Edeson; James Wong Howe; Sol Polito; Bun Haskin. Rear
row, left to right: Sid Hickox; Warren Lynch; Arthur Todd; Lou O’Connell; Ernie Haller
27.1 (above left) *Casbah (1948)

27.2 (above right) The Kid Brother (1927)
27.3 (centre left) Deep staging with fairly sharp focus in the rear planes: Greed (1924)
27.4 (centre right) Deep focus with a strong foreground and employing a wide-angle lens: *The Show (1927)
27.5–27.6 (below) The hard-edged image in the late silent era: So This Is Paris (1926)
27.7–27.8 (above) The soft style in the late silent film: Seventh Heaven (1927)
27.9 (centre left) Moby Dick (1930)

27.10 (centre right) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)
27.11 (below left) The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

27.12 (below right) Wide-angle distortion in Each Dawn I Die (1939)

27.13 (above left) Bulldog Drummond (1929)

27.14 (above right) A Farewell to Arms (1932)
27.15 (centre left) Anthony Adverse (1936)

27.16 (centre right) All That Money Can Buy (1941)
27.17 (below left) The Maltese Falcon (1941)

27.18 (below right) Our Town (1940)
27.19 Kings Row (1941)

27.20 A drawing by William Cameron Menzies for Alibi (1929)

27.21 (above left) Jezebel (1938)
27.23–27.24 (below) Deep space shot/reverse shot in Our Town (1940)
27.22 (above right) Arrowsmith (1931)

27.25 (above) Gregg Toland (far left) and Howard Hawks (far right) using the Mitchell BNC to film Ball of Fire (1941)
27.26 (below left) Use of a wide-angle lens in Dead End (1937), shot by Toland for William Wyler
27.27 (below right) These Three (1936)
27.28 (above left) These Three (1936)

27.29 (above right) Dead End (1937)
27.30 (centre left) The Long Voyage Home (1940)

27.31 (centre right) Dead End (1937)
27.32 (below left) Dead End (1937)

27.33 (below right) The Long Voyage Home (1940)
27.34 (above left) Citizen Kane (1941)

27.35 (above right) T-Men (1948)
27.36 (centre left) Gun Crazy (1949)

27.37 (centre right) The Maltese Falcon (1941)
27.38–27.39 (below) Kings Row (1941)

27.40 (above left) Ball of Fire (1941)
27.41 (above right) The Little Foxes (1941)

27.42 (below left) *Manhandled (1949)
27.43 (below right) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

27.44 (above) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
27.45–27.46 (below) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

28.1 (left) *At Sword’s Point (1952)
28.2 (right) The Goldwyn Follies (1938)

29.1 Filming Oklahoma! (1955) with two Todd-A0 cameras. The size of the lens was due to its extreme angle of
coverage. The film was also shot in CinemaScope; the Scope camera is center right
29.2 (above) Carmen Jones (1954)
29.3 (centre) A slightly off-center Scope composition, balanced by the glance: Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957)
29.4 (below) Not Reconciled (1964)

29.5–29.11 (this page and overleaf) *River of No Return (1954)
29.9–29.11 (above) * River of No Return (1954)

29.12 Pierrot le fou (1964)
Part Four
Film style and technology to 1930

DAVID BORDWELL, JANET STAIGER, and KRISTIN THOMPSON
19
Technology, style and mode of production
DAVID BORD WELL and JANET STAIGER
Technology is an important factor in American film history partly because it sells films. Since at least 1930,
Hollywood has promoted mechanical marvels as assiduously as it has publicized stars, properties, and
genres. Sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, stereophonic sound, ‘Smell-o-vision,’ and other novelties were
marketing strategies as much as they were technical innovations. Today, a film like Apocalypse Now sells in
part because of its Dolby sound, and Star Wars, Superman, Tron, et al. continue the cult of special effects.
Indeed, special effects have exerted a perennial fascination for moviegoers, and popular magazines have
never tired of showing how Hollywood wizardry could simulate bar-room brawls, snowstorms, sea battles,
and earthquakes. The celebration of special effects is only a particular case of the tendency of Hollywood to
promote technology as legerdemain. George Lucas’s special effects firm is aptly named Industrial Light and
Magic.
If we are to understand technology as a historical factor, we should not forget that it is as a benevolent
but spectacular magic that it works to Hollywood’s greatest advantage. Yet we cannot rest content with that
image of technology. Within the film industry and allied spheres, there is nothing oneiric about technology;
it is a concrete historical force. Trade journals, professional discussions, films, and the machines themselves
furnish empirical evidence of a series of changes in design, engineering, and function. In dismissing
hyperbole about magic, it is easy to swing toward fetishizing the physical materials and devices: lists of
early sound or color systems, chronicles of the development of film stocks or lenses, ‘histories’ of
Technicolor or Moviola or process projection. This too will not do. How can we explain technological
change in Hollywood in relation to the classical style of filmmaking and the Hollywood mode of
production? Answering this question in concrete historical terms is the business of this part and Part Six of
this book.
Technological change and the mode of production

It is precisely because of the economic value of ‘industrial light and magic’ that Hollywood instituted
technological change as a business strategy. One inventor put it well: ‘The persistent demands upon motion
picture production for novel effects and broader methods of story-telling have necessarily instituted rapid
and revolutionary developments in technique.’1 In the Hollywood mode of production, we find that any
technological change can be explained by one or more of three basic causes.
TECHNOLOGY, STYLE AND MODE OF PRODUCTION 475
Production efficiency
The industry invested in some changes because of their economies. A new technology might cut costs by
saving time or physical capital, or it might make the results of the work more predictable, or it might solve
particular production problems. Composite photography, light meters, new aspects of camera design,
viewing machines, faster film, machine processing, and varieties of lighting equipment performed such
roles. ‘In cinematography,’ one 1927 writer explained, ‘there is plenty of scope for the ingenious to exercise
their talents. There seems to be, among the practisers of the craft, no end of the inventions or expedients, or
the devising of new things to make the work easier or better.’2 As Chapter 9 points out, the industry praised
and rewarded innovations through trade acknowledgements, awards, and contracts. Such rewards in turn
stimulated further innovation.
Product differentiation
The industry also effected technological changes because of the economic advantages of differentiating
products. Chapter 9 has already shown that one of the most important goals of Hollywood’s economic
practices was distinguishing one firm’s products from another. We are back to the fascination which
technology holds for the spectator: the major innovations—synchronized sound, color, stereoscopy,
widescreen, and stereophony—served to promote significant novelty in the product.
This product differentiation through technological change followed American industry’s tradition of
research and development. Before the 1900s, the solitary inventor was the chief source of scientific
discovery. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, industry had begun to innovate technology in a much
more systematic way. Major firms undertook large-scale research with the aim of product development or
patent control. David F.Noble has shown that companies such as General Electric and Du Pont assimilated
the private inventor into a corporate laboratory and channeled diffuse research efforts into specific
programs.3 Although the film industry wielded nothing like the vast research strength of the chemical or
electrical industry, many technological innovations exploited by Hollywood were the result of careful
strategies of product differentiation. Any firm will expend capital upon research and development if the firm
believes that the technology will allow the firm to retain or expand its share of a market or move it into new
markets. Douglas Gomery argues, for example, that Warner Bros’s innovation of sound was the successful
result of such a strategy.4
Adherence to standards of quality

In some instances, the film industry innovated technology because the industry’s discourse marked certain
innovations as desirable. This sounds circular, and it was. Hollywood’s discourse, as revealed in advertising,
trade papers, et al., set forth standards of the quality film. Technological innovations which would help
attain the goal became institutionalized research aims. An ideology of ‘progress’ (of a particular kind) led
and controlled research. From the earliest period, certain technological innovations, such as sound and color,
were assumed to be almost inevitable.
American cinema’s technological research has been aimed at meeting a commitment to the standards
canonized by the classical stylistic paradigm. Synchronized sound, color, widescreen, stereoscopy, and
stereophony were justified as progress toward better storytelling, greater realism, and enhanced spectacle.
Here is one writer on the value of true stereophonic sound:5
476 FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY TO 1930
Pseudostereophonic methods can indeed be used if the producer is willing to sacrifice the lifelike
perspective effects, the showmanship of offscreen dialogue, music or other sounds, and the improved
fidelity particularly in sets described as ‘boomy’—all of which are provided by true stereophonic
methods.
When MGM introduced a widescreen process, ‘Realife,’ in 1930, one critic wrote: ‘Ordinary “pan” shots
permit the camera to cover the full arc only in shortened limited scenes. With “Realife” the camera covers
all of the attackers in one sweep, and keeps them close enough so individual dramatic details may be seen.’6
A cinematographer noted of Fox’s 1930 ‘Grandeur,’ a 70mm process:7
From the audience standpoint, Grandeur offers a series of spectacular surprises. In the first place, the
new size and proportions of the screen are astounding…. Then, the wide proportion selected is almost
exactly that of natural vision, and removes from the consciousness the dead black borderline which
haunts the smaller screens. The absence of this borderline gives the large pictures a
pseudostereoscopic effect which is very pleasing.
Hollywood’s discourse praised these technologies for reinforcing classical standards, and the firms
calculated that adherence to those standards would maintain or increase profits.
Even minor technological innovations which would not be noticeable to the audience—and thus could
not be used in publicity—were sought by Hollywood. Filmmakers assumed that innovations like the
automatic dissolving shutter (c. 1920) and refinements in sound recording techniques (through the 1930s
and 1940s) cumulatively improved films, although audiences might not be able to pinpoint such
improvements.
It is evident that these three causes for technological change can complement or collide with one another.
Often, for instance, a change effected primarily for differentiating a product could be quite costly, particularly
at the beginning. Obviously, the industry expected longterm advantages, but even small changes could be
expensive. As Joseph Valentine remarked,8
Cinematography is a good deal like a mathematical equation: change one factor, and you find it has
become necessary to make corresponding changes in several others to keep the result correctly in
balance.… [A change in the film stock means other changes] in order to keep the final result at the
balance we call good cinematography.
Here the maintenance of stylistic norms becomes a controlling factor; product differentiation must not
destroy stylistic standardization. The standards thus compel further research, which will solve problems and
restabilize the system. No wonder that in 1938 a professional organization noted: ‘It is frequently difficult to
decide whether the development of the new tools is the cause or the result of the progress being made.’9 In
any instance, technological innovation may be introduced without full consideration of its impact on
filmmaking; the mode of production responds by readjusting other factors in the equation. The rewards of
cost efficiency, product differentiation, and creation of a quality film were often judged worth short-run
imbalances.
Any such readjustment would have to consider a number of factors. Obviously, the style of the films
would be affected, and we shall see in further chapters how the industry worked to reinstate classical
schemata. In addition, existing technology would have to be retuned. A ripple effect modified adjacent
technologies, as when Technicolor filming impelled Max Factor to recast its make-up formulas. Moreover,
the mode of production had to accommodate the innovation. The most important strategy of accommodation
was to insert new subdivisions into the work process. Adding a craft to the chain of assembly was
consistent with the mode’s system of serial manufacture. Furthermore, the new expert specialist continued
the tradition of efficiency and delegation of work knowledge. Once the decision to innovate and diffuse a
technology was made, production firms had to determine how to introduce modifications most rapidly and
smoothly, with the least disruption and cost. Two instances, one a failed innovation, the other a successful
one, illustrate how institutions weighed the various factors introduced by new technology.
Three-dimensional films have been anticipated since the introduction of moving pictures. By 1909,
experimenters had tried using anaglyphic (red/green) systems, alternating projectors, and double-printing
negatives. MGM produced several 3-D shorts in the 1930s, and John A.Norling displayed a 3-D system at
the 1940 World’s Fair.10 In February 1952, when film attendance was down and Hollywood sought ways to
entice the consumer back into the theaters, Norling suggested 3-D: ‘That the motion picture industry could
use something to combat television’s capture of more and more of the theatre audience is undeniable.’11 By
summer, a new company was shooting Bwana Devil. The film’s sensational opening in Los Angeles seemed
to presage a revolution, and in March of 1953, studios were eagerly engaged in extensive 3-D production. Yet
in December 3-D was declared dead. Although stereoscopic pictures provided product differentiation, they
failed. The technology could not assure a high-quality product at each screening, and another innovation,
widescreen, seemed a more efficient way to provide the novelty the industry sought. 3-D did not become
standard because its disadvantages outweighed its advantages.12
In contrast, the innovation of synchronized-sound films shows how the factors of novelty, economy, and
adherence to norms might encourage the industry to make pervasive adjustments in its mode of production.
When Warner Bros used sound-synched pictures to differentiate its product and seize a competitive
advantage, the innovation initially cut down production efficiency, significantly increased costs, and
threatened the standards of quality established during the previous decade. In this case, however, Warner
Bros was willing to deal with the problems because it judged that the innovation would have a comparative
advantage in the long run. Synch-sound pictures did provide product differentiation, they augured a
significant increase in profits from rentals, and initial problems of sound quality were considered capable of
being quickly resolved.
Moreover, Warner Bros and the rest of the industry would not have been able to introduce such a change
in standard filmmaking techniques had not the system of serial manufacture been able to restabilize itself.
Some short-term difficulties were swiftly resolved by established procedures. For instance, the studios now
demanded story material laden with dialogue, but since the firms had for twenty years adapted Broadway
plays, this posed no great obstacles. From the New York stage came writers, directors, and players
experienced in handling dialogue. For a while, rehearsals played a larger part in the director’s preparations,
since companies hoped to avoid the expense of rewriting during shooting and sought to follow the theatrical
procedures to which its new personnel were accustomed. This new production practice fell into disuse as the
workers became accustomed to sound filming.13 The problem of providing foreign-language versions was
also quickly solved, with dubbing and sub-titling becoming standard by the end of 1931.14
In other respects, the mode of production adjusted to sound by sacrificing some flexibility in the
filmmaking process. Improvised shooting declined because of sound’s greater expense and its limited
editing options. In the silent period, the film could be altered in the post-production phase by the insertion
of inter-titles. Once a talkie was shot, however, script changes were more limited, unless the studio would
pay the costs of rewriting and refilming. Likewise, cameramen lost control of cranking speed, and the
machine development of negatives eliminated the possibility of adjusting the image quality during
processing. Synchronized sound also required a longer editing phase, so that directors could not spend as
much time supervising cutting.15 If the value of a lost option was generally recognized, research might be
directed to recover it, but in many instances, sound reduced choices and made production practices more
uniform.
The major effect of synchronized-sound production was to create new subdivisions in the work process,
the most usual way that the mode of production accommodated any large-scale technological change.
Dialogue coaches and directors, speech experts, and dance directors are obvious examples of new roles.
Studios added departments to select, compose, arrange, and orchestrate the film’s musical accompaniment.
These work processes were placed after editing, a position deplored by musicians but consistent with that
allotted to musical accompaniment in the silent era.16 Sound also removed the head of photography from his
position as camera operator. With the rise of multiple-camera shooting in the early sound era, the first
cinematographer became an executive supervising the team of ‘operative cameramen.’ By the 1930s, when
multiple-camera shooting was abandoned, the director of photography remained a supervisor who did not
handle the equipment during shooting.17
The most extensive addition to the structure of divided labor involved the employment of sound
recording experts. The studios hired 75 to 80 per cent of their sound personnel from telegraphy, telephony,
radio broadcasting, and electrical research laboratories.18 In 1931, the RKO sound director, Carl Dreher,
outlined a line-and-staff structure that assigned one group of workers to maintain the equipment and a
second to use it (see fig. 19.1, p. 261). The maintenance engineer oversaw a staff that installed, tested, and
repaired the sound-recording equipment. The recording supervisor, or chief mixer, supervised the recordists
and assistant recordists during shooting.19 Thus when Hollywood added a sound track to the silent picture,
it added a labor process and divided the workers into a parallel hierarchy.
These new craft hierarchies seem to have been modeled upon existing ones. The music department
paralleled the story and writing departments. Rights to music (like rights to stories) had to be purchased;
famous composers (like celebrated writers) created original material to be reworked by others (arrangers
and orchestrators, continuity scriptwriters). In addition, the sound staff was organized in a fashion parallel to
that serving the cinematographer. The chief mixer paralleled the first cinematographer, while the mixer’s
recordists were the counterparts of the operative cameramen: just as the operative cameramen had
responsibility for recording the image track as directed, so the sound recordists were charged with placing
microphones and monitoring sound quality. Rerecording personnel collaborated with the chief mixer much
as special-effects personnel worked with the cinematographer.20
The dissemination of sound filming stands as a typical case of how the Hollywood mode of production
could accommodate technological change. With any such change, the industry could solve certain problems
with established procedures, sacrifice some flexibility for the sake of the innovation, or create new divisions
in the work order. By hiring experts, modeling new work structures upon old, and inserting new operations
into an appropriate phase of the overall work sequence, Hollywood could insure that rapid and efficient
production would continue according to quality standards. New technologies momentarily disrupted the
labor process, but they were absorbed in ways which modified, not revolutionized, the mode of production.
Film technology and the classical style

If technological change can be attributed to such economic causes as production efficiency, product
differentiation, and maintenance of a standard of quality, how can we grasp that change in relation to
stylistic changes visible and audible in Hollywood films? In any sphere, historians typically address four
aspects of change: direction, function, timing, and causation.
Changes in film style may be described in directional terms—away from this, toward something else.
The most common explanation of stylistic change assumes an evolutionary pattern. André Bazin has
proposed that the quest for a ‘total cinema’ of perfect realism gave film history a specific direction and
made Hollywood style a step upon that path.21 V.F.Perkins has argued that although technology moves
toward such a total realism, the effect of this is to expand purely formal means. With the ever-increasing
resources of cinema, the artist gains a greater range of choice: ‘The more completely the cinema is able to
duplicate “mere reality,” the wider becomes the range of alternatives open to the filmmaker.’22
Such teleological accounts of style in history pose problems. Although a complete understanding of the
Hollywood style cannot neglect the idea of progress, that idea cannot adequately explain the direction of
stylistic change. Any such conception of progress ignores the ways in which technological change has often
reduced stylistic options. The classical style has not changed in a cumulative or additive fashion, nor has
technology always left room for a return to discarded practices. We have already seen, for instance, that
synchronized sound forced certain workers to relinquish areas of control. It is not simply nostalgic to assert
that the range of possibilities often became narrower: something was definitely lost when Hollywood
abandoned the hand-cranked camera, rack-and-tank developing by inspection, and three-strip Technicolor.
We cannot make a film today which looks like it was made in 1915, or 1925, or 1945 (even if, after a glance
at today’s grainy, muddy images, we wish we could).
Given the uneven movement of stylistic history, we may be more inclined to accept Jean-Louis Comolli’s
claim that style change has no inherent direction but is instead fundamentally ‘non-linear.’ As an
Althusserian Marxist, Comolli sees every technological innovation as torn by contradictions among economic
pressures, ideological demands, and signifying practices. It is not just that photography fulfilled the bourgeois
dream of capturing the world as a spectacle for a detached observer. Comolli asserts that photography also
disrupted this ideology by challenging the eye as a source of knowledge. Similar contradictions are to be
found in any historical relation of technology to film style.23 Comolli’s point is certainly sound: the
direction of change in the classical Hollywood style has been not linear but dispersed, not a progress toward
a goal but a series of disparate shifts. Yet even if the change is not lawlike, it is not capricious either.
Hollywood’s insistence upon standardization limited the shape which change could take. To describe this
non-linear but not random pattern, we need a non-teleological model of change.
Leonard Meyer has pointed out that several sorts of change exist in the history of the arts, and one sort
which he identifies fits the case at hand. In trended change:24
Change takes place within a limiting set of preconditions, but the potential inherent in the established
relationships may be realized in a number of different ways and the order of the realization may be
variable [i.e., not specified by lawlike and invariant preconditions]. Change is successive and gradual,
but not necessarily sequential; and its rate and extent are variable, depending more upon
external circumstances than upon internal preconditions.
This conception is useful because it grants that stylistic change need not operate according to notions of
revolution or rupture on the one hand or evolutionary unfolding on the other. We do not have to consider
the coming of sound as a drastic break in the classical mode, nor need we accept Bazin’s ‘dialectical
evolution of film language.’ Once we admit that there is no lawlike pattern of development in Hollywood
style, we can look for particular historical circumstances which govern the different ways that the classical
paradigm has been realized and modified. This does not mean, however, that change is capricious. The
category of trended change lets us see stylistic change as operating within a bounded set of possibilities,
even if the causes or the timing of change derive from external spheres such as management decisions or
technological innovations. Finally, Meyer’s account lets us situate an individual’s innovation within the
stylistic preconditions that shape and limit it.25
This is to say that we can also consider the functions of stylistic change differently. For an evolutionary
account, either Utopian like Bazin’s or more open-ended like Perkins’s, any style change functions as one
stride in a forward march. But Meyer’s concept of trended change permits us to use Chapter 1’s concept of
functional equivalents to plot systematic shifts in stylistic devices. If, for example, a scene’s space may be
established by means of a long shot, a camera movement, an editing pattern, an introductory title, or voice-
over narration, then we need to examine not only the change in devices but also their common function—
the establishment of classical narrative space. From this standpoint, the history of Hollywood film style
after 1917 is in large part a series of shifts in formal devices within the range of functions defined by the
classical paradigm.
Those shifts can be analyzed for the ways in which they fulfill or extend the initial options. For instance,
a camera movement—say a track back from a detail to a long shot—can establish the scene’s locale while
serving other canonized functions: creating a stronger cue for three-dimensional space, centering viewer
attention, suspensefully delaying information, creating a parallel to another tracking shot. Or consider the
innovation of sound. In 1927, when sound was inserted into the already-constituted system of classical
filmmaking, it was used in ways that supported the paradigm (e.g., voice for expressivity, sound effects for
realism of locale). But sound also extended the paradigm: now vocal qualities could represent character
psychology, now temporal continuity could be assured by diegetic speech or music. Even though the
classical premises define a limited hierarchy of functions, new stylistic devices can realize those
possibilities in domains that were previously not absorbed functionally. We are back at the issues discussed
in Chapter 7, the ways in which controlled deviations from classical norms can reinforce the authority of
those norms.26
Any consideration of stylistic change must also account for timing and causation, and these aspects force
us to leave the purely stylistic realms of direction and function. Meyer’s notion of trended change cannot
rest content with a historical chronology that locks itself solely within the medium. Yuri Tynianov and Roman
Jakobson have indicated the limits of an autonomous history of style, since immanent laws do not explain27
the rate of change or the choice of a particular evolutionary path from among those which are in
theory possible, since the immanent laws of literary (linguistic) evolution represent only an
indeterminate equation whose solution may be any of a number (albeit limited) of possible solutions,
but not necessarily a single one. The question of the specific evolutionary path chosen, or at least of
the dominant, can be answered only by analyzing the correlation between the literary series and other
historical series.
Thus the timing of stylistic change—why something happens when it does and not before or after—poses
severe problems for a teleological account such as Bazin’s. Bazin claims that the dream of total cinema
predated the actual invention of the apparatus, but Comolli has retorted that all the important scientific
preconditions for cinema existed fifty years before the first films. Again and again we find a lag between the
technological preconditions of color or sound or widescreen and the actual utilization of them. Comolli
claims that no autonomous logic of film style can explain this lag and that the best explanation is to be
found in the socio-economic sphere. Technology does not get used until capitalism has a need for it at a
certain juncture.28 The history of Hollywood technology certainly bears this out; more often than not,
economic factors of the three sorts already mentioned determine when certain devices became standardized.
Hollywood studios became interested in incandescent lighting when tungsten units and panchromatic film
stock made filming cheaper and more efficient in significant respects. Firms decided to switch over to sound
motion pictures when Warners and Fox had proven financial benefits and an acceptable standard of quality.
World War II constraints on set expenditures encouraged location shooting and the development of more
portable equipment. Although widescreen cinema and stereophonic sound were technically feasible before
World War II, they were not exploited until the studios faced a declining theater attendance in the postwar
period. Comolli’s emphasis upon the lag between technological possibility and extended use is helpful in
explaining the timing of stylistic change.
Causation of stylistic change poses even more severe difficulties for an immanent account. The most
common, and commonsensical, move has been to attribute stylistic and technical change to individual
innovation. Two causal agents typically emerge: the inventor and the artist. Consider Perkins’s account of
the way camera movements were devised for F.W.Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924):29
When The Last Laugh was still in the script stage, Mayer went to the photographer Karl Freund to
find out how far it was possible to film long sections of the film with a continuously mobile camera.
When Freund satisfied him that it could be done, Mayer started writing afresh and constructed his
screenplay to exploit the possibilities to the full.
The inventor/artist pairing generates a dialogic model of the causes of technological change. At any given
starting point—the primitive cinema, the end of the 1920s—technology defines a horizon of possibilities.
The filmmaker may either accept these constraints and work within them, or the filmmaker may innovate,
for whatever reason (craving for novelty, the challenge of overcoming obstacles, etc.). When the artist
demands an innovation, the technician responds. In his Last Laugh example, Perkins suggests that the
technician works out the practical details of the artist’s original insight. Horizon of possibilities, artistic
innovation, technological implementation: these stages define the shuttling pattern that Perkins calls ‘a
constant two-way traffic between science and style, technology and technique’30
What vitiates such arguments is the absolutism of the artist/inventor couplet. The model presupposes a
small-scale task to be solved and an interpersonal scale of communication. Yet, as we have seen,
technological change in the film industry has a broad impact, and research and invention are institutional to
a very substantial degree. A vision of individuals talking to individuals does not explain the systematic
effects of technology upon style. The artist/inventor pairing also does not explain why sometimes the
technician innovates when no need is articulated by the artist. Eastman Kodak’s development of ever-faster
film stocks in the 1930s is one example. As one cameraman put it: ‘We were like a bunch of sheep. When
Eastman sent out a new batch—“This is going to do so and so.” Well, all the cameramen wanted to try it
and see it. And the directors had to have it…’31 The artist/inventor couplet, based on the filmmaker’s posing
a problem for the technician to solve, further ignores one crucial fact. Some solutions are more acceptable
than others, and some are unacceptable altogether. The most elegant solution to a technical problem from an
engineering standpoint may be rejected for reasons of ‘showmanship’ or production routines. At any
historical moment, the mode of production and the classical paradigm permit only some solutions. And
about what is permitted, the individual artist or inventor has very little to say.
Because the inventor/artist model fails to recognize broad causes of stylistic change, Comolli has argued
for the necessity of recognizing economic and ideological factors. He has asserted that an autonomous
history of film style and its mechanical/technical causes reduces to a chain of ‘first times’ and purely
contingent links. Comolli calls for historical analysis which recognizes the importance of social ideology
and the film industry as determining technological and stylistic change. This much is probably
uncontroversial. Where Comolli breaks new ground is in insisting that both style and technology are
causally determined by ideological processes.
It is often conceded, especially in French film theory, that monocular perspective in Renaissance painting
is not only an artistic procedure but an ideologically determined mode of representation, embodying a
bourgeois conception of the individual subject’s relation to visible reality. It is less often conceded that the
camera obscura or the photographic camera as a machine is inherently ideological. Comolli claims that no
film technology is a neutral transmitter of the world ‘out there’; the technology is produced in large part by
a socially derived conception of that world and how we know it. For example, he finds the origin of cinema
not in scientific inquiry but in nineteenth-century ideological pressures to represent ‘life as it is’ and in
economic desires to exploit a new spectacle.32
Comolli’s theory is far superior to the simpler account, but it remains sweepingly reductive. Cinema’s
construction of depth is reduced to ‘Renaissance perspective’ (itself a slogan for several perspective
systems), deep focus is usually treated as only a matter of lens length, and most important, ‘technology’ and
‘ideology’ are flattened into abstract and ahistorical generalities. For Comolli, ‘technology’ includes not
only the machines themselves but also many social processes that produce them: theories, scientific
research, manufacture, and the labor of film production. These senses are never clearly distinguished.
Similarly, Comolli makes the concept of ‘ideology’ do too much work; he assumes that ‘bourgeois ideology’
rests in place for three centuries, from Caravaggio to Citizen Kane. This objection echoes a point made by
Raymond Williams:33
One thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural analysis is that it is very much more at
home in what one might call epochal questions than in what one has to call historical questions. That
is to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features of different epochs of
society, as commonly between feudal and bourgeois, than at distinguishing between different phases
of bourgeois society, and different moments within those phases: that true historical process which
demands a much greater precision and delicacy of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis
which is concerned with main lineaments and features.
Comolli’s description of capitalist economy and bourgeois ideology is epochal in exactly Williams’s sense.
Our purpose here is to construct, without falling back into the atomistic dualism of artist and inventor, a
more precisely historical account of Hollywood technology and style.
We can, for instance, immediately translate Comolli’s concept of ‘capitalist economies’ into the more
particular causes of technological change examined earlier—production economies, product differentiation,
and adherence to standards of quality. Similarly, we can replace the broad concept of ‘signifying practice’ with
the historical model of the classical film’s style articulated in Parts One and Three of this book. And in
looking for the agents of causal change, we must be sensitive to Sartre’s criticism of ‘lazy’ Marxists who
replace ‘real, perfectly defined groups’ by vague collectivities such as ‘bourgeois ideology.’34 In our
argument, those concrete groups are the institutions which promoted and guided stylistic change by
articulating the range of permissible solutions to technological problems.
In examining the ways that stylistic change in the period 1917–60 is tied to technological change, we will
need to recognize the significant differences among the four aspects already noted. Business strategies can
usually explain the causation and timing of stylistic change, while the direction and functions of the change
must usually be constructed from the way that technology permitted novel devices to fill roles which the
classical paradigm had already staked out. But where can we locate the historical agents of this process? In
most cases, the agents are a set of specific institutions: manufacturing and supply firms and professional
associations. These institutions transferred the industry’s economic strategies and aesthetic precepts to the
spheres of technological innovation and film form. In doing so, they fulfilled and elaborated the classical
paradigm, spurring and guiding technological change. In short, specific firms and associations functioned as
mediations—not in the sense that they temporally came between film production and film style, but in the
sense that they shaped a particular relationship between the two.35 By mediating between film style and
economic imperatives, these institutions defined the range of practical possibilities open to Hollywood
filmmaking.
Technology and Hollywood institutions

Only institutions could have systematized and guided technological research and development in an
industry as complex as the American studio cinema. Technology’s sources have always been tangled and
diverse, its developments diffuse and interdependent. From the very beginning, cinema has relied upon
discoveries and applications in other fields. Often, for instance, one finds sources of film technology in
military research: zoom lenses were first developed for reconnaissance work, Cinerama came out of
gunnery training exercises, and 3-D cameras used an interlock mechanism devised for missile tracking.
Similarly, it has often happened that a technical development in one area of film offered possibilities for
another area. The 1929–30 experiments with wide film came to little in themselves, but studio engineers
seized upon the high-intensity projection lamps required by wide film and used them to improve the quality
of rear-projection work.36 While the imaginative insight belongs to individuals, institutions must select and
promote certain leads as worth work.
In the earliest years of the American film industry, innovation tended to be sporadic, casual, and impelled
by individual inquiry. But during the teens, economies of scale began to emerge and technological change
became systematized. The industry’s investment in technology required some mechanisms for producing,
monitoring, and assimilating innovations. By 1920, the American film industry had come to depend heavily
upon specific institutions for materials, tools, and processes.
What sort of institutions governed Hollywood’s appropriation of technology? In other industries, the
corporate research laboratory has been indispensible to technological innovation. Although the major film
studios claimed to have their own ‘research departments,’ most were small-scale design and machine shops.37
No studio could afford the research facilities of a General Electric, a Union Carbide, or a Western Electric.
More often, the burden of research fell to new, small, or marginal companies. In the film industry, small
production firms were more likely to tackle research because it was a way to enter markets. Typically, after
such small companies had financed initial research, a larger company would then invest in the technology.
The most basic and significant research was performed by the manufacturers and suppliers of materials and
equipment. In an important sense, Hollywood filmmaking only became a modern industry when it joined
forces with corporate research.
The outstanding example of Hollywood’s reliance upon a giant firm is Eastman Kodak. When in 1889
George Eastman supplied motion picture film for Edison’s experiments, there began a dependence that has
continued throughout the history of the American cinema. In the early years, Eastman’s chief competitor,
Lumière, produced a less dependable stock; by 1910, Eastman’s negative dominated the world market. What
kept the firm’s quality so carefully controlled was its commitment to basic research. In the mid-1890s,
Eastman began to institutionalize technical innovation by recruiting engineers and creating a testing
department. In 1913, C.E.K.Mees, a London chemist and physicist whom Eastman had hired, founded the
firm’s research laboratory.38 In his book, The Industrial Organization of Scientific Research, Mees
explained that while some companies could be content with seeking minor refinements in their product,
leading firms had to commit themselves to fundamental research with no obvious or immediate reward.39
Hence the aim of the Eastman laboratory was nothing less than ‘scientific understanding of photographic
processes.’40 The boldly theoretical research which Mees and his staff undertook yielded rich results for the
motion picture industry. Expanded through the years, the Kodak laboratory introduced a panchromatic
motion picture stock in 1913, reversal film in the 1920s, a range of amateur film stocks (including color), a
series of ever-faster professional emulsions through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and a color negative
film stock in 1950. The Eastman Research Laboratory also created much of the sensitometric theory that
became indispensable for sound film processing after 1926.41
Other large enterprises applied some of their research facilities to supply technology to the film industry.
Du Pont, Eastman’s chief rival for the motion-picture raw-stock market, did not produce film until 1923,
but as the principal producer of explosives since 1802, Du Pont already had a huge corporate research
facility. Western Electric’s subsidiary, Electrical Research Products Incorporated (ERPI), furnished much
of the technological innovation for talking films. Western Electric was in turn the manufacturing subsidiary
of American Telephone and Telegraph, whose corporate research program had been launched in 1910. Before
World War II, AT&T’s Bell Laboratory had a bigger budget for research than any university in America.
Another major corporation, the National Carbon Company, supplied carbon rods and arc lamps for studio
lighting and theater projection. As a subsidiary of Union Carbide, National Carbon drew upon the resources
of a laboratory founded in 1921. Bausch and Lomb, which began as a firm making cheap spectacles,
became prosperous because of its unprecedented mass-manufacture of lenses. Bausch and Lomb supplied
lenses for Edison’s Kinetoscope, introduced the standard Cinephor projection lenses and the Raytar and
Baltar camera lenses, developed the optical systems used in film sound recording and reproduction, and
supplied lenses for rear-projection and widescreen systems. Like its Rochester neighbor Eastman Kodak,
Bausch and Lomb established its own research laboratory to maintain its supremacy in its field. A relative
latecomer was the Radio Corporation of America, created in 1919 by General Electric, other firms, and the
federal government. After a series of successes in radio manufacturing and broadcasting, RCA created its
own Technical and Test Department in New York City. Although much research was done there (chiefly
resulting in velocity microphones), it was not until 1934 that RCA embarked on massive corporate research,
which was eventually to produce innovations in film sound recording.42
Smaller, more specialized, firms also served the film industry. None could afford to be as concerned with
basic research as the giants were, but all worked to varying degrees to innovate technology. Bell & Howell
is the most notable instance. Donald J.Bell, a projectionist, met Albert Howell, a draftsman and mechanic
for a projector-parts manufacturer. The two formed a firm in 1907. Bell deliberately sought to establish a
standardized line of motion-picture machinery. Soon Bell & Howell had built the perforator that would
become the industry norm. In a 1916 paper, Bell urged the industry to standardize the spacing, size, and
shape of film perforations, and he devised a test gauge to measure deviations. The Bell & Howell metal camera,
put on the market in 1909, eventually became the most popular 35mm camera of the silent era. The pilotpin
engineering that made the camera yield superior registration also made the Bell & Howell continuous
printer a great success. Modified and improved through two decades, it was superseded in 1933 by the Bell
& Howell automatic printer. Later innovations included magnetic sound striping, an additive color printer,
and a 35mm reflex camera. Such engineering advances required an ample research department, and Bell &
Howell’s grew steadily. During World War II, the new Lincolnwood laboratories were busy twenty-four
hours a day designing and building not only studio equipment but also gunsights, radar devices, gun
cameras, portable projectors, and combat cameras.43
The Mitchell Camera Corporation lacked Bell’s zeal for standardization, but it was also concerned with
using company research to gain Hollywood business. The firm was born from the idea of a camera that
would have the ability to rack the camera body sidewise quickly and bring the viewing glass into alignment
with the taking lens; this would make framing and focusing easier and faster. In 1921, the company began to
market the machine. George Mitchell had nothing like the research resources of Bell & Howell, but the coming
of sound made the firm launch a new engineering effort. Bell & Howell was unable to quiet the slapping
sound made by the pressure plate and the pilot-pin shuttle. The Mitchell firm redesigned its basic model—
first as the NC (1932), then the BNC (1934)—and created the universally used studio camera of the decades
before I960.44
There were other specialized technical firms serving the studios, and to enter and stay in the market,
many had to develop technology, on however modest a scale. Some, like Bell & Ho well, worked within a
traditional engineering framework. Peter Mole and Elmer Richardson, both trained as electrical engineers,
wound up working for the Creco Lamp Company of Los Angeles. When they saw that the industry was
switching to incandescent lighting for production, they noticed that no firm was providing such units. In
1927, the firm of Mole-Richardson was formed and quickly became the chief supplier of incandescent
fixtures. The founders’ engineering expertise enabled them to plan systematic research programs. They
obtained the cooperation of GE, the National Carbon Company, and Corning Glass in designing and testing
new lighting units, both incandescent and arc. Studios and firms began to come to them with problems to be
solved and equipment to be built.45 Mole boasted that each project required ‘a combination of pure
scientific research, practical phototechnical necessity, and production engineering.’46 We shall encounter a
similarly zealous engineering organization when we examine Technicolor’s contribution to technological
innovation.
Other firms lacked the engineer’s gospel of scientific inquiry but understood the economic advantages of
directed research. Max Factor, who had learned some chemistry as a doctor’s assistant in Russia, opened a
wig and make-up business in Los Angeles in 1908. Although he supplied makeup to the studios during the
1920s, his first major success was the standardizing of panchromatic make-up, which helped take the make-
up process out of the player’s hands and into the control of the studio. After 1928, to guarantee uniformity,
Factor had to create careful testing and research procedures. By 1934, his factory had an assemblyline
operation, a quality-control laboratory, and a research laboratory to develop new formulas. Every innovation
in lighting or film stock sent studios to Factor, and the company devised makeup to suit faster emulsions,
arc lamps, three-color Technicolor, and Eastman Color. In fact, the 1935 make-up developed for
Technicolor became the pancake foundation make-up still used in cosmetics.47
The list of specialized service agencies is long. There is Moviola, which m the 1920s began furnishing
Hollywood studios with precision previewing and editing machinery. There is Bardwell & McAlister, Mole-
Richardson’s chief competitor in supplying lighting equipment. There is Consolidated Film Industries,
which innovated continuous machine processing. Rearprojection equipment, cutaway cars, even wind
machines—for almost everything, from raw stock to camera cranes, the American film industry relied upon
large and small manufacturers and suppliers.48
The service industries bore the brunt of technical innovation, but they had to keep abreast of the studios’
needs. Certainly proximity helped. Most of the specialized firms began their operations in Los Angeles, and
the larger firms established branches there. The first wave of settlement was over by the mid-twenties, when
Technicolor had moved from Boston and the major raw-stock manufacturers (Eastman, Du Pont, Agfa) all
had their Hollywood representatives. The second wave of settlement coincided with the coming of sound. At
the end of the 1930s, RCA and Western Electric had offices in Los Angeles, as did the Chicago-based Bell
& Howell.49 ‘Only in Hollywood,’ wrote Mole in 1938, ‘could designing and production engineers be in
such close daily contact with the ultimate, practical users of their products.’50 It was estimated in 1936 that,
apart from the 16,000 people employed in the studios, another 14,000 worked for service firms.51
Still, to posit the process of technological innovation as a simple communication among neighbors is to
ignore the difficulties within the artist/technician model: the fact that technical agencies could innovate on
their own, the requisite that maker and user must share some conception of permissible innovation, and the
need to explain large-scale technological change. The firms’ research orientation insured the capacity to
innovate. What the firms needed was guidance about the acceptable directions for innovation.
The film industry confronted engineers with a specific set of problems. For instance, the practices of
Hollywood filmmaking did not entirely fit engineers’ conceptions of efficiency. Peter Mole recalled that in
the early days, he was surprised to discover that the correct solution from an engineer’s point of view was
not necessarily the most feasible one for film production. In order to give the cinematographer what he
wanted we would be obliged to sacrifice engineering efficiency all the way along the line.’52 Thus
Hollywood’s aesthetic specificity governed the range of permissible technical innovations. The researcher’s
work could not be abstractly instrumental; filmmaking presented ‘artistic’ problems absent from ordinary
industrial research. In other words, the classical stylistic paradigm had to be made known, however
implicitly, to the technical agencies. To communicate this paradigm, to foster standard solutions to
problems, and to coordinate longrange research became tasks for Hollywood’s professional societies and
associations.
Like most oligopolies in American history, the film industry recognized the value of cooperation among
firms. As early as the mid-teens, the industry possessed formal networks to disseminate standards of quality
filmmaking, new technologies, and efficient production practices. Chapter 9 has traced the emergence of
advertising that established grounds for competition, trade papers and handbooks that described and
prescribed style and production procedures, and various trade, labor, and professional associations that
permitted the exchange of information across companies. In 1922, the film companies officially
demonstrated a commitment to industry-wide uniformity by reorganizing the trade association as the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Under the strong leadership of Will
H.Hays, the MPPDA took steps to solidify the industry.53 Besides controlling subject matter through self-
censorship regulations, the MPPDA was credited with the ‘encouragement of better business practice, such
as standardized budgets, uniform cost accounting, uniform contracts, and the arbitration of disputes.’54 Like
the MPPDA, most industry groups included in their aims the sharing of information and a commitment to
progress.
The same goals characterized the three most important agencies that guided technological innovation: the
American Society of Cinematographers (founded 1918), the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (founded
1916), and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (founded 1927). The three agencies differed
considerably in power, constituency, and purpose. The American Society of Cinematographers was a small
fraternal association dedicated to creating a professional image for first cameramen at the Hollywood studios.
The Society of Motion Picture Engineers, a larger group, drew its members from studio technical personnel
and from the supply and manufacturing sector. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had by
far the most authority in the industry, representing as it did the major studios, the producers, and many
personnel. Although each group undertook a wide range of activities, it is their work in regulating
technological change that is important here.
The American Society of Cinematographers

The American Society of Cinematographer (ASC) grew out of a few cameramen’s clubs begun in 1913.
Functioning chiefly as fraternal organizations, the clubs also encouraged the exchange of information and
published their own journals.55 In 1919, shortly after the clubs dissolved, the ASC was chartered, claiming
as one of its objectives ‘to advance the art and science of cinematography and to encourage, foster, and
strive for preeminence, excellence, artistic perfection, and scientific knowledge in all matters pertaining to
cinematography.’56 In 1920, the ASC began publishing a monthly journal, American Cinematographer,
which has continued to this day. The Society also held regular meetings, usually of an informal social
nature. At some points, notably during a 1933 strike, the ASC became embroiled in labor disputes, but on
the whole it never tried to represent cameramen in the workplace.57 The group’s chief purpose was to
propose and maintain standards of professional work in cinematography.
It is evident that the ASC created a specific conception of the cameraman’s role, one that combined aspects
of ‘artist’ and ‘technician.’ The Society’s motto, ‘Loyalty, progress, and artistry,’ embodies their ideals.
Cinematographers took pride in finding ways to achieve novel effects or to make shooting more economical
and efficient, and in Society meetings and in the pages of American Cinematographer the
Cinematographers shared their discoveries with their peers. Soon after the ASC was founded, it stated:58
When a cameraman encounters a difficult problem in his work which he cannot solve he can call on
sixty-five fellow cameramen. The small producer with limited facilities for experimentation is
benefited with this arrangement. It is equivalent to putting on his payroll the entire membership of the
society, without the exhausting exercise of signing checks to cover their salaries.
Loyalty to professional standards and the pooling of information in the name of progress thus promoted
standardization. As for the third goal of the motto, artistry, after 1910 the cinematographer saw his job as
more than simply creating legible images. As the dominant spatial procedures (e.g., centering, balancing,
depth) became more clearly defined, cinematographers turned their attention to the skilful achievement of
classical goals. Beauty, spectacle, and technical virtuosity came to be recognized as signs of ‘artistic’
cinematography. Later we shall see how important this conception of technician-as-artist was to the
development of the soft style in the 1920s and deep-focus cinematography in the 1930s and 1940s; for now,
what is important is the ASC’s role in guiding industry research.
While the ASC as a whole did not launch research programs, it did create committees to monitor current
developments. In 1928, the ASC announced brief courses for its members in the technique of sound
filming. The Wide Film Committee of 1930 sought to ‘arrive at not only ideal proportions but those most
readily realized in commercial practice.’59 Two decades later, the ASC organized a committee to determine
the most suitable type of cinematography for television production.60 The pragmatically professional ASC
needed to keep its members at a high level of proficiency when new technologies emerged.
That professionalism could not have been maintained, however, if the ASC had not, from the start,
sought liaisons with the manufacturing firms. As one founder wrote, ‘Our original purpose was to get
cameramen to exchange ideas and thus encourage manufacturers to make better equipment, especially
lighting equipment.’61 American Cinematographer carried advertisements from film and equipment
suppliers, and often articles would be devoted to innovations of interest to cinematographers. ASC meetings
hosted manufacturers’ representatives who demonstrated their latest equipment.62 ‘Our members,’ wrote
Charles G.Clarke, ‘learn of these innovations first.’63 The firms also had representatives within the ASC.
During the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, Emery Huse of Eastman was technical editor of American
Cinematographer. In 1930, the ASC created the category of associate member, and researchers from
Bausch and Lomb, Bell & Howell, Eastman, and other firms soon joined; many of the same men also served
on the Society’s research committee. On a few occasions, the ASC threw its weight entirely behind a
technical improvement, as when in 1931 the Society officially recommended the new faster panchromatic
films. In their turn, the firms sought testimonials from leading cinematographers, sending them equipment
to try out.64
Almost no cinematographers had any formal research training, but their links to the technical agencies
gave them the chance to invent and refine. Many ASC members held patents. Tony Gaudio was said to have
patented the view-finder in use on the early Mitchell, with the cooperation of Mitchell and Bausch and
Lomb engineers. In the 1940s, Karl Freund became affiliated with a firm manufacturing exposure meters
and Linwood Dunn conceived a standardized optical printer built by the Acme Tool and Manufacturing
Company. (This printer won an Academy Award of Merit in 1981.) In 1929, Jackson Rose conducted
detailed color rendition tests of all currently available film stocks and was able to pinpoint the capacities of
each; the results were quickly seized upon by Eastman and Du Pont as help in refining their products.65 In
such ways, the ASC constituted a valuable channel between the manufacturer and the film industry. The
cinematographers were able to indicate directions for research to take, either by discussion in meetings or
by active involvement in the process of innovation. Those directions were, to varying degrees, governed by
the economic and stylistic determinations we have seen at work in Hollywood, and they were mediated by
the specific professional ideology of the ASC itself. In subsequent chapters we shall examine in detail how
this occurred.
The Society of Motion Picture Engineers

As David Noble has indicated, professional engineering societies and major corporations predicated
industrial development upon uniformity.66
Without some uniformity in the types and dimensions of industrial products which went into the
production of consumer goods, and standard specifications for the performance of equipment and
machinery, the interchangeability of parts and the regularisation of manufacturing processes upon
which large-scale production depended were impossible. And without widely recognized standards of
quality and readily available means of servicing products after sale, large-scale consumption was
impossible. Standardization in industry was thus the sine qua non of corporate prosperity and, since
the corporations were the locus of technological innovation, of scientific progress as well.
Since 1902, the United States Bureau of Standards was aggressively establishing standards of measurement,
performance, and quality; in 1918, the American Engineering Standards Committee was created to coordinate
the activities of all engineering societies. It is in this context that we must situate the formation of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE). (In 1950, the Society changed its name to the Society of
Motion Picture and Television Engineers [SMPTE]. We shall use its earlier name when describing its
activities before that date.)
Engineering of various sorts—mechanical, optical, electrical, and chemical—had been necessary to the
creation and maintenance of film technology since before 1895. Chapter 9 has detailed the formation of the
SMPE in 1916. Although the SMPE charter members were generally not the university-trained men to be
found in other engineering societies, the goal of standardization helped define their professional status. As
C.Francis Jenkins pointed out at the SMPE’s second meeting in 1916:67
Every new industry standardizes sooner or later, whether we will it or not. It is our duty, therefore, as
engineers to wisely direct this standardization, to secure best standards of equipment, quality,
performance, nomenclature, and, unconsciously, perhaps, a code of ethics. It is entirely a practical
attainable ideal. But we should recognize our responsibility to fix standards with due regard for the
interests of all concerned.
In 1930, the American Standards Association recognized the SMPE as the official representative of the film
industry, and with American involvement in World War II, the SMPE was given federal support in
determining and updating standards. Cooperating with the ASA and the American Engineering Standards
Commission, the Society established standards and recommended practices for perforations, sprocket holes,
dimensions, reels, lenses, splices, screen size and brightness, projection room layout, sensitometry,
densitometry, and terminology.68
The SMPE’s concern for standardization was frankly designed to support what Jenkins called ‘the
interests of all concerned’—that is, the growing service sector. In 1920, some SMPE members worked in
the New York offices of film companies, but the power of the Society lay with the researchers from the
major manufacturing firms: Bausch and Lomb, Corning Glass, Eastman, Union Carbide, Technicolor,
General Electric, and Westinghouse. It was not until 1929, when the Society founded its Pacific Coast
section, that the Society began to include more production personnel and workers in Los Angeles service
firms. Modeling itself on older American engineering societies, the SMPE held conventions twice a year
and established committees on procedures and standards. It published its proceedings, first as a set of
Transactions (1916– 29), then as The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture [and Television] Engineers or
JSMP[T]E (1930-present). Based in the Engineering Societies Building in New York City, the JSMPE
printed committee reports, technical papers, patents abstracts, and résumés of articles from other journals.
The Society’s conduct was governed by the conception of the engineer as both scientist and businessman. A
1925 SMPE policy statement explained:69
Modern business and especially manufacturing is founded on scientific research and sound
engineering practice. Practically all engineering organizations are supported by, and have for their
purpose, increased business for their members.
Experience has shown that in the long run the most business is developed for the majority of people
by cooperation and the interchange of knowledge gained through research and practical application. To
provide a medium for such exchange of data is one of the chief functions of an engineering
organization.
Engineering societies differ from commercial organizations in that they do not let commercial
considerations dominate their work, yet the results of their work are applied directly to business.
In adopting this goal of ‘applied science,’ the SMPE was accepting the engineer’s role as denned by the
profession in the late nineteenth century. The society’s concern for standardization was thus part of a larger
effort to help its member companies prosper.
Indeed, the entire history of the Society shows that it became a central forum for manufacturers. Its
charter members included Donald Bell, two of the partners in Technicolor, and several electrical company
engineers. During the 1920s, the presidents and governors were typically representatives of Edison, General
Electric, Eastman, Technicolor, and other major firms. In the early 1930s, at about the same time that the
ASC sought financial support from manufacturers, the SMPE created the category of sustaining member.
By 1952, there were sixty-three such members, all principal service firms. SMPE conventions provided the
occasion to display new equipment and processes and to discuss research findings. Often technical but
seldom purely theoretical, the papers frequently announced innovations soon to be marketed. The
conventions would often be held in manufacturers’ home towns, yielding an opportunity for promotion. The
Fall 1936 Convention in Rochester included a luncheon underwritten by Eastman, another by Bausch and
Lomb, and a tour of each company’s research facility.70 In 1930, the Pacific Coast section met at the Mitchell
plant to discuss wide film, since the principal wide-film camera was made by Mitchell; after a
demonstration of the camera, the one hundred technicians attending were given a tour of the plant.
Appropriately, at this 1930 meeting Emery Huse of Eastman pointed out that one of the most valuable
functions of the SMPE was ‘the contact it afforded between the industry and the many research
organizations whose work so materially affected the progress of the motion picture industry.’71
The program and activities of the SMPE help us explain why there appears to be a progress or evolution
in the history of film technology. The research in the service sector and the goals of the professional
associations presupposed a fairly linear, accumulative development. In any industry, the policy of
continuous innovation demands a constant revising of basic designs according to some conception of
perfectability. A clear statement of this policy emerged from a 1934 speech by A.N.Goldsmith, then
president of the SMPE. Goldsmith pointed out that engineering is a goal-oriented activity. Like his brethren
in other industries, the motion picture engineer strives to perfect his product according to certain criteria:
freedom of choice, portability, convenience, speed, simplicity, uniformity, and quality control.72 Greater
sensitivity of film stocks, more portable cameras, better lenses, increased recordable range of sound, the
acceleration of laboratory rate and capacity—by Gold-smith’s criteria, the history of Hollywood technology
has constituted a progress comparable to that in other industries.
Given the engineer’s gospel of perfectibility, the SMPE undertook to explain to its manufacturers the
peculiar nature of motion picture engineering. Throughout the society’s history, paper after paper attempts,
as one put it, to ‘reconcile the requirements of showmanship with the limitations of technical advances.’73
The SMPE worked to communicate the Hollywood aesthetic to engineers, albeit seldom in ‘aesthetic’
terms. One of the most explicit statements comes, again, from Goldsmith. The motion picture engineer had
as his task ‘the presentation of a real or imagined happening to the audience in such approach to perfection
that a satisfactory illusion of actual presence at the corresponding event is created.’74 Here is a goal for the
engineer to work toward. (A Bazinian teleology is packed into that phrase ‘approach to perfection.’)
Goldsmith went on to claim that while the engineer strives for a total realism, the film artist (director,
writer) alters the illusion of reality to achieve ‘the most satisfactory audience response.’75 To take another
example: engineers had to learn to accommodate Holly-wood’s demand for unobtrusive technique. In 1930,
John Otterson, President of ERPI, addressed the SMPE banquet:76
It is necessary for the artistic effect of motion pictures that the process by which the result has been
attained should be concealed. Due to this fact, I would say that the work of the engineer, as well as the
motion picture industry of the future, lies in concealing the fact that an engineer has anything to do
with motion pictures—to bring about such a natural effect that the public will not associate with it any
mechanical or engineering process.
‘Showmanship,’ realism, invisibility: such canons guided the SMPE members toward understanding the
acceptable and unacceptable choices in technical innovation, and these too became teleological. In another
industry, the engineer’s goal might be an unbreakable glass or a lighter alloy. In the film industry, the goals
were not only increased efficiency, economy, and flexibility but also spectacle, concealment of artifice, and
what Goldsmith called ‘the production of an acceptable semblance of reality.’
To see Hollywood’s technical institutions as aiming at a steady progress in film machinery is not to
endorse the positions advanced by Bazin and Perkins. Both theorists perceived a teleological direction in
technical change, but both erred as to the source and significance of the change. Bazin attributed the
teleology to a universal urge of the human mind to duplicate reality, a ‘mummy complex,’ a myth of total
cinema which in Bazin’s view could ‘in no way be explained on grounds of scientific, economic, or
industrial evolution.’ On the contrary: only the history of scientific and engineering research in the service
of capitalism can explain both the cinema’s progress and the very idea of progress itself. As for realism,
which both Bazin and Perkins treated as the goal of technology’s evolution, we can see from observations
like Goldsmith’s that this too was rationally adopted as an engineering aim—but wholly within the
framework of Hollywood’s conception of ‘realism.’ Otterson’s remark about invisibility makes it clear that
any absolute phenomenal realism is qualified by aesthetic criteria. ‘The Cinema’ is not ‘evolving’ toward a
‘total realism.’ Rather, institutions, such as the SMPE, chose in a specific historical context to modify an
already-defined aesthetic system according to an ideology of progress.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was chartered in 1927. It has had many fields of
influence, the most publicized being its annual achievement awards, the least-known its role in the history
of labor in Hollywood. In its 1937 revision of its purpose, the Academy declared itself to be a forum for all
motion picture crafts, a clearing house for records of achievements, and a showcase for innovations. At
first, the Academy possessed five branches (actors, directors, writers, producers, and technicians), with an
initial membership of 350. It grew quickly, doubling its membership by 1932 and adding many branches in
the next decade.77
Between 1927 and 1959, the Academy referred matters of technology to a specific body. Until 1932, this
was the Producers-Technicians Committee, a revision of the MPPDA technical committee; as we shall see,
the Academy committee was instrumental in guiding the industry’s switchover to tungsten lighting,
panchromatic film, and synchronized sound pictures. The Producers-Technicians Committee was renamed
the Research Council, and, between 1932 and 1947, it operated with funds, labor, and equipment donated by
the studios. In 1948, the council re-incorporated itself as a separate agency (once again funded by the
MPPDA).78 In its different incarnations, the Academy’s research body represented the studios’ recognition
that large-scale development required collective action. In his book on the organization of scientific
research, C.E.K. Mees pointed out that in many industries, the best research facility was a cooperative
laboratory financed by a trade association. Such laboratories only succeeded, however, in industries in
which little scientific work had been done and in which the basic technical processes were common
knowledge.79 In 1928, both such conditions existed in the film industry. Like their counterparts in other
fields, the production companies rationally pooled their resources. In 1930, the Academy Technical Bureau
claimed:80
Motion pictures may be called an art existing by grace of mechanics, but it is the art and not the
mechanics of it that is sold to the public. Studios all need good cameras, for instance, but the only use
of a camera is to photograph a scene. It is the value of the scene which will be in competition with the
product of other studios. If every camera could be made twice as efficient, the competition would
remain the same, but the industry as a whole would benefit and every studio in proportion.
The same logic was echoed in explaining the formation of the Motion Picture Research Council:81
By 1947 it was freely recognized that insofar as methods, processes, and equipment are concerned,
there was no need for competition among the producers of motion pictures. Accordingly, it was
practical to carry on the development of such equipment, processes, and methods in a common
industry-sponsored technical organization.
Thus Hollywood recognized the collective rewards of organized research.

Through its research agency, the Academy did considerable work on standardization. When in 1930 it
looked as if wide film would become a significant option, the Producers-Technicians Committee held
meetings and gathered information toward the standardization of such formats. In the early years of sound,
Academy committees proposed uniform theater projection equipment and studio recording processes. The
Academy standardized script format, leaders, laboratory sensitometry, screen materials, and even the official
shade of white to be filmed by panchromatic film (actually, pearl gray).82 When 3-D films seemed
promising, the Motion Picture Research Council held lectures for studio personnel, devised an instrument to
help cinematographers reckon convergence, published a set of standards for exhibition, and developed a
single-film 3-D projector.83 Like the SMPE, the Academy created uniform procedures for reasons of
efficiency and economy.
But, like the SMPE, the Academy realized that such standardization could not take place without close
contacts with the service sector. Between 1928 and 1932, such contacts were somewhat ad hoc. With the
creation of the Academy Research Council in 1932, the arrangement became more systematic. The council
was composed of representatives from all five branches, a technical representative from each studio, and an
advisory engineer from each major manufacturing company. At this point, the council’s work was financed
by the Association of Motion Picture Producers.84 In 1933, however, the Academy was reorganized, and it
declared a new aim: ‘to cooperate and/or affiliate with any organization whose objective is the betterment
of the motion picture industry as a whole, on such terms and conditions as may be mutually agreed upon.’85
The new category of corporate member was created to enable manufacturers and suppliers to join the
Academy. Corporate members could not participate in the work of the branches, but could be represented on
the Research Council, and their fees would fund the council’s activities. Later, in 1948, the Research
Council was established as a separate corporation in order to be able to work closely with commercial
firms:86
We are acting as a liaison between studios and suppliers. On one hand, suppliers are using the
Council to distribute directly to those concerned in the studios information on new products. On the
other hand, we are correlating studio needs and desires and presenting such information to the
suppliers. This procedure saves time, standardizes methods and practices, and results in better and less
expensive equipment.87
Thus the Academy’s work as a coordinator of technical activity required the support of the service sector.
The support strengthened the already powerful suppliers. Academy meetings would host representatives
of firms to demonstrate new equipment. More important, the Academy grew accustomed to turning to
favored firms for help on projects. When the Research Bureau was studying the problem of projector
distortion in 1932, it authorized its subcommittee to get technical assistance from Bausch and Lomb and
Bell & Howell. In 1941, the Research Council committee on set noise needed information and so turned to
the major electrical firms and the equipment manufacturers. Usually the Research Council would set out a
problem, investigate alternative solutions, and communicate the industry’s preference to the suppliers.88 For
example, in 1938, the Academy began to standardize a production process jealously guarded by
most studios: rear projection. The committee included not only studio technicians but also engineers from
Bausch and Lomb, Technicolor, Mole-Richardson, Mitchell, the National Carbon Company, and other
firms. In February of 1939, the results were published and sent to all equipment companies. Seven months
later, the committee chairman reported that Mole-Richardson had designed a new lamp housing, Mitchell
was completing a new projection head, and Bell & Howell had taken orders for seventy-six new lenses—all
to Academy specifications. Again, in 1947, the council’s Basic Sound Committee held meetings of studio
technicians and manufacturers to discuss magnetic recording. The manufacturers demonstrated their
products, and the studios supplied specifications about frequency range, volume, speed, and other
features.89 After the Motion Picture Research Council had conceived a new piece of equipment, ‘Normally
we would provide manufacturing firms with performance specifications or a complete design, and they
would manufacture and sell directly to the industry.’90 This was what happened when the Research Council
collected data and drew up plans for a standardized camera crane. Since no companies were willing to make
the crane for the open market, the council licensed the design exclusively to Houston Fearless, collated
studio orders, and placed an initial order for twenty-five.91 In such ways, the Academy got a desirable level
of technical quality, but also sustained the principal manufacturers.
Relations among the technical agencies

The ASC, the SMPE, and the Academy functioned to standardize technology and to link the production
sector with the service industries. Occasionally there was friction. Sometimes the SMPE’s zeal for
standardization was blocked by the producers’ recalcitrance. For instance, the SMPE noted peevishly in
1937 that although it had officially adopted a new uniform perforation several years before, the industry simply
refused to change. Similarly, during the 1930 fad for wide film, the SMPE spent months researching the
problem but by then the industry had decided against the innovation, leaving the Society with an ASA-
approved set of standards for an obsolete format. Sometimes distributors and exhibitors became embroiled
in standardization battles as well, as in the disputes over a standard reel length during the 1930s. Even
apparently straightforward problems, such as standardizing screen dimensions, aperture ratios, and
soundtrack dimensions, occupied the Academy, the ASC, the SMPE, the exhibitors, and the projectionists’
union for many years.92
On the whole, however, the ASC, the Academy, and the SMPE were able to work closely and
cooperatively. Their mutual concern for uniformity, for monitoring technological developments, and for
linking the film industry to its service companies made possible the smooth assimilation of large-scale
technological change. At the same time, the three professional associations could assure that the
fundamental premises of the classical paradigm of narrative construction and film style would, however
tacitly, shape research and innovation.
To trace this process, we must look not only to the historical agents—the manufacturers and suppliers and
the regulating institutions—but also to their discourses. What these institutions said is as important as what
they did. The agencies’ discourse often acknowledges the ways in which a given innovation can save
money, differentiate the product, or further the progress toward a standard of quality. Moreover, in the very
language of these institutions we find admonitions about the range and nature of permissible innovations. It
is in fact one job of the regulating agencies to reiterate what counts as an acceptable technological change.
At this point, the abstract duality between ‘artist’ and ‘inventor’ looks particularly thin. Conferences, papers,
and meetings address issues that involve both engineering and film style. Through the discourses and
practices of these institutions, the principles of the classical model were continually reformulated,
redirected, and translated into problem/solution terms. Finally, we shall have to scrutinize the films
themselves for their stylistic operations. As traces or deposits of technological change, the films yield
evidence for the fundamental continuity of the classical paradigm. The idea of functional equivalence, the
capacity of various techniques to play similar roles, enables us to analyze the ways in which changing
stylistic devices extend and reaffirm the premises of Hollywood filmmaking. The next four chapters will
show how, from the beginning of the classical period through the coming of sound, Hollywood’s
Fig. A—Organization of sound department using portable equipment; film recording only
institutions innovated technology, how they explained their innovations, and how the classical paradigm
was affected.
Fig. B—Organization of sound department using centralized installation; film and disc recording 19.1 The organization
of sound personnel at RKO, 1931
20
Initial standardization of the basic technology
KRISTIN THOMPSON
‘The Hollywood pioneers’—a phrase so familiar we need not ask to whom it refers. It evokes a notion of
the early American film industry’s growth: small groups of daring individuals striking out on their own
toward the West, especially California, working under crude conditions (barns for studios, bathtubs for
developing tanks), and finally carving out a new industry with their own resources. Even some of the names
of these groups—Champion, Yankee, Bison ‘101’, Broncho, American ‘Flying A’— conjure up images of
American history and the Old West. Historians have drawn upon the pioneer metaphor until it seems to
constitute an adequate characterization of the whole period.1*
There is nothing wrong with the metaphor itself; early film companies did send units into desolate
territory to make films, and they did use a good deal of their own initiative to solve immediate problems.
But we cannot stop with that view, appealingly romantic though it be (transforming the early filmmakers
into the cowboys of their own stories). It gives only a onesided picture of the filmmaking institutions that
were developing. Far from being completely on their own in a wilderness, the early film companies tended
to locate in or near cities, and they had links to major manufacturing firms from the start. The number of
those links increased steadily as the industry expanded. As we have seen, Eastman Kodak, the National
Carbon Company, and Bausch and Lomb researched and provided supplies initially, and a support sector
grew up around filmmaking.
The large, existing companies in this support sector supplied those technological devices which could be
adapted from existing products: lighting instruments, lenses, film stock, make-up, and the like. Such devices
also promised a continuing market. As long as films kept being made and studios were expanded or
refurbished, all these products would be in continual demand.
But machines to handle the filmstrip itself — cameras, processing equipment, and projectors — were
specialized items. They could not be simply modified from machines that already existed, and although this
equipment was vital, the market was limited. Firms and cameramen seldom replaced their instruments, and
once the industry had leveled off its expansion, the demand for new cameras would not be great enough to
interest a major corporation. So film-handling equipment was supplied by a group of smaller, specialized
firms.
The support firms’ relation to the industry was relatively casual before the mid-teens, for there was no
regularized means of communication between the two groups. As we shall see, the decisions of individuals
had more effect at this point than they later would. This was a preinstitutional period, when various apparati
competed in a market which had not yet become systematized. The previous chapter discussed the
formation of a set of institutions to guide technological change, beginning with the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers in 1916. Systematic innovation benefited the support sector as well as the film industry.
By the twenties, the film companies were spending more on expanding their studio facilities and less on
498 INITIAL STANDARDIZATION OF THE BASIC TECHNOLOGY
technology, since they were by that point adequately equipped. Increased communication of needs helped
prevent wasted effort by the support firms in supplying this reduced demand.
But even in these pre-institutional years, standardization of equipment tended to occur, due to conditions
in the film equipment market. Either type of support company—the large, existing corporation or the
specialized firm — would foster the adoption of similar equipment across the industry. The corporation
could dominate the field by size and by utilizing its research facilities to create the best product. In a limited
market, competition would tend to eliminate all but a few of the smaller, specialized firms, whose product
would also then dominate the field.
By the end of the teens, for example, there were only a few brands of cameras or lighting instruments
available. It was simply not economical or efficient to have a machine for each specialized trick the
filmmakers could think up; but within the given range of possibilities offered by the standard machines,
there was plenty of room for different styles and for experimentation.
Technological change in the pre-1920 period was already governed by the three considerations outlined
in the previous chapter: production efficiency, product differentiation, and standards of quality. A couple of
examples from the midteens may show how filmmakers worked to balance these factors in determining
whether change would take place.
Throughout the teens, studios sought a combination of techniques that would make location shooting at
night practical. At the time most night scenes were simply shot during the day and then tinted blue, with
possibly an inter-title to indicate the time of day. In 1915, both portable floodlights and generators were
available for night shooting, but these were still too expensive for general use. Those rare films which did
go on location at night gained a considerable novelty value. Universal/Imp’s The House of Fear, made in
1915, was promoted in the trade and fan press as an early use of this lighting equipment.2* Quality and novelty
resulted, but not efficiency. Few films in the mid- and late teens used this equipment. But by 1919, with the
introduction of high-powered arcs (recently invented as searchlights for military use) and better portable
generators, the system became cheap enough to be feasible. From that year on, it was much more common
to find ‘night for night’ scenes in Hollywood films done outside the studio. We can examine the
standardization of this new lighting device using the four aspects of technological change Chapter 19 has
described. The direction of change here follows the Hollywood paradigm, in that night shooting permits a
clearer indication of the temporal relations in a film. In function, it would replace or supplement the blue tinting
or inter-titles, and it would create a less self-conscious narration than would either of those devices. The
timing of the change results from the conjunction at a certain point of new lighting and generating
equipment. Both economic imperatives and the stylistic paradigm contribute to the causation for the
change: the companies were in the process throughout the mid- and late teens of equipping their studios
with artificial illumination, as filmmakers employed more effects lighting. All these factors favored the
eventual adoption of exterior night lighting.
But some innovations of the teens fell by the wayside; already Hollywood’s criteria for technical change
were in place and left no room for them. For example, in 1916, Maurice Tourneur’s film The Hand of Peril
(World) contained a cutaway set in which nine rooms were visible at the same time, stacked in three stories
(see fig 20.1). This again was heavily promoted, with pictures and stories in the trade press. The set’s
function in relation to the paradigm was clear; it showed several separate actions simultaneously in a single
long shot. The Motion Picture News hailed it as an alternative to crosscutting.3 The timing of this innovation
was logical enough. During the mid-teens, the art director was a new production role, and features were
allowing more money to be spent on larger and more spectacular sets. Tourneur in particular had recently
gained success and had a growing reputation as an experimenter. The use of the set was presumably caused
by a desire for novelty. But a cutaway set remained a highly unlikely stylistic alternative, for it did not
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY TO 1930 499
follow the direction of trended change dictated by the Hollywood paradigm, which was at that time nearing
its stable form. Such a set would make redundancy difficult to achieve, by presenting simultaneous events;
it would discourage centering within the frame; and it would certainly call attention to the process of
narration. In addition, a large set of this type would be more expensive to build than a group of individual
rooms (due to the need for a larger stage and for the upper stories to have solid floors and ceilings to
support the actors). Finally, an effective stylistic alternative was already in use: smaller sets and
crosscutting. Isolated experiments like this set may be found in many films throughout Hollywood’s
history. Yet the paradigm quickly became so all-encompassing, so complete, that it filtered out those
devices that were not useful to it.
This chapter will examine the initial standardization of basic technology in the film industry. Why were
certain cameras, lighting instruments, or processing systems adopted? And what did they offer the
filmmaker as a range of possibilities? The answers to these questions should allow us to see how technology
contributed to the early development of the stylistic paradigm. In answering them we will spend
considerable time on teens and even pre-teens equipment, rather than concentrating on the classical period
itself. This early equipment set the pattern for the rest of Hollywood’s history and also demonstrates the
range of equipment available during the process of standardization.
Standardizing cameras
My fondest hope for the industry— Standardization.4

Donald J. Bell, 1930
Hollywood would adopt camera technology on the basis of a set of criteria. Two areas of these criteria have
to do with the quality of the exposed film:
The capability to create a clear, steady image

(Good lenses, a steady registration system, and no light leaks) Controllability
(Gauges to indicate the speed of cranking and the footage remaining, adequate sighting while
filming, and smooth mobility of the camera body)
Two additional groups of criteria deal with efficiency in the filming process:
Durability
(Sturdiness, freedom from frequent replacement and repair) Ease of handling
(Portability, fast focusing and framing systems, fast adjustment and changing of attachments, easy
loading of film stock)
And one additional desirable quality of the camera promotes novelty in the finished product:
Versatility
(Special effects options, reverse-motion capability, single-frame crank, a variety of lenses, mattes,
etc.)
(As we shall see, this set of criteria applies in toto or in part to some other types of film technology as well,
including lighting instruments.) In general, the camera contributes less to the novelty of a film than other
equipment might; its techniques tend to create quality and efficiency.
In the absence of other restraints—relatively high cost, patents control, lack of supply—the camera that best
meets these various needs would be standardized across the industry. But as we shall see, there was no point
in silent film history when all the ideal conditions existed simultaneously. Differences in costs of cameras
or the failure of any one camera to perform all the necessary operations led to a small range of cameras
remaining standard in Hollywood.
The early process of standardization fell into two general periods. Initially, the Motion Picture Patents
Company’s (MPPC) control of the industry through patents limited the availability of the most desirable
types of cameras. This period lasted until the crucial Latham-loop court decision of 1912, after which
followed a period of a comparatively free market. In the second period, several new cameras gradually
came into widespread use, and the cameras of the first period fell into disuse.
Before 1912, there were several types of motion-picture cameras in use. Major Woodville Latham had
patented a loop device in 1895, and the MPPC controlled the patent. Until 1912, all cameras used by non-
licensed production companies either infringed the patent or used alternative principles for moving the film
along its path. In this case, legal and economic conditions in the production situation limited technological
development; for the independents, efficiency, quality, and novelty remained goals, but they were
superceded by the necessity to remain in business with a legal or apparently legal camera mechanism. The
Patents Company members’ belief that they legally monopolized the industry apparently led to a relative
lack of technological innovation. (Lack of innovation is not an inevitable result of patent control, since the
period of control is limited; in the years 1914 to 1919, the patents would be running out for the MPPC. A
reasonable strategy would have been to continue research and innovation. Yet there is evidence that Edison
at least made little effort to improve the camera design, as we shall see.)
The primary non-infringing camera was the Biograph model, used at the American Mutoscope and
Biograph Company from 1896. It had been designed specifically to circumvent Edison’s patent and hence
was atypical of silent film cameras in general. Its large size set the Biograph camera apart, but its main
unique feature was the fact that it used an unperforated film stock over two inches wide. The camera’s
intermittent mechanism was a pair of rollers like those of a wringer washer, with the operator adjusting the
amount of film pulled down for each exposure. While filming, the camera would punch two holes into the
film’s edges as the frame was being exposed—one on either side—producing a very steady image.5* The
Biograph camera had the ability to provide a clear image because of its size, but it was relatively difficult to
handle, and thus inefficient. In 1899, the company built a more compact camera of the common box type,
using standard 35mm film, but the interior mechanism was still overly complex, and when American
Biograph joined the Patents Company in 1908, they turned to a more orthodox system.6
As Chapter 19 pointed out, the American film industry became modern to the degree that it allied itself
with corporate research. Yet during the years of Patents Company control, the member firms could not form
such alliances; they had to get their cameras as best they could. Since Edison never sold cameras, even to
Patents Company members, they were forced to buy cameras or to make their own; all but Kalem and
Essanay chose the latter course. W.Wallace Clendenin gives a good summary of these: Selig’s box-type
camera made by Andrew Schustek; Lubin’s copy of the French Pathé studio model; Vitagraph’s unique
camera that shot two rolls of negative in the same camera simultaneously.7 It was also legal for the Patents
Company members to buy foreign-made cameras, as long as they continued to pay in their license fees. We
shall examine these foreign cameras shortly, since they were also popular with the independents.
Because the independent companies were operating on the fringe of legality, they also failed to create any
alliances with large corporations to guarantee a supply of reliable equipment. Instead, they tried several
different strategies to get hold of any camera minimally capable of producing an image; if they were lucky,
they got one which could do a little better than that.
Some independents tried to remain within the law by obtaining a ‘non-infringing’ camera. Gimmicks
abounded and inventors had a brief field day; the trade papers before 1912 are full of advertisements for
new, supposedly non-infringing cameras (as well as for lawyers specializing in patents suits). The principal
type of camera that did not employ a Latham loop substituted the ‘beater’ movement. Clendenin describes it
thus: ‘A beater camera had only one loop, this being above the gate. From the bottom of the gate the film
ran directly to the lower sprocket in a straight line. After each exposure this stretch of film was struck by a
rotating arm which would displace the film approximately one frame at the aperture.’ According to Clendenin,
this gave an extremely unsteady picture, necessitating the use of a pilot pin and making for a very loud-running
camera. Such cameras, then, did not meet the requirements of quality and controllability for the production
of a clear image. Arthur Miller recalled that John Arnold had a Bianchi camera at the Yankee Film
Company about 1911; it produced a picture that ‘jumped all over the screen.’ Cameramen for non-Patents
Company firms sometimes used a French Gaumont camera, which also employed a beater movement.8 In
contrast to the Biograph camera, the beater cameras were relatively portable, but their image quality would
have precluded their use under less restrictive circumstances.
Because the beater cameras were so unacceptable, many if not most of the independents used loop
cameras, either domestic or foreign. In many cases these were the same cameras being used by the small,
non-patent-holding members of the MPPC. For companies willing to operate illegally, the advantages for
quality and efficiency were obvious. Cameras employing the Latham loop could combine convenient size with
relatively steady registration; thus they provided ease of handling and a quality image.
During the Patents Company’s reign, from 1908 to 1912, foreign cameras became increasingly popular.
Perhaps the lack of improvement in the original American-designed cameras led producers to adopt the
more sophisticated French and English models. Several major brands were English: the Moyer (popularly
known as the Moy), used at Kalem and later at Edison, World, Universal, and a few at Keystone; the Prestwich
Model 5, which was used on most of the Keystone comedies; and the Williamson. (See fig 20.2 for a
comparison of the Moy and Williamson cameras.) The French Debrie Parvo and the Eclair were used by
many American companies.9 But the most popular camera which emerged from the pre-1913 period was the
French-made Pathé Professional camera (see fig 20.3, a 1912 Pathé). This camera had outside magazines
holding 400 feet of film, with the crank on the back. The Pathé Professional combined many of the features
desirable for a studio camera: the dial above the crank is the footage indicator, and it had a focusing scale,
film punch, diaphragm setting indicator, and magnifier for focusing directly through the lens onto the film
before shooting. It was portable, weighing twenty-two pounds.10 As we shall see, it remained the standard
camera for some years.
There were a number of other imported cameras which found occasional use in the American studios.
With few exceptions, they had basically the same technology as far as facilitating shooting went.
Cameramen focused them through the lens before shooting, either through focusing tubes in the camera
body or through magnifying glasses on the side which focussed on an enlarged image from the film in the
gate, reflected by a mirror into the viewer. Most cameras ran in reverse for making dissolves, had footage
counters, and had shutters with openings that could only be changed while the camera was not running
(making in-camera fades difficult); their tripods had pan and tilt cranks; they usually took rolls of films of
200 feet or 400 feet.
The pre-1913 period, then, had a degree of standardization, but constraints outside considerations of
efficiency, product differentiation, and quality limited the possible technical changes. The independents
were hardly in a position to foster technical change through cooperation with manufacturing firms; they
were more concerned with holding onto the best cameras they could obtain. Numerous historical accounts
describe how the independents sometimes disguised the outsides of their cameras or sought to hide from
Patents Company detectives during this period. The Patents Company’s detectives sought not so much to
intimidate crews of independent companies, but to look inside the cameras to see if they used the loop
device; without proof of such usage, the Patents Company’s officials could not take legal action.11 And the
Patents Company firms, although in a better position to promote the growth of specialized camera
manufacturers with research facilities, appear not to have done so. Possibly the problems of industrial
expansion and of organizing distribution methods were higher priorities. At any rate, patent control delayed
the move toward a modern industrial approach to the creation of standard cameras.
But in 1912 a legal decision eliminated the problem. The court decided that an earlier French patent
invalidated the Latham claim.12 The loop device became open to anyone’s use. From this point, the
dependence on European cameras declined, and the major American silent cameras, Bell & Howell and
later Mitchell, began to take over the industry. Standardization could proceed without restraints issuing from
outside the production sitration.
As older cameras began to wear out, they were gradually replaced by newer American models. A few
European makes retained their popularity for some time, however; this was primarily due to the fact that
many cameramen owned their own cameras or had become loyal to the brand they habitually used. Among
the European makes, the Pathé studio camera retained its popularity the longest. In 1917 the Cinema News
described the reasons:13
Cameramen as a rule prefer the Pathé Professional camera because of its mechanical simplicity, its
expert workmanship and its steadiness on the screen. Other cameras may possess these same
qualifications, but have failed as yet to attain the popularity of the Pathé.
The writer also notes that Pathés were not as readily available since the war cut down their production in
France. As in the case of the earlier patents control, a factor outside actual production considerations
interfered to affect the choice of camera; possibly the inability to obtain Pathés hastened the move over to Bell
& Howells.
The Pathé’s lingering popularity after the introduction of the Bell & Howell in the period 1909–12 may
also be due to relative cost. Cameramen would be unlikely to change equipment once they had an outfit,
especially when they could simply modify their camera’s attachments as new technology developed. And
the Pathé was consistently a cheaper camera than the Bell & Howell.14* The Pathé camera remained a
significant force in American film production into the twenties.
The Bell & Howell Company (founded January 1, 1907 by Donald J.Bell and Albert Howell) was the
first notable American company to sell cameras to the industry; as such it marked a new step for the film
industry toward modern business practices. Indeed, the initial impulse for the formation of the company was
an arrangement between Bell & Howell and George Spoor, for whom Bell had worked as a projectionist;
Bell & Howell was to supply Spoor with projectors. When Spoor formed Essanay, his need for projectors
disappeared, and the Bell & Howell Company’s market dried up. The partners’ next project was not in the
film line at all; they built ‘an automatic machine, a very efficient one, producing three thousand strawberry
boxes per hour,’ but the cost was not covered by the contract terms; they turned back to cinema
equipment.15 So the Bell & Howell Company, in spite of its modest beginnings, was a true supply firm,
undertaking research and invention and fitting into the growing support sector of the industry. Its next
uniform products would be not strawberry boxes but perforators and cameras.
The Bell & Howell Company provides a good example of technological innovation in the preinstitutional
era, when individual decisions counted for a good deal. Rather than responding to a call from the film
industry, Bell independently conceived of a goal of standardization for the industry. He recalled: ‘My years
of experience as an operator [i.e., projectionist] and designer of projectors established in my mind the
paramount necessity of producing a standard perforator, this to be our first development toward affecting
standardization of all motion picture producing machinery.’ His partner was a machinist and draftsman,
capable of designing equipment to meet this goal. After the perforator, Howell went on to design the Bell &
Howell Standard camera, a box-type camera somewhat like the Moy and Williamson. Apparently only two
of these 1907 cameras were made, going to the Kalem and Essanay companies.16
But Howell soon came up with a new model, the all-metal Bell & Howell Professional Model (known as
the 2709; see fig 20.4). A complete camera outfit at the time cost about $1,000, far higher than any other
camera on the market. So in spite of the Bell & Howell’s technical superiority, there was a long delay
before it made headway in the studios.
The main advantages of the camera were its steady registration, its focusing system, and its all-metal
construction with ball-bearing shafts. The fine registration resulted from a unique system for moving and
holding the film at the aperture. Rather than simply having a claw to pull the film down in a straight line as
most cameras did, the Bell & Howell had a pressure plate which released when the film moved, allowing it
to pass with minimal friction. As a result, the film moved back to the claws, which pulled it down and
forward onto a pair of pilot pins at the aperture plate. The pressure plate then clamped the film down for
exposure.17 The resulting combination of pressure plate and registration pins gave the best registration of
any motion picture camera. So, better than any other silent camera, the Bell & Howell satisfied one criterion
of quality, the creation of a steady image.
The Bell & Howell also innovated a rackover focusing device which was easier to use and more efficient
in its consumption of shooting time. Most cameras necessitated sighting through the body by means of a
tube or mirror viewer; the cinematographer saw a tiny inverted image on a ground glass plate or on the
actual film in the shooting aperture. A 1927 cinematography handbook described the Bell & Howell
focusing system:18
The direct focusing device does not make use of the actual aperture, but of a corresponding one on the
opposite side of the turret. Thus the camera is set at the left side of the tripod and the lens focussed
upon the screen provided. When this is done the lens is locked. Then the camera is pushed to the right
of the tripod, the lens turret swung through 180 degrees, which brings the lens from focussing position
to taking position, yet due to moving the camera, the lens is still in its former position. This allows
focussing without disturbing the film, and allows a solid pressure plate to be used.
Aside from being less clumsy and unsure, this system saved time and film. No frames were lightstruck
while focusing, as occurred in other cameras. Hence the cameraman did not have to perform the additional
task of cranking the lightstruck portion out of the aperture. He saw through the lens exactly what area the
film would register during shooting without having to use a magnifying tube; so centering and other
procedures of framing became easier. The Bell & Howell focusing system added a greater degree of
control, as well as ease of handling; hence it fostered quality and efficiency.
The Bell & Howell’s metal body, with its ball bearings at all shafts, was also advantageous. The exterior
magazines were more light-tight than those of the wooden Pathé, which sometimes warped and had to be
wrapped to prevent light leaking onto the film. Also, the crank revolved with little effort. As Kevin
Brownlow points out, ‘After a good turn, you could release the handle and it would revolve a turn or so on
its own.’19 The minimization of friction would make a steady cranking rate easier to obtain, since in trying
to overcome drag, the operator’s hand would sometimes go slower on the upswing and faster on the
downswing. A uniform cranking speed would contribute to image quality.
In spite of its obvious superiority, the 1909 allmetal Bell & Howell took a relatively long time to make
any impact on American production. Essanay again bought the first one, but sales were minimal. Indeed,
1912 seems to have been the first year that Bell & Howell sold any appreciable number of cameras, leading
some recent historians to date the invention of the camera in that year.20* After 1912, sales increased
slowly. By 1915, The Static Club Bulletin reported that ‘Bell & Howells are getting common as Kodaks.’21
Soon Ince bought them for his Santa Monica studio, and American followed suit. Harry Perry recalled that
Lasky bought its first Bell & Howells in 1919: ‘Two of them were around the studio for a year before
anyone would touch them. We preferred the old Pathés’; but by 1927, ‘The Lasky Studios had no Mitchell
cameras. We relied upon Bell & Howells and Akeleys.’22 According to Clendenin, 1920 saw the studios
almost 100% Bell & Howell equipped; in that year the company sold 142 cameras.’23
Perry referred to the Akeley camera, now largely forgotten or regarded as an exclusively news-oriented
camera. During the twenties, however, the Akeley (see fig 20.5) became a common specialty camera in
commercial studio production as well. It added a degree of controllability which no other camera of the
period had; with its extremely long lenses and gyroscopic tripod head, it served specifically for filming
scenes of rapid action that required telephoto panning. It was actually invented for filming wild animals in
the bush; a naturalist, Carl E.Akeley, brought it out in 1917. There was a slight delay in introducing the camera
into the industry, due to the heavy demand for Akeleys by the Signal Corps during World War I.24
The Akeley was significantly different from other cameras, both European and American. Its tripod head
was gyroscopic, allowing it to be panned without a crank, and ensuring that the Akeley could be set up
quickly on uneven ground and still deliver a level image. It could pan with relative smoothness using lenses
as long as six inches and had a floating viewing tube which could be moved freely to a comfortable angle no
matter what position the camera occupied.25 The cinematographer could sight through the lens while
shooting, a rare feature in silent cameras.
By 1927 there were Akeley specialists working in most of the major studios. Figure 20.6 shows a location
unit using an Akeley in addition to the standard Bell & Howell cameras. The American Society of
Cinematographer s held meetings of its Akeley specialists and declared in American Cinematographer.
‘The Akeley camera has entered the professional production field and is there to stay. The truly splendid
Akeley achievements which have lately graced our biggest and best productions have sanctioned the use of
the Akeley “shots” as an important factor in the story-telling qualities of the motion picture.’ In 1926,
Charles G.Clarke confirmed that the camera ‘has become so widely used that nowadays scenarios specify
“Akeley shot.”’26 Although it played a limited part in the overall process of shooting a narrative film, the
Akeley’s special functions led to its widespread use in the studios by the mid-twenties.
The impact of Akeley usage becomes apparent in films of the second half of the twenties especially. Tom
Mix’s film The Great K. and A. Train Robbery (Lewis Seiler, 1926, Fox) contains an elaborate stunt during
which Mix hangs high in the air on a rope suspended from a cliff top down to Tony’s saddle. Many of the
closer shots of Mix, plus his slide down the rope, utilize Akeleys to get telephoto and pan effects. Ben-Hur
(Fred Niblo, 1926, MGM), Wings (William Wellman, 1927, Paramount), and Hell’s Angels (Howard
Hughes, 1930, Caddo Co.) are among the more famous films to employ Akeleys. Indeed, many of the
spectacular aerial scenes that became popular in the late twenties and early thirties were made possible by
this camera. More standard films of the period also contain occasional Akeley shots (often for fight scenes,
chases, and races); these are usually quite distinctive and easily recognizable. But the special advantages of
the Akeley also limited it to occasional usage. Its smaller 200-foot magazines made it less versatile, and its
image was less steady than that of either the Bell & Ho well or the Mitchell.
In 1920 the Mitchell camera prototype was turned over to Charles Rosher for use in filming The Love
Light (Frances Marion, 1921, Mary Pickford Productions).27 Figure 20.7 shows Rosher and Mary Pickford
with the new camera, which Rosher used throughout the silent period. By 1921, the Mitchell company was
selling cameras, trying to break into the market that Bell & Howell had recently taken over.
Within a few years, Mitchells became popular, but they did not have enough advantages over the Bell &
Howell to make great inroads until the introduction of sound. At that point the Bell & Howell’s pressure
plate’s noise made it difficult to use, and the quieter Mitchell gained the advantage at the expense of a slight
loss of registration quality. The Mitchell camera resembled the Bell & Howell physically, but differed in
that it was built in two parts rather than one. The camera body of a Mitchell rested within an L-shaped base
below and in front. The Mitchell’s advantages over the Bell & Howell were primarily two: a faster focusing
system and built-in matte holders. The Mitchell had a fourlens turret similar to the Bell & Howell’s, but it
did not need to be turned during the focusing process. A small handle (to which Sol Polito is pointing in
fig 20.8) moved the Mitchell to the side along tracks on the base, with the lenses remaining in place,
attached to the front of the base (fig 20.9). This brought the viewfinder on the left of the camera to a
position behind the taking lens, and the cameraman focused. Bringing the camera to the left put the aperture
behind the taking lens, and the camera was ready to shoot. The viewfinder then became a parallax viewer
which could be used during shooting if desired. This very quick process improved upon the Bell & Howell
system, as the Bell & Howell had improved upon earlier cameras. Clarke says that the Bell & Howell’s
rackover device—initially so efficient compared to other cameras’ focusing methods—had become ‘a slow,
cumbersome way of working,’ in relation to the rising costs of studio production.28 The front of the
Mitchell base created great ease of handling, since it contained an iris, four-way mattes, matte disc, turret
plate, and turret; the iris could be adjusted to any point of the aperture, to allow the easy use of irises
anywhere in the frame.29 The Bell & Howell required a matte attachment, which had to be disengaged from
the camera body during the rackover process, then re-engaged. But the Mitchell never equalled the
registration system of the Bell & Howell; hence neither camera established a clear superiority over the other
during the twenties.
The Mitchell company promoted its camera energetically. Many back and inside covers of American
Cinematographer have advertisements which either illustrate details of the technical advantages (as in
fig 20.9) or reproduce letters from prominent directors and cameramen praising the camera. In 1922,
Mitchell appointed representatives in New York and San Francisco, and by 1923 had to go to a 72-hour
week to deal with a backlog of orders. At this time, there were approximately thirty Mitchells in use in the
Hollywood studios.30 Mitchells and Bell & Howells remained the two standard studio cameras through the
late silent period.
One other camera that came into occasional use in the late silent period deserves brief mention. After the
success of Bell & Howell’s 16mm Filmo camera, introduced in 1923, the firm brought out a 35mm version,
the Eyemo, in 1925. The Eyemo (fig 20.10) was designed as a newsreel camera; at seven pounds, it was far
lighter than the standard studio cameras, which generally weighed over twenty pounds. A wrist strap and
screw-on handle facilitated handheld shots, while without the handle, the camera could attach to a regular
tripod. It held 100 feet of film and ran 35 feet on one wind of its spring motor. Although used primarily for
documentary work (and by many filmmakers as a home-movie camera), it also proved helpful in feature
production. For aerial photography, its motor allowed it to be strapped on, say, the wing of an airplane and
run from the plane’s seat. With the German influence of the mid-twenties, cinematographers increasingly
were interested in photographing from odd angles, and the Eyemo was easy to tuck into small, awkward
places. For dangerous stunts, the Eyemo helped keep the cinematographer safe; Daniel Clark reportedly
used one to shoot over the edges of cliffs and in similar situations for Tom Mix films at Fox. Like the
Akeley, the Eyemo served only as a specialized camera around the studios; it was not particularly efficient
(requiring frequent reloading) or versatile (having a limited range of lenses and special-effects capabilities)
for regular use. But it performed one type of function very well, and the Eyemo remained in use for decades
into the sound period.31
Major advances in camera technology quickly tended to become uniform throughout the industry. For
example, before about 1919, most cameras did not have automatic dissolving shutters. That is, the shutter
opening could not be closed during filming to produce fades and dissolves. Fades were created through the
stopping down of the diaphragm, but since the diaphragm did not close completely, a small dot at the center
would fail to go dark. In films of the teens, it is possible to see these partial fades, or occasionally to see the
center of the fade go suddenly dark as the cameraman puts his hand over the lens to complete the fade. But
in the late teens, the Akeley and a few other cameras introduced the automatic dissolving shutter, which could
be closed down while the camera was running, permitting complete fades. By 1919, several cameras came
equipped with the device. The Badgley shutter was available to add to the Pathé and other cameras.32 The
Mitchell camera had an automatic dissolving shutter from the beginning. The introduction of this particular
device took only a few years, and it resulted in noticeably superior dissolves and fades in films of the
twenties. Possibly the improved quality of fades and dissolves helped bring about the decline in the use of
the iris after the teens.
Standardizing lighting instruments

Many of the same criteria which guided Hollywood in its choice of camera technology also determined what
kinds of lighting instruments the studios would use. The two sets of criteria to promote quality are the same:
The capability to create a clear, steady image

(Lack of flicker, brightness, correct degree of diffusion, actinicity)
Controllability
(Steady light, dimmer control while shooting)
Criteria of efficiency fall into three categories; since lamps consumed electric current in widely different
ways and in large quantities, comparisons among the various types of lighting were necessary:
Durability
Ease of handling
(Automatic functioning with remote control, portability, easy changing of bulbs or carbons)
Efficiency
(A high proportion of lumens vs. heat produced per watt of current)
Lighting instruments could also provide novelty through certain properties:
Versatility
(Directionality, flexible positioning, capacity for a variety of effects)
No one type of light excelled in all these categories. The most efficient type—mercury-vapor tubes—was
also the least directional, and hence was almost useless for effects, or motivated, illumination. But arc
lamps, which gave a strongly directional light, were difficult to handle. The lamp that best solved the
handling problem— the incandescent—was both inefficient and low in actinicity. And while the least
expensive source was sunlight, it was also the least controllable. Consequently, film studios of the classical
period typically used a combination of types of light, or found ways to compensate for the problems created
by the one type chosen. Across the industry there was a standardization of several types of lighting
instruments.
As we saw in Chapter 17, the overall movement of the transitional period was from an almost complete
dependence on overall, diffused illumination to a style employing directional effects lighting. This followed
the general trended change of Hollywood style, in that it gave each film’s light a set of realistically
motivated sources within the narrative space (e.g., sun, candles, lamps). For this reason, the desirable traits
in a lighting instrument differ in type from those of a camera. The camera records the scene, but is not itself
a part of the narrative. But the light forms part of the mise-en-scene, and the instrument producing that light
should ideally enhance the light’s representational qualities. For instance, filmmakers often want light
produced by a studio lamp to imitate moonlight shining through a window, or a match held in cupped
hands, or a candle on a table. A successful imitation demands that the lamp be directional, so that the
spectator can see where the beam of light is supposedly coming from. It should be flexible in its positioning
—easy to place behind that window, in the actor’s hands, or in some concealed spot near the candle’s
flame. It should also be capable of a series of effects—from the strong glare of sunlight to the dimmest flicker
of a tiny flame. In practice, again, most lamps cannot do all these things, and so a range of instruments came
into conventional use.
Of course, once the studio has outfitted itself with the most durable lamps it can find, its management
will not be eager to invest in new equipment. Any innovation had to offer a distinct advantage in one of the
sets of criteria to induce the studios to change.
Mercury-vapor lamps and diffused sunlight

During the first decade of filmmaking, most films were shot in daylight. American Mutoscope and Biograph
built a stage on the roof of a New York building to catch the sun; Lubin did the same in Philadelphia.
Edison’s Black Maria, the first film studio, was enclosed, but had a roof with a panel which could be raised
to admit the sun. Both the Black Maria and the American Mutoscope and Biograph stages rotated to catch
the sunlight evenly throughout the day. In such usage, the stages faced south, causing the light to come
directly into the set from behind the camera and above.
But sunlight was relatively uncontrollable. Even with a revolving stage, the hours when shooting was
practical were limited. From the earliest years to the late teens, there was a gradual move toward artificial
light, which could be turned on and adjusted at will.
The first type of artificial light which came into general usage was the Cooper-Hewitt mercury-vapor lamp.
This type of lighting was invented in 1901, by Peter Cooper-Hewitt, and was marketed for commercial and
industrial use by the Cooper-Hewitt Electric Company, a subsidiary concern of Westinghouse.33 Allan
Dwan, who worked for the Cooper-Hewitt company at that time, has described the advantages of these
lamps for commercial situations: ‘We made up the tubes and put them in the Chicago Post Office for sorting
mail; they’re very fine on the eyes, and the mail-sorters could work many hours more a day without
eyestrain.’34 The mercury-vapor’s gentleness on the eyes resulted from its color spectrum, which was
concentrated in the blue-green portion; it lacked the red end of the spectrum, which is more conducive to
eyestrain. This same fact made this lamp’s light ideal for making motion pictures in the pre-panchromatic
period, since blue and green lights were extremely actinic for orthochromatic film. (Actinicity refers to the
proportion of the light which actually registers as an image on the film stock. For orthochromatic film, a
light containing mainly red and yellow wavelengths would be low in actinicity, no matter how bright it
might appear to the eye; blue or green light, even though less bright, would be more actinic for this type of
film.)
The first ‘dark’ studio (the term used in the teens for a studio lit entirely by artificial lights) appears to
have been the Biograph studio at 11 East 14th Street in New York, into which the company moved in 1903
(fig 20.11); the building had a roof stage, but also a room inside the building lit by Cooper-Hewitts. Other
companies followed suit; Lubin, for example, built a studio with Cooper-Hewitts in Philadelphia in 1907.35
Mercury-vapors were efficient in their use of electrical current, highly actinic, more controllable than
sunlight, and they produced a clear image. Their lack of directionality was not yet a limitation, since effects
lighting was still in only occasional use. So great were their advantages that they remained a basic type of
artificial light well after the widespread introduction of arc lamps.
Mercury-vapor lamps did not imitate the daylight of the open-air stages. Sunlight, unless diffused,
provides a hard, bright light in parallel rays. See, for example, figure 17.8, which shows a scene shot with
undiffused sunlight; the result is a harsh frontal light that creates strong shadows. Mercury-vapor lamps,
which were long tubes similar in appearance and working to neon lights, provided a softer illumination
which was automatically diffused by the larger area covered by the source.
Evidence is sketchy, but it was apparently only after the introduction of mercury-vapor lamps that
filmmakers began to diffuse sunlight by hanging muslin in large sheets over their stages.36* Diffusers
provided only limited control of sunlight, but they cut down on contrast and thus created a clearer image,
with details in shadows more visible than they would be in direct sunlight. Numerous production stills from
the early teens show diffusion cloth over sets (see fig 20.12). Diffusion became quite systematized,
however. In 1913, Motography reported that Universal’s head carpenter at its west coast studio had worked
out a new system of pulleys and rollers to control the diffusers on its outdoor stages. Up to twenty diffusers
could be placed over a set of 40 square feet, thereby eliminating all shadows.37 Figure 20.13 shows an
arrangement of diffusers over an open stage at Inceville. These panels of diffusers apparently also had a
mechanism for sliding back and forth, as the gaps at the upper right show.
Around 1906, glass studios began replacing the open-air rooftop stages, especially in the East, where rain
and other inclement weather posed frequent problems. Edison and Biograph both set up permanent glass
studios that year to replace their roof-top and backyard methods. Vitagraph built a glass studio that same
year, and Selig did the same in 1907. But even in such studios diffusion became important. Again by the
early teens, contemporary sources describe special diffusing glass which was used in the construction of
these studios. In 1912, the American Film Co. built its new Chicago studio using diffusion glass, which was
‘expected to add considerably to the photographic results.’38 The best glass for diffusion purposes was not
simply pebbled or translucent glass; it involved rows of tiny prismatic ridges which broke up the light that
entered. The resulting small spectra would not be noticeable, as they would diffuse back into white light.
The advantage, however, was that prism glass did not cut down the amount of light passing through, while
other types of textured translucent glass did. The 1906 Vitagraph studio, for example, used this type of
glass, as did the 1912 American studio. Glass studios remained standard across the industry through most of
the silent period, although in the late teens and early twenties, firms increasingly depended on ‘dark’
studios, lit entirely by artificial light. By the early teens, then, the standard approach to lighting an interior
set, whether actually shot indoors or outdoors, was to throw a diffused, even light over the whole; shadows
and glaring highlights were undesirable.
Peter Mole has described the standard types of mercury-vapor units: the ‘broadside’ unit, ranging from
six to eight tubes, on wheeled stands (these are the ones most frequently seen in production stills);
‘gooseneck’ units, which started with a broadside unit and added a second unit above, angled downward;
and low front-lighting units, usually of four tubes, for special underlighting effects.39 Overhead banks were
similar to the broadsides, but hung on wires, tilted slightly up to face the rear of the set. These would be
relatively fixed, but the portability of the wheeled floor units would be an advantage in dealing with rows of
the 6-foot tubes (see fig 20.14). These units were built especially for motion-picture work; they were not
simply the hanging types Dwan described installing in the Chicago post office.
Mercury-vapor lamps were ideally suited for orthochromatic film, and they had other advantages which
led to their continued use after the introduction of other lighting sources. In 1922, Alfred Hitchins, the
Director of Ansco Research Laboratory, conducted spectrographic tests to compare the most common types
of artificial lighting available for motion pictures—mercury-vapors, arcs, and incandescents—and found the
mercury-vapor lamps best all-round. He concluded that the Cooper-Hewitts were desirable because they
yielded the best actinicity, provided automatic diffusion, gave little glare even when used in great numbers,
gave off little heat, and consumed less electricity, with no cost for replacing carbons.40 In other words, the
mercury-vapor was highly efficient: it gave off more light in proportion to heat per watt than any other
available light source. Even in recent years, the high-pressure mercury-vapor quartz lamp is one of the most
efficient lamps and is in wide use in filmmaking and in street-lighting. These advantages made the Cooper-
Hewitt a staple of filmmaking throughout most of the silent period. Only the increasingly widespread use of
panchromatic film in the mid-twenties rendered their use less advantageous, due to their lower actinicity
with this stock.
Mercury-vapor lamps were so common in the studios that by 1918 motion pictures were the fourth
industry in the United States in their use, following automobile manufacturers (e.g., Buick, Ford), munitions
manufacturers (e.g., Remington, Winchester), and machine-tool builders (e.g., Erie Forge). Virtually every
motion picture studio had Cooper-Hewitts.41
The main disadvantage of the Cooper-Hewitts was their inability to provide directional light. They could
not cast sharp shadows or pools of limited light; they could not model a figure. Their diffused light was an
even wash over the entire set. In effect, this light did not come from within the narrative; it did not vary to
suit the situation. While it did not distract from the story, it did not add anything either. As the classical
system developed, the concept of making style contribute to the narrative became dominant. Filmmakers
needed a type of light which could be manipulated in a variety of ways, according to the narrative demands
of a scene.
Thus, in spite of their superior efficiency, the mercury-vapor lamps began to give way to other units
which could provide hard, directional illumination for effects lighting. Hollywood developed its three-point
lighting system, described in Chapter 5. By the late teens and twenties, filmmakers were mixing smaller
numbers of mercury-vapors with other types of lamps. The tube units often functioned to provide fill light,
while arcs and, later, incandescents took over the task of creating highlights and modeling figures and
setting. The more expensive arcs offered less efficiency and controllability, but they did permit a lighting
style capable of serving narrative because their directional beams could be realistically motivated as coming
from a source within the scene. Quality and novelty induced studios to invest in new lighting instruments.
Arc lamps
Histories of early film lighting have suggested that the film studios adopted arc lighting wholesale from
contemporary stage instruments. Yet some lamps used in filmmaking derived from technology used in
public illumination, primarily street lighting. Certain devices came from the theater or from photo-
engraving, while in the late teens, modern wartime searchlights quickly made their way to Hollywood.
More generally, looking at the early cinema in a limited perspective and seeing it as slavishly imitating the
theater perpetuates the view that early films were clumsy products of a technically limited and backward
industry, aping a more advanced, established art. Instead, the motion picture industry and the theater both
take their place in the larger development of arc and incandescent lighting.
The carbon arc competed with the gas light for public utility usage during the late 1800s and was not
generally employed until after widespread distribution of electricity made it feasible in the 1880s. By 1910,
the carbon arc had surpassed gas and oil as the most common source of street lighting.42
Carbon arcs were first used in theatrical practice on a limited basis by the Paris Opera, which employed
them in 1846 as floodlights; in 1860 it used the first electric arc spotlight. But arcs created a number of
problems; they hissed, could not be dimmed from the dimmer board as gas could, and produced a harsh
white light. Each individual instrument had to have its own separate stagehand in constant attendance, due
to fire regulations. Because of these disadvantages, arc lighting only supplemented gaslight and served for
special effects and spotlighting. So in the theater arc lights competed with gaslight and limelight (introduced
around 1857 and capable of serving as the illumination in a spotlight). But theaters also began installing
incandescent lamps directly after their introduction in 1879. By 1900, incandescent lighting was almost
universally used.43 The gradual improvement of incandescent filaments culminated in 1913 with the
marketing of drawn-tungsten fibres in an inert gas environment. These gradually replaced arcs in theatrical
spotlighting.
So the simple introduction of carbon arc lighting fixtures in film studios is hardly enough to warrant the
assumption that studio practice derived from stage practice. Nor did filmmakers adopt the standard theater
procedure of using arcs for follow spots, although they did borrow the other common usage of arcs, for special
effects like sunbeams and fireplaces. Barry Salt has found a number of early films which use arc lamps in
isolated scenes for effects of this sort: Edwin S. Porter’s The Seven Ages (1905, Edison), D.W. Griffith’s
Edgar Allan Poe (1909, AB), Oliver Twist (1909, Vitagraph), and others.44 In most such cases, arc lamps
supplement the standard diffuse light in order to suggest a specific source of strong illumination. In the early
teens, such usage became slightly more frequent.
But the more widespread early use of arcs was as floodlights; these provided diffused light, and
commonly were used in combination with mercury-vapors. The arc flood’s chief advantage over the
mercury-vapor would have been its concentration of brightness into a small area; its bluish-white light was
comparable in actinicity to the Cooper-Hewitt’s. The diffused arc lamp derived in some cases from street
lighting. As early as 1897, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company used 400 modified street arcs
to illuminate Madison Square Garden when its cameramen filmed the Jeffries-Sharkey fight. Apparently
Biograph also experimented with this technique for its indoor New York studio; one lighting historian says
the company installed thirty-six Bogue arcs in their 14th Street facilities, before replacing them with
Cooper-Hewitts.45
1908 seems to have been the year that arcs came into occasional but regular use in the studios. The Kliegl
company, which had made its first arcs for stage use in 1896, came out with a motion picture unit in 1908.
Although this was the most prominent, it was by no means the only brand of arc lamp used in motion
picture work in the silent period.
A common early type of studio lamp was the enclosed arc, derived from street lighting. These lamps
typically hung in rows above the sets, supplemented by banks of mercury-vapors on stands, or by open arc
broadside floodlights on stands. Figure 20.15 shows a stage at the Edison studio, with enclosed arcs
overhead; their hoods have been placed at an angle to direct light down into the set from the top front. This
illustration also shows a couple of Kliegl arc ‘broadsides,’ used for floodlighting. Peter Mole described the
introduction of broadsides about 1912: ‘According to cinematographers active at the time, the Wohl was
one of the first, if not actually the first of these units used. It, like most of its successors for a decade or
more, was an adaptation of units previously made for photoengraving.’46 Here we find yet another field from
which the film studios adapted their lighting equipment.
Aside from open broadsides, of the type shown in figure 20.15, during the early teens, studios were
adopting a relatively recent innovation in lighting, the white flame arc. Flame arcs were innovated in 1898;
they consisted of chemical salts mixed in with the carbon to control the spectrum of the light produced.
These, too, were soon enclosed, and the result was an intense light that needed infrequent maintenance,
since the carbons burned less quickly. Motion picture studios used these, since they were highly actinic with
orthochromatic stock. The American Cinematographer stated that American Biograph replaced its ‘low-
intensity enclosed “streetlighting” arcs with white flame carbon-arcs that provided the cinematographer with
a controllable light source having twice the power and penetration capability of anything he had worked
with before.’ By 1919, Vitagraph’s Brooklyn studio was equipped with 225 units, using an average of
twenty per set.47
The primary function of this arc equipment in the early teens was to provide additional overall
illumination; beyond this, the directional control of arc lights made them suitable for creating occasional
effects. Mole describes the use of hard light from arc floods in the period from roughly 1913 to 1915; these
arcs were ‘generally used in conjunction with the softer vapor tubes. Before the introduction of arc spot-
lighting equipment, they were the only sources of strongly directional “hard” light available.’48 So limited
light effects were possible, but the more spectacular low-key arrangements made famous by The Cheat and
other mid-teens films depended on the introduction of spotlights. These apparently reached the studios
about 1914, through the Lasky company.
In 1914, Lasky hired Wilfred Buckland, David Belasco’s supervising artist in charge of production, as its
art director. In New York, Buckland had been assisted by the Kliegl brothers, who had been Belasco’s
theater electricians. The brothers had developed an arc spotlight they called the ‘Klieg light.’ According to
Buckland’s later recollections, he obtained two Klieg spotlights for the Lasky company. (Again, film
production was not lagging far behind theatrical practice; one of Belasco’s most famous and spectacular
uses of these spots had been in his 1910 production, The Return of Peter Grimm.) Arthur Miller recalled
working with George Fitzmaurice of the Astra Film Co. in late 1915 or early 1916: ‘Eighty amp spotlights
had appeared on the scene and their use brought about a noticeable increase in light effect photography. Flat
lighting gave way to modeling with highlight and shadow.’ The changes Miller describes affected much of
the industry’s lighting practice, as we have seen. Perhaps as a direct result of the Lasky use of spotlights, small
or ‘baby’ spotlights appeared about this time, for simulating small light sources like candle flames.49 Here
we have another case of individual decision in the pre-institutional era leading to the introduction of new
equipment. Buckland obtained lighting units because he was accustomed to using them, and the success of
the resulting films apparently led to a widespread adoption of such lighting.
The only major development in arc lighting after the mid-teens came about as a result of the war. This
was the high-power arc searchlight created for various uses on the battleground, including spotting
airplanes. This unit became available to the film industry in early 1918.50 The president of the Sun-light Arc
Company described the value of this arc to filmmakers: ‘Perfect in effect as natural sun; there as long as you
desire. What’s more beautiful than depth, perfect definition; this is art.’51 The ‘sun-arc‘ was the first lighting
unit in history which was actually as bright as sunlight.
Studios began using these arcs almost immediately. By the time these lamps became available, the
institutions for influencing technological change were coming into existence. The Transactions of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers discussed the new units thoroughly, as did the American
Cinematographer several years later; these journals promoted sunlight arcs by explaining their numerous
advantages. They were controllable, making intense light possible at night. They were relatively flexible,
due to four attachments (see fig 20.16): ‘a parabolic mirror, an iris shutter, a frosted glass door, and a clear
glass door.’ By setting the lamp at full flood position, the filmmakers could get a 130° sweep of 100,000
candlepower (with the glass door in use to prevent the common irritation known as ‘Klieg-eyes,’ caused by
the ultra-violet rays in the light burning the eye). Four lamps could light an exterior set at night. The iris shutter
could close the light down to a spot, without the necessity of a focusing lens. To achieve a softer, diffused
light of 60,000 candles, the cinematographer added the diffusing glass. Finally, the parabolic mirror could
intensify the light to a 1,600,000 candlepower spot.52 So the sun arc was versatile, providing both directional
and diffused light. High-power arc searchlights helped to solve a problem which had plagued filmmakers
for years—how to shoot on location at night economically. They also could be used to light large sets in
dark studios.
By 1918, the significant types of arc lighting were available to motion picture producers. They presented
a flexible range of equipment which could be used in various combinations for effects and selective lighting.
From this point, changes involved the technology less than the standardization of approaches to applying
the equipment. Lighting innovations came mainly in the application of incandescent illumination to motion
picture production.
Editing and laboratory technology

On casual inspection, the equipment employed in editing and developing a film in the teens was very simple
in comparison with the cameras and lighting instruments then in use. The Bell & Howell 1909 Professional
Model was a sophisticated instrument; by the late teens, filmmakers were combining mercury-vapors and
arcs for complex effects. But the film these technologies produced then went to a laboratory where it was
dipped in an open wooden tank to be developed— a process called rack-and-tank developing. The cutter
then snipped the shots with a pair of scissors and clamped the ends between finger and thumb. While
camera and lighting equipment constituted a fairly complex technology, the realm of editing and processing
employed mere tools. As with handcranking on the camera, these non-mechanical, labor-intensive methods
lingered on after automated devices became available in the early twenties. While these laboratory and
editing methods were simple, some of them allowed a degree of direct supervision and control which was later
lost.
Automation during the twenties was mainly a matter of efficiency, although in a few instances it added
quality as well; some machines, like automatic splicers, could actually improve the look of the finished
product. But machine developing minimized novelty and, some cinematographers might have argued,
quality. Automated processing diminished the variation which individual filmmakers could introduce into
their work by personal supervision. Essentially, hand laboratory work was somewhat comparable to serial
manufacturing, with handmade products; automated developing introduced a standardization more akin to
what Marx called machine industry.
Editing
There were a variety of circumstances under which pieces of film would be cut and spliced together. The
actual decisions as to what shots would be used in the final film were made by the head editor, or master
cutter, who usually made a positive workprint, assisted by cutters. Here technical efficiency was not
important; the main time expended was in judging tempo, in matching action, and so on. The splices need
not be of perfect quality, since the workprint was never shown to the public. Once the workprint was
complete, the editor or cutter spliced the negative to match it. Here the technical quality of the splices was
crucial; they had to be made so that the splice line would not be visible on the screen; extra time taken to
make them correctly would be acceptable, since the process was only necessary once per film.
But in the silent period, positive prints were also joined by splices. This was partly because the
developing racks could only hold sections of two hundred feet or less, and partly because shots to be tinted
or toned the same color were all temporarily fastened together, then after the coloring bath detached and
spliced into their proper places in the print. The job of assembling positive release prints fell to ‘joiners.’ They
had to make quality splices which would run through projectors many times with minimal breakage.
Efficiency was also a primary concern, since joiners had to work on multiple prints of the same film, and
they did not need to take time to make decisions. Finally, projectionists would splice, or ‘patch,’ the film
when it broke. This aspect of cutting also demanded both efficiency and quality, since the showing would
be delayed until the splice was made, and the print still had to go through as many additional projections as
possible.
Editors, cutters, joiners, and projectionists would at various times perform the same basic task of
splicing. But because their aims differed, they did not always have the same equipment available to assist
them.
During the teens and into the twenties, splicing equipment was simple indeed. Most cutters and joiners
had no guide to align the two pieces of film or clamp to apply pressure to the splice while it dried; they sat at
a table with a pair of rewinds, a light box over which the film passed, a pair of scissors, and a bottle of
cement with brush. Finding the correct spot, the worker would snip the shots apart, scrape the portion to be
spliced, brush on the cement, and press the spice with his or her fingers.53* The handmade splice gave the
editor no extra degree of control; the important decision here was where to cut. Thereafter the main
considerations were quality and efficiency in making the negative and positive prints.
A simple clamp with tracks for lining up the film ends could help make a straight splice that would go
through a printer or projector. The Edison Film Mender was apparently the first hand splicer, but it could be
used only in theaters, being built onto the Edison Universal Kinetoscope projector after at least 1908. It did
not cut or scrape the film, however, but was only a sprockethole guide and clamp. This may reflect an attempt
by the newly formed MPPC to protect its prints from inexperienced projectionists; after all, the companies
were now renting their prints rather than selling them. The MPPC also claimed in advertising that it was
improving its members’ service, especially to second- and third-run houses. The Edison Film Mender was
perhaps one step in that direction. During the teens and twenties, some projectionists reportedly used a
similar device called a ‘splicing block’ or ‘patch press,’ to line up the perforations and apply pressure while
the film cement dried.54 But many theater owners were reluctant to invest in even an inexpensive splicer
when their projectionists’ fingers could serve the same purpose. Throughout the silent period, observers
reported that most film mending in theaters was done entirely by hand.
In 1919, Photoplay described splicing in theaters as involving no guides whatsoever, and ‘The same
process is used in the factories [i.e., studios] for joining the sections of new film.’ Bebe Daniels has recalled
learning to edit from Dorothy Arzner in the mid-twenties, using the handsplicing method in making
workprints and negatives. So the main method for splicing the film at the studios changed little throughout
the silent period. By the late twenties, some editing rooms had added a small, clamp-type splicer, ‘secured
permanently to the table between the rewinds.’55
By the early twenties, technicians were beginning to see the incongruity of lavishing thousands of dollars
upon the shooting phase, only to put the pieces together in such an unsophisticated fashion. The problem
was not so significant in the studios, where the negative was carefully edited and under the direct
supervision of expert personnel. But release prints frequently came back to company exchanges in bad
shape, and considerable footage was being lost through repeated and careless splicing. In 1919, Paramount
even hired an expert to find out why so much damage was being done to release prints. Concluding that
sloppy spikes at the exchanges were the main factor, he proposed a further division of labor, with a
supervisor put in charge of inspection and joining at each exchange office. Standardization was also
increased: ‘We adopted a standard scraping tool, which was nothing more than a flat piece of flexible steel,
ground to a scraping edge, and not to a cutting edge.’56 There was also a running battle between the
distribution exchanges and the projectionists over the types of splices to be used. Projectionists would take
out the narrow splices used by the exchanges and replace them with wide ones; the exchanges then replaced
these new splices, and so on, until the print lost so much footage that it had to be discarded. It was not until
1926 that the SMPE cooperated with Eastman Kodak to make formal recommendations for standard splice
widths.57*
The late standardization of splicing procedures probably resulted from the fact that pre-twenties editing was
at least minimally acceptable; it served its purpose. But another tool of the editor’s trade—the workprint—
came into standard use earlier. In the early teens, filmmakers sometimes made editing decisions while
cutting the negative itself. Cameraman Charles Rosher recalled working at the Nestor studio, which opened
in late 1911 in Hollywood:58
Although we had a developing room, we had no printing machinery. The picture was cut directly from
the negative, and we thought nothing of running original negative through the projector. Scratches and
abrasions were mere details. When the negative was cut, the completed reel was sent to New York or
Chicago for printing.
Allan Dwan has described his experiences heading a unit in California for the American Film company in
similar terms. These descriptions refer to small, independent companies, and in each case the director’s unit
is working at a distance from the company’s laboratory. But American’s scenario editor recalled that even
when that company set up a major studio in Santa Barbara in 1915, there was no laboratory on the premises,
cutting was still done on the negative, and the positive prints were made at the home office in Chicago.
Within a year, however, the Santa Barbara studio got a printer and began to make workprints. It is quite
possible that the major companies that made films entirely at their home studios in the East used workprints
earlier than this. The earliest published reference to workprints I have found occurs in 1911; David Hulfish
calls them ‘proofs’:59
Thus there is produced a final proof picture of the complete film as it is to be released to the public.
The final proof is projected before the producer and critics and if approved it is turned over to the
photographer [i.e., head of the laboratory] as ‘copy.’ The photographer cuts his negative into lengths,
both motion scenes and titles, splicing them together to reproduce a complete continuous negative of
the approved ‘copy.’
We may assume that workprints were probably standardized across the industry during the first half of the
teens.
The tendency to cut the negative directly in the early teens could have resulted from several factors. With
scenarios that laid out all the shots in a numbered list, the cutter’s job was relatively simple; there were perhaps
only a few dozen shots to put in correct order. There were almost never retakes, so the editing process did
not involve choices between different shots of the same action. The lack of significant numbers of cut-ins
similarly meant that matching and choices among different views of the same action were usually
unnecessary. But editing became more complicated as the teens progressed. Greater numbers of shots were
involved, retakes became more common, and the breakdown of the scene analytically required that several
decisions be made to insure a smooth continuity. The cutter needed a clear view of the action and might also
have to handle the film more often. Rosher claimed that ‘scratches and abrasions were mere details’ in 1911,
but repeated viewing and handling for more complex editing would also increase print wear. In addition, the
greater emphasis on quality control as the studio mode of production developed would dictate that
something like a workprint be devised. Not only would a preliminary positive cut of the film save negative
wear and permit the cutters to see better what they were doing, but it would allow studio supervisors to
make sure the film was progressing along its planned lines. The longer production time of the multiple-reel
film also encouraged closer monitoring of the project at each step. The entire expense of a production was
calculated around the negative as a finished object and was often figured as so much per foot of negative
(see fig 12.17). This precious object needed to be preserved; reshooting later would be expensive. As one
cinematography guide put it in 1927, The negative is never projected. To project the negative is to risk
scratching it in the projector mechanism.’60 Workprints were a maans of quality control.
The standardization of editing procedures like splice widths and workprints had little obvious impact on
the look of the films. Certainly the cutting rate increased steadily throughout the teens and into the early
twenties, with the average shots per reel perhaps doubling between 1911 and 1921. The use of workprints
would make cutting so many shots together easier but would not be a necessity. Faster cutting may have
encouraged the use of workprints, or vice versa. Workprints would make for smoother continuity cutting,
with matches on action being easier to achieve. Editing technology in general must have influenced film
style in a minor but pervasive way, permitting existing stylistic devices to be better executed.
Laboratory technology
When the exposed film came from the camera, it would be spooled off its core and wound around a
rectangular wooden frame, or ‘rack,’ with small pegs at intervals to keep the film from slipping. The
laboratory technicians then lowered the rack into a series of wooden tanks containing the various
developing solutions. (Robert Paul reportedly invented the rack-and-tank system in England in 1895,
making birch frames that would hold 40-foot lengths of film.61) Once the negative was developed the rack
was placed on a support that allowed it to pivot as the film wound onto large framework drums, to be turned
until dry. (In figure 20.17, the technicians have a rack on such a pivot, in a horizontal position, and are winding
the film off onto a drum.)
The rack-and-tank method permitted filmmakers to introduce considerable variation into the image at the
developing stage. Thus, rather than having to gauge their image entirely to suit fixed developing methods,
as they would often have to do in the sound period, cinematographers had more leeway in giving
instructions for custom handling. Some of the information the laboratory received was in the form of a
paper record. One 1913 account said that an exposed can of film would be ‘numbered and tagged with a
record of the lighting, temperature, and humidity at the time of taking, and sent to the dark rooms.’62
Another method of conveying information to the laboratory was the film punch, a standard part of most
studio cameras, which could be pressed to make a hole in the film or to notch its edge. The punch was
necessary because in developing, the 400-foot or 1,000-foot roll emerging from the camera magazine would
have to be cut into 200-foot lengths—the most a single rack would hold. To prevent the technician from
cutting in the middle of a shot, the punch would be used between shots to mark safe cutting points.
Cinematographers could also use multiple punch holes to create a code indicating other things. The
cinematographer might do a few preliminary turns of the crank at the beginning of a shot, punch several
times, then shoot the action: ‘The leader of the film ahead of the marker holes may by cut off and developed
to learn whether the exposure is correctly timed, and whether regular or special developer shall be used in
the development.’63 Film could be inspected during the developing process under a red light, since
orthochromatic film stock was insensitive to red.
Perhaps the most common manipulation of the negative in developing during the teens was the attempt to
correct for under- or overexposure. If the light in the shooting situation was too dim, the cinematographer
would sometimes go ahead and shoot, underexposing with the assumption that the laboratory could make up
for the problem. According to Karl Struss, ‘If the cameraman made a mistake in overexposing, why they’d
pull it, you see. They wouldn’t get the right degree of contrast in there.’64 A pulled film would have less
than normal contrast. Similarly, for underexposure, the laboratory would push the film in developing,
creating more contrast.
Laboratory pushing and pulling of negatives to correct exposure continued through much of the silent
period. Some cinematographers apparently believed that such chemical manipulation literally altered the
original exposure time of the frames, producing a good negative by adding or taking away light. Indeed, this
belief may have been one major reason why many opposed mechanized developing.
But the concept of a good negative was itself relative, depending on the function of the shot in the film. A
cinematographer who knew how to expose an image correctly might still use hand developing to manipulate
it. Special treatment of the film was employed, not simply for covering errors, but for creative purposes as
well. Rack-and-tank developing was important to the soft style of cinematography, as we shall see in the
next chapter. Various major cinematographers have recalled working closely with the laboratory in order to
achieve special effects in photography. Hal Mohr spoke of his work in the twenties:65
Even up to the time I was doing The Jazz Singer [1927], I’d get there a half-hour ahead of time and go
to the laboratory. At that time we made tests of every setup, and the negative developer had all my
test strips lying on a lightbox. I’d go through with the lab man, and they’d all be developed to a
certain time. There were many cases where you deliberately overexposed a scene for a certain effect,
or you deliberately underexposed a scene. When you’d overexpose, the purpose was they’d
shortdevelop it, to get a soft, flat effect; where you’d underexpose, the purpose would be that they’d
force the development, to build up contrast.
Often cinematographers went to the laboratories on their own time (as Mohr’s statement suggests), for their
official duties may not always have included consultation with laboratory technicians. Later, as we shall
see, machine processing effectively eliminated the possibility of collaboration between laboratory and
cinematographer, except in extraordinary cases.
Through the teens, the rack-and-tank system changed little, but cinematographers’ attitudes did change,
and as a result they began exploring the possibilities of control over the developing stage. The basic demand
of studio filmmaking upon a film’s photography was that it be ‘clear’— that it show the mise-en-scene
adequately for spectator understanding. But during the mid-teens, as we have seen, cinematographers, in
collaboration with art directors, began to go beyond mere clarity, striving to achieve beauty as well. While
camera and lighting technologies offered the most obvious means for assembling striking compositions,
some cinematographers also discovered laboratory manipulation. Thus the greater variety of photographic
styles that became apparent in the late teens and twenties can be attributed in part to an increased
understanding of laboratory technology. This change goes hand in hand with the growing importance of the
art director and the standardization of selective lighting during these same years. Photographic beauty
became a staple of Hollywood’s quality product.
21
Major technological changes of the 1920s
KRISTIN THOMPSON
Dramatically motion pictures will scarcely rise to higher heights than now attained. The finer
shades of feeling and temperament are now conveyed to the screen in sincerity equal to the best
in the older form of art…. The most marked changes that years succeeding the publication of
this volume will, bring about will be in further mechanical development.1
Homer Croy, 1918
By 1920, with the industry-wide adoption of Bell & Howell cameras and with the introduction of the sun-
arc, the main phase of technological standardization was ending. Similarly, the style paradigm had been
formulated and had reached a certain stability.
Before 1920, technological change could be rapid because many innovations offered major advantages by
reducing inefficiency or by fostering progress in quality or novelty. But in the late silent period, the
introduction of technology slowed. Some of the important changes had only a minor effect on the look of
the films. Panchromatic film stock, which had been available for years, finally became more advantageous
than orthochromatic. Panchro was more efficient, but the visible difference in the finished film was
minimal. Similarly, the automation of developing and editing was largely an efficiency move; quality
received a slight boost, but the novelty value was nil. Perhaps the main stylistic change during the twenties
was the soft style of cinematography, and this in part depended upon the manipulation or modification of
existing techniques. Now the changes were refinements— the replacement of one adequate device with a
more advantageous one—rather than introductions of basic technology.
The change from orthochromatic to panchromatic stock

Audiences today looking at films from the silent period usually see contrasty 16mm or even 8mm prints,
with stark, chalky whites and deep blacks. Perhaps such prints, as much as any other factor, have led to the
myth of the crude early cinema. Historians and fans alike have perpetuated the notion that orthochromatic
film, used in the majority of films until the mid-twenties, was a slow, contrasty, insensitive stock.
Yet the contrastiness of most modern prints arises from the conditions under which the film has been
preserved. Often films survive only in a positive release print rather than a negative. The striking of a
duplicate negative, or the repeated duping of positive prints over the years adds considerable contrast. If one
sees a well-preserved positive print taken directly from an original orthochromatic negative, the range of
grays most likely will be impressive (see, for example, figs 5.5, 5.15, and 5.16, taken from an original
nitrate positive). Given an equal state of preservation, it is usually impossible to tell a film shot on
orthochromatic from one shot on panchromatic.
MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES OF THE 1920S 519
But historians have assumed ortho was an inferior stock; several suggest that as soon as panchromatic
stock became available, filmmakers switched over to it.2* Yet panchromatic stock was available in this country
from 1913 on, failing to become the basic negative in use across the industry until about 1927. Why did
cinematographers cling to ortho so long? In fact there were several reasons why panchro remained an
unattractive alternative for years after its introduction. Only after improvements were made in panchro did
cinematographers turn to it, and then they did so rapidly.
Orthochromatic film’s main limitation was its insensitivity to the yellow and red areas of the spectrum.
Panchromatic, as its name implies, is sensitive to the entire visible spectrum. If all other properties of the
two types of stock were equal, panchro would be more desirable, because it renders all colors in a more
accurate relation to each other, even in black and white. Not only would panchro enhance the quality of the
image, but it would be more efficient, requiring less time on the set to arrange compensatory filters, makeup,
and the like. But the other properties were not equal until 1925.
In spite of its insensitivity to the red ranges, ortho was adequate to its purpose of rendering black and
white images; filmmakers could avoid reds and yellows or use filters to alter image tonality. The impulse
toward the invention of a panchromatic motion picture stock came in the limited area of experimentation
with color cinematography. Charles Urban needed such a stock for his British Kinemacolor system.
Kinemacolor used alternate frames photographed and then projected through red and green filters. But ortho
stock would not register effectively through the red filter. In late 1909, Kinemacolor held a demonstration
screening in New York, and a company soon formed to exploit the process in the United States. Although
production by the Kinemacolor Company of American began in 1910, its films did not reach theaters until
early 1913; the Patents Co. had attempted to keep color films out by threatening to cut off supplies of films
to any theater that showed Kinemacolor. Kinemacolor of America reached an agreement with the Patents
Co. in August of 1913.3 In September of that same year, Eastman Kodak marketed its first panchromatic
stock.4 According to the founder of Eastman’s research laboratory, Eastman was considering marketing the
film for use in relation to Léon Gaumont’s additive color process (a color system similar to Kinemacolor,
except that it used three colored filters instead of two).5 Whether Eastman was responding to Kinemacolor
needs, or to Gaumont, or both, there is little doubt that it brought out its panchro stock in 1913 in response
to the needs of experimenters in color filmmaking.
The simple fact that panchro was now available did not create a rush to abandon ortho. Panchro had three
great disadvantages at this time, any one of which would probably have precluded its extensive use for
black-and-white cinematography. Not only was panchro far more expensive and significantly slower than
ortho, it was also physically unstable. The negative had to be used within weeks of its manufacture, or it
would deteriorate.6 For the next ten years Eastman would supply panchro ‘in small quantities as
experimental material.’7 For Kinemacolor and the other companies working to create a satisfactory color
process, a supply of panchro would be essential.8 This same stock was supplied to studio cinematographers
in the late teens and early twenties for limited usage on a trial basis. But for virtually all commercial film
production, panchromatic film stock became largely a dead issue for the remainder of the teens. Presumably
the failure of Kinemacolor in 1914, plus the fact that cinematographers had not adopted the new stock,
combined to discourage Eastman from attempting to expand the market.
Cinematographers went on using ortho. Only three complaints about the stock appeared consistently in
technical journals: clouds did not show up, since blue skies photographed as flat white (this also made good
day-for-night effects difficult, even with filters); blonde hair photographed too dark; and light blue eyes
photographed nearly white. But cinematographers could compensate to solve such problems. Throughout
the silent period, cameramen reported using orange filters to get cloud effects. As we have already seen,
backlighting helped solve the ‘blonde’ problem; it could render the hair not only light in color, but also
beautifully glowing. The solution to one problem posed by ortho actually ended by enhancing glamor
photography.
The failure of light blue eyes to register created a similar problem for attractive close-ups of actors,
especially women. James Wong Howe recalled that his first fame as a cinematographer came when he
worked out a solution for Mary Miles Minter in 1922. She had pale blue eyes, and Howe managed to make
them photograph dark by placing a screen of black velvet so that it would reflect into the lens from her
eyes.9 Some cinematographers used yellow filters for their close shots of such actors.
Other more general problems could be solved by controlling the colors in the objects photographed. Since
red photographed as black, attempts were made to avoid deep reds. A careless make-up job could cause the
actors’ lips to appear black. Max Factor manufactured make-up to compensate for this problem. Even the
contrast created by stark whites could be controlled through color manipulation:10
Under the modern studio vapor lights, white photographs glaringly and is unpleasant on the screen,
offering, for one thing, too much contrast to other surrounding objects which are darker and therefore
have a different photographic light value. For that reason, garments and objects usually white in
everyday life are usually pink and often yellow when being used for movie studio purposes.
But this does not mean that ortho was highly contrasty in relation to panchro. Even in the sound period
when panchro was in universal use, objects to be filmed were seldom stark white. As with ortho, lights
shining on a white shirt-front could set up a strong glare on panchro stock. So color compensation was not a
problem that disappeared with the abandonment of ortho stock.
In using ortho, the cinematographer had to be able to judge what relative tones of gray the various colors
in the mise-en-scene would translate into the film stock. (A red and a blue object might appear equally dark
to the eye, but on the film the blue object would appear very light grey, the red one nearly black.) But here
again the cinematographers worked out a method that minimized the problematic properties of ortho stock.
By the mid-teens, they had realized that it was possible to view the scene through a blue filter to gauge its
final look on the film. Since ortho registered primarily in the blue range, the filter simulated the tonalities
that would result photographically (see fig 21.1). Outdoors, directors and cinematographers alike often wore
bluelensed glasses.
By the early twenties, cinematographers had managed to adjust to most of the problems inherent in ortho
stock. In addition, as we have seen, ortho offered a tremendous advantage in the developing process; it
could be inspected under a ruby-red light without fogging the negative. For all these reasons, then, the slow
adoption of panchromatic stock is understandable.
Nevertheless, an improved panchro would be useful, offering a fuller sensitivity without compensating
measures. In 1919 and into the early twenties, references to panchro began to crop up again in technical
journals. The stock was still slower than ortho, so its main use was for outdoor shots, where there was
plenty of white light. Panchro gave sky shots which were superior to those achievable with ortho and filters.
Cinematography experts reported that the ‘up-to-date photographer…goes in for beautiful cloud effects and
color values, using color screens, vignetting devices, and panchromatic films.’11 By 1921, the American
Cinematographer was giving this advice to cameramen going on location: ‘Don’t forget for location long
[tripod] legs, small tripod, panchromatic film and filters.’12 But panchro was too slow for most studio use. Arcs
and mercury-vapor lamps, ideal for blue-sensitive stock, were less efficient for panchro, which instead
worked well with the yellower incandescent light. The studios still lit large sets with arcs and vapors, and
would only use ‘inkies’ for close framings, where less light was needed. So from the late teens to the mid-
twenties, panchro was used mainly for location shooting or studio portrait close-ups.
Experimentation soon allowed cinematographers and lab workers to increase the speed of the slow
panchro stock. In 1922, the SMPE’s Committee on Progress reported a new method giving 100 per cent
greater speed. The improvement made it possible ‘to photograph interiors by artificial light or exteriors on
cloudy days’ with panchro.13 The following year, the Committee on Films and Emulsions found that studios
were increasing the speed of panchro by immersing it in a mild ammonia bath.14
The increased speed of panchro in the early twenties made its use practical for entire films. The Headless
Horseman (Edward Venturini, 1922, Sleepy Hollow Corp.) is generally held to be the first feature to have
used panchro throughout. This film provides evidence that studios could get panchro if they wanted it, even
during the ‘experimental’ period; panchro became a regular Eastman Kodak product only in 1923. In a 1926
interview, Henry King recalled shooting Romola (1925, Inspiration Pictures) in 1923–4, using panchro
entirely. He remarked especially on its speed: ‘We were surprised at the little light needed, for while it was
generally supposed that panchromatic was slower than common stock, it proved a great deal faster.’15 This
is somewhat implausible, but the stock King used could well have been about equal in speed with ortho.
The real breakthrough in the dissemination of panchromatic did not come until 1925, when Eastman
lowered its price to a level commensurate with ortho and began actively to promote the stock. Apparently
the manufacturers and studio officials were in no hurry to put panchro into wide use prior to that year. In
1927 John Grierson described this resistance: ‘The Eastman people who are responsible were themselves
terribly slow in promoting the film in the world of cinema. Again, the use of panchromatic in interior work
would involve changes in the system of lighting, and some experiment with softer lights and proper
filters.’16 As Chapter 19 suggested, innovations in one area of technology can affect other areas, ultimately
requiring a considerable investment beyond the cost of the initial innovation. In the case of panchromatic,
the studios might be willing to undertake the changes because the incandescent lamps used with panchro
would be cheaper to run than arcs. Yet the studios would be likely to approach the conversion cautiously.
Grierson was also right about the need for experimentation; in 1928 the film production companies and
support industries cooperated on a series of Mazda tests of incandescent lights and panchromatic stock. The
next chapter will describe these.
In an introduction to Grierson’s article, the American Cinematographer’s editor suggested that the burden
of proving panchro’s worth had been left to the cinematographers, some of whom sought its introduction:
This demand has little by little spurred the manufacturer of film to invest great sums in perfecting this
and subsidiary products. It has forced the manufacturer of lighting apparatus to adapt it to the new
film. It has encouraged the laboratories to perfect the handling of this material so as to make its use
safe and commercially practical.
Aside from resistance by laboratories, lighting manufacturers, and Eastman, the editor saw reluctance on the
part of the producers:17
It was up to the cinematographer to become the natural link between these interests and the adoption
of this revolutionary measure. It was up to him to foster and make known the advantages that he knew
to exist, but which he had to sell to all parties interested in the making of motion pictures.
We must take these claims with a grain of salt, since the American Cinematographer had an interest in
creating an image of its members as innovators. Still, it seems likely that the years 1919 to 1925 would be
used as a period of limited experimentation with panchro in various circumstances. Cinematographers
would hope to distinguish themselves by their achievements during this period. The success reported by
filmmakers like King with Romola or cinematographer Ned Van Buren on The Headless Horseman would
encourage the industry to proceed with the wide introduction of panchro, in spite of the attendant costs.
But whatever the cause, Eastman began to promote panchro. In 1925 it issued a pamphlet describing the
stock: ‘It is of great advantage in close-ups; the flesh tones are much more accurately rendered and the
whole appearance is more natural when panchromatic film is used. It is also valuable for outdoor sets, the
general tones of the landscape being better rendered, and clouds being photographed as they appear in a
blue sky.’ The stock could be used under arc light with a filter, but its speed increased when used under
tungsten lamps, since the incandescent light was more actinic for panchro. Eastman claimed that their
panchro negative was about equal in speed to ortho when used under arcs or in sunlight. It could also be
hyper sensitized.18
By 1925, Eastman had eliminated the two physical inferiorities of panchro. It was now more stable.
Robert Flaherty’s use of it in the south seas for Moana in 1925 proved that panchro would not deteriorate in
heat. And the speed was now acceptable. By lowering the price, Eastman removed the last restraint. During
1926 Hollywood moved rapidly to use panchro. Bert Glennon praised it after using it for Hotel Imperial
(Maurice Stiller, 1926, Famous Players-Lasky). The cast of Old Ironsides (James Cruze, cinematographer
Alfred Gilks, 1926, Famous Players-Lasky) reportedly were able to work without make-up, due to
panchro’s superior rendition of flesh tones. George Barnes used panchro for The Winning of Barbara Worth
(Henry King, 1926, Samuel Goldwyn), and the list goes on.19
On 31 January 1927, a meeting was held in Hollywood which signaled a recognition of the standardized
use of panchro stock. The ASC and Eastman Kodak sponsored an evening of lectures and experimental film
clips; two hundred guests listened to talks on graininess, duplicate negatives,20* and filters.21
Many productions continued to mix film stocks, however, employing panchro primarily for exteriors.
Karl Struss recalled having used this approach on Sunrise. For cinematographers who wanted some special
photographic quality that required inspection of the negative during development, the use of panchro would
be confining, because the red inspection light used for ortho would fog the panchro. But on the whole the
conversion was widespread by 1928: ‘Officials report that a year ago the studios were using approximately
85 per cent, orthochromatic (ordinary) and 15 per cent, panchromatic, but today the percentages are almost
exactly reversed.’22 The introduction of faster ‘Type II’ panchro stock in 1928 put ortho at an additional
disadvantage, and within a few years it was a thing of the past for regular studio use.23*
In the light of all this, we must abandon the traditional view of orthochromatic as an inferior, contrasty,
slow stock. As Van Buren, one of the first cinematographers to work extensively with panchro, pointed out
in 1930: ‘The earlier [i.e., pre-1928] type panchromatic films gave more contrasty results pictorially than
the regular negative. Furthermore, the cameraman was confronted with the idea that to use panchromatic
negative properly it was necessary to use light filters.’24 (The filters were for use in the studios with arcs and
vapor lamps.) The 1928 ‘Type II’ softer stock was the first panchro which was less contrasty than ortho.
The dominant film stock of the silent period, orthochromatic, was excellent for use in both the hard-edged
and the soft styles. It permitted a thorough control impossible with automatic developing and completely
dark developing rooms. The discontinuation of ortho was logical, but so was its lengthy tenure as the basis
of silent production.
Automatic editing and developing devices

Soon after the establishment of the studio system and its division of labor during the teens, there was a
move to automate some key parts of the post-shooting stages. Machines were introduced to develop the film,
to allow the editor to view it, and to splice it. Efficiency and quality control were the impulses behind this
new technology.
Automated editing devices did not affect the degree of control filmmakers had over the editing stage.
Such devices were labor-saving equipment. Typically, cutters looked at the images by holding the strip of
film over a light box, perhaps employing a magnifying glass. Most cutters could ‘read’ the image to follow
movement as they pulled the shots through their fingers against the light. Yet what they were looking at was
a strip of still photographs, and judgments of tempo and matches on action were necessarily rough.
Some editors devised viewing machines for themselves. By removing the head from an old projector, the
editor could contrive a machine that could run and stop the film. The editor would then be able to watch the
shots in movement.25 But most editors did not bother, preferring to trust their own sense of the film’s tempo
as it ran through their fingers. They could check their work by running it on a regular projector. Silentperiod
editor Margaret Booth has described how she worked in the twenties: ‘As we cut the picture, we would
continually screen it. We would make the necessary adjustments, and then screen it again. Cut it and run it,
cut it and run it. And gradually we would make our rhythm, our pattern, for the picture.’26 Editor William
Hornbeck claims that this practice was already going on in 1916–17, when he worked at Keystone as a
projectionist for such sessions.27 But it was more efficient to enable the editor to run individual segments
without summoning a projectionist for a screening each time the film needed checking.
The first editing viewer to be manufactured was the Moviola, which has remained a major brand name in
the industry. After several trial machines, inventor Iwan Serrurier marketed the Moviola Midget in 1924
(see fig 21.2). Mounted between the rewinds by the editor’s light box, the Midget ran the film through at a
constant rate; the operator controlled it with a foot pedal. By the late silent period, virtually all studios had
installed the Midget, and it remained the industry standard until sound necessitated the introduction of a new
model.28* Moviolas promoted quality by making continuity and tempo easier to judge, and they made the
editing process more efficient.
As part of the general move toward automated assembly of the film, automatic splicing machines came into
use in the industry. As with the question of standard splice sizes, this device applied mainly to the
companies’ joining rooms rather than to their editing departments. Whole prints had to be assembled from
the short strips of positive film coming out of the laboratories. (Even in the days of automatic developing
machines, tinted or toned prints had to have a splice at every color change.) Workers, mostly women, sat
making splices in a preordained order. Since they were making no decisions, they needed no time to
consider options; automation would increase efficiency.
In 1918, Bell & Howell introduced an automatic splicer (fig 21.3), but it was designed only to splice
negatives. That is, it made a strong .03-inch splice exactly on the frameline, so that the splice did not extend
into the frame itself and hence was not visible on the screen. This made for a quality negative, but did not
aid greatly in speeding up the editing process, since most editing time was consumed in the assembling and
repairing work at the joining rooms and exchanges. So laboratories requested that Bell & Howell modify its
machine to make it usable for positive film. As we have seen, positive film was typically spliced with a .
156-inch or full-hole, splice; the adjustment was mainly a matter of making the machine do splices of
various widths.
This adjustment was done by early 1922, when one author described the machine’s advantages: it
permitted an experienced worker to do four or five times as many splices as by hand; its pilot pins provided
accurate registration of the two strips of film; the machine scraped the film, cut the ends, eliminated excess
film cement; and its heating unit dried the splice quickly.29 By the mid-twenties, this machine was in
widespread use in studios and exchanges; as in its use with negatives, it added quality by making splices that
would be less noticeable on the screen. Since a splice line on the screen calls attention to the cut, invisible
splices helped the continuity system of editing.
Automatic developing was also more efficient than the rack-and-tank system it replaced; but unlike
editing, the new developing machines did sometimes place restrictions on filmmakers’ choices. Automatic
developing machines began to gain wide attention in the industry about 1921, when over half a dozen
models were available in the United States. One of these models could handle as much as 4,000 feet of film
an hour in 40 square feet of laboratory area and could be run by one operator; it replaced equipment which
would take up 1,500 square feet and require several employees to run. Since the strips of film were longer, a
finished positive reel could contain two splices rather than the previous average of about forty.30
These machines caught on within the next few years, but were almost exclusively limited to the
processing of positive release prints. As originally manufactured, they would not handle negatives, and
there was no great pressure from within the film industry for machine processing of negatives. On the one
hand cinematographers preferred the control offered by the rack-and-tank method; on the other, there was
some fear that irreplaceable negatives could be damaged by equipment breakdown. By 1925, one
manufacturer was able to report: ‘The machine development of positive film calls for no special remarks for
it is rapidly becoming the accepted practice and most of the big laboratories are equipped with developing
machines of one form or another.’ He went on to urge the use of machines for negatives as well, pointing
out that the same machine could easily be modified to run at the slower speed that negatives required.31
But apparently this suggestion went largely unheeded during the silent period. Finally the adoption of
sound in the late twenties necessitated machine developing for negatives; most importantly, the chemicals
and timing had to be absolutely standardized in order to preserve the fidelity of the sound track. So the
conversion was not wholly one of choice, but one forced upon many filmmakers by a change in another area
of technology. Quality control of sound took precedence over that of the image, for sound was the major
novelty upon which film popularity was based at the time. Cinematographer John Seitz, who was noted for
his close collaboration with the laboratory during the silent period, has recalled the alteration of approaches:32
Motion-picture photography of the silent era was an optical and chemical business. The addition of
sound changed it to more of an electrical business. The talking picture made it necessary to
standardize film developing, thereby taking away much of the individuality of the cinematographer.
In the sound period, cinematographers could still introduce variations into their work, but mainly during the
shooting phase; most stylistic touches had to be made in lighting and cinematography. In the 1930s, many
studio laboratories standardized the films’ photographic qualities. At Warner Bros, the laboratory head Fred
Gage tried to get a characteristic studio look, but would push or pull film for varying degrees of contrast.
Mike Leshing of 20th Century-Fox’s laboratory and Daniel Clark of the Camera Department tried for
complete standardization of exposure and development throughout the studio. Similarly, John Nickolaus
tried to create an MGM style; according to Clarke, Nickolaus instructed him not to use diffusion filters
when shooting, since the laboratory would give all films the correct degree of softness during the
developing stage.33 Thus the increasing technical sophistication of Hollywood did not always imply a
straightforward ‘progress.’ Some cinematographers lost a great deal more than simply the ability to move their
cameras freely when sound arrived. In particular, automatic processing put restrictions on a new stylistic
impulse which had arisen during the twenties, the soft style of cinematography.
The soft style of cinematography

During the late teens and especially the 1920s, many Hollywood filmmakers experimented with and
gradually adopted a soft style of cinematography. By ‘the soft style,’ I do not simply mean shallow focus.
This was one way of softening an image, but cinematographers also drew upon a range of other devices:
low-contrast developing, gauzes, filters, soft-edged vignettes, smoke— anything that could reduce contrast
and create diffusion. As we have seen in Chapter 17, for most of the silent period the main cinematographic
style emphasized sharp focus and depth of field: a ‘hard-edged’ look. The soft style was to prove an
enduring alternative to this approach.
Recent accounts tend to credit Billy Bitzer and Henrik Sartov’s work in Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith,
1919, D.W.Griffith Corp.) for the innovation of soft photography, especially in their close shots of Lillian
Gish.34 There is no doubt that Broken Blossoms was very influential, in spite of the fact that it uses fewer
soft-style shots than many of the films that followed it. But its gauzy shots of the Chinese harbor and of
Lucy sleeping in the moonlight in the Yellow Man’s room apparently struck other cinematographers of the
period as a radical break with customary practice.
Yet there are indications that softness had been considered a desirable visual quality for some years
before 1919. Soft filming began with close shots of actors, in an attempt to imitate still photography. A
1914 cinematography manual describes quite specifically how to achieve this effect:35
For portrait pictures in a regular studio with a background it will be well to use a side light, and use as
large an opening in the lens as possible, and the highest shutter speed with which you can get a properly
timed negative. In this manner you can get a softer and more pronounced relief between the object and
the background. The negative should be somewhat thinner than a landscape negative or an outdoor
exposure and somewhat softer, and should be developed and printed for softness instead of contrast.
By giving less time in the printing or using a warmer developer this softness may be obtained.
This author treats the use of soft lighting and shallow focus as a matter of separating the salient characters
from the less important background. A 1917 source adds the idea that soft cinematography enhances the
beauty of the composition:36
Beautiful scenes, involving artistic close-ups that hold the interest to the actors, soft and clear effects,
pleasing angles which give the best expression and expressiveness to the whole, or any part thereof,
are always noticed and appreciated by an audience, regardless of the enthralling interest of the drama.
So a second early justification for using the soft style was beauty—not simply feminine beauty, but beauty
of the whole composition. These two functions would continue through the twenties as the basic
justification of the soft style.
The first passage above suggests that during the early teens, experiments with the soft style depended
upon manipulations the cinematographer could perform using existing technology: placing the lights,
opening the aperture, or altering the developing process. In the mid-teens, however, filmmakers began to
create specific tools for this purpose. In 1916, for example, Triangle-Fine Arts director Paul Powell was
reportedly using a diffusing lens for ‘highly poetic scenes’ in The Marriage of Molly O.37 There is
considerable evidence that Karl Struss’s Pictorial Lens, originally created for his delicately hazy still
photographs of the early decades of the century, made its way into filmmaking in the same year, probably
on this production.38* But it was not until the early twenties that soft-focus lenses became widely available
for motion-picture cameras.
During the later teens, cinematographers experimented with other ways of softening their images, placing
gauze or filters over their lenses. In 1917 one author commented on the use of diffusing filters over the lens:
‘Screens of various materials which do not cut off all the light rays, are being used by cameramen.’ These
little screens were made from wire screening or translucent portrait film, exposed and developed to the
desired degree of opacity; the cameraman would then punch a hole in the center, to create a haziness around
the edge of the frame39 (see figs 16.79 and 16.80). Sources do not discuss the reasons for this usage, aside
from the idea of beauty. But one purpose was probably to isolate the figures from the background,
concentrating the spectator’s attention on the face.
Accessories to create soft effects were commercially available; with these, a cinematographer could get
his regular, sharp-focus anastigmat lens to simulate a soft-focus lens. In 1922, Karl Brown described how an
anastigmat lens
may be made to give acceptable soft images by means of various attachments, such as diffusion disks,
etc. A diffusion disk, such as the Eastman Diffusion Disk, is a piece of optical glass, flat on one
surface, and having the other surface broken up with slight waves or bands, the intensity and
frequency of the bands determining the amount of diffusion.
Other such screens were available, and Brown pointed out that a great variety of meshes of chiffon and
gauze were used for the same purposes, with the advantage that the center could be cut or burned out, again
to create softedged vignettes.40
With the increasingly widespread use of soft shots in the early twenties, it became more efficient to have
special lenses as a standard tool of the cinematographer, so that he would not need to spend time
improvising an effect. During this period, a variety of brands of soft lenses became available to the
cinematographer. Brown’s series, ‘Modern lenses,’ in American Cinematographer, gave an excellent
account of both the optics of soft lenses and the specifications of the various makes —the Wollensak
Verito, the Kalostat, and the Dallmeyer. Brown described the workings of these lenses:41
Most soft focus lenses depend upon spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, or a combination of
the two in various degrees. The usual soft focus image shows a more or less firm main image
overlapped and underlaid with a less intense out-of-focus secondary image, the spread and intensity of
which can be varied with the diaphragm.
Spherical aberration depends upon the fact that the marginal rays passing through the lens element focus in
a different plane than the central rays; most lenses add elements to correct for this. A soft-focus lens
deliberately leaves this aberration at least partially uncorrected. The Struss Pictorial Lens, for example,
consisted of a single lens element. In chromatic aberration, the light is broken into its component colors in
passing through the lens, and the various colors focus on different planes. Brown pointed out that chromatic
aberration is harder to judge in focusing, since the differences are not visible to the eye when the many tiny
spectra overlap to create white light.42 Hence most soft-focus lenses correct chromatic aberration to some
extent.
Brown also discussed something which is easy to overlook in dealing with the twenties soft-focus style;
he explained how these lenses ‘show a great increase in depth of field over an anastigmat of the same
aperture and focal length, and this varies with the formula. Some soft lenses show an increase of several
hundred per cent, greater acceptable depth of field over a similar anastigmat.’43 Thus in discussing the
history of depth of field usage, we should not directly compare the aperture settings of the ultraspeed and
soft-focus lenses of the twenties with the regular lenses in use at the time. Such comparisons will most
likely be inaccurate.
Instead, there were different approaches to soft filming in the twenties. One involved actual shallow
focus, filming a scene with a long lens from a distance, thereby throwing the background out of focus. This
might be supplemented by gauzed lights, gauzed lens, and so on. But there was also a trend toward soft
style maintaining depth of field. As Brown’s description of soft-focus lenses suggests, such lenses could
provide spherical aberration, but maintain depth of field, so that the foreground would be as fuzzy as other
planes. The selective application of gauze, not only to the lens and lamps, but also to the miseen-scène
elements, could also create a diffusion effect in selected planes, without affecting focus.
The tendency toward selective focus was not a strong one during the teens, as we saw in examining
cinematography and depth of field. Most cinematographers would strive to achieve as great a depth of field
as possible under the given conditions. Standard lens lengths in this period were 2 and 3 inches; a 3-inch
lens gave a slightly fuzzy background, but barely enough to be noticeable in the typical plan américain.
Lenses as long as 4-inches were available from an early date.44*
In the twenties cinematographers were employing a greater variety of lenses—not only faster and softer,
but also longer. Clarke recalled that Billy Bitzer did the close-ups for Way Down East (1920, D.W.Griffith
Corp.) with a 6-inch lens to make the backgrounds go out of focus. Bitzer experimented with and bought
new lenses frequently, according to Clarke. By 1927, McKay’s Handbook of Motion Picture Photography
listed standard lenses as 35mm 2-inch (50mm), 3- inch (75mm), 4-inch (100mm), and 6-inch (150mm); he
described the shallow focus tendencies familiar to us from thirties Hollywood:45
In photographing distant scenes, use the small stop for universal sharpness, but for objects in the middle
distance and foreground, open the lens to f8 or larger. This will soften the distance and provide
atmospheric depth.
In filming people, focus sharply upon them and let the background go fuzzy. This will prevent
extraneous objects in the background from spoiling the effect of the picture. This process for using
out of focus planes for securing pictorial effects is known as differential focussing.
So visual softness could be obtained by long lenses as well as by soft lenses and specific accessories (see
fig 21.4). Given this range of tools, certain cinematographers between 1919 and 1929 experimented with
different ways of achieving the hazy, luminous effects characteristic of the soft style.
One of the earliest impulses toward a soft style came from the continuing imitation of portrait
photography (fig. 21.5). Some films would use the regular hard-edged style for most of their shots, but close
shots would suddenly go fuzzy. In 1920, Billy Bitzer and Henrik Sartov worked together on close shots of
Lillian Gish for Way Down East. Bitzer had begun his career using the hard-edged style, but was interested
in experimenting with lenses. Sartov was a portrait photographer originally and he and Bitzer tried for this
soft look in their close-ups of the heroine. Several shot/ reverse-shot situations demonstrate clearly how soft
the treatment of Gish is (fig 21.6), in comparison with the photography of the villain, for example
(fig 21.7).
Another film shot in 1920 was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which had a considerable impact
on other filmmakers of the period. Its cinematographer, John F.Seitz, used lenses, gauze, developing tricks,
and other devices to soften his images. One famous scene involved a hazy effect in the background of a cafe
setting (fig 21.8 ). Here everything remains in sharp focus, but the background planes drop off noticeably in
their degree of contrast. Seitz may have used smoke to help achieve this effect. The use of low contrast
creates a series of beautiful compositions; the scene was frequently singled out for praise in contemporary
reviews. Seitz also used gauze, lighting, and low-contrast developing for glamor effect, as in the first
meeting of the hero and heroine. In figure 17.36, the hero is lit from top and sides, with the background
thrown slightly out of focus. This is a far cry from the evenly lit, deep focus shots of several years earlier
(see figs 16.73 and 16.74).
In Four Horsemen the glamor shots of the actors are only part of a larger pattern, where softness and low
contrast in the cinematography create pictorial beauty in many other types of images as well. It inspired
other cinematographers to experiment increasingly with softstyle techniques. Some of the most spectacular
effects they achieved involved the use of gauze, and a number of the great soft-style films of the late silent
era owe their visual quality as much to gauze as to optical qualities of lenses. Rosher, Struss, and Sartov
were leaders in this area. In figure 21.9, Sartov sets up a close shot of Lillian Gish for La Bohème (1926,
MGM). Sartov’s gauze box is visible on the front of the camera; its length offers a variety of options for
placing gauzes and filters at different positions. Figure 21.10 shows the camera crew of one of the major
soft-style films, Sparrows (William Beaudine, 1926, Pickford Corp.). The large black box on the front of
Struss’s Bell & Howell is his own matte box. (Cinematographers typically built a number of their camera
accessories themselves.) According to Struss, he would fasten gauze and other materials inside this box with
thumbtacks.46
Within a short period, cinematographers placed gauze scrims within the mise-en-scene, sometimes
actually visible to the camera and the audience. In their 1922 film Foolish Wives, Erich von Stroheim and
cinematographer Ben Reynolds used gauze for several important shots. Here the function is not beauty.
These shots always mark the villain’s point-of-view of certain characters. In one shot, Count Karamzin,
filmed in the hardedged style, looks offscreen (fig 21.11); his POV of the counterfeiter’s daughter is filmed
through a gauze, with the texture of the filter visible, in focus between the lens and the actress (fig 21.12).
Rosher made famous the use of large sheets of gauze behind the figures to give the background a washed-
out, overexposed look without sacrificing depth of field. A contemporary review praised the effect in his
1923 film Rosita, saying it contained ‘an almost perfect perspective of the third dimension, or stereoscopic
effect, showing the figures in bold relief in the foreground, at the same time keeping the background sharply
in focus yet obtaining the long-sought for effect of showing distances on a flat surface.’47 This effect probably
reached its culmination in the Mary Pickford film Sparrows, in 1926. There one can see the foregrounds of
the scenes done around the swamp farm clearly, while the background beyond the surrounding clumps of
trees suddenly goes relatively dim; the reviewer’s description of the distance appearing to be on a flat
surface is apt— yet every detail remains in focus (fig 21.13).
This remarkable film brought together the talents of Rosher, Struss, and Hal Mohr. Struss has recalled the
use of gauze in this film in an interview: ‘We put enormous gauzes in the trees, thirty by sixty feet; and we
had three in a line. They all had to be backlit, and we used special reflectors. Miss Pickford was always shot
through gauzes, but this was something else again.’48 Mohr has added information about the soft look of
Sparrows. Rosher dealt with Consolidated Film Laboratories to achieve a special look through the
developing process. As Mohr described it:49
We’d go into a situation where you’d be shooting, let us say, into a terrific backlight, a lot of reflected
light coming in, and so on. It would call for, in those days, a f-8 stop—well, we’d photograph it at 4,
or 4.5, and that’s several stops overexposed. Then Aller [at Consolidated] would skin-develop it; as
soon as the image would show through, it was stopped. … That’s how we got this soft, ethereal look.
Of course, we used a lot of fog machines, also.
The result was a film that used the soft style consistently throughout the sequences, without losing image
definition.
This extremely soft, luminous style, suffusing virtually every image of a film, was not widespread.
Certainly there are many films, possibly the majority, in the mid-1920s, that retain the sharp-focus, hard-
edged lighting style. Yet a soft shot here and there for glamor effects was a likely paradigmatic alternative.
And a consistent soft style had become one way of shooting prestigious films, as with Sparrows and The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Rosher was Pickford’s regular cinematographer and was in constant
demand among the biggest female (and occasionally male) stars in Hollywood for his ability to create
glamorous close-ups.
What factors brought about the soft style? Clearly soft-style cinematography did not promote efficiency.
When workers are hanging giant gauzes, calculating special exposure and developing methods, or buying
extra lenses, shooting time and expenses go up. But on high-budget films especially, considerations of
product differentiation and quality would outweigh limited inefficiency. The soft style first crops up
primarily in films made by powerful independent companies (especially those releasing through United
Artists) or auteur directors. The main impetus for experimentation in this field came from the
cinematographers themselves, and from their directors and actors, in a quest for what they viewed as quality
images. Cinematographers often created their own lenses, camera attachments, and processes. On Four
Horsemen, Seitz provided the laboratory with special chemical formulas to be used in custom developing
the separate shots. (Metro had gone back to the director-unit system for this very high-budget film, and thus
Ingram and Seitz had an unusually high degree of control.) We have seen how Struss’s own Pictorial Lens
made its way into the industry. Rosher said he developed the Rosher Kino Portrait Lens in the mid-1920s.
Such cinematographers and directors employed the soft style initially; then stars began to demand it as they
realized how it enhanced their looks. Alice Terry and Rudolph Valentino became stars overnight as a result
of Four Horsemen, and the soft glamor close shots of them may have contributed a good deal to their
appeal. Rosher used his Kino Portrait lens to photograph close-ups of Pickford and John Barrymore. He has
recalled amusingly his use of the soft style to make Barrymore look younger in The Tempest (Sam Taylor,
1928, Joseph M.Schenck Productions, released United Artists).50 Close shots of the Barrymore character are
hazy; a medium close-up of him looking off at the heroine and her friends bathing in a river surrounds him
with tiny glints of light sparkling on willow leaves, creating a cloud of fuzziness. These shots, as well as
views of Richard Barthelmess in Way Down East and the treatment of a few other male stars in the twenties
indicate that women were not the only subjects of the soft-style treatment. Women usually got heavier
gauzing, but certain men were associated with glamor as well. Some stars could control the assignment of a
cinematographer. If Lillian Gish or Pickford wanted someone like Rosher, experienced in glamor
photography, he was most likely the person she would have.51* The Hollywood cinema uses the human
figure as its center of interest, and a technique that could enhance that figure might well be worth the
additional expense in production.
Aside from the added quality attained through glamor, it was the case that a good many of the most
successful films of the decade used soft-style filming. Seitz was reportedly the highest-paid cinematographer
of the twenties and the only one whose name was used in advertising.52 Hollywood institutions also helped
to make the soft style the ‘quality’ style of the day by rewarding practitioners. The first Academy Awards
for cinematography were given to Rosher and Struss in 1927, for their collaborative work on Sunrise. Other
softstyle films figured prominently in the awards, including Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and The
Tempest. By the years 1926–8, the soft style had reached its peak in the silent period.
Why would cinematographers and other filmmakers create the soft style to begin with? The strongest
influences came from a style prevalent in still photography at the time, the Pictorialist school active in
America from about the turn of the century into the twenties. Pictorialism was practiced primarily by the
Photo-Secessionist group started in 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz, and it influenced many prominent
photographers of the period. The international Pictorialist movement began earlier, in the late 1800s, as an
attempt to promote photography as an art; proponents manipulated the image, either in the taking or
developing stage, to stylize it and to emphasize its similarity to the graphic arts.
There were some direct connections between cinematography and Pictorialist still photography. Some of
the earliest soft-focus cinematography lenses were simply adapted versions of lenses in use on still cameras.
The Struss Pictorial Lens is one example. Struss was himself a still photographer in the Pictorialist tradition
before going into film, as was Henrik Sartov. Also, a number of cinematographers were professional or
amateur still photographers. (Issues of American Cinematographer and International Photographer
frequently reproduced stills taken by cinematographers, often in a hazy Pictorialist style.) By the mid-teens,
when Pictorialism begins to appear in films, it had become the prevailing fashion in photography; and by
the late twenties, it was the standard academic style against which many still photographers were reacting.
There was little danger of following avant-garde trends by taking Pictorialism into the film industry.
Beaumont Newhall has described the work of American Pictorialist photographers like Clarence H.White
and Edward Steichen as being ‘characterized by soft focus, deep shadows relieved with brilliant highlights
and strong, linear compositions.’53 Figures 21.14 and 21.15 show the Pictorialist style in landscape and
portrait work; both of these could be useful to filmmakers. Compare them with figures 21.16 and 21.17. The
frame from Way Down East could almost pass for a Pictorialist still photograph. In Foolish Wives, the mesh
filter in the view of the monk makes the surface resemble that of a painting; it comes very close to a similar
effect used by the Pictorialists (fig 21.18). For stills, a cloth-like texture is created by special printing with
the gum bichromate method.54
These examples of Pictorialist still photography reflect the influence of French Impressionist painting in
their indistinct, fuzzy renditions. Impressionism was itself an academic style by the mid-teens. This was the
period during which filmmakers were eager to prove that cinema, too, was an art. So Hollywood was in
about the same position in the late teens that the Pictorialist photographers had been in twenty years before;
cinematographers hoped that by imitating earlier, established styles in the other arts, they could achieve the
same public status themselves.
In many cases, cinematographers succeeded: soft-style photography was singled out for praise in
reviews, and the public flocked to see the beautifully hazy images of their favorite stars. And in the hands of
experts like Rosher and Struss, Pictorialism enhanced the cinematography of their films. Yet the influence of
Pictorialism brought its own problems, as several contemporary accounts suggest. Brown comments on the
abuses of soft focus:
The worst error into which the cameramen have in the past fallen is excessive diffusion, and failure to
control ‘runaround’ and halo. Perhaps too close attention to the work of prominent pictorialists has
caused this…. An acceptable amount of halo on sun-lit foliage is delightful in a still picture, but an
identical picture in motion on the screen would be impossible, due to the twinkling of the appearing
and disappearing haloes as the foliage moves. A slight runaround does not matter in a still portrait,
but on the screen it appears and vanishes as the subject moves and changes high lights.
Brown also points out a problem which has plagued Hollywood cinematographers ever since, in their search
for complete continuity: The pictorialist does not have to show his pictures in immediate contrast to sharp
scenes; the cameraman must.’55 Another commentator brought up similar objections in 1926:56
From the pictorialist photographers the motion picture makers have borrowed one implement of especial
value—and danger. This is the soft focus lens.… It is easily misused. With it very lovely and delicate
portrait photography, for example, is possible, but such portraits appear strangely out of place when
sandwiched in between scenes in sharp-definition photography.
The soft style, then, presented particular problems for the continuity system. Frequent changes in degree of
contrast or fuzziness from shot to shot would call attention to editing and other stylistic devices. This is
noticeable in films from the first half of the twenties especially; in Four Horsemen, the degree of softness
changes frequently. Yet apparently the enhanced beauty of composition and the glamor of the figures was
considered worth the sacrifice of a small degree of continuity. Later, as we shall see, machine developing in
the sound period lessened the difference among shots, minimizing the continuity problem—if at the expense
of a great deal of the variety of the early soft style.
The support sector of the film industry cooperated in the introduction of soft-style technology. Members
of the ASC would test new lenses and make recommendations for changes. In 1922, Brown’s series on
‘Modern lenses’ included a report on a soft lens for still cameras, the Graf Variable, which was about to
appear on the market for motion-picture cameras as well. Brown had tested the first one made and reported
favorably on it to American Cinematographer readers. He ends his series by urging other cameramen to
help American companies to test their lenses and thereby to surpass German lens makers. At least some
laboratories were willing to give the kind of individualized service demanded for complicated soft effects.
Tom Storey, who had collaborated with Seitz at Metro’s laboratory on the developing of Four Horsemen,
opened his own laboratory in 1922; Storey was called ‘a believer in individuality in photography and plans
to work directly with cameramen whose film he handles, giving personal service and attention to every
detail.’57 Such cooperation would foster the dissemination of the soft style, since laboratory personnel could
learn the techniques from the experimenters, then suggest them to other cinematographers seeking advice.
Since sound negatives had to be developed by machine to ensure absolute uniformity of contrast in the
track, cinematographers could no longer order custom hand-developing after the silent period. Instead, some
studios decided to standardize a soft, slightly diffused look to their films. The result was a relatively uniform,
low-contrast, slightly fuzzy gray look. Heavily gauzed close-ups would still stand out as fuzzier than the
long shots, but the difference was not nearly so noticeable as it had been in the early twenties.
Sound took the soft style partially out of the cinematographers’ control and made it a matter of studio
policy. In effect, the soft style became more pervasive, but less varied. It was also cheaper. Rather than
spending costly time on the set arranging gauzes or in the laboratory concocting special developing
formulas, studios demanded a narrower set of options. Adjustments of the lens would throw a background
out of focus; standard filters and developing baths could give all shots a similarly gray look; the softer
panchromatic film stocks introduced in the late twenties and early thirties also promoted low contrast. The
inefficiency of the twenties soft-style filming was eliminated, but at the expense of novelty, and, arguably,
of some quality. The soft style has remained with us to the present to some degree, but the twenties
probably represented the height of cinematographers’ control of this technique.
22
The Mazda tests of 1928
DAVID BORD WELL
I confidently believe, however, that in the course of a few years the present system of motion
picture lighting will be replaced by a system of illumination by incandescent lamps.1
Frederick S.Mills, 1921
In early 1928, Hollywood technicians were mobilized for a common effort of unprecedented scope. On a set
donated by Warner Bros, open every weekday and some evenings, forty cinematographers exposed 800 hours
of film. The purpose was to test panchromatic film and incandescent lighting under studio conditions.
Today, this massive enterprise is almost wholly forgotten. Historians do not mention it; the films are
apparently lost; many participants have only faint recollections. Yet the Mazda tests, as they were called at
the time, are of capital importance in the history of Hollywood technology. The tests established service
firms as the chief sources of systematic, industry-wide technical innovation and made the Academy the
coordinator of largescale technological change. At the same time, the 1928 tests forged the links among the
Academy, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and the service sector that made for efficient technical
progress.
The film industry’s conversion to sound did not directly trigger the studios’ interest in incandescent lighting
on the set. At first, cutting production costs supplied a more compelling motive. The 1926–7 film season
had shown a marked falloff in earnings, and studios were eager to cut expenses.2 Incandescent, or tungsten,
lighting (also called ‘Mazda’ lighting because of the GE trademark) seemed to many producers one step
toward lower costs. Although arc and mercury-vapor lamps were the chief types of studio lighting during
the early 1920s, some cinematographers used incandescent lighting occasionally, and many cameramen
expected incandescent light eventually to become the industry standard. In 1927, with a growing use of
panchromatic film and a greater demand for production economy, several studios began to use
incandescents. Tungsten lighting was thought to be more efficient than arc lighting for several reasons:
incandescents used less current, required less maintenance, were simpler to change, and were more
portable. In late 1927, nine studios went on record as believing that using incandescents had cut lighting costs
in half, and some companies estimated that as much as two hours of production time per day could be saved
by the ‘inkies.’3
At this point, however, incandescent lighting was crude and unsystematized. Most studios were building
their own fixtures or converting arc units, while a few studios were buying units from the new firm of Mole-
Richardson. There was no standard and many production problems remained to be solved. In November
1927, at a meeting of the Academy Technicians’ Branch, two members predicted that incandescent
illumination would soon be universally adopted. (It is likely that the knowledge that Warners had
experimented with Mazdas for its talkies made the issue even more pressing.) The problem was that very
few cinematographers knew how to use tungsten lighting. As a result, the Technicians’ Branch proposed a
series of tests, to be coordinated by the branch and the American Society of Cinematographers.4
Such tests constituted an ideal project for the newly formed Academy, but it also offered the SMPE an
opportunity it had been awaiting. Since its founding, the SMPE had few members on the West Coast; nearly
all the service firms were in New York, Rochester, Boston, and Chicago. At its spring 1927 convention, the
SMPE discussed the need to form strong bonds with Hollywood. K.C.D. Hickman’s paper, ‘Hollywood and
the Motion Picture Engineers,’ insisted that the manufacturing and research sector had to connect with its
customers:5
We have firstly to disseminate continually and all the time general scientific knowledge, together with
that practical instruction so prized by the field worker; and secondly, we have to get the other man to
describe his business so that we may anticipate his needs of tomorrow. This is not a kindness nor even
a duty. It is a commercial act as necessary as advertisement to a soap manufacturer.
The solution, Hickman claimed, was to bring Hollywood technicians into the SMPE, even though they were
not scientists in any strict sense. Hickman’s point was reinforced by a warning from Eastman Kodak’s John
I.Crabtree. He pointed out that there was just beginning in Hollywood a new professional society, the
Academy, and there ‘the engineer is only in a minority; in other words, the society would include actors,
scenario writers, and so on, and engineers. Once that society is established, I don’t know where the Society
of Motion Picture Engineers will fit.’6 The result was that the SMPE scheduled its April 1928 convention for
Los Angeles.
The timing was superb. After the Academy’s Mazda tests had been planned, J.A. Ball of Technicolor
suggested to the Technicians’ Branch that the lighting demonstrations be held just before the SMPE’s April
convention, since that would make it easier to attract experts from the major manufacturers.7 As it happened,
the results of the tests were announced immediately after the SMPE convention.
Since most studios were already convinced of incandescent lighting’s cost efficiency, it is plain that most
participants were not interested in comparing arc light to incandescent. (Nor did the tests address the
usefulness of mercury-vapor lamps, since the latter favored the green band of the spectrum and were thus
unsuited to panchromatic film.) Some emphasis, of course, fell upon production economy, and a few tests
measured one system against another with respect to labor and production time. But most tests assumed the
feasability of Mazdas and went on to explore their range and determine their weaknesses. What the
producers wanted was practice in using incandescents, information on how one could use them most
efficiently, and a means of notifying suppliers what to supply. It was important, then, that manufacturers
participate in the tests. The Technicians’ Branch invited all suppliers of incandescent equipment and
panchromatic film to send representatives and new equipment. General Electric contributed thousands of
dollars worth of lamps, and Mole-Richardson sent their entire line of products. Du Pont, Eastman, and Agfa
supplied free film and processing. Max Factor donated a make-up artist and make-up materials. Eventually,
over a dozen service firms participated in the tests.8 For the first time, the manufacturers had a chance to
display their wares for systematic comparison.
The tests were conducted between 18 January and early March of 1928. All members of the ASC and of
the Academy were invited to use the facilities. Aside from the daily tests on Warner Bros’ set, twelve major
public demonstrations were held. The ASC edited the 72,000 feet of film into eight reels and screened them
on 17 April at the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Since the SMPE convention had ended only three
days before, many members extended their stay to see the film and to participate in the discussions that
followed.9
534 THE MAZDA TESTS OF 1928
The Academy proposed no official recommendations at the close of the Mazda tests, but it was hardly
necessary, since the adoption of incandescent lighting had been felt as almost inevitable.10 The ASC made
its own position clear:11
It was decided from the results obtained in the tests that the tungsten incandescent lamp is superior to
all other types of light source now in use in the following respects: convenience; economy of power
and operating labor; ready controllability; freedom from smoke and dirt; superior color of light
permitting correct tone reproduction of colored objects when used with panchromatic color sensitive
motion picture film.
Moreover, thanks to the tests, engineers and manufacturers now knew more exactly what problems
Hollywood had with Mazdas and panchromatic. Early in 1928, the Academy had already assembled and
disseminated a dossier of studio attitudes toward Mazda lighting, including criticisms (that the light was too
diffuse, too weak, too hot). These dossiers were made available to the manufacturers. At the close of the
tests, the results were published as Academy Report’s No. 1: Incandescent Illumination, and the document
was sent to the research departments of the firms, as a guide to innovation and development.12 This was the
manufacturers’ chance to do what Hickman had suggested: to get the other man to describe his business.
The Mazda tests were a turning point in the history of Hollywood technology. For one thing, they
established incandescent light and panchromatic film as the industry’s norm for three decades. It is often
thought that sound filming directly caused the adoption of panchromatic and tungsten lighting, but we can
now see that the case was more complex. It was while the Mazda tests were under way that The Jazz Singer
was recognized as a box-office success and that the major studios signed with ERPI for sound rights (May
1928). When the Academy published the official test reports in July 1928, the first alltalking feature, The
Lights of New York, was released.13 Thus investigation into panchromatic film and incandescent lighting
paralleled and reinforced Hollywood’s decision to adopt sound. As Charles G.Clarke puts it: ‘When sound
came, we were ready.’14 (See fig. 22.1.)
Stylistically, the tests reflected certain classical principles developed before the 1920s. The Warner Bros
set, for instance, was a baronial hall with fireplace, easy chairs, table, piano, and raftered ceiling—a typical
upper-class interior for a silent film. Test exposures were made to the established formulas of camera
distance and angle. Records of the test films reveal incipient narrative situations, as when a young man and
woman in evening clothes greet one another in a room, or when the couple, sitting in a darkened library, are
interrupted by the woman’s father.15 Most important, the decision to match incandescent lighting with
panchromatic film favored the dominance of a somewhat diffused photographic style. The previous chapter
has shown that the heavily diffused soft style was one option in the 1920s; Mazda lamps helped any film
obtain a moderately soft look akin to that of the prestigious late silent films. As one cinematographer put it
in the Academy report: ‘In order to obtain soft photography with Arc lights it is necessary to diffuse. The
Mazda lamp, on the other hand, has a softness to it that does not need the amount of diffusion, if any,
required by the hard light.’16
The 1928 tests constituted a turning point in still other ways. In the short run, service firms that adapted
to the prevalence of incandescent lighting prospered. During the tests, Max Factor created a make-up for
panchromatic film that became the industry standard. Mole-Richardson, virtually the only company
manufacturing incandescent equipment, flourished.17 In the long run, the Mazda tests established the
Academy as the coordinator and clearing house for technical innovation. The SMPE, for its part, obtained
its link to Hollywood. At its April convention, held under the Academy’s auspices, the Society hosted many
papers from Hollywood industry workers— scriptwriters, directors, laboratory technicians, and theater
managers. More importantly, the workers were exhorted to join the SMPE under premises that considerably
stretched its conception of the professional engineer: ‘Every man contributing a real part in the motion picture
industry qualifies as an engineer.’18
Most significantly, the Mazda tests, coming on the heels of the Vitaphone shorts, Don Juan, and The Jazz
Singer, mark Hollywood’s recognition that it needed to support technical research in a directed, explicit
way. The Academy gave the SMPE a banquet at the close of its convention, and the engineers took the
opportunity to lecture their hosts on the necessity for industrial research and development. A representative
from General Electric pointed out that in modern companies, scientific research was considered an
investment. C.E.K. Mees, founder of Eastman’s research laboratory, said that now, thanks to the SMPE, the
producers could cooperate closely with the manufacturers.19
Before the Mazda tests, technological innovation was fairly haphazard and uncoordinated, relying on
individual firms such as Cooper-Hewitt, Eastman, and Bell & Howell, or on institutional imperatives such
as the creative role constructed for the cinematographer. After the tests, Hollywood had a network for the
organized articulation of technical questions and the systematic search for answers. On 20 April 1928, at the
very close of the Mazda tests, the Academy announced its intention to create a technical bureau which
would use ‘all research laboratories for the immediate benefit that we ourselves can gain.’20 The bureau
would contract with firms to solve particular problems, standardize materials with the cooperation of the
Federal Department of Standards, and eventually create its own research laboratory. On 8 August 1928, the
Academy Technical Bureau was established.21 The bureau’s head was J.A. Ball—a principal engineer at
Technicolor, an active member of the SMPE, a founding member of the Academy, and the man who had
proposed synchronizing the Mazda tests with the SMPE convention.
23
The introduction of sound
DAVID BORD WELL
The talking pictures of the future will follow the general line of treatment heretofore developed
by the silent drama. They will be motion pictures in which the characters will talk by audible
speech instead of printed subtitles. The talking scenes will require different handling, but the
general construction of the story will be much the same.1
Frank Woods, Secretary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1928
Attempts to synchronize sound and image were part of Edison’s research program, and several firms
introduced technologies through the early 1920s. Invariably, synchronization and amplification systems
proved inadequate, and exhibitors failed to adopt the equipment. As Douglas Gomery has shown, the
decisions by Warner Bros and Fox to introduce sound in the mid-1920s eventually forced the major firms to
compete. Warners and Fox, both minor firms, saw the technology as a method of product differentiation and
a means of appealing to smaller exhibitors unable to afford a live stage program of the sort offered in the
first-run theaters. Drawing upon Western Electric’s corporate research program and control of patents,
Warner Bros formed Vitaphone in 1926 and embarked on a strategy of step-by-step introduction of sound
films. Fox brought out its Movietone News later that year. The success of these endeavors was apparent. In
early 1927, MGM, First National, Paramount, Universal, and Producers Distributing Corporation requested
the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, the industry’s trade association, to investigate
the competing sound systems. In May 1928, the major firms signed with Western Electric’s subsidiary
ERPI and the industry faced a wholesale conversion of its equipment and production procedures.2
With the shift to a new technology came adjustments in film style. This chapter first examines how the
technology was standardized through the efforts of Hollywood’s institutions. Once we understand this
process we can consider the logic of image/sound relations that adjusted sound to classical norms. Finally,
the chapter considers how certain stylistic devices, such as editing schemata and camera movement,
changed with the introduction of sound.
Technical agencies and the standardization of sound

The 1928 Mazda tests may be regarded as a trial run for the technological standardization required by sound.
Indeed, in 1929, the Academy claimed that research into sound was modeled upon research into
incandescent illumination. The situation was simply more intensified. Sound firmly initiated a pattern of
industry-wide expansion and cooperation. In the silent era, most technological matters had been left to the
cameraman, the laboratory, the studio machine shop, and a few key manufacturers. With sound film
production, however, studios had to acquire expensive and sophisticated equipment. In the silent days, the
cinematographer had often supplied his own camera; now a studio required a department and a staff to maintain
its cameras. Editing changed from a scissors, glue, and rewinds operation to one requiring more elaborate
equipment (gang sprockets, machines to number sound frames, the sound Moviola). More importantly, film
companies began to rely more heavily on trained engineers, draftsmen, and machinists. In the silent era,
such men had worked primarily for manufacturers; now a studio might well employ a staff of these
experts.3 Furthermore, producers became dependent upon manufacturers and professional associations to an
unprecedented degree.
To solve some small-scale problems, producers could call on their own ‘research’ departments. Most
studios had machine shops for solving day-to-day practical problems, but the introduction of sound created
larger research facilities in some studios. At Paramount, for instance, Farciot Edouart took the lead in
studying and improving various rear-projection systems. At MGM, John Arnold and Douglas Shearer,
heads of camera and sound departments respectively, created a tradition of in-house research. In these
studios, when a researcher arrived at a design, the studio shop would built a prototype. If that showed
promise, a manufacturer would be requested to produce the equipment for the studio’s use or for wider
marketing. Articles in the professional journals and demonstrations at SMPE, ASC, and Academy meetings
could serve to publicize the device. For example, in 1929, Shearer assigned his staff to build a flexible
microphone boom. The MGM shop built a prototype, then asked Mole-Richardson to produce several. By
the next year, the Mole-Richardson Boom was enthusiastically promoted and came into use in the major
studios.4
Such demands on outside firms caused a great expansion in the technical service sector between 1928 and
1930. Kodak established the Eastman Service Building on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1929; the facility was
equipped with a lounge, a reference library, a test laboratory, and a private theater, all at the disposal of
cinematographers. Later in the same year, Du Pont furnished its Hollywood building with a ‘baby set’ that
would enable cinematographers to make tests. Mole-Richardson, prospering with the general adoption of
incandescent lighting, moved to expanded quarters in 1928, built an addition a year later, and by June of
1930 employed fifty-seven engineers, technicians, and clerical personnel. In 1929, the Mitchell Camera
Company opened a new, bigger factory. By the end of 1930, Eastman had completed an up-to-date film
processing plant in Hollywood. Outside Los Angeles, manufacturers were no less responsive. In 1929, Bell
Telephone built a New York research laboratory devoted entirely to solving problems of sound film.5 At the
same time, in Chicago, Bell & Howell completed its large Rockwell Engineering Laboratory, declaring that
the four hundred engineers in this facility would devote themselves to innovations and standardization in
motion pictures and that the laboratory was at the disposal of the industry: ‘Assignments on any phase of
new picture developments are invited.’6
The growth of manufacturers still did not empower them to solve the film industry’s problems of
development and standardization. It was the Academy that took over the function of coordinating the
service companies and the professional organizations with the production sector. Representing the studios,
the Academy defined the industry’s needs and goals. As early as September of 1928, the Academy’s
Bulletin claimed that ‘The Academy with its five creative branches is obviously the only central clearing
house for this essential process of self-education on sound synchronization.’7 Between May and October of
1928, the branch units held thirteen major meetings on problems of sound film. At a higher level, the
Academy went beyond simply sharing information. It took the initiative in articulating and solving
technical problems by creating the Producers-Technicians Committee out of Ball’s Academy Technical
Bureau. Chaired by Irving Thalberg of MGM, this crucial committee consisted of producers drawn from the
major studios and of representatives of such organizations as Technicolor, ERPI, RCA, and the SMPE. From
1929 to 1931, the committee conducted a series of recording courses which established a common set of
538 THE INTRODUCTION OF SOUND
sound procedures along what Frank Woods called ‘non-competitive lines.’ By May of 1930, 900 studio
employees had finished the course.8 The Producers-Technicians Committee took another step toward
uniformity by isolating the three most pressing problems of the transitional period—silencing the arc lamp,
silencing the camera, and constructing soundproof set material. A series of subcommittees, always including
engineers from ERPI or RCA, adopted an inquiry method modeled on that of the Mazda tests: surveys of
studio practice, tests under controlled conditions, consultations with firms, and publication of results. The
Academy disseminated the Committee’s recommendations to the production companies, the professional
associations, and the manufacturers.9
Once the Academy had defined critical production or exhibition problems, it could work with the
manufacturers and the professional groups to solve them. Consider the problem of silencing the arc lamp.
Although incandescent lighting had been proven superior for panchromatic film, the early Mazda bulbs
lacked both the carrying power and the sharp shadows yielded by arcs; many cinematographers preferred
the arcs’ photographic quality. In great numbers, Mazdas were also very hot. Moreover, if the studios
abandoned the arc, they would be throwing money away. A representative of the National Carbon Company
pointed out that in 1928 the studios owned between two and three million dollars’ worth of arc lamp
equipment, and it would be a severe loss to discard it all. Yet arc lamps gave off a highpitched whistle that
microphones picked up. In spring of 1930, the Producers-Technicians Committee investigated how various
studios silenced arc equipment. The committee found that Fox’s chief engineer had devised a choke coil to
filter the commutator ripple of the arcs. The committee concluded that the choke coil was the best
solution.10 Other studios did not hasten to return to arc lighting (chiefly because Eastman Kodak quickly
introduced its Type II panchromatic film, balanced specifically for incandescent light), but research by the
National Carbon Company continued in the 1930s, and the results were disseminated through the technical
journals. This work proved essential when Technicolor demanded quiet arc lamps in the middle 1930s.
Aided by the SMPE’s engineering efforts, the Academy established links to key manufacturers during the
transition to sound. The Academy tacitly strengthened major suppliers by inviting representatives of
Western Electric, Movietone, and other firms to conduct demonstrations at branch meetings. The
Academy’s power over equipment standardization is well-illustrated by the work done on camera silencing
devices. Given the demands of the classical style, camera noise became a vexing problem: just as the viewer
should not glimpse the camera’s reflection in a mirror, he or she should not hear the camera’s whir. Once
the problem of silencing the camera was defined, the Producers-Technicians Committee narrowed the range
of acceptable solutions. The subcommittee, consisting of the vice-president of ERPI and an engineer from
RCA, surveyed the various booths, bungalows, and blimps used in the studios to muffle camera noise.
Manufacturers cooperated: Mitchell furnished data on camera maintenance and ERPI donated access to its
laboratory. In 1930, the committee proposed an ideal, standardized blimp, which a Pathé engineer promptly
built; the design won an Academy Award. At the same time, Mole-Richardson used the academy’s
recommended specifications to design tripods which would support the new blimp. But the blimps were still
too heavy to be efficient on the set. After surveying sixty cinematographers, the Producers-Technicians
Committee learned that most wanted the camera body and mechanisms to be silenced, and so the committee
resolved to consult with the manufacturers.11 When the Research Council superseded the committee, it took
camera silencing as a major goal and decided to help in several ways:12
To coordinate the ideas of individual experimenters, assist the manufacturers and provide facilities in
the studios for further development work if necessary. To draw up specifications for the guidance of
manufacturers…. To supervise tests of any new cameras and associated equipment.
With this support, Bell & Howell, Mitchell, and the Fox studios worked throughout the 1930s to create
silent-running cameras.13
Throughout the decade, the academy continued to monitor sound innovations. The presence of RCA and
ERPI representatives on the Producers-Technicians Committee was essential, for these were the outside
firms best equipped to undertake far-reaching innovations in sound recording and reproduction. It is
important to recall that such firms and not the film industry created sound-on-film in the first place; as
Gomery has shown, it was Western Electric who approached Warner Bros and the private research
laboratory of Case-Sponable who approached Fox. The most basic equipment—microphones, recorders,
speakers, and synchronous motors—had all been developed outside the film industry, in radio, phonography,
and telephony. Once the studios and the professional organizations had laid out the direction of inquiry, the
gigantic research capabilities of ERPI and RCA were turned to the solving of particular problems. Between
1932 and 1935, the two firms created directional microphones, increased the frequency range of film
recording, reduced ground noise (resulting from the particle size of the recording medium—optical film—
and from residual noise from amplification systems) and extended the volume range with ‘push-pull’ sound
tracks. Such developments impelled the Academy Research Council to sponsor an updated series of sound-
recording courses for studio workers in 1936. The basic course was conducted by an ERPI engineer, and
over two hundred technicians attended. A year later, under the aegis of the Academy, the major studios
adopted a uniform recording characteristic to insure comparable reproduction. The later part of the decade
saw even more important improvements: RCA’s ultraviolet recording system (1936) which increased
frequency response, its ‘high-range’ process for greater volume range (1937), the achievement of multiple-
channel recording (1938), and the adoption of fine-grain film for better variable-density recording (1939).
While the Academy neither financed nor innovated such improvement, in its role as a clearing house it
made the industry’s needs known and helped spread and organize a uniform usage of the innovations. Once
a certain standardization in recording was accomplished, the Academy turned its attention to standardizing
reproduction through a series of recommendations concerning theater sound.14
Style: the image-sound analogy

What was stabilized by all these efforts? What purposes governed the adjustments, modifications, and
revisions of technology? Sound cinema was not a radical alternative to silent filmmaking; sound as sound,
as a material and as a set of technical procedures, was inserted into the already-constituted system of the
classical Hollywood style. This meant that sound technique was on the whole brought into conformity with
silent filmmaking norms. Throughout the practices and discourses of the technical agencies from 1927 to
1932, one finds a highly coherent set of analogies between image and sound, between the visual and the
auditory construction of narrative space and time. In these analogies, the recording of speech is modeled
upon the way cinematography records visible material, and the treatment of music and sound effects is
modeled upon the editing and laboratory work applied to the visual track.
In the technical discourse of Hollywood during the 1930s, the link between sound recording and
cinematography rests upon a biological analogy. Combined, camera and microphone resemble a limited but
lifelike human body. ‘The technic of acoustic control,’ claimed the most influential article on sound
recording, ‘is based on letting the camera be the eye and the microphone the ear of an imaginary person
viewing the scene.’15 From this analogy there extend many parallels. Just as cinematography is monocular,
sound recording must work with only one ‘ear.’ Technical adjustments must compensate for this: the
cinematographer must work to create an impression of visual depth and the sound recordist must create
‘sound perspective.’16 To the cinematographer’s control of space through lighting and composition
corresponds the recordist’s control of volume and reverberation:17
The resulting flatness or ‘depth’ in recorded sound is comparable to the lack of perspective in a
photographed picture…. These handicaps can be overcome to a certain degree by careful attention to
the acoustic conditions existing within the set in sound recording, and by skilful lighting of the actors
and their backgrounds in photography.
Sets must be designed not only to provide convincing visual depth but also to evoke auditory space. Just as
manipulation of focus and framing eliminates unwanted background detail, techniques for reducing ground
noise create a ‘foreground’ vocal space: ‘Because of the background of silence, the player’s voice is more
lifelike than ever.’18 One sound engineer compared sound recording to lighting by defining ‘high key’
sound (for comedies), ‘low key’ sound (for drama) and ‘contrasted’ sound (for melodrama).19 And while the
cinematographer had his filters and diffusion lenses to govern the transmission of visual information, by
1931 the recordist had his wind gags, microphone baffles, and electric filters to compensate for boomy sets
or to distort speech deliberately (as for telephone conversations) .20
Furthermore, the vocal track must be as mobile as the visual track. For every cut from point to point there
must be an auditory shift as well. ‘I can give you a closeup of a sound, just as I can give you a closeup of a
person.’21 In the late 1920s, there was a considerable controversy about whether it was more ‘natural’ for a
close-up’s volume to be louder than the volume for a long shot, but by the early 1930s, it was evident that
volume should be in rough proportion to shot scale. This would maintain what William deMille called ‘the
proper illusion of distance.’22 It is not only cutting that raises this issue. How is the single ear of the
imaginary observer to accompany its single eye during camera movement? The earliest microphones were
stationary because they had their own amplifiers attached, and the slightest noise of movement would be
picked up. To follow sound it was necessary to rig several mikes and fade one up and one down as the actor
moved. Technicians worked to create mobile mikes, and in 1930, Mole-Richardson manufactured its
microphone boom. Later in the decade MGM and Mole-Richardson equipped the boom with a telescoping
arm and rebuilt it of aluminium. While the French director Jean Epstein was calling for a drastic disparity of
microphone and camera positions, for an independent path for the microphone and a formal play with sound
distance, the Hollywood aesthetic stressed a harmony of the moving camera and the moving microphone.
The mike boom was analogous to the camera dolly or crane.23 Like a camera carriage, the boom made it
possible to record continuous movement: ‘The microphoneboom operator on the set must “follow” as
skilfully as any Operative Cinematographer or Akeley-camera specialist.’24 And, like a camera carriage, the
boom could shift recording positions quickly and save production time.
In Hollywood’s conception of the monocular, monaural ‘invisible observer,’ sound was considered to
consist essentially of the human voice. Until the late 1930s, the post-dubbing of voices gave poor fidelity, so
most dialogue was recorded direct.25 More importantly, in sound cinema the voice became as central to the
sound track as the human figure was to the image track. Like bodily build and facial expression, the voice
individuates, it characterizes, it marks traits for narrative development, it gives access to psychological-
causal factors. Of course cinematic speech need not function in these ways, as we can tell from the
disembodied, anonymous voices that crisscross films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Le gai savoir, Marguerite
Duras’s India Song (1975), or Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931). But in Hollywood, dialogue constitutes
the chief vehicle of narrative action and must be personalized no less than body, face, and space.
The centrality of speech became a guideline for innovations in sound recording. Directional microphones
cut down reverberation from sets and reduced noise from the camera, allowing the dialogue to stand out
more intelligibly. Increasing the fidelity of recording through extended volume and frequency range
heightened the dramatic possibilities of vocal timbre, pitch, and loudness. Ultraviolet recording sought to
eliminate the ‘fuzzy high notes’ and sibilants: ‘Women’s voices will be especially benefited.’26 The primary
energy was thus invested in staging the visual spectacle —the human figures in surroundings—and
coordinating that with a staging of the characters’ voices. Body and voice, the person: that is what one
records, on image and on sound, for use in narrative.
In particular, many of the 1930s sound improvements aimed at a clearer articulation of the voice in
relation to music. This was important not only in the musical film but also in dramas, since in the late 1930s
the ‘symphonic’ score was becoming prominent. RCA’s ‘high-range’ process created at least a 6-decibel
difference between voice and music. Multiple-channel recording developed from a similar need to
guarantee the primacy of the voice. Throughout most of the 1930s, musical numbers were recorded on two
tracks—singing on one, accompaniment on the other—which would be balanced at the dubbing stage. For
One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), RCA engineers made it possible to record the orchestra on seven
tracks and the singer on one, all to be mixed later.27 Such innovations were governed by the assumption that
music must support the expressive human voice, the sonic equivalent of the face.
Since the voice is compared to the visual field that the camera records, sound effects and music become
important at later stages of production. What editing and optical effects are to shooting, sound editing and
dubbing become to sound recording. Editing and laboratory effects work over the visual track, selecting and
assembling shots, tightening transitions, blending scenes by dissolves or wipes, creating montage
sequences. Similarly, sound editing and dubbing rework the auditory track. The victory of Movietone’s
optical sound system over Warner’s disk system was at least partly due to the fact that putting optical sound
on film enabled it to be cut as freely as the visual track. In 1930, Moviola produced the first of many sound
models, and by the same year various sound takes were being cut together to assemble the best tracks. The
‘bloop’ or sound splice allowed unwanted sounds to be painted out of the track as easily as an unwanted
frame could be snipped. Edge numbering, already provided by the film manufacturer on the raw stock, was
introduced for the sound track as well, thus permitting perfect synchronization. By 1932, the average film was
said to be about 50 per cent re-recorded, and in the same year another editor reported that all sound effects
were put in the film after the picture track had been cut. Re-recording sound effects was also compared to
process photography: the sound ‘background’ of a restaurant crowd or a traffic-filled street was like the
back-projection added to give realism and to save money. The analogies generated corresponding
terminology regarding auditory ‘fades’ and ‘dissolves.’28
The clearest example of the assimilation of sound to classical norms has always been music. The chief
difference between silent and sound film composing was quantitative, in that less music was needed for the
dialogue film. This limited the formal inventiveness of the composer. The music could enter only in short
passages, bits and pieces to tie together a montage sequence, connect scenes, or underscore an action or line
of dialogue. Hence the chief formal device of film composing continued to be the leitmotif, the tag that
identified characters or situations. ‘Every character should have a theme,’ Max Steiner declared. ‘Music
aids audiences in keeping characters straight in their minds.’29 Erich Wolfgang Korngold boasted that
Anthony Adverse (1936) had a theme for ‘each major character, mood, or idea.’30 As we have seen in
Chapter 3, this practice was already a Hollywood convention in the silent era. Other parts of the film would
call for specially composed passages, all pleonastic: fanfares or songs for the opening credits, crescendos
for suspense, marches for military scenes, and so on. Although it became more fragmentary, film music in
the sound era still functioned as a factor in narrational continuity. Coming at the last phase of production,
music became the glue that joins scenes, the polish that brightens a point, or what Bernard Herrmann called
‘a kind of binding veneer that holds a film together.’31
The technical agencies, then, sought to map onto the sound cinema the classical norms governing the
visual track—norms going back into the silent cinema. Yet the image/sound analogy was only a partial one.
To some degree, sound actually changed the visual style of Hollywood films.
Let us take a particular pair of examples: Ernst Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (Warners, 1924) and his
remake, One Hour With You (Paramount, 1932). Granting important differences of narrative, several of the
scenes are enough alike to point up the range of stylistic alternatives. One scene in both films shows an
errant husband being seduced by his wife’s best friend. At the same time, his unsuspecting wife and his best
friend roam through the garden looking for them. The fundamental similarities are apparent: psychological
causality, parallel situations, motivic construction (a pesky scarf in one version, a tie in the second), spatial
coherence (the garden as a consistent locale, obedience to the 180° rule), and temporal unity (simultaneous
action rendered through crosscutting). One can even argue that the expository inter-titles in The Marriage
Circle find their functional equivalent in the spoken and sung address to the audience in One Hour With
You. Still, several small-scale differences are instructive.
For one thing, of course, the performances in the sound version are less mobile; in using voices to signal
the characters’ feelings, the later film plays down facial expression and bodily movement. Moreover,
although both scenes run almost exactly the same length, the silent version has several more shots (forty-
one as opposed to twenty-five; only three of the forty-one are titles). This means that the silent version’s
shots run about seven seconds each, while the sound version’s average shot length is almost eleven seconds.
Conversely, One Hour With You makes more use of camera movement. There are many reframings, while
The Marriage Circle has none. There is also much more panning and tracking in the sound version,
especially independently of figure movement. Finally, the later film’s photography has a softer, lower-
contrast quality; The Marriage Circle defines figures, planes, and volumes with comparative crispness.
These parallel sequences are emblematic of the relation of Hollywood’s silent style to its sound style:
differences of stylistic devices (voice, shot length, cutting rhythm, camera mobility) but fundamental
similarity of the systems (coherence of causality, space, and time). The transition from silence to sound was
a matter of finding functional equivalents: new techniques appeared, but they served constant formal
purposes. One technique might wholly replace a prior one; with the introduction of sound, dialogue inter-
titles left the classical paradigm. Or a device might simply become the preferred paradigmatic alternative, as
when refraining replaced quick cutting as a means of keeping moving figures centered. More complexly,
vocal expressivity might reinforce facial and bodily expressivity or it might become the chief transmitter of
story information, making visual cues secondary. Some stylistic devices of the early sound cinema, such as
over-the-shoulder shot/reverse-shot cutting and a moderately soft photographic style, were already present
in the late silent period (see Chapter 21). And we have already seen how the classical paradigm’s principles
continued to dominate sound cinema, through the work of the technical organizations in promulgating the
image/sound analogy. What needs explaining is how new stylistic devices came to supplant or supplement
old ones. The films of the transitional years 1928–31 show how fresh devices became functional within the
canonized systems and how they occasionally managed to extend those systems in new directions.
1928–31: multiple-camera shooting

There are some significant misconceptions about early talkies. Consider this typical description: The camera
stood still while the players mouthed their lines. Cuts were rare.’32 Or this, of Lights of New York (1928): ‘The
story stood still to record scenes of seemingly endless dialogue. The director cut sparingly, if at all.’33 But
such descriptions are inaccurate. For one thing, cutting is plentiful in these early talkies, with many shots
per scene (an average of thirty in Lights of New York). Furthermore, the camera itself is not at all still. It
may track in or out, and it frequently pans to follow character movement and reframes to center characters,
indeed much more so than in the silent cinema.
It is true that with the coming of sound, cutting did decrease somewhat. Between 1917 and 1927, the
average shot ran between five and six seconds; between 1928 and 1934, the length was closer to eleven
seconds. It is obvious that the shot lengthened to accommodate the speaking of lines. (Lest this be taken as
‘natural,’ we should remember that the continuity of speech need not be respected in the way that
Hollywood does. In Marcel Hanoun’s L’Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (1966), one medium-
length sentence is fractured into eight separate shots.) But in neither period can the average shot lengths be
explained by technical constraints. In the silent era, arc lamps began to flicker after a few minutes and rack-
and-tank developing set a limit of 200 feet on any one shot, yet there is no technological reason why every
shot was not one to two minutes long. When sound was introduced, incandescent lamps could be operated
longer than arcs, camera reels became standardized at 1,000 feet, and machine processing could
accommodate 1,000-foot lengths of film.34 Yet the shots in the transitional films of 1928–31 are still
comparatively short. In an era when every shot could have run ten minutes, the paradigmatic range of shot
lengths almost never exceeded twenty seconds; most commonly, a film’s average shot length would lie
between eight and fourteen seconds. Even the most talky and self-conscious example, the infamous Lights of
New York (1928), has an average shot length of only nine seconds. What is remarkable about the
transitional films is not how long the takes are but how relatively short they are; although the technology
permitted a shot to be drastically prolonged, Hollywood remained a cinema of cutting.
It is evident that the classical model continued to dominate filmmakers’ stylistic decisions. Part Three has
shown that by 1920, Hollywood had bound cinematic storytelling closely to cutting. There was an insistence
upon many shots, both to analyze a scene’s action and to intercut one scene with others. In Chapter 6, we
found that the post-1917 silent film would contain between 500 and 800 shots per hour. There were economic
and stylistic rationales for this heavily edited decoupage: a conception of the realistic quality film militated
against the long take (which was more susceptible to error); editing permitted personnel to adjust the
product in final stages of production; continuity cutting was seen as the chief narrational means for
manipulating space and time. Given the centrality of editing within the classical paradigm, the coming of
sound represented a threat. For both economic and stylistic reasons, the option of editing had to be
preserved. The task became that of inserting sound into the already existing model of filmmaking. The
immediate result was the standardization of multiple-camera filming.
Multiple-camera shooting, which was the dominant studio practice from 1929 to 1931, shows how hard
American filmmakers worked to maintain the classical model of film style (see figs 23.1 and 23.2). For,
after all, why not simply film with only one camera? Why set up the action to be filmed by two to nine
cameras simultaneously? The difficulties were formidable. Microphones had to be concealed, scenes had to
be lit for several angles, and most film shot was wasted. What made all this trouble worthwhile was the
option of cutting, especially cutting to a variety of angles. Silent filmmaking had developed the power of the
narration to penetrate the dramatic space, to analyze it from many angles. The psychological development
of the drama depended upon fluid shifts from long shots to angle and reverse-angle positions, to inserts, and
to close-ups. Wesley Miller pointed out in 1931 that the silent film’s ability ‘to cut from place to place, to
recognize no limits of time or space, had made it possible to play upon the imagination of the audience to
the point where they were almost in the scenes depicted before them on the screen.’35 This fluidity had to be
restored.
Multiple-camera shooting was not a new idea. In silent films, scenes of spectacle (such as the chariot race
in Ben-Hur) or scenes with unrepeatable actions (stunts, fires, crashes, explosions) would be filmed by
several cameras from different angles. It was not, however, until the Vitaphone shorts that multiple-camera
filming proved a necessity. Because the sound was recorded on disks, the action could not be interrupted for
a change of camera position, and post-synchronization was not yet developed. To avoid the ‘unfilmic’ stasis
of a single six-minute take, Vitaphone filmmakers shot with batteries of cameras.36 In The Light Cavalry
Overture (c. 1927), for example, the orchestra performance is filmed by three cameras. Even the Vitaphone
shorts with individual soloists use at least two cameras, yielding a full-figure framing and a plan américain.
It is thus no surprise that the earliest talkies have a repetitive, even routine, method of cutting up the
narrative space. A sequence from Lights of New York (1928) offers a prototype. Establishing shot: a 35mm
lens films the action from more or less straight on as the thugs wait in the Hawk’s office (fig 23.3). During
the conversation, we cut to medium-long shots from a camera filming from straight on or from a side angle
(figs 23.4 through 23.10). The enlargement of scale in these shots comes from the use of long focal-length
lenses, not from a physically closer camera location. The variety of camera positions (six cameras at two
general angles on the action) makes an effort to recapture the spatial omnipresence characteristic of silent
film narration.
This scene shows how multiple-camera shooting struck a compromise between the technical necessity of
sound and the filmmaking style of the silent era. At bottom, the sequence is perfectly classical: cutting
analyzes the space; the semi-circular arrangement of the booths guarantees obedience to the 180° rule;
matches on action are facilitated. But there is also a loss. In the Lights sequence, the framing is seldom
closer than medium shot. There are no high or low angles. Most importantly, now that shifts of shot scale
are effected through drastic changes in lens lengths, perspective jumps from shot to shot. For example,
cutting from figure 23.3 to figure 23.4 yields a move from a fairly short focal-length lens to a very long one
(probably 150–200mm). The sudden flattening of space produced by the longer lenses (figs 23.7 and 23.9)
is quite disconcerting. Yet if the cut-in is less drastic, we can wind up with odd lateral cuts, resulting from
two cameras placed side by side and using lenses of the same focal length (see figs 23.11 and 23.12, from
*Down stairs, 1932). Thus multiple-camera shooting does not completely recover the sense of penetrating
the scene’s space that changing camera positions and more moderate lens lengths supplied in the silent
cinema. One need only compare the shots from *The Show (1927, figs 23.13 through 23.14) to see how a
late silent film deploys a greater frontality of figures and variety of angles, and a volumetric shot/reverse-
shot space that enables the audience, as Miller put it, to feel that ‘they are almost in the scenes depicted
before them on the screen.’
The years 1929–31 saw consistent attempts to overcome the monotony of a sequence such as the Lights
of New York example. Scenes in On With the Show! (1929), Glorifying the American Girl (1929), and
*Applause (1929) use more high and low angles than does Lights. Other films place the camera booths at
more oblique angles to a conversation, so that a dialogue scene will contain over-the-shoulder shots. A film
like Moby Dick exemplifies how by 1930 the director could put the multiple cameras at extreme high and
low angles and create a variety of shot/reverse-shot patterns. The scene of Ahab’s brother and his wife (figs
23.15 and 23.16) is a good instance of how strongly the developed multiple-camera style resembled that of
later sound films. Hollywood made no attempt to explore systematically the possibilities of multiple-camera
filming for spatial disorientation and discontinuity cutting; not until Akira Kurosawa’s films (e.g., Record
of a Living Being [1955], High and Low [1963]) does an alternative aesthetic of multiple-camera filming
emerge. Hollywood was content to try to recover the conventional patterns of the silent film.
Multiple-camera shooting presented Hollywood’s technical agencies with two tasks. First, to insure
continued production, multiple-camera filming had to be made as efficient as possible. JSMPE, American
Cinematographer, and other journals disseminated information on how to stage and shoot in this fashion.37
Secondly, filmmakers were aware that multiple-camera shooting was only a short-term compromise. The
task was to return to the practices of silent production as much as possible: the action broken into bits, to be
staged and shot in controllable segments; a single camera which could be shifted easily to make one shot
after another; the ability to control timing and meaning during the editing stage.
Engineers and researchers thus turned to several problems. The camera had to be liberated from its
soundproof booth, which meant designing blimps and casings for the camera body. As we have seen, the
Academy Research Council spurred manufacturers to design quieter cameras and camera containers. The
camera also had to rest on a different kind of support. Wooden tripods transmitted camera noise to the legs
and floor, creating vibrations picked up by microphones. Moreover, the blimp had increased the weight of
the camera considerably. In the silent era, the cinematographer could quickly shift his camera and tripod
from spot to spot. But once out of the booth, the sound camera could no longer be supported by a tripod and
could not be moved so easily. So from 1930 onward, Bell & Howell, Mole-Richardson, Fearless, and other
firms introduced a series of rolling camera carriages (see fig 23.17). Dollies, perambulators,
‘rotambulators,’ and small cranes enabled the crew to set up one shot after another with an ease akin to that
of silent film production.38 By 1933, shooting a sound film came to mean shooting a silent film with sound.
By the end of 1931, the efforts of the technical agencies had succeeded, and the period of multiple-
camera filming ended. As a transitional form, it preserved the classical decoupage until a new technology
could be brought into conformity with the style and the work habits of the silent era. But multiple-camera
filming also extended the range of the classical style.
Talking pictures created a concrete and inflexible tempo for the Hollywood film. Duration in a silent
picture, even one accompanied by music, has a more abstract quality: crosscutting, inter-titles, ellipses, and
even the varying rates of shooting and projection create a malleable, plastic duration. What one writer called
‘the actual timeelapsed speed’ of the talkie was more fixed, rooted in the pace of recorded speech.39 In 1929,
the discrepancy between silent tempo and sound was highly visible; Harold Franklin hoped that ‘The abrupt
change of tempo when the dialogue stops and the action resumes will somehow be blended into a smooth-
running continuity.’40 The operative term is, of course, continuity. Given that sentences and speeches must
be tied to a coherent diegetic world, how can one preserve an even flow of sound and image? The
transitional period found several solutions: shorter and more plentiful scenes, the montage sequence, and
what one observer called ‘an almost constantly moving camera.’41
Considering their reputations for visual blandness, the 1928–31 talkies have a surprising amount of
camera movement. Tracking shots follow characters, travel down aisles or corridors, or begin on a detail
and glide back to a full view. There seems to have been a fad for starting a film with a striking camera
movement before settling down to a pithier shooting style (see, for instance, Sunny Side Up [1929] and
Street Scene [1931]). Such camera movements did not spring suddenly into existence; as Chapters 7 and 17
indicate, the German cinema’s mobile camerawork influenced Hollywood during the late silent era. Even
reframings—the dominant type of camera movement in the sound era—may be seen in many late silent films,
such as For Heaven’s Sake (1926) and *The Michigan Kid (1928). As with multiple-camera shooting, what
was one free choice during the late silent era came to be judged necessary and normal in the early sound period.
In this context, the celebrated camera movements in *Applause (Rouben Mamoulian, 1929) and Hallelujah!
(King Vidor, 1929) seem not individual innovations but extensions of common practice.
Moreover, we have seen that certain camera movements—lateral pans to follow characters and to reframe
compositions—were part and parcel of multiple-camera shooting. The long lenses scanned the space, just as
telephoto TV cameras pan back and forth across sports events today. Even after multiple-camera shooting
became rare, the lateral pan or track to follow action continued as a dominant stylistic device. A character
enters a room and walks to a desk. In a 1925 film, there would be an extreme-long shot of the room as the
character enters, then a long shot of the character walking, and then a medium-long shot of the character
halting by the desk. But in a 1933 film, the camera would frame the door in a medium-long shot and pan or
track as the character walks to the desk. Evidently the practice of scanning the scene from a booth suggested
ways that lateral camera movement could solve the problem of continuity and tempo that speech had
created.
Once clear signals had been sent from the production end, technical agencies strove to realize the
possibilities of camera mobility. The camera carriages of the sound era were created not only to convey the
bulky camera between setups but also to make moving shots. For instance, the 1930 Mole-Richardson
perambulator sought ‘to eliminate the difficulties encountered in the ceaseless changing from stationary to
travel shots or vice-versa.’42 Bell & Howell’s 1932 ’rotambulator’ was equipped with a rotating oiled base
that made for smooth panning. The 1933 Fearless Camera Dolly was a lighter machine, using hydraulics to
achieve smooth elevation. Sometimes units were built solely in order to execute complex moving shots: the
Universal crane used for Broadway (1929; see fig 23.18), William Cameron Menzies’s ‘perambulator-
elevator’ (1930), the Fox camera carriage (1933). The Academy sponsored demonstrations of new dollies
and booms. Technical journals announced the newest designs; professional conventions included displays
of equipment. Sometimes a studio staff would design a carriage that would then be built in quantity by an
outside firm. In 1930 Mole-Richardson modified a rolling tripod developed at MGM, and six years later Fox
and Fearless cooperated on a dolly.43 In sum, Hollywood’s technical corps responded to the demand for
increased camera mobility.
Although some cinematographers criticized the excesses of early 1930s camera mobility, there was no
doubt that camera movement had become a significant instance of virtuosity, a source of spectacle in its
own right. One writer pointed out that in All Quiet on the Western Front, the use of a crane turned an
ordinary scene into:44
an impressive and extraordinary example of the camera-man’s art…. Such photography, interspersed
throughout the more commonplace scenes, does much to determine the success or failure of any
motion picture. The problem of keeping the plot moving along and at the same time impressing the
beauty and color of the setting upon the spectator is solved in many cases by the camera crane.
As a continuity factor, camera movement appealed to the cinematographer’s pride in invisible

craftsmanship; as a fleeting display of prowess, camera movement testified to his expertise.
The vogue for flashy camera movements in the early 1930s is thus part of a larger process that includes
the re-introduction of refraining. All these camera movements helped the classical style recover control of
spatial and, particularly, temporal smoothness. Panning and tracking lent a greater sense of depth to the
shot; in this way, the mobile camera compensated somewhat for the flatness produced by the telephoto
lenses in multiple-camera filming.45 Joseph Dubray of Bell & Howell pointed out that although Hollywood
learned of camera movement in the silent era, The new technic proved invaluable as a means of sustaining
the tempo of an action which the spoken word has a tendency to slacken.’46 By the middle 1930s, writers
were praising dolly shots because they aided ‘the continuity and smoothness of action of the motion picture
story.’47 We have, then, a good example of different techniques being recognized as functionally
equivalent. As we saw in comparing The Marriage Circle with One Hour With You, the omnipresent point-
of-view which cutting had provided during the silent era was replaced to some extent by a ubiquity yielded
by camera movement. None the less, the fundamental functions which both techniques fulfilled—narrative
continuity, clear definition of space, covert narrational presence, control of rhythm—remained constant.
As a transitional form, multiple-camera shooting also affected production procedures of the 1930s. As
Chapter 19 mentioned, multiple-camera shooting created a new production role: the number of camera
operators increased, and the ‘first cinematographer’ became the supervisor. Another consequence was the
‘master scene’ technique. In the silent period, it was conventional to film each action in a separate shot
without substantial overlaps of action between shots. Multiple-camera shooting, however, accustomed
cinematographers and directors to having one complete record of the action in long shot. Edward DuPar
recalled that for the Vitaphone shorts, he operated the ‘close-up’ camera and often had to change lenses.
Every time he did, ‘a few frames of the picture would be lost, but as the long shot camera was going all the
time, we could always cut back and keep everything in sync.’48 For later features, the long-shot camera
provided an uninterrupted reference point —the so-called master scene or master shot. Although multiple-
camera shooting was abandoned, the ‘master shot’ concept held on. After 1932, it became standard practice
to film the entire scene once straight through in long shot. Then key actions would be repeated and shot
from closer positions. This procedure obviously allows control in editing: one always has coverage for
every action, always has a shot to go back to. (A few directors, such as John Ford, denied producers and
editors that coverage by refusing to shoot master shots.49) Such calculated overshooting produced a very
standardized set of choices at the editing stage.50
The differences between silent and sound visual style, then, can be seen as issuing in large part from
attempts during the transitional years 1928– 31 to retain the power of editing in the classical style. Slightly
longer takes, with more camera movement, emerged as functional equivalents for controlling spatial,
temporal, and narrative continuity. Technical agencies worked to make these equivalents viable and efficient.
It is during this period that basic premises of the classical style were transmitted into the sound cinema.
Part Five
The Hollywood mode of production, 1930–60

JANET STAIGER
24
The labor-force, financing and the mode of production
Chapter 19 examined the relationship between production practices and technological change, probably the
most significant of the factors in the means of production for this industry. This chapter will look at two
other aspects of the mode of production, the labor-force and the ownership and financing of the films. We
need to consider the interconnections between these factors and production practices. These
interconnections while present from the very start of the American film industry have usually been
considered most complex after the vertical integration of the major studios, the conversion to sound, and the
unionization of the labor-force. What traditional historians have tended to ignore is that laborforce activities
and financing reinforced rather than contradicted or changed the production system as it had been
constructed. In the case of the labor-force, we will find that union jurisdictional disputes and fights for
individual worker recognition reinforced and solidified the subdivision of the work and practices of
differentiation.
Ownership involved economic agents which contributed capital to permit the firm to operate. Some
historians have argued that the film industry changed when its financing methods shifted from capitalism to
advanced capitalism. While it is apparent that advanced capitalism affected the industrial structure, the
implications for the mode of production are not so clear.
The labor-force and the mode of production

Like the labor-force in any US industry, film workers wanted a greater share of the earnings through
increased wages and salaries and more favorable working conditions. And just as in any other industry, the
owners sought to avoid this, fearing loss of their profits. In the film industry, the labor-force was composed
of both management and non-management workers, each presenting different bargaining problems—also
the case in most industries. On the one hand, the industry perceived some skilled laborers and ‘talent’ as
contributing desired knowledge, craftsmanship, and special abilities. (Stars, for instance, were seen as
having a monopoly on a particular personality.) On the other hand, for work positions in which there was a
ready supply of willing and able replacements, the companies had a bargaining advantage. Thus, the
differentials between workers’ bargaining powers were large, and, as a result, the earliest labor coalitions
for collective action to improve wages and conditions arose in the less skilled work areas. The more skilled
and desired workers organized into guilds and only later into unions.1*
Since the earliest labor difficulties in the teens, a pattern of union and management conflict has occurred.
The firms used strike-breakers, and the organizing unions competed among themselves, slowing down the
workers’ gains. Murray Ross’s extensive history of the unionizing of the industry through 1941 traces a
classic pattern: workers strike, top management makes countermoves (in the interests of the owners), and
550 THE HOLLYWOOD MODE OF PRODUCTION, 1930–60
the State intervenes either to promote or retard union goals. (The State’s interest in harmonious industrial
relations during political and economic crises—wars and the depression—contributed to compromises and
evential recognition of the unions by the firms.)2
Yet one of the effects of union activities and State intervention was the reinforcement and solidification of
the division of labor. In many instances, unions battled less against the owners and more against competing
unions for jurisdiction of work functions. These struggles resulted in very distinctly drawn job boundaries.
Between 1918 and 1921 three major strikes produced compromises on wages, but the firms retained an open
shop. During these and future strikes, members of rival organizing groups not only crossed picket lines, but
offered their memberworkers at lower rates than the striking group. To solve this internecine warfare the
feuding unions drew strict jurisdictional boundaries. In 1925 and 1926, the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners achieved control over
general construction, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) acquired
jurisdiction for the actual processes of shooting films—constructing property and scenery, handling
lighting, and creating miniatures. With the internal dispute settled (and IATSE’s control of theater
projectionists), the film companies collectively recognized five unions in the Studio Basic Agreement of
1926. This union victory set the precedent for future collective contracts.
In subsequent years, squabbles broke out again and again among organizing unions, often when new
technology introduced new work functions. B.B.Kahane, vice president of Columbia, rationalized this in
1948 during another strike: ‘The issue simply is this: Who does what work, and who pays dues to whom.
That is an issue solely between the unions. It is not an issue between the unions and us.’ An instance of the
necessity to redefine lines (often done amicably despite the management’s representation to the contrary)
was the introduction of liquid rubber to replace textile padding of actors’ bodies. ‘In Hollywood, as elsewhere,
jurisdiction is frequently determined by the materials used or fabricated.’ This particular dispute was
avoided when the Motion Picture Costumers were alloted control of body padding and the Make-Up Artists
took responsibility for all rubber aids. Such earthshaking disputes were solved by the segregation of work
functions to very specific job positions which, in turn, were allocated to particular unions. When the state
and federal governments intervened, particularly after 1932, they also tended to codify whatever work
arrangement on which all disputing parties would compromise. As a result, unionizing practices did not
contest the production system; they reinforced and furthered the solidification of the subdivision of the
work.3
As important as prior accounts of unionization are, they do not stress an important area of labor activities
—the fight by individual craft workers for recognition and bargaining power. Proper recognition could lead
to greater personal power in contract agreements (beyond the minimums established in any union
contracts). As pointed out in Chapter 9, the industrial discourse encouraged the individual craft worker to
strive to attain the standards of the quality film and to innovate in acceptable ways. The worker seeks public
acknowledgment of his or her contribution to the film not merely because of pride, but also because the
worker’s future bargaining status is at stake. If a worker could gain recognition for either achieving the
standard of excellence or innovating successfully, then his or her bargaining power would increase. Two
major means of achieving public recognition were credits and awards, and, as a result, these became very
important to the worker.
The credit system was an early practice. Apparently at least by 1897 Edison added a title to its films
which carried the firm’s name and a copyright statement. The practice there was following US legal
constructions to retain property rights. (Company titles and trademark decorations became more elaborate,
particularly when illegal duplication of prints threatened profits.) In 1911, the industry credited Edison with
the innovation of listing the members of the cast on a brief introductory title card. Since Edison advertised
THE LABOR FORCE, FINANCING AND THE MODE OF PRODUCTION 551
its hiring of stage players, this is not a surprising move (and its carry-over from theater programs is
evident). Once the firms were exploiting the players’ names, the major reason to hold back on this credit
practice was the 1,000-foot limit of the one-reel film (and the viewers’ patience). In early 1912 Edison
added the story writer’s name (but not the continuity technician’s). The industry argued that this practice
encouraged submissions from famous writers and decreased possibilities of plagiarism. Other firms quickly
followed suit (see fig 24.1).4
Advertising in the US film industry exploited very few labor areas, in part because its product standards
emphasized the narrative. For the average consumer, the important labor areas were the stars, writers, and
directors—the most obvious creators of that narrative. These workers could use public recognition to boost
their ‘exchange-value’ to the firm, the same way that the firm used that public recognition as an exchange-
value to entice the spectator to its products. However, the function of screen credits for most of the other
workers was slightly different: the recognition sought was less public than intra-industrial. Credits tied the
name of a worker to a film and became a means of achieving status in the industry. As an instance of how
important this was to the workers, we can note the elaborate criteria which the writers’ guild set up to
determine credits for its members. Once it had become common for several individuals to write a film
script, overloading the credits with names did not acknowledge the dominant contributors or provide much
recognition for anyone. As a result, the 1932 Academy writers’ agreement and its 1934 revision tried to
provide a solution. All writers on a script would review the cutting continuity and final film and among
themselves unanimously decide on one or two names for the credits. (If they failed to make a unanimous
decision, credits were left to the studio’s discretion.) As the Academy explained:5
The object of reducing the number of writing credits on the screen is to give the screen playwright a
better chance for recognition in the industry and by the public. The names of the authors are big assets
to books and plays. For many years the names of directors have been built into assets in selling
motion pictures. Writers’ names can be made equally valuable, but never as long as from three to
seven names are used on the screen….
However, the writer has had to rely largely on his screen credits in securing work at other studios.
To acknowledge all the workers, the Academy published a monthly bulletin listing the writers on a film and
distributed it to relevant managers in the various firms.
Also symptomatic of this fight for recognition was the Academy’s activities to publicize workers’ efforts
with its annual awards. Achievement awards for the ‘best’ picture, the ‘best’ cinematography, special
achievement in scientific or technical contributions, and so on not only set up a state-of-the-art standard, but
also reinforced the workers’ attempts to achieve recognition in their work categories. In a production system
in which a laborer’s worth depended on the creation of exchange-value, credits and awards became very
important. As such the craftsman-laborer sought to achieve what the industry rewarded, and, consequently,
the worker achieved what the industry established as its needs: the quality film with acceptable innovations.
The activities of the labor-force, then, reinforced production practices. As unions compromised over their
areas of control, they defined strict divisional lines between work functions and positions. This was
necessary to insure workers’ job security and to improve salaries and working conditions, and the union job
definitions also confirmed the separation of conception from execution in film production. As a result,
Hollywood’s labor union activities intensified the structure. In addition, the fight for craftsmen-worker
recognition perpetuated the practices of standardization and differentiation. Workers used the advertising
function of tying a name to a film in hopes of future gain from recognition on the basis of the quality of that
film. The work of the Academy and subsequent craft organizations participated in the standardization of the
industry, including improving the product within defined parameters.
Advanced capitalism, the mode and the product

Two types of financing and ownership have occurred in the film industry: capitalism and advanced
capitalism (also called finance or monopoly capitalism). Advanced capitalism implies the concentration and
centralization of capital. It is characterized by a massive vertical and horizontal integration for economy of
scale, a shift from identifiable owners to joint-stock firms, and a multinational range in marketing control. The
standard analysis is that advanced capitalism in the general economy of the United States began to surge
forth around the turn of the century and that it definitely characterized the economy after World War I. Film
histories accept this characterization as applicable to the film industry, the shift being dated between 1919
and 1935. (The beginning of advanced capitalism in the film industry is Paramount’s movement into total
integration with its theater purchases in 1919. I date the end of the shift as 1935 because after 1929 several
of the major firms went into receiverships and bankruptcy; as the firms emerged from court control the
identifiable ownerships were dissolved into joint-stock ownerships.) Although there is no doubt that
advanced capitalism affected the industry’s structure and conduct, I am interested in a different question:
how does the financing of film production and the shift to advanced capitalism affect the mode of
production and the films?
How did financing affect the product? Outside financing of films started when production costs increased.
With the multiple-reel film and the star system, the firms expended a much higher outlay per film.
Simultaneously, the retention of ownership of the negative by the producer and the extended-run system
delayed the return on liabilities for up to a year. While waiting for this return, the studios needed outside
capital to finance new productions. By 1917 the companies used three major external financing techniques.
The studio might persuade a distribution firm to finance part of the negative costs. In this method, distributors
could deposit advance money from exhibitors in banks as collateral for loans to the producers. Thus the
distributors acted as finance arrangers (in many respects, as they do today). Or a studio might receive direct
financing from loans by private individuals (sometimes loan sharks) or banks and investment firms. Or a
studio might issue public stock underwritten by investment firms—a method which spread ownership and
helped move the firms into advanced capitalism.6
Whatever the method, the grounds for acquiring these external funds were always the difference between
being or not being able to make films. In early 1919, Paramount requested a loan of $10,000,000 from
Kuhn, Loeb and Company to purchase theaters. As investment bankers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company had been
financing public utility and industrial companies, so before deciding about the loan request, it asked an
affiliate to investigate Paramount and the industry. While the entire report demonstrated Paramount’s
dominance in the industry and its sound financial status, the basis for Kuhn, Loeb’s positive response was in
large part due to the perceived quality of the firm’s product.7 The method the investigator used to make that
judgment is symptomatic of the system of standards this book has been describing:8
In judging the quality of the company’s product, the investigating corporation mentioned three main
factors, dramatic material, stars, and directors. A large reservoir of dramatic material had been
established through arrangements by the corporation with authors and theatrical producers. A
comparison of the stars’ ages, salaries, and probable future screen life with those of other leading
producers showed the corporation to be in the lead. An equally imposing corps of directors was
employed.
Choosing these three factors provided an additional economic support for an ideological/ signifying practice.
With financing, and on that basis potential market strength, determined by the quality of the product, story,
stars, and directors were further reinforced as factors necessary to and dominant in product design. The
financiers explicitly supported and maintained Hollywood’s existent film standards.
In the 1920s, as outside financing increased, film finance firms organized for the sole purpose of
extending capital for negative production. These firms and the established banks and investment houses
continued to require these quality standards (plus good distribution) as the basis for the use of their capital
and banking facilities. A typical early film investment company was the Cinema Finance Corporation
formed about 1921 by a group of Los Angeles bankers, Harry Chandler (publisher of the Los Angeles
Times), Thomas Ince, and several other producers. The company, its secretary explained, furnished
financing on three criteria: ‘First, a producer’s demonstrated ability, both business and artistic, and his
absolute integrity. Secondly, a suitable story and cast, and thirdly, a satisfactory releasing arrangement with
reputable distributing company.’ As for the large established sources of capital, the Bank of Italy and the
Bank of America in California, for example, were involved in loaning funds to film firms from about 1912
on. Attilio H.Giannini, vice president of the Bank of Italy, explained that he required a financial statement, a
star lead, a solid story, and a known director. Producing firms with contracts to release through distributors
that owned their own theaters had a ‘distinct advantage’ over those that did not, and larger firms developed
a line of credit. Beyond that, Giannini said, he would stay out of managing the firm and the product. By
1927 he recognized a flourishing competition to loan money to film companies. Thus, financing by outside
capital reinforced not only the industry’s adherence to efficient, contemporary business practices but also its
product practices of the dominance of the story and the use of stars. Furthermore, in judging a firm, the
investors considered the director as a key manager. They looked at his ability to bring in a project on time
and to make that film within the norm.9
Besides understanding how financing affected the films, we can reformulate some implications of
advanced capitalism for the mode. In their analyses of the film industry and financing, earlier film historians
have responded to that theory of advanced capitalism most influentially formulated by Rudolf Hilferding’s
Das Finanzkapital (1910). Hilferding argued a theory of growth. The industrial revolution and business
competition at the end of the nineteenth century stimulated the concentration and centralization of capital
while an increase in size was useful for economical production and as a barrier to entry. Size became a
competitive advantage. Vertical and horizontal integration spread risks and insured stability in long-term
production, while formerly competitive firms found collusion more profitable than cut-throat competition.
Challenging neo-classical economics, the Marxist Hilferding believed that the concept of competition did
not work as a tool for analyzing business strategies once advanced capitalism developed. Prices, for
instance, were no longer determined by supply and demand; because of the oligopolistic and monopolistic
structures of collusion, firms could set prices to reap profits larger than under ‘pure competition’ markets.10
Many scholars (including Ernest Mandel) have expanded Hilferding’s analysis. With the growth of
external financing and joint-stock corporations, collusion could be direct. Financiers could place
representatives on boards of directors and control the industry and the economy through inter-locking
directorships. Of particular concern were the ‘spheres of influence’ of Rockefeller and Morgan.11
The problem for film historians was to apply this theory to the film industry and then to production
practices. In an early analysis, F.D. Klingender and Stuart Legg listed the growing involvement of
financiers in the film industry and went on to argue that the introduction of sound equipment (controlled by
the electrical and telephone companies) gave the Morgan and Rockefeller spheres of influence virtual
control over the major film companies. This was accomplished indirectly through their control of sound
equipment and patents and directly through the number of their key executives on the boards of directors.
Klingender and Legg do not theorize any change in production practices, but they do imply an effect on the
product. Writing in the middle of the 1930s depression, they claim: ‘Whether the movies will regain their
former financial success ultimately depends on whether the Morgans and Rockefellers will find it in their
interest in the unceasing change of American life to provide the masses with the type of pictures that alone
will induce them to flock to their cinemas.’12 Robert Sklar perceived the absurdity of this analysis: there is
‘every indication that Wall Street’s interest coincided with that of Hollywood’s old hands—to make as
much money as possible.’ (As a matter of fact, as we have seen, the grounds for financing film production
by investment houses explicitly supported the accepted standards of the quality film as well as profit
maximization.) Sklar then writes that it is not so important ‘who owns the movie companies but who manages
them.’13 Indeed, Klingender and Legg ignore the significance of management hierarchies which place
certain types of decisions in various work positions.
In fact, more recent analyses of advanced capitalism suggest revisions in our approach to its effects.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith and to Paul M.Sweezy, the first analysis of advanced capitalism was
inadequate in part because of its own logic and material history. Galbraith points out that financial spheres
such as Rockefeller’s and Morgan’s realms of interest still provide competition. In the film industry, the
historical evidence is that investment groups competed for control of the companies and that ERPI and RCA
(the major sound technology firms) both vied for the industry’s business.14
Sweezy argues against the Hilferding/Mandel analysis on other grounds: once an industry is oligopolistic,
companies shift to internal sources of funds, and banks and investment firms move into a secondary
position. After an initial use of finance capital for the transitional move to advanced capitalism, the power
of collusion and price setting and the distance between stockholders and managers permit the use of retained
earnings and issues of stock shares as sources of funds for growth. So although external capital may be
important for a while, the advantages of autonomy from factors external to the firm promote rapid
movement away from it. Sweezy’s formulation contributes two elements to a revised theory of advanced
capitalism. First, he reminds us that the State insures property relations; for instance, the federal and state
governments are willing to compromise with workers’ demands to promote industrial tranquility (which we
noted in the discussion on the film labor-force). Secondly, Sweezy argues that the theory needs to reanalyze
the significance of the conception of ownership to the means of production. In the classical Marxist
economics of the Hilferding/Mandel analysis, what is significant is who owns the means of production, with
the presumption that ownership equals control. That equation, however, is complicated by the joint-stock
company. After all, stockholders in advanced capitalism do not direct the capital of the company; managers
representing these owners do.15
Sweezy, joined by Paul A.Baran in Monopoly Capital (1966), suggests a new paradigm, one of the
analysis of ‘control’ of the firm, to replace the ‘sphere of influence’ theory. The ‘control’ theory shifts
interest from ownership to management—a move to cope with the shift from the owner-run firm in
capitalism to the manager-run firm in advanced capitalism. This model creates a necessity to theorize
managerial goals as distinct from owner goals.16 Management’s goals may not produce direct profit
maximization for the owners; instead, managerial actions may include retention of profits for corporate and
personal use.17 (This theorization provides the background for what Mae D.Huettig and others noticed
about the top film management: before payment of dividends, they voted themselves large salaries and
bonuses which in several cases caused stockholder suits.18)
The effects of the structural shift to manager-run firms are several, but two become important for
Hollywood’s mode of production. The first effect is the managers’ concern for the general growth of the
firm rather than high dividends. To control long-term planning and stability, the firm must expand, thus
insuring steady supplies of raw materials, provisions for capital, and minimization of risks.19* In the film
industry, growth led not only to the fully integrated firms of the 1920s through the 1940s, but also to the
conglomerates of the post-1960s. With growth comes the second effect—diversification and then
decentralization. Economists have linked decentralized management structures to complications produced
by diversified business functions. As a result, management functions continued increasingly to split between
strategic and tactical ones. As Richard Edwards points out, a complex management structure controls the
work (and the workers) through an ‘institutionalization of hierarchical power.’ Furthermore, effective
decision-making resides in diverse and multiple levels of the bureaucracy. Thus, not only top- but middle-
management may be central to business decisions. Galbraith argues, in addition, that in a highly
technological industry this separation may be further enhanced. It becomes difficult to question the
judgment of specialists and experts: a ‘distinction [must be made] between ratification of a group’s decision
based on information and actual decision-making.’20
This revised theory of advanced capitalism indicates new methods for analyzing the film industry.
Furthermore, when we study its implications to Hollywood’s mode of production, we find that advanced
capitalism confirmed the practices. The work structure and procedures remained as before, and middle-level
management retained its prerogatives over the routines of filmmaking. When earnings were inadequate,
boards of directors did not rearrange (or question) the work order but replaced the top manager, the head of
production. As Bing Crosby observed about the line dividing the front office from the rest of the studio:
‘Back of that line everyone has been at Paramount for thirty-four years or more; in front of it they change
every six months.’21 Middle-management, Galbraith’s effective decision-makers, continued to operate as
before, as did the entire system of structural control.
Pertinent, then, to a study of Hollywood’s mode of production is an analysis of who managed the firms—
an analysis which considers the stylistic paradigms and economic practices operating as received norms for
these managers. What advanced capitalism did do to the mode of production was to intensify the existent
mode by reasserting the production hierarchies of management. This reinforced the control of the
management structure, particularly the power wielded by the tactical experts whose knowledge of the
technology and work process placed product design in their control. Thus, the impact of advanced capitalism
confirmed the production practices, maintaining them as the established order. The standard became even
more the standard.
Independent production
In discussions of the move to advanced capitalism, one way to argue that the shift affected the mode of
production and films in the United States is to show that it shut off the small competitor. In the American
film industry, this usually translates into eliminating commercial independent production. Showing that
advanced capitalism and financing reinforced the dominant mode of production and group style does not
consider their possible effects on optional, subordinate modes and products. So it is important to analyze
not only the dominant system but also alternatives in the industrial structure and market, the most important
alternative being independent production. We need to consider independent production in the same terms
we have been using in considering the dominant system: the relations in its work process, its means of
production, the financing of its films, its conception of quality films, and its system of consumption.
What is an independent producer? Used loosely, the term applies to David O.Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn,
and Charles Chaplin in United Artists as well as to Monogram, Maya Deren, and Pare Lorentz. Temporarily,
I will use the term as it was generally used in Hollywood. An independent production firm was a small
company with no corporate relationship to a distribution firm. An independent producer might have a
contract with a distributor or participate in a distribution alliance, but it neither owned nor was owned by a
distributing company. The term also implied a small firm: independents produced only a few films per year.
Thus, they did not commit themselves to a full-year supply of product to exhibitors.
Independent production in this sense began to appear during the diffusion of multiple-reel films around
1911–14. While several economic conditions led to its existence, three stand out. A single producer-
distributor of multiple-reelers had difficulty gearing up production to the level necessary to supply all the
films an exhibitor could use during a year (104 for a twice-weekly change). The attempt to reach full supply
carried over from the ‘service’ period of the one-reelers, but it was also necessary for a conversion to a full
feature-film exhibition system.22 In addition, significant at this time was the growth in salaries, share-
returns, and box-office power to certain individual workers. Stars and other talents were able to finance
their own production companies by accumulating the necessary capital or by attracting investors. One more
factor promoting independent production was the strength of optional distribution alliances and states’-
rights exchanges which expected to deal with a multitude of sources for their product. First National and
other such distribution groups not only bought films from these independents, but they offered to finance
productions.
According to one estimate, independents made one-third of the features produced between 1916 and
1918. Price, Waterhouse explained several techniques an independent used to secure distribution:
contracting with a larger producer or distributor to manufacture a number of films on order (e.g., the
producers at United Artists); producing a film and then selling it; or making a film which the production
company then promoted and road-showed itself.23
In the early 1920s, there were plenty of outlets for independent films; for the 1925–6 season, states’-
rights distributors handled 248 of the 696 releases; First National and United Artists, an additional 60; with
an undetermined number within other national distributors’ output. As the last section pointed out, financing
was available from several sources, with judgments being made on the bases of a producer’s demonstrated
ability, a suitable story and cast, and satisfactory distribution.24
Independent firms often did not own the entire means of production. One writer in 1922 observed that
most producers did not ‘own, or even have entire studios for the filming of their pictures.’ Understandably,
a company producing only a few films a year could not maintain the costs of a physical facility and the
large staff necessary by then to make a standard quality feature film. Instead, these firms turned to such
facilities as United Studios which could supply not only space and equipment but support personnel as well,
organized in the standard departments. In addition to these rental studios, some of the larger companies
(such as Universal) also rented space and labor support to independents.25
The advanced-capitalism movement of the mid-and late 1920s changed the situation somewhat. As the
soon-to-be-majors consolidated and organized their control of first-run exhibition, the independent
production company found its access to the top-profit theaters cut off unless it had distribution contracts
with the majors or United Artists—although only a very few (e.g., Goldwyn) had the status of sufficiently
high-cost production to be in this position. Without the possibility of first-run distribution, financing from
outside capital sources became difficult. Another difficulty during this period was the industry’s conversion
to sound. Since the majors contracted for huge amounts of equipment, sufficient quantities for the
independent studios were not available until mid-1929. The depression, of course, added to the problem of
securing financing.26
By 1931, however, double-feature programming and its need to supply the demand of the second-and
subsequent-run houses for 208 films a year (two films for twice-weekly changes) gave independent firms a
resurgence. As the Motion Picture Herald reported:27
Practically all important independent theatres have now equipped with sound; a more substantial
response and favorable reaction has been felt from independents’ bankers, while the condition of state
right exchanges, after a hectic two-year period, now are [sic] beginning to assume a more healthy
aspect.
The paper reported the entrance of a number of new companies as well as the reactivation of others. Twenty-
two independents planned 192 features, 247 shorts, and 8 serials for the 1931–2 season.
This optimism continued, and within a year the independents formed a protective association, in part to
bargain collectively with the labor unions. In 1936, Sidney Kent, then president of Twentieth Century-Fox,
estimated that there were, besides the seven majors, twenty-five to thirty active producing firms which each
made between three and ten films a year. The ‘healthiest,’ such as Selznick and Goldwyn, released through
United Artists. Some such as Republic, Monogram, and Producers Releasing Corporation eventually
integrated into national distribution; others used states’-rights exchanges. Banks and firms such as
Consolidated Film Industries (a major independent laboratory) acted as suppliers of capital. Independents
continued to rent space and service from studios, with their rental costs balancing the overhead costs of the
major companies.28
Much independent production, then, was within the mainstream of the American film industry. In most
cases, independents followed the director-unit, central producer, or producer-unit system of management
(e.g., Chaplin, Monogram, Selznick). Nor was the overall mode of a detailed division of labor ever in
question; (the independents hired union workers too). This is of major importance in any analysis of the
Hollywood mode versus ‘independent production.’ Moreover, the type of financing was not at issue
(although getting it may have been). Some firms were privately owned; others used finance companies,
banks, and public stock issues—all just like the majors. Access to the standard technology was not a
problem (except for one brief period). Raw film stock, cameras, lighting equipment, and processing by the
same firms that supplied the majors were available to the independents. Usually the standard for the design
of the product was not an issue either. Finally, at least into the mid-1920s, access to first-run exhibition was
about the same if the firm’s production expenditures were comparable to the major companies.
With advanced capitalism, some narrowing of possibilities for independents did occur. Firms with higher
costs-per-film, firms with ‘talents’ and quality design, could still get national distribution in first-run
theaters. For other independents, if they adhered to the standard design but were without major first-run
exhibition outlets, their returns were limited, and, consequently, their best chance to compete was with the
majors’ B-product. Here the catch-22 situation operated. They could not get better financing without good
distribution, but to get distribution required evidence of a secure financial program and the ingredients for a
quality product.
Without a doubt, the majors did cut off first-run exhibition, thus good distribution, and thus prospects of
financing. Independents, however, potentially had access to subsequent-run theaters. Moreover, a large
number of unaffiliated exhibitors tried during the 1930s and 1940s to compete with the powerful affiliated
majors. Had an independent’s films been successful in trial cases, it would be reasonable for those interested
in profit maximization to support them.
Furthermore, some writers have argued a contradiction within the capitalists’ aims which might have
encouraged interest in unusual independent projects. The question is to what extent would major firms
support films which might advocate (even tacitly) political or social actions that might, on the long-term,
harm the capitalist system (e.g., positive representations of communism, criticisms of dominant political
policies). Terry Lovell points out that some firms might seek short-term profits despite any longer-range
disadvantageous effects. Thus, the capitalist might undermine his or her own goal of profit maximization. As
a result, independent projects, despite perhaps rather problematic content, might be financed if they seemed
to augur box office success.29
Thus, while the majors monopolized first-run exhibition and consequently the higher-priced product, a
conduct generally regarded as unfair competition, some independents competed with them, independents
had outlets in subsequent-run commercial exhibition, and independents with potentially profitable projects
might secure financing. Commercial independent production in the terms we have been analyzing the
dominant studio mode of production seems to have organized itself in similar fashion. Its relations in its
work processes were that of a hierarchy with divided labor; its means of production were identical;
financing came from the same sorts of investors on the same grounds, with some people owning the firm
and other workers being employed. Independent production’s conception of quality films generally was
within the classical paradigm; and its systems of consumption were commercial theatrical exhibition. If,
however, we widen our consideration of filmmakers to the likes of Maya Deren or Pare Lorentz, we do face
alternatives to Hollywood. Here do arise variations from the commercial mode, and we will consider the
issue of alternative modes of film practice in Chapter 31.
As we have seen in previous chapters, the production practices and product design constructed by the
American film industry did not change after 1930. The actions of the labor-force strengthened both the
subdivision of labor and the economic practices of standardization and differentiation. Likewise, once film
firms turned to external sources of capital, those sources accepted the industry’s assessment of what
constituted a profitable product. With the shift to advanced capitalism, the manager-run company reaffirmed
the control of the management structure and hierarchy. Finally, commercial independent production moved
with the mainstream of the system.
25
The producer-unit system: management by specialization after
1931
The ‘producer-unit’ system of production (1931–55)
Good pictures are created, not manufactured.1

Motion Picture Herald, 1931
Efficiency experts trained in other industries are usually baffled when they try to fit the making
of a movie to their standard rules. The fact is, a movie is essentially a hand-craft operation, a
one-of-a-kind custom job—but it must be made on a factory basis, with production-line
economics, if we’re to hold the price down within reach of most of the people. The job is to do
this without losing the picture’s individuality.2
Dore Senary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer, 1950
In 1931 the film industry moved away from the central producer management system to a management
organization in which a group of men supervised six to eight films per year, usually each producer
concentrating on a particular type of film. Like other changes in the mode, this introduced greater
specialization, in this case in the upper-management levels.
In fact, over the period of the central producer system, specialization in the producer function was already
occurring. Dominating the detailed division of labor from 1914 through the 1920s, the central producer
system had provided a single controlling manager over the production of a firm’s films. W.C.Harcus
described the 1930 typical studio organization for SMPE members: a general manager supervised the
production of fifty or so films per year. Under him were the executive manager (in charge of financial and
legal affairs and routine studio functions), the production manager (in charge of pre-shooting and post-
shooting work), the studio manager (in charge of various support departments), and a set of supervisors to
help plan the films. The prototypical example of the central producer at this time was Irving Thalberg at
MGM. Thalberg had gradually organized a set of subordinates, associate supervisors, the number of which
by the early 1930s had grown to ten men. Each of these men had an area of specialization: sophisticated
stories, animal stories, genre films and ‘curios,’ Marie Dressier films, sex ‘fables,’ and sad stories. With a
project in mind, Thalberg and the selected associate would assign a writer, a director, and the leads. The
associate then took over following the rewrites until a script was ready for Thalberg’s revisions. The
associate supervisor’s decisions about cost estimates, sets, costumes, the rest of the staff, and so on were not
final until approved by Thalberg. Despite this subdivision of supervision, a strong central producer was still
in charge.3
560 THE PRODUCER-UNIT SYSTEM: AFTER 1931
Howard Lewis explains that around 1926 when theater attendance declined some firms believed that the
films had become ‘stereotyped’ and attributed the problem to the fact that one individual had charge of
producing thirty to fifty films a year. A proposed solution was a system in which a number of producers
would supply product and the firm would merely finance the negatives. Lewis writes that the firm
considering this was diverted from the change by the sound and merger movements.4
In 1931 when attendance dropped off again, Lewis recounts that another company was said to be
considering the change, including a profit-sharing program. The reason for the proposal was the belief that
central control by producers and directors ‘had a tendency to minimize originality and the transfusion of
new ideas.’ The use of a profit-sharing incentive would eliminate pressures of creation by time, and the firm
would act almost as an independent facility. It would contract individually with talent for a number of films
and would allow the filmmakers to work on its premises with no further interference. Eventually, the
company rejected its first plan, but late in 1931 the firm did go to another plan. Lewis notes that one of the first
firms to make the move was Columbia in October 1931. In November Fox and Paramount also instituted
new management systems.
The trade papers reported part of these activities while they were in progress, helping rapidly spread the
concept of ‘unit production.’ In June 1931, the Motion Picture Herald wrote that ‘a movement is under way…
to band together a number of the industry’s prominent directors for the purpose of carrying out . a plan of
unit production…. The group would function… along the lines of the now defunct Associated
Producers…’5 Subsequent articles attributed the idea to David Selznick. Selznick and Lewis Milestone had
in mind an independent production system in which a number of producers would each make one film at a
time. Selznick promoted the plan on two grounds—‘cost and quality’— grounds dear to Hollywood. He
argued:6
Through unit production there is a saving in overhead of between 30 and 40 per cent. The only good
reason for factory production in any line of business is to lower cost. Now, the minute you remove the
reason for factory production it is no longer useful.
Under the factory system of production you rob the director of his individualism, and this being a
creative industry that is harmful to the quality of the product made.
In editorials and columns, the Motion Picture Herald praised the plan, with Terry Ramsaye proclaiming
that the idea ‘tends toward a restoration of some part of the individualism which seems to be an essential
factor in creative effort.’ The Selznick-Milestone firm was not to test this procedure; Selznick, instead,
signed as production head for RKO Radio Pictures within two months.7
Meanwhile, other events were affecting the industry; most notably, the depression had started to force
economy moves in the studios. One survival tactic was a type of collusion: an acrossfirm truce limited the
budgets for the top films to $200,000, and the companies agreed to halt bidding wars for stars. Another
tactic was cutting out expensive or non-productive workers. Three directing teams replaced John Ford at
Fox, saving 50 per cent of his salary with the potential of three times the output. MGM fired writers in its
story department, and Fox eliminated its reading department. Salaries were cut.8
In late October 1931, Columbia announced its installation of ‘the unit system of production’:9
The associate producers are Sam Briskin, Jack Bachman, Ralph Block, and J.K. McGuiness. Harry
Cohn, vice president in charge of production, will confer with each producer on details for each film.
THE HOLLYWOOD MODE OF PRODUCTION, 1930–60 561
The individual producers will follow their films through to completion, and submit them to Cohn
for final consultation. The new system is expected to allow greater freedom of action, singleness of
purpose, and consequent better results in production.
When, in the next two weeks, Selznick took over RKO Pictures and RKO Pathe, ‘that company officially
adopted the unit system of production championed by Selznick.’ Next came Fox. Winfield Sheehan and Sol
Wurtzel would be producers with four associate producers. ‘Sheehan estimates that economies in effect at
the Fox studios will save about $1,000,000 annually. He believes a saving of about $20,000 on each picture
will result under the unit system, totaling $1,000,000 on the 50 features scheduled.’ Paramount followed in
late November. That firm had been extensively considering ‘radical recommendations for elimination of
waste.’ As constituted, B.P. Schulberg headed seven associate producers.10
Although the institution of unit production in the studios had a different format than Selznick initially
envisioned, his reasons for proposing it do seem to be the motivations of the films. A central producer could
not keep as close a tab on day-to-day operations and costs as could a producer supervising one or two films
at a time. In terms of quality, the image of individualism in creativity seems compatible with then-current
ideologies. Both of these factors (abetted by industry discourse) resulted in a rather rapid changeover in
management organization.
Lewis calls this unit system ‘decentralization of production,’ possibly following a current business
term.11 Yet the elimination of a central producer who made or approved most of the routine decisions and
the creation of a set of fairly autonomous producers cannot be equated with ‘decentralization’ since the
studios retained centralized physical facilities and labor. In other words, no multi-divisional production
operation was set up. (The scale of production did not justify such an action.) The producer-unit system may
have imitated approved business standards (or responded to discourses about creativity and the independent
artist), but the end result is not fairly termed decentralization.
In a sense, the producer-unit system was a revision of the director-unit system but with the producer in
charge and a central staff which planned the work process. The producer-unit system also followed the
industry’s earlier tendency toward type-casting and specialization, since these studio producers were
identified with certain categories—which might be as illogically divided as Fortune’s 1932 list of MGM’s
associate producers.
Studios now had one more management structure as an option, and they could employ it when they found
it advantageous. A later section of this chapter will survey the structures utilized by the major studios during
the 1930s and 1940s. The central producer had gradually gathered a corps of associates; given their
experience in filmmaking, the disappearance of the central producer eliminated a higher authority but did
little to change their routine activities. This change to a new system fitted into the dominant production
practices, as a brief review of the modifications in those practices will show.
Further subdivisions of the work in the 1930s and 1940s

During the 1930s and 1940s, various changes in the work procedures occurred, including the addition of
some small steps and the creation of a new department and several management positions. As Chapter 19
noted, when the production system faced new technologies, its solution was adding specialists and new
steps in the chain of assembly. The same process is at work here; several of these changes are, in fact,
attributable to new technologies, but several are also due to general expansion of the system.
The increased work activities in several departments resulted in further specializations and several new
steps in the work order. The most significant of these were in story acquisition, script writing, research,
casting, pre-shooting production, cinematography, make-up, and marketing research.
The procedures of finding suitable story material intensified. Studios embarked upon complete coverage
of worldwide publishing. East and west coast editorial departments hired up to fifty employees; scouts
talked to agents and famous writers, sometimes gaining access to a manuscript or galleys before
publication. The reading staff would prepare ten- to seventy-five-page synopses which the editorial staff
analyzed and assessed in a one-page summary. Extensive files with cross-checking by ‘plot structure, the
dramatic possibilities, and the characteristic comic or tragic elements of the story’ covered almost
everything published. If a studio purchased a ‘property,’ the other studios kept track of it in case they
decided to buy it later. In the early- or mid-1930s, story conferences started, with verbal discussions of the
possibilities of the stories before treatments were made.12
With dialogue, a new element entered the continuity script, and this disrupted its established format. In
addition, the post-sound shooting practice of the master-shot affected the work situation. Each studio
adapted the old script format differently. When the Academy initiated its Research Council in 1932, one of
the tasks with which the academy charged it was the standardization of script format. The academy
summarized its problem and added the directive:13
As a result [of the change to talking films] the placement, order, numbering, and display of the
various parts [of the continuity script]— dialogue, action, set descriptions, camera instructions, etc.
vary widely among the studios and are constantly subject to change. This unnecessarily complicates
the work of those who handle the scripts during production.
….
Proposed: To conduct such surveys as may be necessary to establish the basis for the various
present practices. To correlate this information and secure general agreement on a recommended form
of script that will be most legible, graphic, and convenient in practical use by actors, directors,
writers, executives and the various production departments.
The form that eventually became standard (the master-scene) was a combination of theatrical and pre-sound
film scripts, a variant of the continuity synopsis used in the 1920s (see figs 25.1, 25.2).
The research department added tasks. It aided the legal department in avoiding accidental use of real
street names, phone numbers, and people’s names (which might lead to lawsuits). The studios also added a
separate research library for music. That library searched for copyright sources, catalogued music purchased
by the firm, and determined authentic versions of older works.14
Casting activities remained similar to those before 1931 although the loans of players were common and
agents started functioning to some extent as producers. In a loan situation the renting studio paid the
player’s salary plus an additional 75 per cent to the studio to compensate for the player’s unavailability
there. Warners loaned Perc Westmore, its head make-up artist, to RKO for The Hunchback of Notre Dame
for a fee of $10,000. The deals could involve capital exchange rather than outright cash. Jimmy Stewart has
said: ‘Your studio could trade you around like ball players. I was traded once to Universal for the use of
their back lot for three weeks.’15
Agents, particularly the firms of Myron Selznick and the William Morris Agency, functioned not only as
go-betweens in setting up contracts but also as personal representatives, managing a client’s total career. By
the late 1930s, with clients working throughout the entertainment fields, some agencies occasionally ‘block-
booked’ their talent. They also ‘packaged’ shows by providing a complete set of entertainers for a producer
(often in radio). These activities started moving the agency from functioning as a support firm into
producing activities as well.16
An additional step in pre-shooting production was script timing. H.G.Tasker described that work for the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers:17
A group of now experienced script analysts study the proposed story to determine the playing time of
each scene of the production and, from the total, determine how long the picture would run. It is at
once shortened to proper release length before filming, thus avoiding the common and expensive
procedure of throwing away several reels of completed negative in order to boil the picture down to
acceptable length.
What had been common procedure in the one-reel period (to estimate and reduce the narrative to fit release-
length restrictions) and in the 1920s (to cut costs wherever possible through careful planning) became in the
1930s, as Tasker put it, ‘a neat bit of engineering.’
The introduction of Technicolor added a camera assistant who was expert in the process. The
Technicolor Corporation insisted on this, wanting to insure quality color production (but also preventing
access to its patented technology). The new Technicolor assistant concentrated on the camera’s operation,
did daily tests, kept the daily log, and handled the slate and the ‘lily,’ a color chart for lab control. He also
acted as the liaison with the Technicolor laboratories.18
The standardization of make-up in the Academy sound tests (see fig 25.3) not only simplified directions
to the players but more importantly insured continuity throughout the entire film. By the early 1930s, the
studio make-up department had taken over the major players’ responsibility for selecting and applying
make-up although extras continued to do their own. For a major player, the studio would do an extensive
initial make-up session in cooperation with the cinematographer. Once everyone agreed on the facial design
of powders, paints, and plastics, a chart—another paper record—would outline the areas and makeup codes
for reference and continuity between the days of shooting (see fig 25.4).19
Marketing research, likewise, became more complicated. While MGM routinely previewed and then
extensively reshot and re-edited, other studios, for more expensive productions, took care to predetermine
the effect of a general release. For Paramount’s Night at the Opera, half a dozen scenarists composed a
version which was pre-tested in small towns for six months, after which the story was rewritten on the basis
of the audiences’ reactions.20
In the early 1940s, the studios started using more formal methods of market research. By 1946, eleven
studios tested their rough-cut films with George Gallup’s Audience Research, Inc. (ARI). By 1949, the
Motion Picture Herald reported that independent production companies that had pre-tested their title, script,
and cast with ARI met much more favorable loan-request responses from bankers. Leo A. Handel who ran
his own audience research company, the Motion Picture Research Bureau, believed that with firms finally
renting on a film-by-film basis (see Chapter 26), a pre-estimate of a response was more useful: the firms
could better determine what rental fee to charge exhibitors. These two reasons for the institutionalization of
marketing research was probably joined by a third. With declining audiences after World War II, knowledge
about who was going to films became more important.21
Technology produced a new department: during the 1930s, as special process work and composite
photography increased in complexity and precision (see figs 25.5, 25.6) the work of such experts became
recognized as an important subdivision of the labor process. Although work units with the art and
cinematography departments specialized in this during the 1920s, some firms now organized separate,
unified departments. Interestingly enough, Warner Bros’ unit in 1929 had the title ‘Special Research
Department’ and resulted from the merger of the special process departments at Warners and First National
when the former bought the latter (fig 25.7). The head, Fred Jackman, had ten subordinates, each had his
own speciality. In September 1932 RKO reorganized all of its effects workers into a single department; its
head Vernon Walker consulted with the art and photography directors. The company justified the move as
increasing economy and efficiency and allowing concentrated effort on ‘the highly specialized work.’ MGM
retained part of its special effects with the art department until 1936 when it separated that section into an
individual unit; that department prepared miniatures, process work, and full-sized composites while another
department handled matte paintings and optical effects. In addition, several support companies offered
special process work.22
Apart from small added steps and the creation of the special effects department, the principal change
during the period was the addition of management positions. The production department added a unit head
for each film. The new unit manager split the responsibilities for coordinating the film with the assistant
director. Generally, the unit manager handled pre-shooting organization and budget control while the
assistant director worked as the aid to the director.23
Similarly, the art department subdivided the work with a supervising art director assigning a unit art director.
This unit art director did the layouts, sketches, and planning and checked back with the supervisor for
approval of the work. Part of this trend was due to the increased complexity of the art work. Hans Dreier,
art director at Paramount in 1937, pointed out that with color and sound, the staff had to consider special
camera filters, set paints, and wall construction for resonance. The studio had to follow insurance
requirements and state building laws, particularly for parts of the sets which the players used. As a result, it
was customary for sketches and set models to consider lighting, camera placement, and lenses, and the staff
would calculate lighting, camera, and microphone movements (fig 25.8). If the film was made in color, a
Technicolor advisor supervised the coordination of all the colors of sets, costumes, and props.
Finally, sometime in the mid-1930s, the ‘production designer’ position appeared for a few films. The
production designer—the prototype was William Cameron Menzies—assimilated several work areas: he did
art direction but also sketched camera set-ups and might even direct the film. Menzies’s control over the
look of a film was probably a result of his successes in designing and the introduction of German films and
talking pictures in the late 1920s. (For more on Menzies, see Chapter 27.)24
This brief summary cannot detail the work of all the 276 professions and trades which, as of the 1940s,
contributed to a motion picture.25 Later modifications were, in effect, extensions of the earlier practices.
Only minor changes occurred, and this supports the conclusion that the effects of advanced capitalism were
not felt at the middlemanagement or specialist’s level in this technological industry. The firms
accommodated increased work and changes in technology by adding specialists and more record-keeping to
guide the making and assembling of the quality film. This is not imply that there were no variations within
production practices; in fact, each studio organized itself a bit differently from the others.
The studios and their systems of production: 1930s and 1940s

A look at the seven major producing studios will reveal what management systems were in effect. Three
implications of these systems deserve special note.
First, whether a central producer or a producer-unit system controlled the work decisions, all of the
department organizations followed the standard structures and work practices. Despite the apparent
differences among studios’ management structures, production practices were overwhelmingly uniform
across the industry. Description after description of the department heads, their staffs, and work activities
are similar, partly because of the industrial discourse’s emphasis upon efficient practices and partly because
of the unionization, which reinforced a uniform subdivision and work procedure. Such a general conformity
helps explain the stylistic similarities between films made by many different workers in a number of studios.
Secondly, given the standardization of the product, we need to understand smaller deviations, particularly
when they contribute to an innovation which becomes standard. Here we are interested in controlled
stylistic change. Industrial discourse encouraged innovations, but these have to be seen in the context of the
particular work situations. Production practices are part of the conditions for the existence of stylistic
practices. Thus, any assignment of creative responsibility for a film must consider what decisions were
allocated to what positions and note deviations among studios. It is at the point of management structures
that variations in allocation of effective-decision-making occur. Beyond that, the standard procedures take
hold. Furthermore, there were small variations in major decision-making not only among studios but within
them. Upper-level management seems to have paid much greater personal attention to the more expensive
productions. Certainly the preparations for these extended through more than one production season,
compared to the rapid pre-shooting plans of the lower-cost A-product, which might see art direction start
only a month or less in advance of shooting. B-product was hardly supervised at all by the first-string
managers; most studios considered it the training ground for younger staff.
Thirdly, quality films—as defined by the box office—did not come so much from variation within the
management systems but from overall investment in the top laborers, materials, and technology, which is
probably why there is variance among studios. Now whether or not we would agree that box office success
is a worthwhile criterion for the excellence of a film, it was the case that that was a primary factor for
Hollywood (although Hollywood executives continually bemoaned the fact that films considered more
prestigious and high-class often failed at the box office). Mae Huettig noted in 1941 that ‘it is a fixed belief
in Hollywood and throughout the motion picture industry that the quality of firms is generally
commensurate with cost.’ The ranking of the firms with respect to boxoffice successes was: United Artists,
MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount, RKO, Universal, and Columbia.26
Certainly this information will not support much hypothesizing, but it does agree with the general
consensus on how well these companies met the industry’s standards in quality filmmaking. Furthermore,
the top three firms also ranked in the same order for highest expenditures-per-film. What is of interest to us
is that box office success did not come only to studios that allowed one individual much control but also to
those which used collective decision-making procedures and much mass production. The three leaders all
employed different management systems: United Artists used director-units and producer-units; Twentieth
Century-Fox, a central producer; and MGM, a producer-unit. This consideration is important for any
discussion of one system versus another. In the following survey, as far as possible, the studios are ranked
in descending order of management control.
Twentieth Century-Fox
In 1930 Fox had a central producer system in which the central producer Winfield Sheehan seems to have
left many decisions in the directors’ realm. Sheehan participated in script and casting selection, knew the
financial and production situations for each film, and checked the dailies. The company’s production
department head Sol Wurtzel assumed Sheehan’s responsibilities in his absence, and each production had a
unit manager. The director generally decided takes and supervised the final cut, which was checked by
Sheehan, Wurtzel, the writer, and others.27
In November 1931, Fox shifted to a producer-unit system plan with two producers and four associates.
Under this system, by 1933 Sheehan handled about twelve films a year, Wurtzel did the cheaper product,
and Jesse L.Lasky, the rest. In 1935 Twentieth Century and Fox merged, bringing in Darryl F.Zanuck and
initiating a modified central producer arrangement. Wurtzel was left in charge of a little less than half the
product, had his own set of writers, directors, and associate producers, and reported to Zanuck every week.
Zanuck supervised the upper half of the output with greater and lesser degrees of dominance. Zanuck made
the story purchase choices, controlled story conference decisions, chose the leads, and took the casting
director’s advice on minor players. But while his control was overt in pre-shooting, he generally left his
directors alone on the set. According to his assistant, some directors had freedom to shoot as they saw fit
while others were required to follow the script or consult with the producer. Zanuck stepped back in during
post-shooting production. While watching rushes, he gave instructions to the editor, dictated comments to
the director, and chose takes and their arrangements. John Ford apparently was one of the very few directors
usually exempted from this control. Zanuck did retakes for photography as well as acting. Zanuck became
an independent producer releasing through Twentieth Century-Fox in 1956; until then, the work process he
managed followed a strict central control.28
Warner Bros
Warner Bros employed a producer-unit system with relatively rigorous attention to cost-efficiency
production. Until 1933 Zanuck was the major production executive, but when he left, Hal B. Wallis became
associate executive in charge of production under Jack Warner, studio head. In 1937, Wallis was using six
associate producers, including Bryan Foy (who handled all of the B product). The other producers had
specialities: for example, Lou Edelman made ‘service’ pictures and ‘headliners’ (films from events reported
in the press), while Henry Blanke handled the more prestigious biography films including The Adventures
of Robin Hood, Juarez, The Story of Louis Pasteur, and The Life of Emile Zola. Wallis devoted more of his
attention to the company’s specials, initiated many of the scripts, and approved all of them.29
The studio expected directors to follow the scripts, which in many cases they had little hand in writing.
During the early 1930s, the exceptions to this included Jack Warner’s son-in-law, Mervyn LeRoy, who after
early box office successes did what he wanted with his own budget, had some players under personal
contract, and shared in profits. The other exceptions were directors of the highest budget films: consider, for
instance, the making of Juarez between 1937 and 1939 (fig 25.9). After Jack Warner and Wallis had chosen
a Paul Muni biography picture, Blanke and director William Dieterle picked a head writer and three others.
The research department started assembling background material; later the vice consul of Mexico acted as a
technical advisor; and Wallis, Blanke, Muni, and Dieterle took a six-week tour of Mexico, following the
events in Juarez’ history. Art director Anton Grot and his assistant did 3,643 set sketches and models, and
draughtsmen prepared 7,360 scale blueprints. A wardrobe head organized most of the costumes while the
studio’s ‘style creator’ Orry-Kelly designed eighteen gowns for the female lead.30
For the programmers and B-films, writers, directors, and other personnel had set working hours and a per-
day expected piece-rate production. Retakes after shooting was over were most unusual. Under the
supervision of Jack Warner and Wallis, directors participated in cutting unless shooting took them away.
Studio composers received the film after the final cut. Warners also invested heavily in capital assets, such
as its special process and sound equipment (fig 25.10). In the late 1930s, Warners started some special unit
productions with producer-directors such as Anatole Litvak, William Wyler, and Howard Hawks, and in the
early 1940s began distributing independent productions.31
Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer

MGM’s Irving Thalberg functioned as a central producer until his illness in 1932. At that point, Louis
B.Mayer hired son-in-law David Selznick to produce a set of films with his own unit. While Thalberg was
in Europe, Mayer shifted the studio structure, turning Thalberg’s staff into associate producers. Selznick,
Thalberg on his return, Hunt Stromberg, Walter Wanger, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and others (with Harry
Rapf doing the B product) filled out a staff line answerable only to Mayer. While Mayer has been accused of
deliberately diluting Thalberg’s power—and that was the change’s effect—it must also be noted that the
new structure followed the general pattern developing in the industry. (That may have made it easier for
Mayer to justify the change.) After 1933, Thalberg averaged six films a year for MGM until his death.32
After Mayer returned from New York City from the yearly production meetings, he would have a large
staff meeting. Then the associate producers were on their own. They assigned unit staff members under each
department head to each film, and as far as possible tried to keep work units together film after film. MGM,
like Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros, and other studios, had a tendency, however, to avoid consulting
cinematographers during pre-shooting work. The company also almost always limited their directors to the
shooting phase, with films following one after another. If MGM demanded retakes, as it often did, and if the
initial director was in another production, other directors might do the re-shooting.
In 1948, Mayer adopted a modified central producer system with Dore Schary in charge of production.
During Schary’s tenure there until 1956, he managed the MGM product of thirty to thirty-five films per
year with a set of fairly independent associate producers. The making of An American in Paris (Vincente
Minnelli, 1950) during Schary’s control has been documented in a series of interviews with the cast and
technical staff. Its production history repeats the Hollywood pattern with the exception of the ballet
sequence, which was planned and shot after the completion of the ‘book’ (the narrative) and the rest of the
numbers.33
Universal
Universal also had a producer-unit system by the mid-1930s. During the 1930–6 period the company
focused on the subsequent-run exhibition market and the B half of the double feature. When Universal’s
ownership changed hands in 1936, the policy shifted toward A production. Universal added independent
arrangements to its operations in the late 1930s.34
In 1937, to acquaint SMPE members with current Hollywood filmmaking procedures, Universal hosted a
conference tour, describing the making of a typical film in their studio. The producer Robert Presnell
discussed problems of budgeting a lower-cost A film: since he could not afford higher-salaried actors, he
often used new personalities. He had to plan in advance for a specific number of shooting days to meet the
budget, so he would instruct script writers to limit the number of sets for the story. Since Deanna Durbin
was Universal’s rising new star, the SMPE group watched her pre-record ‘Sunbeams’ for One Hundred Men
and a Girl (1937). The supervising art director, John Harkrider, described sketches, blueprints, models, set
dressing, and costuming and emphasized Universal’s innovative use of pastel-colored paints on the set: ‘The
colors impart the correct atmosphere from the aesthetic, logical, and psychological standpoints.’ Through
specialization and integration of the work, Universal’s staff of experts created their motion pictures.
In 1946, when Universal merged with International, a new production manager, James Pratt, took over
the department, instituting lengthy two-day meetings in which every production worker on a film came in
and discussed the project. The intent of the meetings was to foresee every problem before shooting started.
As Pratt recalled:35
It takes the whole team, it’s a collaborative art that requires the efforts of all, every son of a gun from
the doorman to the front office guy, you know. And I tried my best to actuate that, to create a respect,
a mutual regard between the so-called creative group and the so-called backlot group.
Like the other studios, Universal worked to integrate its disparate craftspeople into an efficient, organized
labor-force.
Paramount
Throughout the 1930–50 period, Paramount had a looser organization than other studios. The studio used a
director-unit system with a central producer system of planning and departmental centralization. From 1928
through 1931, under Lasky and B.P.Schulberg, a set of associate producers ‘advised’ the directors who had
a greater amount of decision-making and coordinating powers than in other studios. In fact, the associate
producer and a unit manager were often assigned to a production after the director was chosen. The
director, his assistant, and the editor assembled the final cut.36
In November 1931, Paramount moved to a producer-unit system with seven associate producers. In 1935,
the organization had run through a series of production executives, including a 1935 team of Ernst Lubitsch
and Henry Herzbrun. Lubitsch supervised a few films, leaving the other productions on their own. When the
board of directors changed that year, the new president put William Le Baron in charge. Joseph Kennedy’s
1936 investigation of Paramount revealed cost overruns, random shooting schedules, and inefficient use of
players and stars, and, again, the company replaced the top production management—this time with Adolph
Zukor as studio head. Zukor, like Mayer and Jack Warner, acted as the liaison with New York management
and as major purchaser of talent, but remained a broad decision-maker. Zukor supported Le Baron as
production head and George Bagnall as studio manager, which helped secure conformance to schedules and
budgets. Half the total output was assigned to B-product and a single producer with his associates, and the
management left him on his own. For the other half, about twenty-six films for 1937, two systems operated
under Le Baron. One system was a variant of the director-unit system, giving the director-producer charge of
his production: once he had a story and cast idea, he cleared it with Le Baron and received a budget. The
other system was a producer-unit one in which a producer acted in a supervisory manner over a director.
For all of these, Paramount maintained a staff in sixty departments. Paramount also followed an earlier
policy of releasing films produced by independents, such as the early 1930s films by writers Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur. Despite subsequent changes in studio top-management, most of the middle-line
executives remained constant throughout the period.37
RKO Radio Pictures

RKO had one of the most changing histories of top-management control, but employees at the technical
level remained fairly stable. During the early 1930s, RKO’s policy was the high-cost film, with independent
producers supplying a number of additional films. There was also a program of B-product. When a new
investment group bought minority control, RKO shifted to a double system: as at Paramount, part of the top
management staff were producer-directors; the other part, a group of producers. As RKO president from
1938 to 1942, George Schaefer eliminated independent production with his director-unit and producer-unit
systems and generally allowed the units their own control after initial decisions and approval. RKO
followed standard practices with centralized departments, unit managers, and unit art directors. It had one of
the best special effects departments in Hollywood and many of the remarkable shots in Citizen Kane (Orson
Welles, 1941) were due to its work. In 1942, Charles Koerner took over as production head, and RKO
returned to a policy of renting space in the studio to independents. In the mid-1940s under Senary, the firm
made higher- and moderate-budget films and released the work of independents. When Howard Hughes
took over the company, production schedules disintegrated and independent releases became dominant.38
Columbia
The last of the seven, Columbia, was the first to move to a producer-unit plan in which it concentrated on
lower-budget films until the firm had several box office successes in 1934. One of the most careful planners
of production schedules, the studio throughout the period invited short-term independent production deals
with successful directors, the best known of which was Frank Capra.39
This review indicates the variance among the studios in their allocation of top-management decisions
regarding the films. However, when cinematographer Lucien Ballard responded to an interviewer’s question
as to whether there were differences among the studios, he said, ‘No; when you’re a professional, you know
what you’re doing, and it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s at Paramount or Fox or Warners. But
after [Josef von] Sternberg left [Columbia], I was under contract to Columbia, and, you know, the biggest
pictures there were eighteen-day pictures!’40 On the one hand, while cost allocations made a difference in
production time and production value, it is more difficult to find cases in which the management structure
made any specific difference in standard work practices.
On the other hand, some management structures may have inhibited alternative shooting techniques.
Arthur Miller recounts an instance at Twentieth Century-Fox in which director Edmund Goulding tried to
shoot each scene for The Razor’s Edge in a single take. Studio head Zanuck apparently stopped this,
however, because ‘Zanuck wanted medium shots and plenty of closeups to play with when the time came to
edit a picture.’ Since Zanuck took strong control of the post-shooting work, the practice of the long take
would work against his ability to rearrange and rework the film.41 This may also have been the situation at
Warners. Director Vincent Sherman recalled:42
Having seen many of John Ford’s pictures, I can imagine that he does a lot of cutting with the camera.
We couldn’t do that at Warner Brothers. If we started doing that at Warners, we would have been in
trouble right away. We knew that we had to cover a scene from many angles so there would be a
choice, so that Wallis and Warner would have a choice of what they wanted. Now, sometimes we
wanted to have a choice ourselves on these things.
Here, desire by management for control of the film’s look and sound seems to have hindered any stylistic
options. (But recall, too, that Sherman accepts the most probable alternatives within the classical paradigm.)
It might not be just top management who worked to sustain the classical style. MGM editor Adrienne
Fazan reported that Editorial Supervisor Margaret Booth expected her to go to close-ups, although Vincente
Minnelli might intentionally not have provided them: ‘Minnelli sometimes fell in love with certain
sequences, and he didn’t want them to be broken up or shortened. So he shot that way [no close-ups and
long takes with camera movement] on purpose so that it could not be changed in the editing room.’ But studios
satisfied their desire for close-ups by blowing up frames during editing—so even if a director tried to out
smart the studio by avoiding close-ups, technology provided a solution.43
As Booth had an impact on editing procedures, MGM production manager Walter Strohm may have
controlled experimentation with large camera movements. In recalling the studio’s filming practices, Strohm
said that he believed the use of a camera boom had to be watched: Many directors ‘became very awkward
and mechanical, and you became conscious of a boom and not of the action…. You just couldn’t have a
boom put on a shooting schedule without my approval, and I didn’t give it often.’ For Minnelli, however,
Strohm readily granted his permission because he believed that Minnelli knew how to make acceptable
camera movements.44
It should be clear that Hollywood’s criteria of the quality film usually guided individual decisions, no
matter what position or which worker had the power to make them. Together, groups of craftspeople
worked on a film project, collaborating on the commodity. Furthermore, Hollywood’s mode of production,
despite its modifications and minor variations through the 1930s and 1940s, continued to specialize the
work tasks and to function with standardized production practices. Many workers felt positive about the
collective work process. As Schary remarked later about the period:45
One of the lost things you can look back on in that era and say was good was the system of patronage
that enabled us to keep together a group of highly talented people and let them function rather freely
and profitably.
Serial manufacture of a standardized product resulted in a collaborative work situation in which

craftspeople jointly mass produced a great number of remarkable (and, admittedly, not so remarkable)
films.
26
The package-unit system: unit management after 1955
The ‘package-unit’ system of production

When historians speak of the structure of the industry after World War II, they describe it as a period of the
ending of mass production of films and the diffusion of independent production. As noted in Chapter 24,
commercial independent filmmaking occurred as a minority strategy in the United States through the 1930s,
with mass production by the major studios as the dominant approach to filmmaking. An independent film
company was a firm which was not owned by nor owned a distribution organization. Rather, the company
had several distribution options: it could make a film on contract with a distributor, it could make one and
then sell it, or it could make one and then distribute it through road-showing. An independent’s output was
also small, usually no more than ten films per year. After the war when the production sector made fewer
films, and those chiefly through independents, it adopted a new method of organizing the labor: the
‘packageunit’ system of production.
Recall that the definition of commercial independent production is not based on its organization of the
mode of production; in fact, an independent firm could use any of the systems. Firms such as David
O.Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn which produced a larger number of films might use a producer-unit system;
some such as Charles Chaplin with a very small output might opt for the director system, modified with
some pre-shooting planning. Thus, rather than confuse the industrial structure and the mode of production,
we must remember that the production system we are about to study is a distinct concept from the industrial
structure.
What, then, was the ‘package-unit’ system of production and how was it a change from the prior system?
The signal concept is that of package. Rather than an individual company containing the source of the labor
and materials, the entire industry became the pool for these. A producer organized a film project: he or she
secured financing and combined the necessary laborers (whose roles had previously been defined by the
standardized production structure and subdivision of work categories) and the means of production (the
narrative ‘property,’ the equipment, and the physical sites of production).
The major differences between this system of production and the prior one, the producer-unit system,
were the transitory nature of the combination and the disappearance of the selfcontained studio. With the
old producer-unit system, a producer had a commitment to make six to eight films per year with a fairly
identifiable staff. The package-unit system, however, was a short-term film-by-film arrangement. Of
course, often many subordinate members of the labor hierarchy worked time and again with the same
people because of skills and work habits; workers’ employment was, none the less, based on a film not a
firm. With the disappearance of the selfcontained studio, the means of production was also a short-term
combination. Instead of a filming unit owning its entire means of production for use in film after film, the
572 THE PACKAGE-UNIT SYSTEM: AFTER 1955
unit leased or purchased the pieces for a particular project from an array of support firms. Costumes,
cameras, special effects technology, lighting and recording equipment were specialities of various support
companies, available for component packaging.
There continued, however, a number of characteristics from prior systems, making the package-unit
system still an instance of detailed division of labor. Because of the success of the former methods of
filmmaking and because the labor pool for the industry was still unionized (to protect the lower- and middle-
echelon workers), the labor structure was one of a subdivision of work and a management hierarchy.
Technological expertise, in part a result of the specialized support firm, also reinforced this. With such a
system, craft specialization continued to increase, and detailed knowledge of each work process belonged to
only some of the workers. Still acting as standardizing mechanisms, the professional associations continued
to function as the means of easing the introduction of new equipment and securing the interchangeability of
the parts and their technicians.
This system of production was intricately tied to the postwar industrial shift: instead of the mass
production of many films by a few manufacturing firms, now there was the specialized production of a few
films by many independents. The majors acted as financiers and distributors. As independent production
gained predominance, the industry also constructed the package-unit system, causing the close connection
between the industrial structure and the mode.
The move to a reduced output supplied primarily by independents occurred in two phases. During the
first half of the 1940s, incentives for the shift included the elimination by a 1940 consent decree of blind
selling and block booking, certain effects of World War II, and an apparent tax advantage. After the war,
the movement intensified because of income losses, divorcement of exhibition from production and
distribution, and new distribution strategies. By the mid-1950s, limited output, independent production, and
the package-unit system typified Hollywood.
The early 1940s

Commercial independent production had always been part of the industrial structure in the United States.
Even in the 1930s, a period dominated by the major integrated firms, independents found methods to
finance and distribute their products. United Artists and even some of the majors worked with the better
independents.1
When the producer-unit system was introduced in the 1930s (see Chapter 25), its proponents argued that
it would improve the quality of the films. The reasoning followed ideological lines regarding ideas of
innovation and authorship: allow certain workers to specialize on selected projects and better films would
result. Despite this, however, the distribution and exhibition system held the industry in check. Its regular
release schedule did not encourage the companies to move very far away from mass production.
An incentive to do so developed out of a 1940 consent decree in the federal government’s antitrust suit
against the affiliated majors (those firms with full integration into exhibition). In an attempt to settle the
complaints against their trade practices of blind selling and block booking all their product, the majors
agreed to trade shows and blocks of no-more-than-five films.2 This change encouraged the companies to
load up each film with as much talent and spectacle as possible so that all the blocks-of-five would attract
exhibitors. Furthermore, concentrating on fewer and higher-priced films fell in line with monopolistic
practices. The affiliated majors could indirectly collude, reducing the total number of A and Super-A
products, most desired by the exhibitor, and still achieve similar profit returns. Even when the consent
decree lapsed in 1943, the firms did not return to their former practices.3
Another incentive to move away from mass production was a result of World War II. With more
disposable income, people turned to movie-going, and attendance figures climbed, eventually to their all-
time peak in 1946. As part of this, the top-budget films commanded longer runs. Again, certain conditions
favored reduction of output and concentration on more expensive films. Even the companies formerly
specializing in ‘B’ pictures began shifting their policies by adding special A-budget films.4
Into the gap between current and former product-supply levels stepped the independents. By 1943, the
trade papers noted a surprising increase in available capital for film projects, and, at the same time, talents
such as James Cagney, Hal Wallis, and Joseph Hazen started setting up independent deals with their former
employers. By the end of the war, a virtual wave of independent companies had formed while majors now
offered ‘decentralised’ control and ‘semi-independent status’ to many other desired employees. The
independents were encouraged to leave studio employment not only because almost every film was now
making money, but because the US wartime tax laws favored forgoing salaries and setting up private
companies instead. In fact, for a while, single-picture firms seemed the most profitable method although the
Bureau of Internal Revenue halted that practice.5
By the end of World War II, the effects of the 1940 consent decree, wartime film attendance trends, and
tax laws promoted a move away from mass production and toward independent production. By the end of
1946, every major firm except MGM had some independent projects as part of their regular production
schedule.
Later incentives to continue the trend

With the war over we might wonder why the industry did not return to its earlier structure. Postwar
conditions, however, reinforced the independent trend as fewer and selectively produced films seemed the best
way to make profits.
More typical consumption patterns returned, with a significant reduction in film-going by the public.
Although A-products continued to do well, the average film found itself in difficulty. Furthermore, foreign
countries, particularly Britain, set up restrictions on exporting film revenues. This hindered the ability of US
companies to use that foreign income to offset domestic losses.6
With both problems harming profit-making, the studios responded in a familiar pattern: they reduced
short-term costs and fixed liabilities. The number of employed film workers declined. In addition, the
companies turned to location shooting outside Los Angeles and the United States. This both reduced some
costs and, in the case of non-US productions, might unfreeze blocked foreign revenues.7
By 1950, additional factors led to continued domestic income losses: population shifts, changing
recreational habits, regional unemployment, and particularly competition with television. By 1953, film
firms were investigating 3-D and widescreen technologies as means to differentiate their products from
television (see Chapter 29).8
As income losses continued, the advantage of independent deals was clear. One-time packages reduced
fixed costs and allowed more studio flexibility. Furthermore, in 1948, the courts ordered the majors to
separate their exhibition holdings from the production-distribution sectors of the firms. This eased any self-
generated need to return to mass production. Instead, a firm could concentrate on making fewer, specialized
projects and financing or buying the more desirable independent films.
Finally, another incentive to move away from mass production was the industry’s new distribution
strategies. Recognizing changing consumption patterns and targeting parts of the population as its most
likely and desired audiences, the industry concentrated even more on a highly differentiated film.
Moreover, ignoring marginal theaters, the film companies moved toward aiming films primarily at first-run
audiences only.9
As the majors increasingly financed independent films, the new independent production companies
turned to the already-available army of support firms for their technology, studio space, and technical
experts. Furthermore, the unions functioned as a labor pool, supplying skilled workers to the independents as
well as the growing television industry. By 1956, even MGM was making outside deals. With the industrial
shift to independent production, the package-unit system of filmmaking replaced the older studiosystem.10
The package-unit system in operation

Although still an instance of divided labor with a structural hierarchy, the package-unit system differed from
former systems in its industry-wide pooling of labor and materials, the disappearance of the self-contained
studio, and the transitory combination of labor-force and means of production. As we have noted, these
were all effects of the industrial shift away from mass production and toward film-by-film financing and
planning. Several other differences deserve some attention.
The package-unit system further intensified the need to differentiate the product on the basis of its
innovations, its story, its stars, and its director. With the major firms supplying financing and other benefits
that were not visible to the consumer, the use of a studio brand name became only another (if slightly
larger) line on the poster. Instead, the names of individuals and the unique package were marketed,
particularly to certain audiences. When *Gidget, starring James Barren and Sandra Dee, was released in
1959, advertising and promotion aimed the film at the teen market, with a personal endorsement from
Dick Clark, ‘idol and trend-setter extraordinary of young America.’11 The goal of aiming a film at a
heterogeneous audience was no longer standard.
The advertising stress on certain workers also increased distinctive laborers’ bargaining power. In a
package-unit system, the worker returned to the labor-supply after each project, ready to negotiate his or her
next deal. When Vincente Minnelli chose Joseph Ruttenberg as director of photography for Gigi (1956,
MGM), American Cinematographer explained:12
Minnelli, who has a passion for moving camera shots, acquired both an expert craftsman and a
recognized exponent of the ‘fluid’ camera. During his long and successful career at MGM, Joseph
Ruttenberg has achieved photography with a boom-mounted camera that has won high praise from his
contemporaries and contributed largely to the photographic achievements that have netted him three
Academy Awards….
Ruttenberg’s labors in Gigi won him a fourth Oscar.

With the package-unit system, the assembling of the project’s components was usually done by the major
studios and individual producers, but talent agencies also commonly did this producer function. The William
Morris Agency had packaged complete programs for the radio since the late 1930s, and Music Corporation
of America (MCA), Famous Artists, and others joined the field. As talent started crossing into more media,
such as television, these agencies facilitated the package-unit system. Experts and specialists in casting, they
helped pull together writers, actors, directors, stories, and producers: the major part of a deal. By 1959,
MCA was so powerful that it bought control of Universal Studios, the physical plant of Universal Pictures.
Besides that holding, its subsidiaries included its Hollywood talent agency (MCA Artists, Ltd), a distributor
of television films (MCA-TV), a packager of live television shows (Management Corporation of America),
and one of the biggest producers of television films (Revue Productions). Examples of MCA’s packages
included the 1958 films The Young Lions (MCA represented stars Marion Brando, Montgomery Clift, and
Dean Martin) and The Big Country (MCA represented the director William Wyler and stars Gregory Peck,
Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, and Charles Bickford.)13
Although not directly a result of the package-unit system, another change affected the production of
films: location shooting abroad often resulted in variations from the standard division of labor. Not only
was foreign labor sometimes cheaper but many of the postwar trade agreements with foreign countries
encouraged the use of their crews as a means of unfreezing earnings. The diffusion of independent
production also spread the sources of funding, with companies seeking the best financial arrangement
regardless of country. Even if a US firm distributed a film, the legal ownership of the product might be
partly or wholly non-American. Once again, economic concerns affected the mode of production. Producing
films outside the United States—the famous ‘runaway’ productions as well as investment in foreign
filmmaking—made utilization of other production practices an important factor. Such productions
commonly employed local laborers at the middle and lower levels, causing the foreign country’s domestic
work structures to alter the normal US processes in some cases. In 1953, forty-eight films had some foreign
location shooting, with Hollywood either partially or fully financing the project. Reasons for such a large
number included ‘the need for authentic background and locale,’ tax advantages, foreign policies, foreign
private financing, ‘split hemisphere’ deals, lower production costs, and the importance of the foreign box
office. N.Peter Rathvon was already advocating the ‘international picture’ in which the production was
‘conceived and filmed to serve the screen demands of two countries.’14
The effect of such joint productions on the division of labor was to alter the number of people on crews,
to redefine labor responsibilities, and to change the general work conditions. For foreign-based films, crews
were usually a mixture of nationalities. In shooting Gigi in Paris, Ruttenberg discovered that the French
crew did not ‘rough in’ a set. In Hollywood, the head electrician (the ‘gaffer’) anticipated a set-up and
‘roughed in’ the basic lighting arrangements (easy with the standardized lighting patterns). With that done,
the cinematographer directed the minor refinements. In France, however, Ruttenberg found that the head
cinematographer directed every lighting placement. For The Nun’s Story (1959), director of photography
Franz Planer supervised an Italian camera operator. Burnett Guffey’s principal crew in Okinawa for Hell to
Eternity (1960) was American, but his two other teams of cameramen were Japanese. (He used an
interpreter.) Robert Aldrich had an American cameraman but indicated that he had to cope with a chiefly
British staff and German crew for the Berlin-based shooting of Ten Seconds to Hell (1959); for The Angry
Hills (1959), British and Greek crews shot part of the locations in Greece and England.15 We can mark slight
individual variations within the mode of production once foreign-based shooting became so important in the
1950s and afterwards. These variations, however, were only on location; in Hollywood, practices did not
change.
Finally, the package-unit system also slightly changed the division of labor and the work hierarchy. This
was a result of paying some workers by profit-shares rather than time. Profit-sharing could, of course, have
been provided for all the workers, but generally it was arranged only for certain personnel—those in the
middle-and upper-management levels. The probable reason for this is that the lower-echelon workers, in
keeping with the wage differentials, would receive percentages which might very well be lower than their
secure union wage schedule. Only the most powerful workers—major stars, directors, sometimes writers—
could demand a large enough piece of the picture to make profit-sharing attractive.
The effect of profit-sharing was to encourage more cooperative pre-shooting planning with less strict
division of certain labor functions. With a regular mass-production schedule and a fixed output, the
employer had had to encourage speed in production. Concentrating the specialists, and only those workers,
in their areas of expertise produced a faster rate of output since they could quickly repeat time and again the
same job. Such a system also discouraged other workers from participating in planning since this would
take them away from their routine tasks and would divert earnings to pay their time in planning. When the
industry abandoned a regular-release schedule, the deadline effect was reduced. Furthermore, with profit-
sharing, concern for loss of money due to time spent on the job was gone. If a worker paid by profits wanted
to spend his or her time functioning in several capacities and contributing to planning, the pressure to meet a
deadline was off. Also it was up to him or her to determine how valuable his or her time was. When
workers paid by time were involved, then the deadline effect returned, particularly in shooting schedules.
During the 1940s, Hollywood personnel perceived the new flexibility in planning as a remarkable contrast
to the prior system. Cinematographer Lee Garmes, for instance, contributed to much of the pre-shooting
plans for Spectre of the Rose (1956) and had complete charge of camera distances, angles, and lighting. In
1947, the Screen Writers Guild arranged with Zanuck and Senary to let writers watch shooting activities so
they could learn that part of the production practices. (Schary records that in the economy moves around
1950, MGM started letting middle-level workers do two or three tasks to reduce costs—so this cannot be
completely seen as altruistic or due to the industrial transformation.16) Although much more common after
1960, by the late 1940s, individuals combined positions: writer-director Billy Wilder for Sunset Boulevard
(1950), producer-director Stanley Kramer for The Defiant Ones (1958), stardirector-producer John Wayne
for The Alamo (I960).17
Although some labor processes were less strictly divided, such changes existed only in certain parts of the
middle- and upper-management levels of the work structure: producing, writing, directing, and acting.
Directors or stars who had previously moved from shooting one film immediately to the next now took over
a business function, spending a larger part of their time negotiating each new film deal. The older system
was as much in force as ever for the other departments and lower-level workers. This had to do in part with
the complexity of the technologies and in part with the union contracts which specified minimal conditions
of work for those employees. The unions bargained with those who hired their workers. When independent
production started increasing in the mid-1940s, the new independent producers united into their own trade
associations and collectively bargained with the unions. In 1946 besides the Association of Motion Picture
Producers, which was the bargaining group for ten major studios, two other associations existed: the Society
of Independent Motion Picture Producers, which represented twenty-five independents, and the
Independent Motion Picture Producers Association, which included thirty-two smaller independents,
Monogram, and Producers Releasing Corporation. Even though the unions might consider special
difficulties which the independents faced, scales and minimal work conditions were bargained. Thus, as
Chapter 24 suggested, the unions— while protecting their member-workers—also contributed to the
continuance of the detailed division of labor mode.18
The Hollywood mode of production: an evaluation
You had a feeling on [the MGM] lot that they made the best pictures in the world, which they
did. A great feeling!19
Ed Woehler, Unit Production Manager, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
What occurred in the Hollywood mode of production was the result of its conditions of existence: the
economic and ideological/signifying practices which individual firms and institutions took as their initial
models. Furthermore, the industry changed these models to suit its particular medium and situations, and,
through its own internal organization, the industry generated its own structure. As John Ellis writes, ‘the
history of cinema cannot be read off from its conditions of existence,’ which is why this extended look at
the formations and effects that resulted in the particular mode of production has been necessary.
The Hollywood mode of production changed continually. Conceptions of efficiency and quality developed
the subdivisions of the execution of the work. Economy moves helped cause the subdivision of the jobs of
assistant directors, unit managers, production department workers. Narrative coherence and clarity
supported the movement of star personalities to the foreground and their directors toward the top of the
management pyramid. Verisimilitude provided a need for researchers, art directors, specialized construction
crews, and composite photography experts. Continuity techniques encouraged the use of continuity writers,
continuity clerks, expert editors, and make-up artists. Spectacle and emotional effects led to specialists in
technological tours de force and novelties.
Subdivisions of the work occurred initially as a method to increase film output and to insure the movies’
predictable quality and appearance. Subsequently, the divisions of labor occurred as they did for several
reasons, primarily because of examples in related work areas (the stage mode of production and concurrent
US business practices), because of conceptions of work necessary to achieve a particular look and sound in
the film, and because of technological change and unionization. Workers used the script first as a rough
outline of the story and then as a blueprint that precalculated costs, prechecked narrative continuity and
coherence, and provided on paper a permanent memory that guided the assembly of a film made in many
phases and places by various craftspeople. Technological change was encouraged and accommodated. Labor
activities and advanced capitalism tended to reinforce a divided labor system with a structural and
hierarchical management.
Each management system in one or a few areas differed from the prior one, changed out of it. But in
many ways each new system retained much of its predecessor’s organization. In a rather surprising way, the
dominant systems participated in a cycle effect. From a period in which deadlines were less important (the
cameraman system), the systems moved through periods in which mass production very much enforced
deadlines (the director, the director-unit, the central producer, and the producer-unit systems), to the last
period (the package-unit system) in which release dates did not have the force of earlier years. Throughout
these changes, directors of capital assigned control of production to a rather powerful worker: the
cameraman, then the director, then the producer, and finally, often, the star. The cycle, however, never
returned to the origin. Gone were the conditions of the existence for inventor-cameraman-owner
W.K.L.Dickson’s trip in 1900 to film the Boer War. Gone were the conditions for D.W.Griffith’s one-reel
Biographs and Thomas Ince’s scientifically managed factory. Even later visions of returning to the golden
era of mass production in the studio were altered by more contemporary ideologies of specialized, individually
controlled films. Francis Ford Coppola wanted the studio he purchased in 1979 to be an ‘all inclusive
gathering of talent utilizing the best features of the powerful and productive studios of the 30s and 40s.’20
But he also explained:21
The movies I really want to make can only be made after we get the studio in L.A. to be an all-
electronic studio, so that it’s all stages and guys building things; a totally electronic medium. You put
some guys in there for a week and they come out with a film with gigantic sets, just like that. You can
make it and cut electronically. I’m trying to make a film factory that works incredibly well and then
I’ll get it turning out these class B pictures, take a really wonderful story like The Black Stallion, a
really wonderful story that everyone can understand, and give it a really arty class treatment. Just make
movies like that, a lot of them. Then, when I’ve got this whole big factory going, then I want to take it
over and just make one film.
If the Hollywood mode of production has provoked praise in some quarters, in others, it has been an
example not of the good but the bad, and, occasionally, the ugly. Many workers found it alienating,
depressing, stifling. Cinematographers continually complained about the stupidity of the producers in not
bringing them in on the planning phases of a film, and writers described the destruction of the Great
American screenplay. The plot of A Star Is Born had a basis in the lives of the actors and actresses who
were often manipulated by publicity and the vicissitudes of the box office. Hollywood was also criticized
for the aesthetic quality of its films. Dudley Nichols wrote: It is too much the modern factory-system —each
man working on a different machine and never in an integrated creation. It tends to destroy that
individuality of style which is the mark of any superior work of art.’ V.F.Perkins believed that the corporate
boss of the package-unit studio must ‘encourage indecision and cowardice’—with presumed effects on the
films.22
Undoubtedly, Hollywood deserves criticism for parts of its mode of production. However, that criticism
has to be carefully applied. It is unfair to represent its production practices as uniformly dehumanizing and
merely formulaic. For one thing, the tension between standardization and differentiation allowed two
worthwhile goals for workers: first, a standard of making a quality film; second, the encouragement to
innovate, to redefine that standard. Such a dual system created a flexibility and a tolerance within,
admittedly, ideological and economic boundaries.
Nor is it fair to think of production in this industry as monolithic. The mode had various degrees of
rigidity in the work order, within the hierarchical structure, and in regard to deadlines. In Hollywood
filmmaking at the craftsman’s level of work, manufacturing never reached the degree of dehumanization
that it has in other industries. Making a film was not working on a Ford moving assembly-line. Even at
mass production’s peak in the central producer and producer-unit systems, middle-management as
craftsmen had much control over their sections of work and their work conditions. Within an instance of
serial manufacture, these craftsmen were organized into a collective group, with varying degrees of
exchange of ideas for every film the company turned out.
In fact, I would argue, the auteurist tendency to attempt to attribute particular stylistic innovations to a
single worker (producer, director, writer) may have reinforced the hierarchical system. Certainly the
movement from the early 1930s has been increasingly in the direction of assuming that one individual ought
to control almost all aspects of the filming so that that individual’s personal vision can be created. The
introduction of the producer-unit system in 1931 and package-unit filmmaking in the 1940s followed this
ideological attitude toward authorship without consideration of its effect on the rest of the mode of
production.
What was valuable in the Hollywood mode of production was its combination of the expertise of multiple
crafts. Groups of specialists, although in divided labor, made films which just seem difficult to conceive
having been created by workers in other work arrangements. Not that that should be the criterion by which
to judge a mode of production if the effects of the work situation or the signifying practices are abhorrent. But
much is commendable in joint-work projects in which the skills of individuals are combined to make
something perhaps otherwise not possible.
Others have noticed this about the Hollywood work mode. Many workers felt a great sense of pride in the
craftsmanship which went into the films. George Gibson, head of scenic art at MGM, believed that the
studio system allowed a special type of creative association:23
Creativity demands a continuing relationship with people, the people who work for you and you, in turn,
work for someone else. It’s the only way that I think any kind of creative effort can be accomplished.
We weren’t aping anybody. We were doing a job that was a very demanding and highly disciplined
type of job. We couldn’t do it any other way. Everything had to go into it that we knew how best to
put into it.
…. All I know is that the [MGM scenic art] building represented the best that there was in the field
of scenic art, both as a place to work and to the personnel who were working in it. It was the best
there was, best there’s ever been.
Cinematographer Hal Rossen also thought this:24
[Leonard Mal tin]: Many people have criticized the studio system, saying that it hampered creativity.
Did you feel this way as a cameraman?
Rossen: I am a product of the studio system, star system, and I thought it was a very good way to make
pictures. I’m sure it hampered some, but when I think of the great help it gave so many many more
than it hampered, I think it helped a great deal more than it hampered.
…. I was so happy with my work, I wanted to see it on the screen. I had the best time in the world,
and for that I was paid.
If Coppola’s remarks quoted earlier about his hopes for a factory gathering of the best talent exhibit a
nostalgia for the studio era, it is in part because of the value of the mass production approach. The package-
unit system, although still a collective work arrangement, lost long-term stability while it gained some
degree of creative power for a few top managers. In achieving the freedom to seek out, negotiate, and plan
every project, the package-unit director or star tied up more of her or his time in business dealing than in
filmmaking. On the other hand, if the entire mode as an instance of serial manufacture did allow collectivity,
it also divided labor and set up hierarchies; not all laborers had equal opportunities to contribute to the
conception and execution of the work. This has been the case from the director system through the package-
unit system.
All of this should remind us that any system or mode of production has contradictions. But we might also
remember that if we want to appreciate the work of artists/craftsmen/laborers in the creation of an object,
we might consider contemplating the precision, expertise, and skill the various lower-echelon workers, the
technical experts, and the other managers gave to the films as they contributed their share of knowledge,
creativity, and labor-power to what was known as the Hollywood film.
Part Six
Film style and technology, 1930–60

DAVID BORD WELL
By 1931, Hollywood had a model of how the mode of production could initiate and assimilate a new
technology. During the next two decades, the producer-unit system provided a stable basis for technological
innovation. These are very active years for the Academy Research Council, the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers, the American Society of Cinematographers, and manufacturers’ research departments. It is
within this solid framework that we must locate the trended stylistic changes in deep-focus cinematography
and Technicolor filmmaking. The last principal innovations, widescreen and stereophony, coincided with
the rise of package-unit production and represented the last major studio-sponsored technical initiatives.
The causation and timing of each technological change can, in the last analysis, be attributed to such
economic pressures as product differentiation and the promotion of quality standards. The changes created
some production inefficiencies and extra expenses, but in each case the Hollywood mode of production
absorbed the innovation and restabilized itself. The classical style promptly assigned the new techniques to
already-canonized functions; reciprocally, some of the new devices extended and enriched the classical
paradigm.
27
Deep-focus cinematography
Deep-focus cinematography has held a great interest for film aestheticians, and the reasons are not obscure.
It is a technological development which can be clearly correlated with stylistic consequences: the evidence
seems to be baldly there on the screen. Just as importantly, deep focus seems to invite a stress upon
innovation as such—André Bazin called it ‘a dialectical step forward in the evolution of film language’—
and upon the individual innovators (Orson Welles, William Wyler, Gregg Toland, et al.). The argument
being made in this book tries to frame the central problems somewhat differently.
First, what are we trying to explain? ‘Deep focus’ itself requires some definition: the ‘deep focus’ of
Lumière is not that of Renoir, and that of Renoir is not that of Welles. Nor will a simple opposition of depth
and flatness in image composition take us very far. Most simply, we are asking why at specific periods the
classical paradigm favored certain renditions of depth over others. Why is a shot like figure 27.1, with its
fairly close foreground plane and sharply focused rear plane, so rare in 1937 and yet quite ordinary a decade
later? To answer such a question, we must not simply link technological devices to the image; we must
examine how such ‘deep focus’ functioned within the classical paradigm. The issue of innovation should in
its turn be treated in an institutional context. This is not to say that individual filmmakers do not count, but
the nature of their contributions will be largely defined by the ways that the mode of production encouraged
and appropriated individuals’ innovations. In certain ways, deep focus extended the range of the classical
paradigm. To investigate deep-focus cinematography, we will need to look at the historical role played by
specific technical agencies, especially the American Society of Cinematographers.
In discussing how films may represent depth, we must keep several distinctions in mind. Spatial depth is
not simply one ‘thing’; it is a quality we attribute to widely different sorts of images. One distinction that
must be maintained is that between mise-en-scene and cinematography. You can represent spatial depth
through composition, setting, and light and shadow; and you can represent depth through choice of lens,
amount of light, aperture, film stock, and optical process work. For example, Jean Renoir’s films of the
1930s often produce depth by composing significant action on two planes or by using doors and windows to
frame distant action; yet usually only one of these planes will be in sharp focus. Similarly, one can have
every plane of a shot in sharp focus, as in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), and
yet because of the ambiguous composition and the blank decor relatively little depth is demarcated. The
distinction between deep-space mise-en-scene and deep-focus cinematography lets us isolate various ways
that the classical Hollywood style has represented space.
A second distinction is no less important: that between device and function. It is one thing to say that
Citizen Kane (1941), or any film, contains shots of unprecedented spatial depth; it is another thing to claim
that that device functions in a new way. The innovations, sources, and first times exhumed by film
historians often become less startling if placed in their functional context, within a film or within a tradition.
582 FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY, 1930–60
The soft style in the sound period

During the 1920s, the classical representation of a shot’s depth obeyed a few simple principles. Typically,
the principal actors performed on one or two planes only, and the surroundings (wall, road, horizon)
constituted general background planes. There would usually be one plane of interest, the figure in the
foreground (e.g., a closeup or medium shot of the hero) or, less often, a figure in the middle ground (e.g.,
the hero framed by a tree or doorway in the foreground). Great depth is more common in long shots than in
closer framings. In The Kid Brother (1927), Harold waves goodbye to his girlfriend in the distance
(fig 27.2), but the foreground plane is still at a considerable distance from us. Medium shots could also use
marked depth, as in figures 27.3 and 27.4, but such compositions are rare in American silent films. On the
whole, deep-space staging in the shot obeys a fixed rule: the greater the shot scale (that is, the closer it
comes to being a long shot), the greater the potential depth; the less the shot scale, the shallower the space.
What of deep-focus cinematography? Again, Chapter 21 has shown that in the 1920s, the American
cinema contained two distinct impulses, one toward sharp-focus filming, another toward a softer and more
diffused look. Not until the second half of the 1920s did a certain photographic softness become generally
accepted. By April 1928 Joseph Dubray could write: ‘It is acknowledged by cinematographers in general
that the need of absolutely sharp definition is a thing of the past. The dramatic quality of present day
cinematography demands a certain softness of contours throughout the whole image.’1 Several factors
contributed to the soft look: soft-focus lenses, filters, diffusion of the light sources, different developing
procedures, and the increased use of Mazda lamps. The style owed a good deal to much older trends in still
photography, whereby pictures were considered ‘artistic’ and painterly if they had a blurry softness about
them. Whether the image was crisp or diffused, however, the arrangement of the players in the shot did not
fundamentally differ. Compare two sets of shots (figs 27.5 through 27.8) from So This Is Paris (Lubitsch,
1926) and Seventh Heaven (Borzage, 1927). The cinematographic styles are significantly different
(determined by differences in studio, genre, and filmmaker) but the depth of each shot’s playing space is
comparable: medium close-ups of a figure and a background, long shots with greater depth.
The introduction of sound modified the soft style. In certain respects, the image remained soft in focus
and definition, and Patrick Ogle has pointed out how certain factors favored that quality (the supremacy of
the Mazda lamp, the use of low-contrast developing solutions, the cinematographers’ insistence on shooting
at maximum aperture).2 Certainly the practice of multiple-camera shooting also had an effect. The need to
light the set for several camera positions created a flat illumination, while the extremely long lenses used
for multiple-camera filming tended to weaken definition. Yet the softness of the early sound films is not the
softness of Sunrise (1927), Seventh Heaven, or The Tempest (1928). In the outstanding films of the silent
soft style, the blurring of edges and textures was often accompanied by dark blacks and sparkling
highlights; the image shimmered. In the early sound films, the image can be said to be soft only insofar as it
is grayer, with lower contrast.
The difference was due to several factors. Machine-developing tended to standardize a middle-range
degree of contrast in processing all shots. Moreover, early incandescent illumination simply could not
produce crisp definition. In 1928, Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, two chief practitioners of the soft style,
complained that with Mazdas the colors blended too much: arcs could pick out wrinkles in fabrics, but
Mazdas could not distinguish two black-clothed figures when they came into contact. Proponents of
incandescents found this a desirable ‘softness,’ while antagonists called it ‘blurred, foggy composition.’3
Theater projectionists protested that they could not focus these images; the National Carbon Company even
advertised new projector carbons for ‘the modern soft, low key or fuzzy film.’4 Furthermore, the fact that
most 1928– 31 shots were filmed through a pane of glass (because the camera was in a booth or blimp) gave
early talkie photography a lack of definition that one observer called ‘mushy.’5 (See fig 27.9.) Finally, the
DEEP-FOCUS CINEMATOGRAPHY 583
soft films not only diffused the light sources but also applied very heavy diffusion filters to the lens. (The
filters were ranked from 1 to 4, the heaviest.) Sometimes the cinematographer would also set up taut sheets
of mesh or other material between various planes of the shot. (See fig 21.11 through 21.13.) After the
coming of sound, cinematographers avoided such heavy diffusion. Scrims were not generally used
between planes, and much lighter diffusion filters (scaled from to beyond ) became the norm.6 The result
was a smooth and slight overall blurring that sought to be both unnoticeable and constant from shot to shot.
After the early 1930s, the sparkling, heavily diffused soft style was used only to convey a fantasy
atmosphere (see figs 27.10 and 27.11).
Once a modified ‘soft’ style became the norm for the sound era, the service firms responded. The earliest
panchromatic film had been relatively slow and contrasty, but in 1928 Eastman marketed a lower-contrast,
more sensitive stock. In 1931, the firm introduced Super Sensitive Panchromatic, the first stock created
specifically for Mazda light, low contrast, and ‘softer highlight rendering.’7 Proponents claimed that the film
itself produced the softness that would otherwise have to be created by lighting and filters. Eastman quickly
improved the Super Sensitive stock by adding an anti-halation backing that gave a brighter image with more
shadow detail. Within two years, both Du Pont and Agfa had introduced similar emulsions. While other
service agencies quickly adapted to the film stock— Bausch and Lomb introduced its Raytar lenses
designed for fast film, and Max Factor devised appropriate make-up—cinematographers pondered exactly
how to use the new panchromatic.8
Producers expected that the sensitive emulsions, being at least twice as fast as the old ones, would lead to
a lowering of lighting levels and consequently a decrease in costs. At first, this did not happen. A 1931
Academy survey discovered that most studios using fast film did not consume less amperage.9
Cinematographers were using the same number of lighting units and were not stopping down the lens
because ‘sharp photography is not artistic photography.’10 But when the ASC officially recommended the
new fast films to its members, it pointed out that ‘with the present lightings and smaller lens openings,
improved definition can be obtained without sacrifice of those qualities of softness which have always been
the artistic aim of cinematographers.’11 After 1931, most cinematographers chose to keep the lens at full
aperture, cut down the light levels, and save money on the set. Cinematography in the 1930s thus became a
give-and-take between the technical agencies and the cinematographers. The agencies were committed to
‘progress’: faster and finer-grained films, faster lenses, more portable and powerful light sources.
Throughout the decade, suppliers introduced a series of faster emulsions, culminating in 1938 with Agfa
Supreme, Du Pont Superior II, and Eastman Plus X and Super XX. Mole-Richardson perfected an
incandescent spotlight with Fresnel focusing lenses in 1935, and at the same period created a new series of
lightweight and automatic-feed arc lamps. Most cinematographers in turn chose to keep a soft style. The
faster films and more powerful lights were used to reduce set lighting levels, sometimes by as much as
seventy per cent. The arc lamp had never been completely abandoned when sound arrived, but after 1935 it
was not uncommon for cameramen to mix incandescents with the improved Mole-Richardson arcs, again in
the name of control, economy, and efficiency.12 The faster films also reduced the need for modeling light. As
one cinematographer put it:13
The film itself [Plus X] now does half the work of separating the different planes of your picture.
People stand out more clearly from their backgrounds. Even separating the planes in close shots—the
little matter of keeping a coat-lapel from blending into the background of a garment—of giving an
illusion of depth to faces and figures—is easier with the new film.
The speed of the new films allowed some cinematographers to rely more on spotlighting. Because dolly
shots often made floor lighting cumbersome, most lights were hung above the set; but the light was often so
distant from the action that only powerful spotlights could work effectively. Mole-Richardson cooperated
and designed a variety of spots with controllable beam-spreads and a dimmer that regulated the intensity of
light at any point.14 In short, most cinematographers sought to maintain a balance between technological
novelty and the ‘artistic’ demand for soft images. Yet some cinematographers experimented with ways to
produce harder, more sharply defined shots. What explains this penchant for innovation?
As an organization, the ASC replicated, in its own particular terms, the tension between standardization
and differentiation at work in the production sector generally. On the one hand, the ASC asked the
cinematographer to be a craftsman, cleanly obeying the rules. At the same time, he was expected to
originate techniques. ‘Bert Glennon introducing new method of interior photography’; ‘Reverse studio
lighting methods to put big night spots on the screen’; ‘A new viewpoint on the lighting of motion
pictures’— such titles, from American Cinematographer and JSMPE, indicate the degree to which novelty
had become institutionalized. Every article told the same story. The cinematographer encounters a particular
problem on a production. He devises a mechanism or procedure to solve the problem in a way that might
prove useful on other productions. The article concludes that the solution could improved quality,
differentiate the product, or cut expenses. For ‘example, when Hal Mohr devised a ball-and-socket lens
mount to keep several planes in focus, the American Cinematographer featured an article in which he
explained that such shots made the scene more dramatic and easier to shoot. The article concluded that ‘the
device can be of inestimable value in the Cinematographer’s efforts to reconcile the dramatic purpose of
Cinematography with the mechanical limitations of the camera.’15 Similarly, Bert Glennon was praised as ‘a
man whose progressiveness and sincerity has kept the photographic competition moving.’16 Not only the
cameraman’s employer but his professional association encouraged him to innovate.
While some cinematographers sought to introduce new lighting techniques, camera supports, or niters,
others experimented with the rendering of depth. Some cinematographers used lenses wider than the 50mm
norm to increase depth of field. James Wong Howe (Transatlantic and Viva Villa!, 1933) and Hal Mohr
(Tess of the Storm Country, 1932) are the most famous instances, but many early sound films (e.g., *Applause,
*Young Sinners) use a short focal-length lens occasionally. Mohr used his ball-and-socket mount for Green
Pastures (1936) and Bullets or Ballots (1936). Bert Glennon employed a 25mm lens for Stagecoach (1939).
In Each Dawn I Die (1939), Arthur Edeson made fairly close shots with a wide-angle lens (see fig 27.12). Tony
Gaudio’s ‘precision lighting’ was an attempt to increase depth by creating strong key light with less fill.
Coated lenses, which increased light transmission and enabled cameramen to stop down the aperture, began
to be used in the late 1930s in films like Tobacco Road (1940), which Arthur Miller shot with remarkably
little backlighting.17
Such developments in deep-focus cinematography encouraged some directors to stage more ambitiously
in depth. Deep-space compositions crop up occasionally throughout the early sound era (see figs 27.13
through 27.15 for instances). Such shots are chiefly remarkable for placing the foreground plane in medium
shot, even if it is not in focus. But on the whole, the 1930s cinema adhered to the staging practices of the
1920s. Not until 1940 and 1941 do films systematically place foregrounds quite close to the camera and in
sharp focus. This prototypical ‘deep-focus’ look is usually associated with Citizen Kane, but this film,
available for industry viewing in April 1941, appeared in the midst of a string of similar efforts.
There is, for example, The Stranger on the Third Floor (available to the trade in September 1940), in
which Boris Ingster and his cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca played and filmed courtroom scenes in
considerable depth. There is William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (July 1941), shot by Joseph
August, with its striking backlighting, wide-angle shots, and emphatically close foregrounds (fig 27.16).
There is Meet John Doe (March 1941), in which George Barnes used wide-angle lenses and rapid rack-
focusing to create great depth. There is also The Maltese Falcon (September 1941), whose looming
ceilings, foreshortened views, and striking depth of field make Arthur Edeson’s cinematography strongly akin
to Toland’s work (fig 27.17). There are, in particular, two films designed by William Cameron Menzies, Our
Town (May 1940) and Kings Row (December 1941), both directed by Sam Wood. Many shots in Our Town
are staged in remarkable depth, with looming foreground objects and great depth of focus (fig 27.18). Kings
Row is no less claustrophobic, with huge foregrounds and a dense organization of actors and decor
(fig 27.19). One of the most important exponents of deep space and deep focus, Menzies sketched each shot
in advance and even specified the lens to be used.18 Unlike Toland, who was to argue for the realism of
deep space, Menzies excelled in using depth to create contorted, fantastic perspective. His set designs for
The Tempest (1928), Bulldog Drummond (1929), and other films had a calculated Germanic look which
exploited unusual angles for deep-space compositions (fig 27.20; compare figs 1.1 and 17.17). Whether or
not Menzies influenced Toland (who assisted George Barnes on Bulldog Drummond), his work anticipates
the grotesquely monumental depth of Citizen Kane.
These innovations are not all that drastic. Within the context of the classical style, such depth devices
were quickly assigned familiar functions. For instance, staging in depth often enhanced centering, as when
the foreground figures are silhouetted or out of focus and our attention is drawn to the lighted middle
ground (see fig 27.21). At other moments, a deep-focus composition will function as an establishing shot,
especially in a cramped setting (for example, fig 27.22). Or the spatial depth will constitute a variant on the
familiar shot/reverse-shot (figs 27.23 and 27.24). Sometimes the depth is motivated generically, as in the
skewed sets of a horror film like The Bat Whispers (1931). Stylized or ‘realistic,’ before Citizen Kane,
staging and shooting in depth went generally unnoticed because the devices fitted comfortably into roles
allotted by the classical style.
Gregg Toland and deep focus

The innovations of Gregg Toland should be seen not only in the context of the development of 1930s
technology but also in the context of the ASC as a professional organization. Patrick Ogle has examined the
ways in which Toland synthesized various innovations of the decade— wide-angle lenses, fast film, arc
lighting for black and white, coated lenses, the new silenced Mitchell camera (figs 27.25 and 27.26). But
Ogle assigns the cause of this to Toland’s artistic desire to experiment.19 What Ogle’s purely technical
account misses is the way the concept of artistic experimentation was defined by the institutions within
which Toland worked. Certainly as an independent producer, Samuel Goldwyn gave Toland a strong
incentive to differentiate the studio’s product. The most pertinent stimulus, however, was supplied by
Toland’s professional organization.
The ASC articulated a contradictory task for the cameraman. He was, firstly, to be an artist. The ASC
encouraged its members to think of themselves as creative people, comparable to the screenwriter or director.
Implicitly, then, each cinematographer’s work was to have something distinctive about it. We have already
seen the stress laid on individual innovations and virtuosity. But at the same time, the ethos of the craft held
that the cinematographer’s work must go unnoticed by the layman. The ideal, remarked John Arnold, president
of the ASC, ‘is to so perfectly suit the cinematography to the story that the former is imperceptible, and the
latter is subtly heightened.’20 Arthur Miller claimed that the viewer should forget that he or she has seen
cinematography in watching a film.21 To avoid distracting from the story, the cinematographer’s style
would have to adapt itself to each film. The American Cinematographer praised one cameraman because ‘The
casual observer viewing these two films would hardly suspect they were photographed by the same man.’22
The model is unobtrusive artistry, innovation that does not challenge reigning norms. Gregg Toland’s
problematic position in the early 1940s arose from the conflicting demands of individual artistry and self-
effacing professionalism.
For a few years, Toland was the most famous cinematographer in Hollywood, and indeed the world. He
began very young: an assistant cameraman at age sixteen, George Barnes’s assistant at twenty-two, and at
twenty-seven the youngest first cameraman in Hollywood. During his work with Goldwyn, Toland was
entrusted with many of the studio’s most important projects, such as Eddie Cantor and Anna Sten vehicles.
Toland was admitted to the ASC in 1934, when he was barely thirty. For the next six years, no
cinematographer received more public attention. In the pages of American Cinematographer, Toland
explained how he used the new Mitchell camera, shot low-key, planned every set-up, used arc lighting for
black and white, and devised new photographic gadgets. He shot a string of prestigious films (Les
Miserables [1935], These Three [1936], Dead End [1937], Kidnapped [1938], and Goldwyn Follies [1938]).
After winning the Academy Award for black-and-white cinematography for *Wuthering Heights (1939), he
clinched his fame with The Grapes of Wrath, The Westerner, and The Long Voyage Home (all 1940). With
the reputation of being a fast, efficient worker and a meticulous attender to details of laboratory work,
Gregg Toland at the age of thirty-six was the most powerful cameraman in Hollywood. He had an
unprecedented long-range contract with Goldwyn, which was said to include a provision that he must be
allowed to direct a film.23 (At his death, he was also one of the few stockholders in Goldwyn Productions.)
No wonder, then, that the American Cinematographer noted that most cinematographers believed that
‘Toland’s acknowledged brilliance has placed him in the most nearly ideal position any Director of
Photography has enjoyed since the halcyon days when D.W.Griffith and Billy Bitzer were between them
creating the basic technique of the screen.’24
Like many of his peers during the 1930s, Toland occasionally experimented with technical devices to
give greater depth: arc lamps, faster film, lens coating, and wide-angle lenses. Many of Toland’s shots
display qualities common in other cinematographers’ work. Sometimes the shot will have considerable
spatial depth in the composition, but the foreground will be decoratively darkened or unfocused (fig 27.27).
Sometimes a short-focal-length lens at an unusual angle will yield a shot/reverse- shot pattern (fig 27.28).
Almost always, however, the 1920s principle holds: long shots have greater depth of field than closer shots.
Even as late as *Wuthering Heights, when a shot’s foreground may be in medium closeup, one plane or
another is out of focus. When Cathy is at the table, for instance, she is in focus in the middle ground and
Hindley’s shoulder and the servant’s hand are out of focus in the foreground. Nevertheless, Toland’s work
of the late 1930s deserves closer consideration. First, several of the films he worked on make a systematic
use of depth of space and of focus that was generally rare at the time; and secondly, in some images we can
find what would become Toland’s individual use of deep focus.
*Wuthering Heights (March 1939), shot for William Wyler at Goldwyn, employs certain aspects of the
setting as motifs, and these aspects usually have to do with depth. In general, there is Wuthering Heights
itself, a low, mazelike set with raked floors and low ceilings similar to those in Stagecoach (released February
1939). More specifically, depth is used as a motif to contrast eras within the story. When as youngsters
Cathy and Heathcliff peer into the Grange, the camera tracks past them to the window to reveal the ball
inside. The penetration into the room expresses Cathy’s fascination with the glittering life there. Years later,
with Cathy now Lockley’s wife and mistress of the Grange, Heathcliff the gentleman calls on them. As the
three leave the room, the camera suddenly tracks back, through the same window. The contrast of periods
and the sense of change issue from the parallel camera movements into and out of depth.
Dead End (1937) is in many respects even more remarkable. The confinement to a single set and a loose
unity of duration (one day) mark the film as fairly theatrical. Within these conventions, however, Toland
and Wyler create a constant interplay in depth. The various lines of action are interwoven within deep space:
Wyler will shift our attention from a foreground action to a new action in the background. This practice
poses no great problem for depth of focus, since typically the foreground is still in long shot. But in one
virtuosic framing, two hoodlums in a restaurant plan to kidnap the rich man’s son (fig 27.29). The men are
in focus in profiled close-up; outside the window, a woman wheels a baby carriage across the street. The
woman is too far away to be in focus, and her child is not the target of the scheme, but the fact that she
occupies frame center and is the only moving figure in the shot gives her a symbolic salience. Here is the
sort of staging in extreme depth, with a significant element in foreground close-up and a thematically
important element in a distant plane, that will become familiar in Citizen Kane.
The Long Voyage Home (October 1940) was praised by American Cinematographer for Toland’s
memorable shots, and it is possible that it exercised considerable influence on deep-focus films of 1941. As
in Dead End, there is little backlighting, but the sensitivity of the film stock picks out various planes.
Again, the action is staged in depth, especially along the ship’s deck. Since the background plane is often
only a few feet beyond an extremely close foreground plane, both planes can be in sharp focus (fig 27.30).
Toland’s late 1930s career is of interest chiefly because in the three films mentioned, a fairly rigorous use
of depth becomes central to the overall construction of space. Moreover, while many shots resemble other
cinematographers’ explorations of deep-focus imagery at the period, certain images in Dead End and The
Long Voyage Home bear the mark of Toland’s distinctive treatment of deep space and deep focus. The
characteristic Toland shot is lit low-key, with little fill or backlighting. There are several significant planes
of depth, all in focus. There is an exaggeratedly enlarged foreground plane— usually a face. Most
importantly, heads crowd into the frame, competing for attention by position (centered, uncentered), size,
movement, glance, and aspect (profile, frontal).
An excellent example of the Toland trademark occurs in figure 27.31, when the Bogart character
terrorizes the young boy. There are not only several planes (from the beanie in extreme lower foreground to
the wall in the distance) but several distinct areas of action in the shot. A comparable zigzag of our attention
operates in figure 27.32. In the scene of the group song from The Long Voyage Home (fig 27.33), the
foreground element is not so exaggerated, but the frontality is even more marked. Furthermore, the typical
Toland composition crams all the dramatically significant elements into the frame. This has the effect of
making the shot notably static: all the figures are visible from only one vantage point; any camera or figure
movement would impede our sightlines. Toland’s densely organized compositions do not, as Bazin argued,
make our perception existentially free; instead, dialogue, gesture, and figure aspect direct our attention. We
must also remember that such packed shots are legible because they are carefully imbedded in an orthodox
context of clear establishing shots, analytical cutting, and closeups. Such compositions’ use of deep space
and deep focus will become dominant in Toland’s 1941 work.
If Toland was striving, within his professional context, to distinguish his own contribution, what do we make
of Citizen Kane (released April 1941)? The film’s stylistic features—the diagonal perspectives (with
ceilings), the splitting of action into two or more distinct planes, the use of an enlarged foreground plane
(close-up or even extreme close-up), the low-key lighting, and the persistent frontality—all had been seen,
in fragmentary fashion, in Toland’s previous work. But Kane enabled Toland to consolidate a unified ‘look’
as his trademark.
In this film, deep focus is elevated to a coherent style on the basis of two principles. The first is the
dramatic expanse of the sets. The Inquirer offices, the auditoriums and opera stages, Xanadu, even the Kane
family cabin and the El Rancho nightclub, are all conceived as enormous spaces, both high and deep. Here
Toland’s deep focus functions in traditional ways: even on these vast sets, the angles still operate within
patterns of shot/reverse shot (e.g., Kane and Susan shouting across the cavernous hall in Xanadu) or of
establishing shots (e.g., Gettys watching Kane’s rally from a balcony). A second, more innovative principle
made Kane’s deep focus flagrant: the use of unusually long takes. Toland claimed that in the interest of
‘simplification,’ Welles decided to avoid cuts.25
We pre-planned our angles and compositions so that action which would ordinarily be shown in direct
cuts would be shown in a single, longer scene—often one in which important action might take place
simultaneously in widely-separated points in extreme foreground and background…. Welles’
technique of visual simplification might combine what would conventionally be made as two separate
shots— a close-up and an insert—in a single, non-dollying shot.
The important phrase here is ‘non-dollying.’ In Kane, the static, cramped quality of Toland’s particular
brand of depth is given full sway by the use of the almost unmoving long take. The most famous deep-focus
shots in the film—Susan’s music lesson, the scene of Kane signing away his newspapers (fig 27.34), Kane’s
firing of Leland, Susan’s attempted suicide, and most of the shot in Mrs Kane’s boarding house—all are
notably rigid and posed, relying greatly upon frontality and narrowly circumscribed figure movement.
These shots call attention to themselves not only because they are so deep but also because they are so
prolonged and fixed.
Citizen Kane was, then, an opportunity for Toland to make flamboyant deep focus identified with his own
work. Welles had come to Hollywood with no professional film experience, and (according to Welles)
Toland had sought out the Kane assignment. After the filming was completed, Toland was at pains to claim
several innovations. For greater realism, he explained, many sets were designed with ceilings,
which required him to light from the floor. Since the sets were also deep, he relied on the carrying power of
arc lamps. Furthermore, since Welles and Toland had decided to stage action in depth, Toland sought great
depth of focus by using Super XX film, increasing the lighting levels, and using optically coated wide-angle
lenses.26 As a result, Toland claimed to be able to stop down his lens ‘to apertures infinitely smaller than
anything that has been used for conventional interior cinematography in many years.’27 In an era when f-2.3
and f-2.8 were the common apertures, Toland boasted that he shot all Kane’s interiors at f-8 or smaller
apertures.28* The result shifted the traditional limits of deep space. In yielding a depth of field that extended
from about eighteen inches to infinity, Toland’s ‘pan-focus’ made it possible to have a sharp foreground
plane in medium shot or even close-up and still keep very distant background planes in focus.
In justifying pan-focus for Citizen Kane, Toland walked the cinematographer’s narrow line between
artistic innovation and modest craftsmanship. Welles allowed originality full play, Toland claimed. But
experimentation was controlled by certain demands. Static long takes in the name of ‘simplification’ could
be justified as a more efficient production procedure, allowing dialogue scenes to be shot more quickly.
There was a stylistic demand as well, which Toland labeled ‘realism.’ Realism of space, because the eye
sees in depth: ‘For all practical purposes it is a perfect universal-focus lens.’ Realism of time, because cuts
call the audience’s attention to ‘the mechanics of picture-making.’ In all, realism in the name of continuity
and concealed artifice: ‘Both Welles and I…felt that if it was possible, the picture should be brought to the
screen in such a way that the audience would feel it was looking at reality, rather than merely a movie.’29
The terms of the rationale are familiar, but ‘the most style-conscious cameraman of his time,’ as Toland was
later called, did not quite get away with it.30 The visual style of Citizen Kane was sensed as so unusual that
the Toland ‘look’ became famous but also came under considerable criticism within the industry.
Citizen Kane’s distinctive cinematography made Toland the only Hollywood cameraman whose name
was known to the general public. In 1941, Toland signed five major articles about his shooting technique,
one of which appeared in Popular Photography and another in Theatre Arts. In June, Life ran an extensive
feature about Kane: nominally about Welles, the article devoted most space to explaining ‘pan-focus’ using
illustrations especially prepared by Toland. Toland’s name was kept in the limelight by the release of two more
films in 1941, The Little Foxes (August) and Ball of Fire (December). By the end of the year, amateur
enthusiasts were learning how to apply pan-focus to their home movies and Goldwyn was reported to be
offering Toland the most lucrative and prestigious contract any cinematographer had received.31
Toland’s professional peers had a more mixed response to his work. True, he had publicized the
cinematographer as a creative artist. None the less, many cinematographers felt that Toland’s work swerved
too far from the orthodox style.32 Kane was criticized for distorted perspectives and excessive shadows.
Charles G.Clarke pointed out in American Cinematographer that although the soft style had been abused,
Toland had gone too far to the other extreme. For one thing, Kane’s small apertures gained depth at the
price of ‘that illusion of roundness which—fully as important as depth of definition—is a necessity in
conveying the illusion of three-dimensional reality in our two-dimensional pictures.’33 Clarke went on to
claim that exaggerated depth of field sacrificed selectivity, the ability to control audience attention by
focusing on only the most important character. Toland was often criticized on these grounds. The American
Cinematographer’s review of How Green Was My Valley (December 1941) hits Toland in almost every
sentence:34
[Arthur] Miller makes eloquent use of the modern increased-depth technique. But he does it without
lapsing into the brittle artificiality which has so often accompanied the use of this technique. His
scenes have depth—often to a surprising degree—but they also have qualities of ‘good photography’
which are all too often lost in attaining unusual depth of field. His scenes have depth, yes; but they
also have a lifelike roundness, a soft plasticity of image, and a pleasing gradational range which have
all too often been sacrificed in pursuit of depth.
Commentary in American Cinematographer about The Little Foxes was even more critical, complaining that
simultaneous action in foreground and background created confused, scattered compositions: ‘The eye
hardly knows where to look.’35
Such responses to Toland’s work were not simply jealousy. They were signals that Toland had developed
too eccentric a style. His artistry was no longer unobtrusive. The reaction against Toland’s lack of volumes
and selectivity was caused by his refusal to use edge-lighting, his rigid placement of figures, his relatively
undiffused close shots of women, his cramped compositions, and especially the lengthy takes that prolonged
the viewer’s awareness of depth.
One other factor, not mentioned at the time of Kane’s release, seems an important cause of the film’s
‘brittle artificiality.’ So strong was the mystique surrounding Toland that his ‘pan-focus’ lens work was
given credit for shots that were not made as he had claimed. During the late 1930s, the RKO Special Effects
Unit, under Vernon Walker, had become famous for its realistic matte and optical printer work.36 In 1941,
no writers acknowledged that many of Citizen Kane’s deep-focus effects had been created by Walker’s unit.
Several of the Xanadu shots, ceilings included, were mattes. The shot of Kane firing Jed Leland was done in
back-projection. In 1943, Linwood Dunn, supervisor of RKO’s optical printer work, claimed: ‘The picture
was about 50% optically duped, some reels consisting of 80% to 90% of optically-printed footage. Many
normal-looking scenes were optical composites of units photographed separately…’37 (Again, William
Cameron Menzies had anticipated this practice, using back-projection and mattework for depth effects in
Our Town.) Even shots not optically treated were not necessarily strict ‘pan-focus.’ Dunn points out that
Susan’s suicide scene, for example, was a multiple exposure, the foreground planes of the shot being
exposed separately and the focus being changed for each plane.38 At the time, Toland did not admit that
many deep-focus shots were not done in the camera. Indeed, many of the illustrations accompanying his
1941 articles and interviews are captioned as examples of pan-focus when they are actually optically printed
images. In his later films, Toland had no recourse to such optical work, which explains why their depth of
field is not so extreme. Kane’s use of special effects gave it a cartoonish look which was not greatly
imitated. That Arthur Miller, not Toland, won the Academy Award for black-and-white cinematography in
1941 and that Citizen Kane looks not quite like any later Hollywood film suggest that Toland’s extreme
style had to be modified to fit classical norms.
Deep-focus cinematography in the 1940s and 1950s

If Kane was more controversial than copied, where lies Toland’s significance? Even while criticizing
Toland, Clarke claimed that deep focus gave the cinematographer a new tool, ‘a better way of meeting the
requirements of any storysituation. Let us hope that if the pendulum of cinematographic style swings back
again toward increased softness, we will not forget this technique.’39 Toland set a new standard for
technical prowess: after him, a skilled cinematographer had to know how to use coated lenses, fast film,
floor-level lights, and great depth of field. Moreover, although extreme deep focus had been attempted
before, the publicity attending Toland made deep focus an active issue for the first time. Cinematographers
were forced to face exactly how deep focus would be used, as Clarke put it, in particular story situations.
One of those situations was defined, following Toland, as ‘realism.’ In Chapter 7, we saw that in the
1940s a realist aesthetic somewhat modified classical practice. This was conceived as partly an ‘objective’
verisimilitude, especially of setting and lighting. Filming on location was initially encouraged by wartime
economy measures in production, and it was facilitated by the fact that military demand had resulted in the
production of more portable and versatile equipment.40*
Once the war ended, manufacturers created equipment and film stocks that helped location filming. 35mm
camera design was least changed. A very few filmmakers did use Eyemos, Arriflexes, or Eclair Camerettes,
but lightweight cameras were rarely used in Hollywood before the 1960s. Sometimes a cinematographer
might use a combat camera, such as the Cunningham, for ‘realistic action scenes.’ More development took
place in other fields. Several companies began to supply powerful portable photoflood units. After William
Daniels used photofloods extensively on Naked City (1948), filmmakers began to take these lamps to
location because they could run off house current. Photoflood lighting was also feasible because of
increased film speed.41 In 1947, Paramount and Du Pont began to use latensification to raise film speed
quite considerably. (Intensification is a process which converts underexposed film to acceptable printing
quality by re-exposing the film to a weak light.) By 1950 latensification was standard practice in several
studios.42
It is now possible to shoot location scenes in office buildings, narrow halls, alleys, etc., using only a
few photofloods for illumination and, by giving the negative the latensification treatment, insure an
acceptable print. Moreover, it is possible to achieve print quality in such footage that makes it no problem
at all to edit it with scenes shot with normal studio lighting.
Soon after, in 1954, Eastman dramatically increased black-and-white film speed by introducing Tri-X (ASA
250 daylight, 200 tungsten). At the end of the decade, Eastman produced a sharper black-and-white stock
and a color film suited for location shooting.43
Location shooting, taken in conjunction with low-key (‘mood’) lighting, helped define one distinct
postwar cinematographic practice. Chapter 7 shows that this practice did not fundamentally violate classical
principles of causal and generic motivation. Now we can see that this conception of ‘realism’ also owed
something to a standardization of deep-focus shooting. Certain traits became common to many ‘realistic’
films of the 1940s and 1950s. First, there was the increased use of short focal-length lenses. The wide-angle
lenses necessary for achieving deep focus were handy for cinematographers working in close quarters on
location: by exaggerating distances, the short focal-length lens made actual locations, such as small rooms,
seem more spacious. Moreover, in some shooting situations, full and sharply-focused shots of several
figures would be impossible without a lens which could expand the angle of view.
The 35mm and 30mm lenses became more common. Frank Planer, in describing his work on Criss Cross
(1948), remarked: ‘To give the picture added realism through photography, we filmed every scene with the
30mm lens to carry a wiresharp depth of focus throughout the frame.’44 Whereas the 50mm lens was
considered standard until the war, by 1950, the 35mm had become the norm; by 1959, cinematographers were
said to have almost completely discarded the 50mm lens.45 Another innovation of the late 1940s, the
Garutso modified lens, was designed to increase depth of field without increasing the amount of light. With
the Garutso, even location filming could use fairly wide apertures and still get good depth of field.46 Thus many
films of the period retained great depth of playing space and depth of focus on location. Several films shot
on location used deep-focus extensively (Act of Violence [1948], Lady from Shanghai [1948], Johnny
Belinda [1948], A Double Life [1948], Asphalt Jungle [1950], and Viva Zapata! [1952]).
Furthermore, just as Toland had used the faster Eastman stocks with more light, so some
cinematographers took advantage of faster films and latensification to increase depth of field. Tri-X,
initially designed for television filming, could be used on location to achieve depth of field, as in
Blackboard Jungle and Black Tuesday (both 1955). Similarly, latensification was praised for enabling the
cinematographer to stop down for greater depth. Joe MacDonald reported that latensification enabled him to
film some shots for Viva Zapata! (1952) at an aperture of f-22. Comparable results had already been
obtained in Sunset Boulevard and Asphalt Jungle (both 1950).47
In some ways, then, Clarke’s prophecy was fulfilled. Deep focus gave the cinematographer ‘a better way
of meeting the requirements of any story-situation.’ Deep focus became one paradigmatic alternative (see
figs 27.35 and 27.36). Yet it was not a drastically new one. Cinematographers continued to use diffusion
filters and three-point lighting, and they sought innovations like the Garutso lens (which yielded a great
depth of field without the hard, contrasty effects of stopping down the lens). Just as Hollywood had quickly
lauded, then revised, the extreme low-key ‘Lasky lighting’ in The Cheat (1915), so cinematographers toned
down Toland’s idiosyncratic style. Even in non-location films, deep focus and deep space were assimilated
to existing norms of genre and decoupage. A horror film like Hangover Square (1945) could use bizarre low
angles and depth to signify a threatening atmosphere. Other films absorbed deep focus into normal shooting
and cutting patterns. If the shot was not a static long take (as in Kane), an occasional deep-focus
composition could effectively establish or reestablish a locale (fig 27.37). If the deep shot was not
exaggeratedly frontal, it could create a crisp over-the-shoulder reverse angle (figs 27.38 and 27.39). Toland
himself used his particular brand of deep focus in such conventional ways for the comedy Ball of Fire
(December 1941), which—although not entirely free of the rigid poses of Kane—does avoid the long take
and fits the deep shots into orthodox shot/reverse-shot combinations or into grotesque comic juxtapositions
(fig 27.40).
While many filmmakers of the 1940s inserted the deep-focus composition into a classical decoupage,
some directors explored another possibility. For Wyler, as Bazin pointed out, the shot in depth constituted
an equivalent of a normally edited breakdown of the scene. Action and reaction, cause and effect, are now
shown within the same shot. But frontality, evenly spaced figures, and glances all function to guide the
spectator’s perception of the image. The pragmatic Wyler justified his practice as wholly traditional,
creating ‘smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene.’48 Thus in The Little Foxes, when Zan
glimpses her boyfriend eating with another woman, Wyler refrains from cutting in to him; but since Zan
turns her back to us, our attention is driven to the background (fig 27.41). Other filmmakers followed the
same principle, although with more open compositions; in figure 27.42, from *Manhandled (1949), the
detective notices the water cooler in the nearest plane, and his glance cues us to look at it. In both examples,
the single shot does duty for a series of eyeline-matched close-ups. Thus filmmakers either inserted deep-
focus shots into a traditional sequence or implanted the classical editing principles within the deep-focus
shots themselves. Either way, the classical paradigm remained in place. Hollywood deep-focus
cinematography created only what Leonard Meyer calls trended change.
Toland’s own career after 1942 is a measure of the assimilation of deep focus to classical norms. After
returning from the Navy, he shot The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for Wyler and Goldwyn. The film has
several deep-focus shots, but now Toland almost never jams many faces into the frame and never makes the
foreground plane close and frontal. Compare figure 27.43, of Fred and Peggy in the drugstore and the
manager in the distance, with the famous shot in Mrs Kane’s boarding house; or compare the intimate space
of the parlor in figure 27.44 with the depth of the stairwell in figure 5.25, from The Little Foxes. Toland’s
postwar compositions are relatively spacious and open, with more recourse to reframing, and none are
allowed to take on the rigidity of Kane’s long-take tableaux. The most famous example of the new
flexibility in Toland’s compositions is the scene in Butch’s tavern, when Al looks from Homer playing the
piano in the foreground to the phone booth in the distance, where Fred is calling Peggy (fig 27.45). In Kane,
our attention would be drawn to the booth by decor, lighting, and sharply-angled perspective. Here, Wyler
cuts in closer (fig 27.46). The scene is analyzed for us.
Toland’s professional practices changed as well. Wyler recalled that in the postwar films Toland had
recourse to a sliding diffusion screen ‘to keep the sharp focus of realism, without being harsh or unflattering
to the women he photographed.’49 In interviews, Toland justified his quest for deep focus as always
subservient to the film’s story. But he did continue his experiments. Toland was associated with his
trademark—wire-sharp depth in cinematography—until his death in 1948 and thereafter. For Roseanna
McCoy (1949), he was said to have perfected an ‘ultimate focus’ lens that could stop down to f-64. He was
reported to carry in his wallet a strip of film bearing a shot with a focal depth of three inches to infinity; in
the foreground was a face.50
Toland, then, did not overthrow the classical style. The film that posed the most problems, Citizen Kane,
was not typical, partly because of its reliance upon optical work, partly because of its lighting, compositions,
and long takes. None the less, Toland’s innovations not only made his reputation; they also influenced his
peers. After 1942, in good part through the activities of the ASC, Hollywood cinematography adopted a less
picturesque deep-focus style better suited to the demands of classical narrative and decoupage. Long takes
would be used, but not in conjunction with static deep-focus compositions. The ability to execute a shot in
depth became one more mark of the expert cinematographer, but the wary professional chose not to call
attention to deep focus by making it a personal trademark,
28
Technicolor
One source of spectacle in early silent films was color—tinting, toning, and handcoloring. For years many
firms worked persistently to secure a predictable and reasonably priced photographic color that would
conform to Hollywood’s stylistic standards. In 1929, over twenty companies claimed basic color patents, but
a single firm won control of the field.1 Technicolor’s supremacy resulted from several factors. The firm
carefully developed, revised, and publicized its process. The company was generally sensitive to the
business and engineering requirements of Hollywood film production. Moreover, Technicolor Corporation
worked effectively with the professional associations, especially the SMPE (in which Technicolor staff
members were prominent). The success of
Technicolor during the 1930s and 1940s can be measured both by its increased volume of business and
its several Academy Awards. Technicolor is an instance of a service firm initiating research within a
specialized area. In such situations, major production firms tended to let smaller firms initiate a new
technology, withholding investment until severe problems had been ironed out. This explains why
Technicolor lived precariously for such a long time— sixteen years without making a profit. It took that
long to harness a significant novelty to Hollywood’s standards of cost efficiency and quality.
The company was founded in 1916 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock, and W.Burton Wescott as an
outgrowth of their industrialengineering consulting firm. The earliest Technicolor process, an additive
method, aroused little interest. (An additive color process blends light of primary colors on the screen
surface, rather than using pigments or dyes in the film strip itself. Technicolor’s earliest method
superimposed red-and-green-filtered images on the screen.) In the 1920s, a two-strip Technicolor process
was used almost exclusively in sequences in black-and-white movies. Technicolor’s first boom came during
the years 1929–31. The firm had devised a new two-strip subtractive process and its celebrated imbibition
printing method.2* Warner Bros, having innovated talking pictures, used the improved Technicolor for On
With the Show! (1929), and other studios followed suit. But within three years, the decline in release-print
quality and the cost of the process made firms halt Technicolor filming. In 1932, Joseph A. Ball created a three-
strip method that offered much better color rendition. (For this method, Ball added a three-color beamsplitter
and a third strip of film, so that each matrix—red, blue, green— had its own separation negative.) Tested on
Walt Disney cartoons (beginning with Flowers and Trees [1932]), a live-action short (La Cucaracha
[1934]), and then on a feature (Becky Sharp [1935]), Technicolor attracted attention again. The success of
Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), and Gone
With the Wind (1939) confirmed Technicolor’s new powers. Soon the firm could not keep up with the
producers’ demands. Presided over by Herbert Kalmus, Technicolor virtually monopolized Hollywood
color filming until the early 1950s.3
To win Hollywood’s support, Technicolor employed a time-tested business tactic, that of supplying
research prototypes. Every new Technicolor process was demonstrated in a sample film financed by the
company itself or by a sympathetic backer. Kalmus and his colleagues produced The Gulf Between (1917)
to display the additive process, Toll of the Sea (1922) to exhibit the initial two-color procedure, and The
Flag (1927) and The Viking (1928) to publicize the revised two-color process. By the time Technicolor was
ready to showcase the three-strip process in a feature film, Merriam C.Cooper and John Hay Whitney
formed an independent firm, Pioneer Films, to make La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp.4 Again and again
Kalmus’s company had to assume responsibility for proving that its color method could meet the industry’s
standard of quality.
The issue of production economies also dogged Technicolor. Even after the three-strip method was
proven viable, the studios did not rush to convert. One principal reason was that Technicolor was hard to
adjust to demands of cost and labor-time. In 1936, Technicolor could increase a picture’s budget by $100,
000 to $300,000, an enormous amount during the Depression. A Technicolor film consumed more
production time, required more electrical power, and could not draw upon the studio library of stock
footage. Many producers doubted that Technicolor’s novelty compensated for the expense. As American
Cinematographer put it, if the color was unnatural, the audience noticed it (and that was bad); if the color
was good, the audience forgot about it (thus it was not worth the cost).5
Technicolor was sensitive to demands for cost effectiveness because its founders were experienced
engineers. Both Kalmus and Comstock were graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
had taught there; they employed three MIT physics students to work on the process; even the firm’s name
paid tribute to ‘Tech.’ As industrial consultants, Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott had gained a sound
reputation for research. And as engineers, Technicolor’s directors decided on a ‘progressive step
development’ strategy for nurturing their color process little by little, with a three-color process as the
ultimate goal. It was Ball, one of Comstock’s students and a prominent member of the SMPE and the
Academy, who designed the three-color camera and guided Technicolor research through the 1930s.6 It was
generally acknowledged that Comstock, Leonard Troland, and Ball were the inventors while Kalmus was the
promoter: ‘Businessmen regard Dr. Kalmus as a scientist and scientists regard him as a businessman.’7 But
even Kalmus continued to experiment in solving engineering problems in his spare time.
Throughout the years, Technicolor followed many industrial-engineering principles to maximize
efficiency. The company started a research laboratory. It retained a staff to design and build special printers
and processing machinery. Laboratory chief Gerald Rackett pointed to his operation as a model of
successful engineering. Although the cameras were built by Mitchell, they were designed and repaired in
the optical and machine shops of Technicolor. The plant was a paragon of industrial organization.
Management carefully divided the labor, limited knowledge to specialties, and discouraged transfers across
departments. Entering sensitive areas required security passes. Only the firm’s executives had a total view
of research development and patented processes.8
After the 1935 color boom, Technicolor controlled its quality by placing restrictions on production
practices. Because the 1929–31 color vogue had resulted in untrained cinematographers using the process,
the firm wanted to supervise production to a great degree. Filming procedures became standardized. To
make a Technicolor film, a producer had to rent the cameras, hire a Technicolor cameraman (eventually to
be called a ‘camera optical engineer’), use Technicolor make-up, and have the film processed and printed by
Technicolor. The producer would also have to accept a ‘color consultant’ who would advise what color
schemes to use on sets, costumes, and make-up. Every day the camera magazines were inspected in the
Technicolor laboratory, checked out by the cinematographer, and returned at the end of the day. Only
trained crews could operate the camera, and the production’s cinematographer had to work closely with the
Technicolor cameraman. The firm also adjusted itself to studio differences, supplying motors for various
studios’ electrical and sound requirements.9
TECHNICOLOR 595
Before 1950, few of Technicolor’s research innovations spilled over beyond the improvement of its own
color process. In the mid-1930s, the firm devised a remote-control focusing device that was occasionally
used on black-and-white films. Technicolor also spurred the development of bright process-projection
equipment. The most significant innovation of all occurred in 1935. Since the three-color process was
balanced for daylight, arc lighting most closely approximated the film’s needs. But most studios’ arc
equipment dated back to the 1920s. Technicolor commissioned Mole-Richardson to design silent, efficient
arc units that would yield a uniform, flat distribution of light. Two years later, Mole-Richardson introduced
a new line of side arcs, overhead ‘scoops,’ and spotlights. These lamps soon became common in both color
and black-and-white filming.10
As a service company, Technicolor maintained almost complete control of its product; as a color process,
it had to conform to classical norms. Hollywood’s use of Technicolor was almost entirely motivated by
genre. It was to the firm’s advantage to stress that color was simply an increase in realism applicable to any
film, but the argument did not convince.11 On the whole, Technicolor was identified with the musical
comedy, the historical epic, the adventure story, and the fantasy—in short, the genres of stylization and
spectacle. During the 1920s, Technicolor sequences were inserted into The Merry Widow (1925), Beau
Geste (1926), Ben-Hur (1926), The Ten Commandments (1923), and others; in The Big Parade (1925) and
The Wedding March (1928), the process was used for scenes of pageantry. The Black Pirate (1926), one of
the first two-strip Technicolor features, made extensive use of color for spectacle. The 1929–31 Technicolor
boom was identified with the rise of the musical. (Desert Song, Glorifying the American Girl, Golddiggers
of Broadway, Rio Rita, Show of Shows, King of Jazz, and Whoopee are the best-known.) Contemporary
accounts emphasize that two-color (red-green) Technicolor was best suited for ‘musical revues’ because
they appeal by virtue of costume and artificial settings: ‘Color pictures [scripts] which depend for their
effect upon outdoor sets will be of comparatively little value to studios using a color process which cannot
obtain good blues in sea and sky.’12
Even after Ball devised the more ‘realistic’ three-strip color method, color films remained codified by
genre. There were musicals (The Dancing Pirate [1935], Vogues of 1938 [1937], Goldwyn Follies [1938],
Down Argentine Way [1940], The Gang’s All Here [1943]). There were historical spectacles and adventure
tales in exotic locales (Adventures of Robin Hood [1938], Drums Along the Mohawk [1939], Northwest
Mounted Police [1940], Western Union [1941], The Black Swan [1942], For Whom the Bell Tolls [1943]). A
Western (e.g., Jesse James [1939]), a comedy (e.g., Nothing Sacred [1937]), or a romance set in an exotic
locale (e.g., The Garden of Allah [1936]) also had an occasional chance of being filmed in color. The
Women (1940) justified color by its lengthy interpolated fashion show, while *An American Romance
(1944) uses color to reinforce its ‘epic’ account of an immigrant making good. It is probable that two films
of 1939 played a central role in defining color’s generic range: Gone With the Wind, a historical spectacle,
was credited with having proven that color could add to a film’s boxoffice appeal, and The Wizard of Oz
used Technicolor only for the central Oz fantasy, not for a rendering of Dorothy’s everyday life in Kansas.
Like certain kinds of music or lighting, the presence of color was governed by genre conventions.13
Other conventions of the classical paradigm limited Technicolor’s use. While Technicolor could play up
the spectacular and the artificial, the industry cautioned that color must not distract from the story. It was
widely felt that two-strip Technicolor musicals had been weak films bolstered by the novelties of color and
sound; this diagnosis was confirmed by the lukewarm response given to Becky Sharp (1935). ‘Never use
color for the sake of color alone,’ warned a Selznick art director in 1937. ‘It is only something which is
added to the story, and the story should not be made for the sake of it.’14
Technicolor was aware of Hollywood’s demands. From the outset, the firm had understood that in order
to succeed commercially color would have to favor principal narrative elements. Around 1920, a producer
explained the problem to Comstock:15
The human being is the center of the drama, not flowers, gardens, and dresses. The face is the center
of the human being. And the eyes are the center of the face. If a process is not sharp enough to show
clearly the whites of a person’s eyes at a reasonable distance, it isn’t any good no matter what it is.
The plausible rendering of complexion and expression became the chief goal of Technicolor’s research. One
critic pointed out problems of definition in the 1916–23 efforts: ‘When the figures retreat to any distance, it
is difficult to distinguish their expression.’16 Complaints about Becky Sharp’s ‘overripe’ and ‘scarletina’
skin tones made Technicolor ask Max Factor to devise pancake make-up. Throughout the 1930s,
Technicolor calmed cinematographers’ fears that color would aggravate facial blemishes.17 The firm was at
pains to compromise between developing a ‘lifelike’ rendition of the visible spectrum and developing a
treatment of the human face that would accord with classical requisites of beauty and narrative centrality.
To fit Technicolor’s recording capacities smoothly to Hollywood’s needs, the firm created the role of
color consultant. Natalie Kalmus, Herbert’s wife, had been the first model for Technicolor filming. She and
Kalmus were divorced in 1921 (although they continued to live in the same house for another twenty-five
years), and one condition of the divorce made Natalie the color supervisor on most Technicolor
productions. A former art student, she insisted that sets and costumes be in cool colors, the better to set off
the tones of the characters’ faces. She is sometimes credited with Technicolor’s reluctance to film bright or
saturated colors, the assumption being that pastels were less harsh and distracting. The same worry that
Technicolor would look artificial governed the ban on symbolically colored lighting, a constraint not
completely overcome until South Pacific (1958).18
Natalie Kalmus also promoted the idea that Technicolor could yield not a flat and candy-box image, but
actually a more rounded and deep one. With the proper color separation of foreground and background, she
wrote, ‘it is possible to make it appear as though the actors were actually standing there in person, thus
creating the illusion of a third dimension.’19 On the whole, cinematographers accepted this dictum. They
shot Technicolor with softer and flatter light, using less backlight and letting the color difference separate
the planes. A frame like figure 28.1 shows how color areas could distinguish planes without need for edge
lighting. As late as 1957, the SMPTE was still advocating low-contrast lighting for color (no more than a 3:
1 key-fill ratio). Most cinematographers used the same arrangement of lighting units for color and black and
white; only the intensity and number of the sources differed.20 The effect was far from transgressive, as can
be seen from almost any shot in a 1930s or 1940s Technicolor film. Highkey Technicolor shooting yielded
an image that conformed to the norms of softness, low contrast, and diffusion characteristic of 1930s
cinematography (see fig 28.2). The rarer low-key Technicolor shot still possesses a softness, especially in
shadow areas, consistent with Hollywood norms. Classical ideals of volume, separation of planes, and dim
backgrounds were amply satisfied by Technicolor cinematography.
Just as sound filming practices strove to recover the standardized procedures of the silent era, so
Technicolor filming attempted to become as much as possible like monochrome filming. Color brought with
it three changes: a very slow film stock, the need for arc lighting, and the awkward three-strip camera.
Many cinematographers accepted certain inevitable demands, such as the necessity of gauging light by
exposure meters. But knowing that light levels were a problem, Technicolor constantly tried to increase its film
speed. The company’s efforts resulted in a faster, fine-grained stock first used on Gone With the Wind
(1939). Combined with Mole-Richardson’s portable arc units, this film stock put color cinematography
TECHNICOLOR 597
somewhat closer to monochrome methods. Nonetheless, by 1948, a cinematographer could still point out
that for low-key filming, color required ten lighting units for every two used in black and white, and that
changes in light intensity affected not only exposure but color gradations, often for the worse.21
From an engineering standpoint, Technicolor filming could not become fully consonant with mainstream
production practice as long as it utilized a three-strip method. The bulky cameras were hard to maneuver,
complicated to thread, difficult to maintain. It is clear that Herbert Kalmus set as a goal a monopack film
that could be used in any camera. In 1939, he announced that in a year Technicolor would employ a single
camera negative. Monopack was used for sequences in some films (Dive Bomber [1941], Captains of the
Clouds [1942], Forest Rangers [1942], Lassie Come Home [1943]) and for one entire film (Thunderhead—
Son ofFlicka [1944]), but the process was declared unsatisfactory. It was even slower than ordinary
Technicolor stock, it rendered interior sets poorly, and the processing often gave contrasty results.
Researchers were uncertain as to whether a single-strip negative film could ever yield consistently good
release prints in large quantity. World War II delayed research on the process, but Kalmus was
also hesitant, probably recalling the difficulties he had faced after rushing into an untried process in 1929.
Expecting monopack to come eventually, Technicolor built no more three-strip cameras.22 (This decision
caused further problems, since Technicolor could not satisfy the postwar demand for color.) When a color
negative film arrived, however, Technicolor was not its originator.
Initially, Technicolor and Eastman Kodak had agreed not to compete for monopack color film. Through
the research work of Comstock and Troland, Technicolor held crucial patents on monopack. A cross-
licensing agreement allowed Eastman to use the process for Kodachrome, its amateur-gauge process. From
1937 to 1939, Technicolor and Eastman jointly researched a feasible 35mm color negative. The result was
the monopack Technicolor process that saw limited use in the 1940s. In 1947, a government antitrust suit
charged Eastman and Technicolor with monopolistic practices. Among other claims, the suit alleged that
Technicolor had colluded with Eastman to restrict the development of monopack. Eastman soon signed a
consent decree whereby it would license all its patents on the open market, with no priority given to
Technicolor. In early 1950, Technicolor signed a consent decree that terminated its relations with Eastman.
At least as important as the government suit was the fact that in 1945 the original Troland patents had
expired. By the time that Technicolor had submitted to the suit, Eastman had already announced its own
color negative process.23
It took about four years for Eastman Color to dethrone Technicolor: the three-strip camera was last used
on Foxfire (1954). What gave Eastman Color the edge was that it could be used in any camera and
processed and printed by generally conventional means. Within two years, most studios began to use
Eastman Color to a degree, some claiming it as the basis of their ‘own’ system (e.g., Warnercolor,
Columbia’s Super Cinecolor). In 1953, Eastman introduced an improved, faster negative stock and
corresponding print and internegative stocks. At about the same time, studios discovered that Technicolor
dye-imbibition printing did not yield enough resolution for the new widescreen processes. Thus Eastman
Color was used to film The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire, Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef (all 1953),
and other early anamorphic films. As of November 1955, most widescreen productions were shooting
Eastman Color negative.24
Technicolor adjusted as best it could. Its lab processed a great deal of Eastman negative and often made
release prints by its color-separation method. It eventually adapted its imbibition method to widescreen
needs; Technicolor designed printers that could make films in any format. Moreover, until the 1960s,
Technicolor was the only Hollywood laboratory with the capacity to process and print 65mm and 70mm
gauges. The firm also introduced electronic print timing and a (short-lived) anamorphic process of its own,
Technirama. None the less, Technicolor’s use in motion pictures declined. In 1947, 90 per cent of 35mm
color was Technicolor; ten years later, the firm met only half the industry’s color needs. After 1953,
Technicolor operated as primarily a laboratory and a research firm (working for television, NASA, and the
military).25
Technicolor’s future was settled when Eastman entered the 35mm color market. A specialized firm
concentrating on short-term and small-scale problems could not compete effectively with the basic-research
program of Eastman Kodak. Eastman held thousands of patents, supported an immense laboratory, and
invested millions in color research every year. (Eastman Color monopack grew directly out of the firm’s
development of color couplers for still photography.) Most likely, Technicolor had long realized how
precarious its control was and, expecting Eastman to devise monopack eventually, created the licensing
agreements to give itself the first chance at the process. But color negative came too late, and three-color
Technicolor gave way to a method which promised greater cost efficiency and compatibility with other
innovations (e.g., widescreen). During its two decades of hegemony, Technicolor demonstrated that an
engineering firm could flourish by shaping technological innovation to the economic and stylistic needs of
its customers.
29
Widescreen processes and stereophonic sound
The early 1950s saw the most pervasive technological innovations in Hollywood since the late 1920s. A
series of processes changed the size of the screen, the shape of the image, the dimensions of the films, and
the recording and reproducing of sound. There were triple-camera and -projector systems like Cinerama
(introduced in 1952) and CineMiracle (1957). Of the single-camera and -projector processes, VistaVision
(1954) consisted of shooting (and, initially, showing) the film on its horizontal axis to give a wider and less
grainy image. There were several anamorphic processes, which in shooting or printing squeezed onto the
film a wide field of view to be unsqueezed in projection: the most famous of these processes was
CinemaScope (1953). There were also the wide-film systems, such as Todd-AO (1955), which was shot on
65mm and projected at 70mm (see fig 29.1). It was possible to combine processes, such as in the
anamorphic wide-film systems (CinemaScope 55 [1955], Ultra-Panavision [1956]). Nearly all of these
widescreen systems included stereophonic reproduction.
Jean-Louis Comolli’s conception of the lag between technical possibility and ideological need is clearly
pertinent to these postwar innovations. In almost every respect, widescreen cinema was technically feasible
at least two decades before its acceptance. In 1929, for example, Ralph Fear proposed putting a wide image
on film by a method similar to that of VistaVision. In fact, the VistaVision cameras used in the 1950s were
originally designed in the late 1920s for the Fox Natural Color system, a two-color additive process. Henri
Chrétien’s anamorphic system was known in the early 1930s, long before it was purchased and renamed
CinemaScope. ‘Widescope,’ a two-lens system comparable to Cinerama, was demonstrated to the SMPE as
early as 1922; three-lens Cinerama had its source in the spherical film projection at the 1934 World’s Fair.
Wide film gauges became of particular interest in 1929 and 1930. There was the Spoor Natural Vision
(63mm), the Paramount process (56mm), Fox Grandeur (70mm), and MGM’s Realife (wide film reduced to
35mm for projection). The Grandeur process had the greatest success, with the Mitchell Company
furnishing precision cameras and the International Projector Corporation manufacturing Super-Simplex
70mm projection equipment. For a time, it appeared that widescreen would become common. The SMPE,
ASC, and Academy held several forums on standardization (at one of which Sergei Eisenstein pleaded for a
square image format). Although there were difficulties with focus and illumination, by December of 1930,
the SMPE was confident enough to report that the engineering problems could be solved if the producers
would only agree on a single process. That too seemed to be settled, since in July 1930 several major
studios announced plans to shoot on 65mm, enlarge the sound track area, and project the film in 70mm (the
Todd-AO and Ultra-Panavision procedure of later years). But the major production firms apparently decided
that in a Depression economy, the novelty would not repay the investment, so extensive work on widefilm
processes came to a halt.1
Stereophonic sound was also anticipated during the 1930s. Many of the wide-gauge processes sought to
expand the soundtrack area for greater fidelity. For the first Fox Grandeur film, Happy Days (1930), the
600 WIDESCREEN PROCESSES AND STEREOPHONIC SOUND
70mm film yielded a wider sound track which was said to give ‘a more perfect reproduction of the human
voice.’2 A 1932 paper defending Chrétien’s anamorphic process suggested that the Hypergonar could put
two tracks on the film and thus create ‘the acoustical equivalent of the stereoscopic effect.’3 Bell Telephone
was experimenting continually with stereophonic recording and reproduction, holding technical
demonstrations in 1934 and 1938. At the SMPE convention in the fall of 1937, ERPI demonstrated
stereophonic recording on film. (‘The illusion of position is very strong.’4) Two years later, another
exhibition proved that auditory perspective could be controlled at the dubbing phase as well. With the help
of RCA, Warner Bros had a brief fling with ‘Vitasound,’ a two-channel reproduction system, used on Four
Wives (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940). The most famous experiment in stereophonic sound was Walt
Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which utilized RCA’s ‘Panoramic’ process. Many producers expected that
stereophonic sound would soon come —the spring 1941 SMPE convention hosted five papers on the subject
—but America’s entry into World War II curtailed systematic nonmilitary work.5
Economic factors can help explain the timing of the reintroduction of widescreen and stereophonic
systems. As Chapter 26 points out, between 1950 and 1952, film production companies were feeling severe
losses in earnings, partly due to the competition of television. Most producers believed that some novelty
was needed to recapture the audience. In late 1952, both Cinerama and ‘Natural Vision’ 3-D6* attracted
public attention, and in November film firms’ earnings started to rise steadily.7 Although 3-D survived only
a little over a year and Cinerama remained an exceptional roadshow process, the film industry committed
many resources to devising other alternatives to television.
Research organizations such as the SMPTE or the Academy Motion Picture Research Council did not
initiate widescreen processes; most were innovated by small, independent firms (e.g., Fred Waller’s
Cinerama, Robert Gottshalk’s Panavision). Problems with the systems soon arose, though. For instance, all
of the processes required a greatly enlarged theater screen—this was indeed one of their points of novelty.
But there was a limit to how much the projected image could be magnified without losing certain standards
of quality, such as brightness and definition. More powerful projector lamps could be used, but graininess
remained a major difficulty. Thus engineers had to increase the area exposed on the original negative.
Nearly all of the major systems reduced grain by filling more negative area: VistaVision by exposing the
film strip horizontally; CinemaScope by making the perforations smaller and enlarging the aperture; Todd-
AO and other systems by using wider film. To effect such changes, the small manufacturers and the studios
required the cooperation of major manufacturers and of the mediating agencies. Specific solutions were
needed for such problems as the perspective distortion in early anamorphic lenses and the peripheral flicker
visible in some widescreen systems.8
Once the production sector decided upon the widescreen strategy, the service companies became
important sources of research and improvement. Mitchell initially supplied the cameras for VistaVision,
Todd-AO, and Panavision. Phillips of Holland designed 70mm projectors. Eastman Kodak responded to the
new production demands by computing the best negative areas for minimum grain and maximum
information. Cinematographers sought to improve definition and depth in widescreen productions by
stopping down their lenses. The smaller apertures, combined with the bigger widescreen sets and the longer
focal lengths of widescreen lenses, all demanded much more light than had been customary in the late
1940s. While lamp makers such as General Electric designed high-wattage studio lamps, Eastman
introduced two faster emulsions which permitted the lowering of light levels.9
Widescreen processes established one new supply firm as solidly as sound had established Mole-
Richardson. Panavision began as a company developing and building anamorphic projector lenses. MGM
asked the firm to develop a widescreen system free of distortion that would be compatible with Cinerama,
anamorphic, and wide-gauge processes. The result, ‘Ultra-Panavision,’ was a 65mm/70mm process that
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY, 1930–60 601
created a negative from which a print in any format could be extracted. Relying upon Technicolor’s
laboratory expertise, Panavision could yield prints in ratios of 1.33:1, 1.85:1, 2:1, 2.25:1, 2.55:1, and 3:1.
This made all systems compatible, and the results, first seen in Ben-Hur (1960), won Panavision an Academy
Technical Award.10
CinemaScope was the most-utilized widescreen process of the period. In early 1953, after some years of
work on widescreen and stereophonic processes, Twentieth Century-Fox announced purchase of the rights
to Henri Chrétien’s Hypergonar anamorphic process. Fox did little to dispell the belief that CinemaScope
was a combination of Cinerama and 3-D: its advertisements exaggerated the curvature of the screen and
proclaimed, ‘You see it without glasses!’ (Although the ‘Scope ratio was initially planned to be 2.66:1, the
addition of magnetic sound tracks meant that it had to be reduced to 2.55:1. Optical sound further reduced
the picture area to 2.35:1.) CinemaScope quickly emerged as the compromise widescreen system. It offered
a significantly different product, but required the fewest changes in exhibition procedures: only new lenses,
a new screen, and some minor retooling in projection machinery. The problems with loss of projection light
were solved by an aluminized lenticular screen and new lamphouses. Bausch and Lomb designed
anamorphic camera and projection lenses which improved definition and reduced distortion. Exhibitors
quickly converted: by 1957, four out of five American theaters could show a film in CinemaScope.
Similarly, the number of ‘Scope releases rose steadily between 1953 and 1958, with many films shot in
other processes (Technirama, MGM 65, Todd-AO) winding up with 35mm prints in the anamorphic format.
(Of the major studios, only Paramount obstinately resisted the process.) The SMPTE proposed
CinemaScope standards, which were approved by the American Standards Association in 1956.11 In short,
CinemaScope succeeded at least partly because it was sufficiently novel, it was improved with the help of
the service companies, and it was easiest to accommodate to standardized production and exhibition
practices.
Stereophonic sound was initially planned as an integral part of CinemaScope. Some industry technicians
had criticized Fantasia because stereo was not very dramatic as an accompaniment to an image of normal
size and shape.12 In 1948, after several experiments, Twentieth Century-Fox’s director of research pointed
out that ‘increased effectiveness of stereophonic sound is obtained if used with a picture of greater aspect
ratio than presently used.’13 The growing use of magnetic recording after the war made stereophonic sound
technically and economically feasible. The two major processes of 1952, Cinerama and Natural Vision 3-D,
both used stereo. With the help of Western Electric and ERPI, Fox engineers perfected a three-channel
stereo system. Unlike most widescreen processes, which reproduced stereophonically from a monaural
studio recording, CinemaScope productions were also recorded in stereo. Three microphones, spread across
a sound boom, yielded the sound to be played through the three theater speakers. A fourth track carried
added sound effects. Simplex, Kinevox, MagnaSync, and Westrex all supplied the four-channel sound head
necessary for projecting ‘Scope magnetic sound, and the SMPTE accepted the modifications in perforation
shape that made room for the magnetic tracks.14
Despite all this cooperation, stereophonic sound posed problems. It was, as we shall see, difficult to cut with
regard to the image. The magnetic tracks decayed with use and picked up stray noise. Exhibitors were
reluctant to install new sound heads and speakers. By 1956, only about one-fourth of the CinemaScope
installations in the United States and Canada had magnetic playback facilities. Because of the expense of
making both optical and magnetic release prints, Fox in 1957 turned to a combined ‘MagOptical’ print format
that made the CinemaScope ratio officially 2.35:1.15 Stereo sound remained confined chiefly to roadshow
theaters.
Many critics believed that widescreen filming decisively changed Hollywood film style. André Bazin,
though critical of the distorted optics of CinemaScope and Cinerama, saw these innovations as a progressive
step away from a montage-based cinema.16 ‘The wide screen can only hasten what we like in the most
modern tendencies in the cinema: the reduction of all artifice external to the content of the image itself, of
all expressionism of time or space.’17 The revisionist Bazinians of Cahiers du cinéma and Movie quickly
seized upon the widescreen processes as proof of the mystique of mise-en-scene. With CinemaScope,
François Truffaut exulted, film had moved closer to total realism.18 Charles Barr’s influential essay,
‘CinemaScope: before and after,’ argued that the wide screen could delineate the narrative situation more
subtly through a greater ‘gradation of emphasis.’ CinemaScope also encouraged an active and alert state of
mind in the spectator: ‘We have to make a positive act of interpreting, of “reading” the shot.’ Now editing
could not abstract a detail from its context; even a close-up, Barr argued, becomes a part of its ‘natural’
situation.19 In mainstream usage, however, widescreen cinema belied these assertions. Hollywood’s
widescreen filmmaking was but another instance of trended change, a new set of stylistic devices brought into
line with the classical schemata.
Like Technicolor, widescreen was initially motivated generically. The expanded format was believed
well-suited for spectacle: the travelogue (This Is Cinerama [1952], Cinerama Holiday [1955]), the
historical pageant (The Robe [1953], Knights of the Round Table [1953]), the adventure film (Beneath the
Twelve-Mile Reef [1953], King of the Khyber Rifles [1954]), the musical (Carmen Jones [1954], Seven
Brides for Seven Brothers [1954], Oklahoma [1955]), and the Western (Broken Lance [1954], Sitting Bull
[1954]). (Bazin: ‘Like a fish in the biggest aquarium, the cowboy is most at ease on the wide screen.’20)
Rather than enhancing realism, the monumental screen size and shape tended toward stylization and the
enhancement of spectacle.
But, like color and sound, widescreen posed potential problems for the classical style. Cinematographers
and directors had difficulty in guiding the audience’s attention to the significant elements in the frame.
Spatial orientation was also disturbed. Before Panavision, the widescreen processes had to use longer lenses,
which produced shallower depth of field. If, to get greater depth of field, the cinematographer used a lens of
shorter focal length, distortion increased drastically. Actors looking off at the same object seemed to be
looking in slightly different directions; horizon lines could warp; a panning shot could produce a giddying
heave of perspective.21 In addition, editing was felt to jolt the audience. ‘Rapid cutting,’ claimed Kenneth
MacGowan, ‘is disturbing on the wide screen.’22 Other problems were peculiar to certain systems —especially
Cinerama and Todd-AO—and remained unsolved.23* It is evident, however, that the crucial difficulties of
widescreen were resolved within the terms of the classical paradigm.
We might expect that some deep-focus procedures would have been quickly applied to widescreen
cinema. But the shallow depth of field of most widescreen lenses precluded anything like the looming sharp
foregrounds of Toland’s work for Welles or Wyler. Depth in the widescreen format obeyed the principle
established in the teens: the further the foreground plane from the camera, the greater the potential depth of
field. Most of the celebrated uses of deep-focus in CinemaScope, for instance, place the foreground plane
no closer than medium shot. And almost never does widescreen filming yield greater use of depth than the
modified deep-focus style of the 1940s.24 (Indeed, for some years, interior scenes in widescreen films
tended to be somewhat shallower in focus than was the case in the previous decade.) The widescreen
process did, however, affect the length of the take and shot composition.
It is generally assumed that widescreen filming triggered a move to lengthier shots. If Cahiers du cinéma
writers hailed CinemaScope for its ability to make editing less important, no less ‘Bazinian’ was
Hollywood’s own attitude. Henry Koster, director of The Robe, asserted that a cut in to a close-up was now
unnecessary, since virtually every detail in the shot was magnified. Charles G. Clarke suggested that cutting
should be avoided in CinemaScope because each change of shot demanded more viewer adjustment than
did cutting in regular format. Todd-AO cameramen were told to stay well back from the players and to
avoid close-ups.25 We might then expect that the average shot length jumps dramatically for widescreen
films. Although the average shot duration did lengthen somewhat when widescreen processes were
introduced, the classical system fairly quickly restabilized itself.
Certainly early (1953–5) CinemaScope films lean to longer takes. The typical range is between 180 and
350 shots per hour for ‘Scope films, as opposed to 300–520 shots per hour for non-Scope ones. In practice,
the ASL of early widescreen films is four to seven seconds longer than the eleven-second non-widescreen
norm. But the range of paradigmatic options soon broadened. After 1955, a CinemaScope film might
contain between 200 and 600 shots per hour, with the 300– 400 shot range being most common. This range
falls within the common Academy-ratio norm (200–500 shots per hour). Thus a later widescreen film’s ASL
might be anywhere between six and eighteen seconds. By 1959 it was possible to cut a CinemaScope film
as rapidly as a 1930s Warners’ film: both Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and Wild River (1960)
have an ASL of slightly over six seconds. As in early sound decoupage, what is remarkable is not how long
most widescreen takes are but how comparatively short they are.
The formal effects of the somewhat longer widescreen take were slight. Very few Hollywood directors
exploited the wide screen for unusually lengthy takes, and those tended to be directors like George Cukor
and Otto Preminger who had made the long take an integral part of their decoupage before widescreen
processes arrived. Moreover, the single-take scene remained as rare in Hollywood as it had ever been.
While there are relatively fewer shots per scene in the widescreen films of the 1950s, the number is still
high: about nineteen shots per scene in the UnS. In other filmmaking traditions, the long takes of Kenji
Mizoguchi, Miklós Jancsó, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Jean-Luc Godard create a film of
large durational chunks, of segments impossible to frame within an orthodox decoupage; the long take
becomes a major structural factor. But in Hollywood filmmaking, the innovation of widescreen had no such
radical effect. The Letter (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), and other films were predecessors of this ‘crossbred’
decoupage: the long take was permitted only as a privileged rhetorical device controlled by classical cutting
patterns. The single-take scene was, in other words, a secondary paradigmatic alternative to the classically
edited scene, and widescreen shots almost always functioned in a pattern of establishment, analysis, shot/
reverse shot, and the like. (See figs 5.42 and 5.43.)
Examining Welles’s use of wide-angle lenses, Bazin coined the term ‘lateral depth of field’ to describe
‘the exceptional openness of this angle of vision.’26 Depicting George and Fanny in the kitchen in The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), or depicting the Amberson ball, Welles created multiple centers of interest,
not necessarily in great depth, but spread across the screen. Such lateral compositions became more
prominent with widescreen ratios. Clarke pointed out that a horizontal composition was more comfortable
for the viewer; Elia Kazan called it more relaxed, ‘more like a stage—more “across.”’27 Doubled and
triangular compositions looked less cramped than in the regular format; it was easy to string several heads
and shoulders across the frame. (See fig 29.2.) The director then had to guide our attention to a single figure
at any given moment, chiefly through lighting, camera position, sound, and frontal positioning. In framing a
single figure in medium shot, the dominant widescreen practice is to avoid exact centering; the actor is
positioned slightly off-center, leaving space for his or her gaze or for pertinent background material
(fig 29.3).28 Using the lateral stretch this way, the Hollywood filmmaker confirms our sense of the unity of
profilmic space: the glance and the setting charge the empty area with narrative meaning. An alternative
practice would refuse to let the character’s gaze impregnate the empty space, as in figure 29.4, from Straub/
Huillet’s Not Reconciled (1964).
Both the long take and lateral staging practices, as devices, operated within the spatial system of classical
decoupage. Several Hollywood artists admitted as much. Working on her second CinemaScope film, Fox
editor Barbara Webb used ‘one-foot cuts’ in a fight scene and concluded that the task was exactly like
cutting a film in the ordinary format.29 Although the shots might be lengthier, Leon Shamroy pointed out,
‘this won’t be apparent to most audiences because any well-edited film looks like one long uninterrupted strip
of film anyway.’30 This was also apparent to Bazinian devotees of the wide screen. Truffaut was delighted
that CinemaScope would not overturn the classical style: ‘The close-ups of Victor Mature in The Robe are
completely convincing; the faces are as diffused as those in Notorious; a long scene with Lauren Bacall
reassures us of the persistence of the plan américain…’31 Charles Bitsch found A Star Is Born (1954)
virtually the Hegelian synthesis of all previous cinema.32
Notice: fast cutting, ten-minute takes, the most skillful camera movements, the most daring match-
cuts, the most difficult framings— everything is there. We have finally the material proof that in
CinemaScope everything is possible. With A Star Is Born, CinemaScope is born.
Since cinematographers worried about directing attention, filmmakers struggled to retain the stability of
continuity editing. We do not find in Hollywood widescreen filming the disjunctive cutting of Akira
Kurosawa’s Tohoscope High and Low (1963), in which cuts take us across the 180° line but keep the shot
scale constant, so that from shot to shot we must search for cues to reorient ourselves to the space.
Even Hollywood’s auteurist uses of the widescreen do not deviate significantly. In the critical literature,
probably the most-praised widescreen shot is that from *River of No Return (1954). Harry has lifted Kay off
the raft and her valise of clothes has fallen into the river (fig 29.7). V.F. Perkins writes:33
Kay’s gradual loss of the physical tokens of her way of life has great symbolic significance. But
Preminger is not over-impressed. The bundle simply floats away offscreen while Harry brings Kay
ashore. It would be wrong to describe this as understatement. The symbolism is in the event, not in the
visual pattern, so the director presents the action clearly and leaves interpretation to the viewer.
As the scene continues, Kay and Harry join Matt and Mark on the shore. After Kay and the boy have gone
off to the cabin, Harry and Matt slowly follow and talk. As the camera tracks and pans right with them, we
glimpse far in the background Kay’s valise still floating down river (fig 29.11). Barr praises the ‘natural’
integration of such details as characteristic of the virtues of the wide screen. ‘The spectator is “free” to
notice the bundle, and when he does so, free to interpret it as significant.’34
If we situate the shots in their context, however, we see that they rely almost completely upon classical
principles. When Kay loses her bundle, the camera reframes sharply to the right as she looks at it (fig 29.8);
there is also a chord on the musical track; the glance, the music, and the camera call our attention to the
valise. Our subsequent view of the bundle being carried away in the background is not ‘free’; on the
contrary, it is heavily motivated. First, the bundle is kept in frame for a long time (figs 29.9 and 29.10).
When Matt and Harry pass (fig 29.11), the bundle is more or less centered. Furthermore, Preminger has
‘primed’ this orientation a few shots earlier, when Matt ran to the edge of the river (fig 29.5). Our
orientation in figure 29.11 is thus a repetition of an earlier one. As we saw in Chapter 5 (figs 5.50 through 5.
53) the classical film commonly establishes space in a neutral way a few shots before we are to notice a
particular aspect of it; we absorb the new (narratively significant) information against a background of
familiarity. In *River of No Return, Preminger primes his shots again and again. (For example, when Kay
first comes onstage to sing, she passes a roulette wheel; in the next shot, when Matt strolls through the
saloon to look at Kay, the roulette wheel jumps to our notice because it is moving and because, for the first
time, we can hear its soft ticking spin.) Finally, one can argue that noticing the bundle when it moves down
river in the background is not vital to our comprehension of the film. Perkins is surely right about the
symbolic significance of Kay’s gradual loss of her things, but the point is reiterated visually and verbally
throughout the film. After the raft scene, when Kay is cleaning her shoes, she tells Mark: ‘They’re all I’ve
got left.’ Later she loses her guitar as well. The last shot of the film, a close-up of her discarded shoes, signals
her abandonment of her old life. So the narrative point of the raft scene—that she loses her valise—is one
that no spectator, ‘free’ or not, can fail to grasp. One can admire the devices which Preminger employs in the
scene while still recognizing that the scene’s spatial system remains strictly within the classical range of
choices.
In 1954, Jacques Rivette looked forward to a new art brought by CinemaScope:35
The director will learn to sometimes assert the entire surface of the screen, to activate it by his zest, to
play a diverse and tight game there— instead of staking out the poles of the drama, to create zones of
silence, surfaces of repose, or provocative gaps, knowing ruptures; quickly tiring of chandeliers and
vases introduced at the sides of the image to balance medium-shots, he will discover the beauty of
empty spots, of open and free spaces through which the wind glides; he will unburden the image, no
longer fearing holes or imbalances, and will multiply compositional violations the better to obey the
truths of cinema.
Such a passage evokes the compositional fractures of Kurosawa’s, Godard’s, Nagisa Oshima’s, and
Jancsó’s widescreen films (see fig 29.12), but it does not describe Hollywood’s normal practice. Novel
devices were absorbed into orthodox systems, which in turn remained within the classical paradigm. With a
little adjustment and with some help from the supply companies and the professional associations,
widescreen filmmaking offered only trended changes in the classical style.
Part Seven
Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema

DAVID BORDWELL and JANET STAIGER
30
Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice
The previous chapters have shown the complex and shifting relations between style and mode of production
in Hollywood filmmaking. There is no question that economic factors have strongly affected the
development of the classical style. The steady demands for more footage in the first two decades of the industry
contributed to the development of the multiple-shot film and later to features. At the same time, narrative
filmmaking proved the most efficient, controllable approach and soon came to dominate the companies’
output. In subsequent years, technological change was often the result of economic imperatives, and the
particular moment of an innovation’s adoption can be traced to a specific attempt to improve efficiency or
differentiate the product.
In the last analysis, however, stylistic factors can explain the most specific and interesting aspects of
Hollywood filmmaking. The particular nature of the classical norms depended upon models of story telling
drawn from literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. After 1917, the principle of using narrative logic to
control systems of space and time became central. Maintaining narrative dominance and its particular
systems (e.g., psychological motivation, continuity editing) was a central cause for the emergence of
successive production systems. Once the director-unit method was succeeded by the central-producer system
around 1914, a rigid mass-production framework was in place, to be elaborated and perpetuated in the
producer-unit system of the 1930s and 1940s. Even when mass-production declined with the package-unit
system of the middle 1950s, a detailed division of labor and a hierarchical work order remained. The
classical style was critical in reinforcing both economic practices (e.g., cost efficiency) and ideological/
signifying practices (e.g., the standard of the quality film). Within the mode of production, the tensions of
standardization and differentiation, the increase in specialization, and the tendency of Hollywood’s
institutions to focus energy and capital toward a controlled uniformity all crucially depended upon the
norms of the classical style.
Similarly, while technological change had to be economically beneficial in the long run, the directions
and functions of such change were strongly contained by stylistic premises. Classical norms dictated how
cameras, lighting, laboratory equipment, sound recording, deep-focus cinematography, color, and
widescreen could be introduced and used. By 1920, specific institutions— manufacturers and suppliers,
professional organizations—had generated activities and discourses that were able to assimilate
technological change to Hollywood’s parameters.
Self-professed pragmatists are fond of asserting that Hollywood makes movies to make money, not to
make art. This is supposed to bring the interlocutor down with a thump, to quell a preoccupation with
‘aesthetics’ by a hardheaded call to business practices. Yet in a capitalist society there is no opposition of
business and art: most artists make art to make money. And one could make movies more cheaply if one did
not recognize conventions of narrative construction, spectacle, verisimilitude, continuity, and so on.
608 HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA
Between 1917 and 1960, these conventions constituted Hollywood’s very definition of a movie itself, so our
pragmatist’s claim must be revised: Hollywood makes classical movies to make money. Historically, the
classical style played a major, if not the central, role in the American film industry and its mode of
production.
By confining our history of this cinema to the four decades after 1917, we may have seemed to assume
Stendhal’s definition of classicism as a style which gives the greatest possible pleasure to an audience’s
ancestors.1 But plainly the principles of classical filmmaking still hold sway. It is now pertinent to consider
to what extent the Hollywood mode of production and the classical style have changed in the last two
decades. Again, we shall find that in most cases the desire to maintain and vary the classical style has
played the determining part in Hollywood’s film practice.
Capital and Elective Affinities
Sergei Eisenstein has slipped into a difficult and absurd situation. He has suddenly found
himself proclaimed a world-class director, a genius, he has been heaped with political and
artistic decorations….
…. It comes as no surprise therefore that Eisenstein has announced his intention to film
Marx’s Capital—no lesser theme would do.2
Osip Brik, 1928
Since 1960, there have been several modifications in the US film industry, but most of them have had only
minor effects on the mode of production. While new trade practices, such as four-walling, saturation
booking, platforming, extensive market analyses, revising advertising campaigns in the middle of release,
year-round bidding, and recutting and redistributing a film, have emerged in recent years, none of these
affects the mode of production in any significant way.3 For example, recutting and re-releasing a film is an
extension of earlier years’ practice of using previews and retakes before release. Similarly, the demographic
analyses produced by market research take to new levels of precision the audience research of the 1940s.
One might argue that conglomerate ownership of film production has affected the mode, but this does not
seem to be the case. This change in the structure of the industry can actually be seen in part as fostered by
one symptom of the package-unit system—the blockbuster film. After the 1940s, when the industry
concentrated on fewer, specialized projects, it developed an interest in the film which did spectacularly at the
box office. Such a highly profitable film permits a company to use the film’s excessive earnings for growth
purposes, particularly for diversifying into areas which might provide a stable growth income to
counterbalance the more speculative film-finance operations. Although some film firms became parts of
conglomerates through mergers with larger corporations not in the entertainment field (Paramount became
part of Gulf & Western in 1966, for instance), other film companies created their own conglomerate
organizations through diversification. Earnings from blockbusters contributed to various acquisitions, often
in the leisure field: hotels and recreation areas, publishing firms, video equipment and cable television,
record companies, pinball- and electronic-game machine manufacturers. Twentieth Century-Fox invested
part of its Star Wars (1977) profits in a Coca-Cola bottling company; Jaws (1975) permitted Universal to do
the same. As Time noticed: ‘The acquisition will move the movie business toward controlling not only what
the audience sees but what they buy in the lobby.’4 Such a conglomerate structure might be different from
the earlier industrial structure, but as Alfred D.Chandler, Jr, points out, conglomerate ownership leads to
decentralized management control.5 Each branch ends up with the power to make tactical decisions for its
own area. Thus, just as the shift to advanced capitalism during the 1920s and 1930s did not significantly
SINCE 1960: THE PERSISTENCE OF A MODE OF FILM PRACTICE 609
change the mode of film production, so the current major firms act primarily as financiers and distributors,
allowing individual package units to operate on their own once a deal is set.
On the whole, recent years have witnessed only a continuation of the package-unit system.6 What is
currently called ‘clout’ is the power of the worker’s perceived value to determine his or her share of the
next project. Gone are long-term option contracts which controlled profit-share increases. Some top talent,
the ‘superstars,’ even determine whether or not a project is financed— something which seldom happened
during the earlier periods. One writer-producer described the comparative status of these top talents: ‘If
Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack want to shoot “Telephone Pole,” they can go to any studio for
financing. Or if Barbra Streisand wants to film herself atop the Wailing Wall shouting, “Look, Ma! Top of
the World!” who would say no?’7 Exhibitors book by stars, and stars who are popular find financing. So do
directors. Vincent Canby in reviewing Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) wrote that the French
would explain the film by ‘the Politique des Comptables. Here: the accountant theory. Put another way, it’s
“you’re as good as your last picture, Sam,” meaning that the amount of freedom and clout that a director has
at any moment depends pretty much on the grosses of his most recent film.’ For Canby, this explains ‘why
directors of very profitable films so often follow up with films that are in some fashion self-indulgent and
out-of-control.’8
Only workers in producing, writing, directing, and acting have this noticeable power and flexibility in their
division of labor. The package-unit system remains in effect in the rest of the structure. Talent agencies,
such as International Creative Management, have continued as producers, putting together packages; in
1977, five of the major film firms employed top managers who were formerly agents.9 Technology and
unions still keep the labor crafts specialized. For example, Robert Faulkner has detailed the standard
employment process of Hollywood recording musicians. As a holdover from the self-contained studio
period, many of the freelancers have a commitment to work for a studio if contacted ninety-six hours in
advance, and composers and conductors can specify whom they want hired. A contractor assembles the
orchestra. Union contract agreements prearrange wage scales and working conditions.10 Thus, as
Chapter 24 suggests, the unions, while protecting their members, have also contributed to the continuation of
detailed division of labor.
Production processes have changed only in very minor ways. By the late 1950s, on occasion, shooting
procedures resembled television multiple-camera practices. One camera would continuously cover the
action while one or two other ones filmed the action sporadically and then quickly moved to set up for new
shots. Saving shooting time was the primary reason for adopting this technique. On the other hand, for more
extravagant affairs, shooting times have lengthened. As Michael Cimino explained during production of
Heaven’s Gate (1960):11
At one time…when certain parts of films were unsatisfactory, people could go back and reshoot. It
was rather standard practice. If one needed an extra scene, one went back and did it; or if one didn’t
like the score, one rescored the film. It was possible because everyone was under contract. We no
longer have that kind of option. Most of what we shoot is on location, often under difficult
circumstances, and there is no going back. There is no reconstructing sets, there is no getting the
actors back together. And we certainly don’t want to be sitting in a cutting room a year after shooting
is completed and wishing, if I had only gotten this or that. By then it’s too late.
Despite such a narrowing of production options, the package-unit system still utilizes detailed division of
labor. Conceiving the work remains the prerogative of the upper- and middlemanagement, and the
subdivision of work continues. The script is still the blueprint, and most films are planned carefully with
experts attending to craft details. The standard of the quality film remains dominant. Cimino’s project, for
instance, revelled in details of authenticity: ‘Every article of clothing, every structure, every sign…is based
on a photograph of the period.’12 Producer Joann Carelli claimed: ‘The special thing about Heaven’s Gate is
that nobody has reproduced these times as they actually were. When this Western comes to the screen, it
will be the first time you have seen a moving documentation of that era.’13 Yet Cimino adjusted the
historical facts to make a story. As reporter Rex McGee comments:14
The facts of the Johnson County War are somewhat at odds with the version in Heaven’s Gate, a
point which doesn’t disturb Cimino in the slightest. ‘It was not my intention to write a history book,’
Cimino said. ‘I’m telling a story that interests me and hopefully will interest other people. One uses
history in a very free way. After all, you’re not trying to rewrite it or reinvent it. You’re using it as
context. The specific facts of that incident recounted in a literal way would be of no interest.’
Osip Brik’s observation about Eisenstein may seem less out of place now that we recognize that the
package-unit system of production gives some creative personnel a power to choose projects and working
conditions. In the Hollywood mode of production, however, conceiving a film of Marx’s Capital is an
improbable alternative. Spectacle, technological tours de force, and human emotions —above all, love—are
more likely pretexts than political economy. And so we are left with Francis Ford Coppola, the current
prototype of the independent and visionary director, who wants to make Elective Affinities, based on
Goethe’s novel. Coppola has explained how he would treat the proposed quartet of films. Although the
whole project would be ‘a big movie,’ the films would also be ‘Very, very intimate epics.’ Elective
Affinities would deal with love: ‘male-female love; sexual love; romantic love; spiritual love.’ Coppola’s
film incorporates rocket ships, ‘the birth of the universe,’ politics, and ‘the first moving hologram.’ He also
contemplates a step toward vertical integration: entering the exhibition field:15
L.A. Weekly: But you’re going to show this film in your own theatre, aren’t you?
Coppola: Right. And do you know where the theatre will be? In the Rocky Mountains. We’re going to
build this incredible theatre there—2,000 seats on the top of the Rockies. You go in there and
it’s just glass so you can see the view. Then, at a certain point, the glass gets dark and you’re
in a totally dark room and then—ultimately—you get a color hologram.
L.A. Weekly: Is this your design concept?
Coppola: No, but underneath it, underneath it, there is a hotel. A hotel in the Rockies. You go there for
the weekend to see Elective Affinities. It’s a weekend event. You go, you get a great room and
at night on your television set, anytime, whenever the hell, you can see any part of the film
over and over again. If you want to see a scene that you didn’t understand or you don’t know
what you felt about it or you missed it…
L.A. Weekly: It seems like a new film form.
Coppola: It is. It’s a new kind of mental theme park.
The China Syndrome and Tout va Bien
Hollywood? Yes, but this cultural phenomenon is much stronger than any other and it cannot
disappear. It can’t; the proof is that it continues stronger than ever.16
Jean-Luc Godard
Just as the Hollywood mode of production continues, the classical style remains the dominant model for
feature filmmaking. Any number of well-known films of the last two decades offer examples, but consider
as one instance The China Syndrome (1979). The project exemplifies the package-unit system: the
scriptwriter (Michael Gray) induced the producer and star (Michael Douglas) to assemble the project, a
process aided by the ‘matchmaking’ of Columbia Pictures.17 Stylistically, the film not only demonstrates the
endurance of the classical paradigm, but it shows how that paradigm’s formal operations shape the film’s
presentation of controversial political issues.
The story action of The China Syndrome adheres completely to the canons of classical construction. After
an initial cause (a nearly disastrous breakdown in a nuclear plant), individual characters endowed with goals
struggle against obstacles. Television reporter Kimberly Wells wants to cover hard news, her cameraman
Richard Adams seeks to do investigative journalism, and Jack Goodell the nuclear plantworker wants to
make the plant safe. These characters run into opposition: the television station executives want to pacify
Kimberly and dismiss Richard, while the nuclear plant owners work to silence Jack. In addition, the star
system sustains these character roles. Michael Douglas, as Richard, continues playing the impetuous young
idealist established in his television series, The Streets of San Francisco. In the role of Kimberly, Jane
Fonda reenacts the middle-class woman’s discovery of ‘liberation’ which underpins her later films (A
Doll’s House [1973], Julia [1977], Coming Home [1978], Nine to Five [1981]) and which is tied to the myth
of her personal life.18 Jack Lemmon trades on one aspect of his star persona: the organization man gifted
with conscience (Mr. Roberts [1955], The Apartment [1960], Save the Tiger [1973]). (Of course, the
character’s name, Jack Goodell, echoes the star’s name, while the reference to the character’s Navy career
recalls Lemmon as Ensign Pulver in Mr. Roberts, which starred Jane Fonda’s father.) The opposing forces are
played by actors stereotyped as heavies, either suave bureaucrats or thugs. Finally, generic conventions
operate to shape the story action. The film is a detective story (what caused the accident?), with Jack,
Kimberly, and Richard following up clues. The film is also a gangster film, with the cigar-smoking
corporate managers playing the role of the mob: thugs intimidate Jack, kill the sound man Hector, and in a
car chase pursue Jack to the plant. In such ways, the film renders its ostensibly progressive subject by the
most traditional means.
The China Syndrome tames its central political issue by means of the standard device of the double plot.
Here the pretext action is the nuclear accident at Ventana, while the real action is Kimberly’s quest to win
her reportoriai spurs. The film makes the personal goal take precedence over the social issue by situating its
protagonists in an ambivalent position with respect to the problem of nuclear safety. (The credits, a montage
sequence showing Kimberly and Richard driving to Ventana, is accompanied by a song, ‘Somewhere in
Between.’) Kimberly and Richard want to reveal the cover-up, but they do not take a position on nuclear
power per se. Jack Goodell is just as compromised. He explains that ‘the system works,’ and nothing in the
film confutes this: the mechanical design of the plant is sound. What Jack’s sleuthing discovers is shoddy
workmanship and cost-cutting in plant construction. Jack is central to the narrative’s reshaping of the
political issue, since he redefines the problem as one of faulty execution and individual greed, not of the
economic system that puts nuclear power into corporate hands. While the double plot makes the nuclear
issue a means to Kimberly’s goal, Jack’s investigation shifts the political problem to one of technical causes
and a subcontractor’s dishonesty. The film’s narrative action identifies its protagonists as ‘somewhere in
between’ the anti-nuclear demonstrators (seen testifying at a public hearing) and the nuclear industry.19
The evasive double plot also yields classical closure. Jack has barricaded himself in the plant control
room and insists on telling the truth over television. Plant authorities distract him by triggering another
turbine trip, and the police rush in and shoot him. But this trip convinces Jack’s assistant (as the first
accident had convinced Jack) that the cover-up must be revealed. So coming outside to the reporters, Ted
Spindler takes up Jack’s mantle and promises to tell all. Although Jack dies, his goal—full disclosure—is
achieved. Moreover, Kimberly’s poised and resourceful coverage convinces her station bosses that she can
handle ‘serious’ material. In her commentary, Kimberly says of the Ventana scandal: ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t
end here,’ but in fact the film has used up the nuclearpower pretext action. In the last shot, two television
monitors serve as emblems for the film’s two lines of action. On one, the coverage of the accident is
replaced by a commercial for microwave ovens. On the other monitor, we see Kimberly and Richard
joyfully embracing—the canonic last shot of the classical Hollywood film, the man and woman celebrating
the achievement of their personal goals. The public problem is not theirs to solve.
Narration in The China Syndrome also conforms to classical principles. The action stretches over five
days, each clearly demarcated. There are appointments and deadlines, both explicit (‘I want that film on my
desk before he gets back’) and implicit (the rush to stop the first turbine trip, Hector’s race to get Jack’s
evidence to the hearing, the last-minute rescue situation in the control room). The film follows plotlines
through crosscutting, especially in the last third. Shifts of locale are motivated narratively; scenes
completely obey rules of spatial coherence. (The sequences in the plant control room constitute excellent
examples of the classical definition of space through eyelines and reverse angles.) The anatomy of each
segment follows the standard pattern of establishment, new information, and ‘hooking’ to the next.
We can see the classical presuppositions of The China Syndrome’s narration most clearly in the film’s
contrast between cinema and television. As we have seen, classical narration aims to create the impression
that it proceeds directly from the story action (thanks to multiple motivation and other factors). Television is
a perfect foil for this process. In The China Syndrome, television is limited, contained, and manipulated.
The TV image passes through many hands (the studio console, the power supply at Ventana); at any point,
the image can be interrupted or halted. At the limit, there is straightforward censorship. Television mediates
reality; it disjoins and fragments. Film, on the other hand, is immediate. When Richard, Hector, and Kimberly
visit the plant, Richard surreptitiously films the turbine trip. Shooting from the hip, he can casually record
all the relevant information about the accident: by scrutinizing Richard’s film, scientists can tell what really
happened. Cinema makes the event completely readable simply by recording it.
It would be easy to say that in these ways cinema is celebrated as realistic and transparent, but here, as
usual in the classical cinema, realistic motivation is at the service of compositional motivation:
verisimilitude depends on coherence. So, for instance, Richard’s documentary footage ends with a shot of
Jack, desperately relieved that the plant pulled through. Certainly this image suggests that cinema can not
only record the event, but also reveal the human truth of the event. That revelation, however, also gains its
truth status from its confirmation of our view of Jack: we saw the same concerned expression on his face
during the accident, and it reappears at later moments of crisis. Television is not simply distanced and
artificial, it is fragmentary (e.g., the schizophrenic shots of the control room monitors). Cinema reasserts
continuity of meaning: Richard’s film, document of a fiction, corroborates the unity of the fiction.
Operating within classical premises, The China Syndrome cannot question the homogeneity of film
technique without questioning its own style. Godard’s work offers an instructive alternative here. In Numéro
Deux (1975), the fragmentary nature of television imagery furnishes a tool of analysis. Similarly, Tout va
bien (1972) resembles the story of The China Syndrome in several ways, but Godard makes the inquiry into
cinema central to his political purpose, thus refusing unified narrative, motivated technique, and continuity
devices. The China Syndrome shows that the classical paradigm continues to flourish, partly by absorbing
current topics of interest and partly by perpetuating seventy-year-old assumptions about what a film is and
does.
Blow-up and The Conversation
Hollywood no longer exists in the same way, but it re-exists in another way.20
Jean-Luc Godard
The China Syndrome represents the way that most American commercial cinema has continued the classical
tradition. But some would argue that during the late 1960s and 1970s more venture-some filmmakers took
fresh directions. Scorsese, Coppola, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader, Woody Allen, and others are often cited
as contemporary directors who have created a ‘New Hollywood’ or a ‘Hollywood Renaissance.’
It has been claimed that several of these directors have created a ‘youth revolution’: Cimino directed his first
Hollywood film at the age of thirty-one, Scorsese at thirty, Coppola at twenty-eight, Brian DePalma and
Steven Spielberg at twenty-seven. Yet the Hollywood director has customarily started young. Allan Dwan,
Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, Henry King, Charles Chaplin, John Ford, King Vidor, W.S. Van Dyke,
William Wellman, Frank Capra, Mervyn LeRoy, George Stevens, Garson Kanin, Orson Welles, Budd
Boetticher, Robert Wise, Stanley Donen, Richard Fleischer, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer, Robert
Mulligan, and Roger Corman all began directing before they were thirty. William K.Howard started when
he was only twenty-one, William Wyler when he was twenty-three. It is rarer to find a Hollywood director
who started ‘late’—say, after forty.
Nor have the New Hollywood directors significantly changed the mode of film production. Michael Pye
and Lynda Myles argue that film-school training gave younger directors a unified vision of their craft, since
as students they had to learn writing, editing, sound, and camerawork.21 But this knowledge is itself a sparse
sampling of all the crafts that contribute to a top-budget professional motion picture. (The ‘versatility’ of the
film-school graduates has enabled publicity mechanisms to promote the New Hollywood films as creations
of a single artistic vision.) Nor can the film-school training be considered innocent, since many university
film departments have taken upon themselves the task of transmitting dominant standards to students eager
to enter the industry. Moreover, as we have seen, the New Hollywood maintains the division of labor
established decades earlier. Even if one person plays the roles of screenwriter, director, and producer, these
remain supervisory functions not different from those enjoyed by independent producer-directors like
Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and others during the 1940s and 1950s.
The New Hollywood has also been denned by its technological feats: sophisticated special effects, new
camera supports (Panaflex, Steadicam, the Louma crane), television viewfinding, time-coded
synchronization, computer-assisted storyboarding, and expanded multitrack sound recording.22 Parts Four
and Six, however, have shown that Hollywood has always used technological innovation to promote films.
Recent developments are no exception to this trend. Coppola and George Lucas have proven themselves
especially alert to promoting technical ‘breakthroughs.’ Expectably, recent innovations have been justified
in utterly orthodox ways—in the name of economy, realism, unobtrusiveness, spectacle, and narrative
supremacy. Here is Altman on the value of multitrack sound: ‘Suddenly leaving that track there live…we
were able to put their lines in, and it just gave that sense of reality to the thing that otherwise it wouldn’t
have had.’23 His sound recordist adds that Altman demands a track which will ‘color, highlight, and
augment his story.’24 Steadicam’s manufacturer claims that it duplicates normal vision; cameramen praise
the device for saving money and time; Haskell Wexler points out that it allows for spectacular camera
movements.25 The f-0.7 lens in Barry Lyndon (1975) is explained as a way ‘to preserve the natural patina
and feeling of these old castles at night as they actually were.’26 When journalistic panegyrics publicize
such technological innovations, the New Hollywood becomes a manifestation of what Ernest Mandel has
called the specific form of bourgeois ideology under late capitalism: ‘belief in the omnipotence of
technology.’27
The strongest argument for a New Hollywood rests upon the claim that the directors’ works constitute a
non-classical approach to narrative and technique. The case was anticipated in 1971 by Peter Lloyd, who
claimed to find a disintegration in the Hollywood style after 1961. Lloyd argued that narrative structure had
splintered, genre conventions had dissolved, linearity had been replaced by ambiguity, and the individual
protagonist could no longer be seen as heroic.28 In the mid-1970s, Thomas Elsaesser suggested that the New
Hollywood of Thieves Like Us (1974), Sugarland Express (1974), Easy Rider (1969), and American Graffiti
(1973) revealed unmotivated protagonists, picaresque journey structures, and a self-consciousness that
slipped into pastiche, parody, or ‘the pathos of failure.’29 While Lloyd’s and Elsaesser’s observations are
apt, these new films do not constitute a sharply distinct style, but can better be explained by that process of
stylistic assimilation we have seen at work throughout Hollywood’s history. As the ‘old’ Hollywood had
incorporated and refunctionalized devices from German Expressionism and Soviet montage (see Chapters 7
and 17), the ‘New’ Hollywood has selectively borrowed from the international art cinema.
The category of the art cinema includes the internationally distributed films identified with such directors
as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Luchino Visconti, and Bernardo Bertolucci.30 Just
as in the classical Hollywood cinema, formal principles cohere to create a distinct group style and a unified
set of viewing strategies.
Formally, the art cinema employs a looser, more tenuous linkage of events than we find in the classical
film. In L’Avventura (1960), for example, Anna is lost and never found; in A bout de souffle (1959), the
reasons for Patricia’s betrayal of Michel remain unknown. The art cinema motivates this slackening by two
principles: realism and authorial expressivity.
The art film defines itself as realistic. It will show us actual locations, ‘realistic’ eroticism, and genuine
problems (e.g., contemporary ‘alienation,’ ‘lack of communication’). Most important, the art cinema depicts
psychologically ambivalent or confused characters. Whereas characters in the Hollywood film have clear-
cut traits and objectives, the characters of the art cinema lack precise desires and goals. Characters may act
for inconsistent reasons (Marcello in La Dolce Vita [I960]) or may question themselves about their goals
(Borg in Wild Strawberries [1957]). Choices become vague or nonexistent. Hence a certain drifting,
episodic quality to the art film’s narrative.
What takes up the forward causal momentum is an exploration of the nature and sources of psychological
states. The art cinema is concerned less with action than reaction; it is a cinema of psychological effects in
search of their causes. The dissection of feeling is often represented explicitly as therapy and cure (e.g.,
Persona [1966]), but even when it is not, the forward flow of causation is braked and characters pause to
seek the aetiology of their feelings. The protagonist becomes a supersensitive individual, and in the course
of the search he or she may come to the edge of psychological breakdown.
A conception of realism also affects the film’s spatial and temporal construction. The options range from
a documentary factuality (e.g., Il posto [1961]) to intense psychological subjectivity (e.g., Hiroshima mon
amour [1959]). Thus room is left for two viewing strategies. Violations of classical conceptions of time and
space are justified as the intrusion of an unpredictable daily reality or as the subjective reality of complex
characters. Manipulations of story order remain anchored to character subjectivity, as in 8 1/2 (1963). In
similar ways, the representation of space will be motivated as documentary realism (e.g., location shooting,
available light), as character revelation (a pan cross an apartment), or in extreme cases as purely mental
imagery.
At the same time, the art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film’s system. Sometimes
the author is represented as a biographical individual, and the film solicits confessional readings (e.g., Fellini’s
and Truffaut’s films). More often, the author is identified with an overt narration. The author comes forward
chiefly as patterned violations of the classical norm. Deviations from the classical canon—an unusual angle,
a stressed bit of cutting, a prohibited camera movement, an unmotivated shift in lighting or setting, indeed
any failure to motivate cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic— can be read as ‘authorial
commentary.’ Or the art film may foreground the narrational act by posing enigmas. In the classical film,
the puzzles are born of story: what is in her past? what will he do now? In the art film, the puzzle is one of
narration: who is telling this story? how is this story being told? why tell the story this way? A telltale sign
of such narrational presence is the flashforward—the narration’s anticipation of a future story action. The
flashforward is unthinkable in the classical narrative cinema, which seeks to retard the ending and to motivate
a step-by-step narration. But art films like Love Affair; or, the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator
(1967) and Stavisky (1974) force us to notice how the narrator teases us with knowledge that no character
can have.
Realism and authorial expressivity, then, will be the means whereby the art film unifies itself. Yet
verisimilitude, objective or subjective, can be incompatible with an intrusive author. The art cinema solves
the problem by means of ambiguity. The art film is nonclassical in that it emphasizes unplugged gaps and
unresolved issues. But these very deviations get placed, resituated as realism (in life, things happen this
way) or authorial commentary (the ambiguity is symbolic). Thus the art film solicits a particular viewing
procedure. Whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or space, we first seek realistic
motivation. (Is a character’s mental state causing the uncertainty? Is life just leaving loose ends?) If we are
thwarted, we seek narrational reasons. (What is being ‘said’ here? What significance justifies the violation
of the norm?) Ideally, the film hesitates, suggesting all at once character subjectivity, life’s untidiness, and
author’s vision. Uncertainties persist, but are understood as such, as obvious uncertainties. Whereas the
classical film solicits a univocal reading, the slogan of the art cinema might be, ‘When in doubt, read for
maximum ambiguity.’
This excursion into the art cinema has been necessary to show how the New Hollywood has absorbed
several conventions of the mode. But such absorption has not been simple copying; art-film principles have
been merged with certain conventions of the classical style. The process is easiest to see at the level of
technique. Recent American film has bent art-film devices to causally or generically motivated functions:
the jump-cut used for violence or comedy, the sound bridge for continuity or shock effect, the elimination
of the dissolve as a transition, and the freeze-frame used to signify finality. (Compare the narrative
irresolution of the freeze-frame in Les 400 coups [1959] with its powerful closure in Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid [1969].) Editor Ralph Rosenblum cites Hiroshima mon amour and A bout de souffle (both
1959) as having influenced the brief and abrupt flashbacks in The Pawnbroker (1965).31 Certain technical
tics of the art cinema have proven easy to assimilate.
There are more pervasive indications that an ‘art cinema’ has emerged in Hollywood. Like the European
art film, the ‘new Hollywood’ film is sharply aware of its relation to the ‘old Hollywood’: DePalma’s
rehashes of Hitchcock, Lucas’s use of Warners’ war films and Universal serials as prototypes for Star Wars,
remakes of serials (Superman [1979] and Flash Gordon [1981]) and cartoons (Popeye [1980]),
Bogdanovich’s attempts to revive the screwball comedy and the musical. Scorsese explains that he studied
1940s musicals before shooting New York, New York (1977). The song ‘Hurray for Hollywood’ in The Long
Goodbye (1973) functions partly to stress the differences between this detective film and its predecessors.
In keeping with the definition of a non-Hollywood Hollywood, American films are imitating the look of
European art films: Bresson is copied in Taxi Driver (1976) and American Gigolo (1980), Truffaut and
Fellini in Paul Mazursky’s work, Bergman in Interiors (1978), Godard in Alan Pakula’s Klute (1971). More
interestingly, the new directors sometimes flaunt the act of narration, as in the parallel-time structure of
Godfather II (1974), the opening credits of Nashville (1975), or the gratuitous tracking shot in Taxi Driver
that leaves the protagonist behind. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), the Leonard Cohen songs serve as a
symbolic commentary on the action; at the end of Blue Collar (1978), an earlier line from the film is
repeated nondiegetically over a freeze-frame. Altman’s Three Women (1977) is a veritable orgy of art-film
narration, creating dream/reality confusion and symbolic transmutations derivative of Persona. So strong
has the cult of the director become that Scorsese and Mazursky can play roles in their films and Coppola
can in Apocalypse Now (1979) portray, naturally, a filmmaker. Pascal Kané points out that in many recent
Hollywood films the active role of the traditional hero has been transferred to the director-as-creator; the
film’s unity can be recovered, as in the art cinema, at the level of authorial ‘statement.’32
Yet two factors keep the New Hollywood from becoming only a pastiche of the continental art cinema.
First, there is the almost complete conservatism of style. No recent American director has produced an
idiosyncratic style comparable to even Truffaut’s or Bergman’s, let alone to that of Antonioni or Bresson.
The classical premises of time and space remain powerfully in force, with only minor instrumental changes
(e.g., multiple cameras to capture reverse angles, zooms doing duty for tracking shots). Altman, probably
the most interesting stylist to emerge in the New Hollywood, none the less uses techniques in ways which
conform to the dominant paradigm. Secondly, even the most ambitious directors cannot escape genres. New
Hollywood cinema consists of gangster and outlaw films, thrillers, Westerns, musicals, science-fiction films,
comedies, and an occasional melodrama. Apocalypse Now is primarily and almost entirely a war movie. Blue
Collar, a film of putative social significance, includes fight scenes reminiscent of prison films like Brute
Force (1947), a caper intrigue, and even a car chase. Classical film style and codified genres swallow up art-
film borrowings, taming the (already limited) disruptiveness of the art cinema. We can watch this process
clearly at work in a famous film by the most prestigious director of his generation.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is, fundamentally, a detective story. Harry Caul, an
expert in audio surveillance, is hired to record a conversation between a young man and woman. As he
assembles his documentation, he begins to suspect that the couple is in danger from his mysterious
employer, the director of a company. The film thus follows classical detective patterns: Harry must uncover
and interpret clues to reveal the truth. Some of the clues are highly conventional. The director’s sinister
assistant warns Harry not to get involved with the tapes because they are dangerous and ‘someone may get
hurt.’ Later, Harry is able to decipher more and more of the conversation and to pick out the date of a hotel
rendezvous. At first Harry refuses to turn over the tapes, but they are stolen by a spy sent by the director.
Convinced that the director intends to kill the couple, Harry visits the hotel at the time mentioned in the
conversation. There he overhears and glimpses a murder. The twist in the plot comes when he learns that it
is the company director who has been killed by the daughter and the young man with the help of the
director’s assistant. Harry has misinterpreted the clues. The film ends with him immured at home, unable to
report the crime because he is himself being bugged.
The genre conventions—investigation, threat, and evasion maneuvers—provide most of the film’s causal
impetus. Narrationally the film operates from a classical base as well. The opening, which reveals Harry’s
crew recording the conversation, immediately establishes the principal characters and the paramount issues
of the film: what did the couple say, and what does it mean? During the recording, interference distorts the
speech; as the film proceeds, Harry’s re-recording clarifies more and more. We move toward
enlightenment. The consistency of narrative space is assured not only by composition and cutting but also
by sound perspective; a line is unclear only when it is necessary to be (momentarily) unclear. Narrative time
is homogeneous, achieved through a short durational span (a few days) and a tight mesh of appointments
(going to a surveillance convention, meeting other wiretappers, meeting the company director) leading to
the crucial deadline, the mysterious Sunday rendezvous at the Jack Tar Hotel. Scenes are linked by dialogue
hooks, as when Coppola cuts from the taped conversation (‘Three o’clock—room 773’) to Harry at the
hotel lobby asking for room 773; the next scene begins with a close-up of the door of room 773. There are
even two montage sequences, functioning to compress story time.
Except for the elements which must remain enigmatic for the sake of the mystery, characters and
situations are redundant and consistent. At first it is unclear why the call girl Meredith should be attracted to
Harry, but later he and we discover that she has been an agent for the director and has stolen the
incriminating tape. As the protagonist, Harry states his initial goal explicitly in the first scene: ‘I don’t care
what they’re talking about. All I want is a nice fat recording.’ His plastic raincoat, his neutral business suit,
his halting manner, his habit of backing away from other characters—all define Harry as anonymous,
solitary, and fearful of human contact. Before he knocks on his girlfriend’s door, Harry dodges behind the
staircase to see if anyone is watching. After he is inside her apartment, Amy asks why she once saw him hiding
on the stairs; her question confirms our inferences about his behavior. Later, Harry’s Catholicism is
redundantly stressed. The last shot, which shows Harry alone in his apartment, is thus a logical culmination
of his movement toward isolation.
Into this classical context, The Conversation imports strategies and devices taken from the art cinema. If
the investigation is the pretext action, the second plotline presents an uncertain protagonist in a
psychological crisis. Harry is alienated, psychically drifting. As he says in the second scene, 1 don’t have
anything personal. Nothing of value.’ His professional goal, achieving the perfect recording, is mitigated by
a sense of guilt. Years before, his bugging inadvertently caused a family’s death. Now Harry cannot decide
whether to intervene in the situation he has discovered. He goes to confession, and he dreams of warning
the director’s daughter. In the same dream, he reveals facts from his childhood and fantasizes the murder
that might come to pass. The paralytic, drifting protagonist of the art film fits badly into the detective role:
where Sam Spade would have tried to prevent the murder in room 773, Harry can only listen, then crumple
up on the bed in an agony of indecision. Finally, Harry cannot solve the mystery in time—a good example
of how the failed protagonist of the art cinema can stand not far from the failed hero of the film noir.
(Compare other recent private-eye films such as Chinatown [1974] and Night Moves [1975].)
The film gives us access to the protagonist’s state of mind through his behavior, speech, dreams, and,
chiefly, through Harry’s dissection of the tape. Here Coppola exploits an ingenious narrational device.
When Harry plays the tape, the film shows us images of the crucial conversation, so we see the characters
speaking the lines we hear. (These are not always the shots that we saw in the opening scene.) We are inclined
to read these images as flashbacks, cued by the recording: that is, the sound is ‘objective,’ but the images
are Harry’s recollections. It is during these replays that we hear the young man say, ‘He’d kill us if he could.’
These lead us to share Harry’s suspicions of the company director. But at the film’s end, when Harry discovers
his error, another flashback shows us the young man saying, ‘He’d kill us if he could.’ Not only the image
but the sound has been subjective; we have shared Harry’s mental state to a greater degree than we have
realized. (Coppola’s duplicity extends to playing Harry’s subjective version of the tape not only when Harry
is alone but in a more ‘objective’ scene, when the director and his assistant are present; we are thus led still
further to assume, wrongly, that the tape is as we hear it.) As Walter Murch, the sound editor for the film,
puts it: The tape becomes his obsession, so it gets replayed at various points in the film, for various reasons,
in different spaces and in different realities. Sometimes it’s totally in his head—you’re listening to the tape,
but the way he imagines it.’33
There is more than character subjectivity at work, though, for The Conversation also uses authorial
intervention to increase ambiguity. Many shots, especially in Harry’s apartment, hold on empty spaces,
connoting not only the vacant quality of his life but also marking the presence of a commenting narration. Other
shots, such as one of a mirror at the convention, have obvious symbolic functions. Coppola also creates
ambiguity by refusing to assign certain images either to the character or to the narration. During Harry’s
dream, an image of the murder yet to come can be read as Harry’s premonition or as the narration’s
flashforward. The same calculated uncertainty is engendered when Harry examines the murder room and
blood begins overflowing the toilet bowl. Is the image objective (i.e., the blood from the crime emerging
after the cleanup) or subjective (Harry’s imagination)? Near the end of the film, Harry learns of the
director’s death (supposedly in a car crash) and goes to the firm. There the daughter, the young man, and the
director’s assistant are fending off reporters. Coppola alternates shots of the characters in the present, shots
taken from earlier sequences, and shots showing the murder of the father in the hotel room. These
interspersed images can be read in several ways: as fragmentary flashbacks (daughter, boyfriend, assistant,
and Harry each recalling certain events), as Harry’s swift inferences about what must have happened, or as
the narration’s intervention to explain the story to us. The soundtrack produces similar problems, with
distorted music (recalling the murder scene) underscoring fragments of the original conversation.
The Conversation exemplifies how the New Hollywood has absorbed narrational strategies of the art
cinema while controlling them within a coherent genre framework. Although the film’s narration switches
from objectivity to character subjectivity to authorial commentary, a puzzle and solution remain firmly at
the center of the story. Thanks to genre conventions, the film finally reveals that the young couple
committed the murder, presumably to take control of the corporation. It is true that this conclusion is not
spelled out to the degree that it would be in a classical film, but nothing in the action contradicts this reading
and a great deal (the thwarting of Harry’s investigation, the bugging of his apartment) supports it. Even the
misleading presentation of the crucial conversation is partly motivated by the duplicitous narration
characteristic of the detective film. (Recall a similar device in The Maltese Falcon, discussed in Chapter 3.)
Contrast Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966), a film with which The Conversation is often compared. In that film,
the detective puzzle cannot be solved. The protagonist has only the vaguest suspicions; we have no access to
the murder plot, to motives, or to any evidence but the photograph. Antonioni glancingly cites the detective-
puzzle situation, whereas Coppola expands it in order to anchor the film within generic expectations. The
New Hollywood can explore ambiguous narrational possibilities but those explorations remain within
classical boundaries.
31
Alternative modes of film practice
The longevity of the classical cinema accounts partly for its influence. We often forget that Hollywood
cinema has affected nearly every sphere of Western cultural life, from building design to conceptions of
physical beauty. Certainly the classical style has influenced other narrative media—modern literature,
advertising, comic strips, and photography. Even if we confine our survey to the sphere of filmmaking, we
cannot ignore the extent to which the classical film has become a model for the entire world.
By the end of the 1920s, the classical style dominated the world’s screens. The pattern of events was
similar almost everywhere. World War I would force a country to cut back its film production, but theaters
would still need motion pictures. American films, imported in huge numbers, became stupendously popular.
In Italy audiences quickly succumbed to the appeal of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks, and domestic
producers recovered only by erecting trade barriers. In postwar France, for every French film in circulation
there were four American ones; what was widely called la crise du scénario came down to an inability to
duplicate the vigor of the Hollywood narrative.1 A German critic ruefully recalled his compatriots’ dismay
that ‘America, with all her faults, could nevertheless do one thing and she could do it well—and that the
Germans realized. She could produce popular films—films that were stupid, inane, and often immoral, but
for all that, films that did fill the theatres.’2 British critics complained that their country’s films had
succumbed to slavish copying of Hollywood. When the Danish director Urban Gad wrote a book on
filmmaking he championed both American principles of style and the Hollywood division of labor.3 The
emergence of classical narrative form and style after 1917 provided a stable and powerful exemplum for
European cinema.
Hollywood did not limit its colonizing to Europe. In Japan, as early as 1919 American films were the
most popular foreign ones, and after the 1923 Kanto earthquake severely damaged Japanese studios,
Hollywood established its economic domination of the import trade.4 One Japanese film historian wrote that
with the coming of American films, ‘Japanese producers were taught for the first time what a true motion
picture must be like, and the new conception was fully illustrated by the American example.’5 Well into the
1930s, Japanese cameramen and directors studied American films, sometimes even counting and timing
shots.6 In India, the same sort of assimilation occurred. As elsewhere, Hollywood was able to offer its films
at lower rentals than domestic producers could, and by 1927, most of the films seen in India were
American.7 And there is little need to elaborate upon the classical cinema’s influence upon the young film
industry of Soviet Russia. Lev Kuleshov’s defense of ‘Americanitis’ and V.I. Pudovkin’s admiration for the
use of ‘plastic material’ in Tol’able David are well-known. Eisenstein wrote admiringly of Ford and Griffith
and recalled his discovery of smooth continuity editing:8
I myself remember what exertions it cost me, at the start of my career in cinema, to learn to see on the
screen a scene, let us say, in which Douglas Fairbanks puts out a cigarette—to see it not as a single
620 ALTERNATIVE MODES OF FILM PRACTICE
action but professionally, i.e., in all three of its montage segments: 1) mid-shot—takes cigarette out of
mouth; 2) close-up —hand extinguishes cigarette on ashtray; 3) knees-up shot—having dropped the
cigarettebutt, Douglas walks away from table!
Two effects of Hollywood’s international dominance stand out. First, it spurred Europeans to imitation.
French Westerns, pseudo-DeMille sex comedies, and King Kong Made in Japan (1933) offer only the most
striking symptoms of a much deeper commitment to the classical mode. It is evident that the ‘ordinary film’
of France, Germany, and even Japan and Russia constructed causality, time, and space in ways
characteristic of the normal Hollywood film.9 The accessibility of Hollywood cinema to audiences of
different cultures made it a transnational standard. This trend has, of course, continued to the present.
There is, however, a second effect of Hollywood’s international prominence: the need within various
countries to distinguish domestic films from the American product. The growth of ‘national film styles’ after
1919 can best be seen as an attempt to compete economically with the classical style.10 The German cinema
drew upon native art movements (e.g., Expressionism) and literary traditions to create a distinctly Teutonic
quality. French Impressionist cinema also sought to constitute an alternative to the American style. The
Japanese cinema drew upon its indigenous culture as a way to draw audiences away from the American
import. (In various ways, all these attempts created contradictions within each nation’s film practice.) When
the nationalism strategy did not work, there were a few attempts to create international film syndicates that
might compete with Hollywood. Nationalist strategies continue to the present; the most recent examples are
the Australian cinema and the anti-colonialist cinema of Third World countries.
The classical style extends its influence to other filmmaking domains as well. It has changed the history of
animation; Walt Disney built his career upon transposing the narrative and stylistic principles of classical
cinema into animated film. (Recall Pinocchio [1940], with its depth compositions, complex crane shots, and
goal-oriented protagonist.) Hollywood has also standardized a style for documentary filmmaking. Industrial
and government films, educational shorts, and training films, although often non-narrative in structure, call
upon the devices and systems of Hollywood filmmaking. World War II combat films, for example,
attempted to duplicate Hollywood techniques and production values. Contemporary television has continued
this influence: shot/reverse shot, eyeline matching, and edge lighting are obvious borrowings.11 The
multiple-camera shooting of early talkies fore-shadowed the dominant shooting procedures in studio
television. Even the amateur cinema has been cut to the classical pattern. From the early 1920s, when 16mm
filming became available, Eastman Kodak has urged amateurs to follow the dominant practice. Script your
film in advance, make sure the camera is level, balance your compositions, use backlighting and lots of
closeups.12 Industry journals like American Cinematographer gave tips on how the home moviemaker could
accomplish Hollywood effects. In sum, it is not too much to say that our conception of any film (or
television show), fictional or not, rests chiefly upon assumptions derived from the classical Hollywood
cinema.
The most dispiriting evidence of the identification of the cinema as a whole with the classical film style
comes from the writings of film theorists, who should know better. There is ample excuse for Hugo
Münsterberg to believe that every film must have unified action and consistent characters; he was writing in
1916, when classical filmmaking was emerging.13 There is less reason for psychologists writing sixty years
later to call mismatched editing ‘bad’ cutting and justify the term by appeal to manuals of Hollywood
practice.14 And there is no excuse for a linguist to assert in 1980 that viewers find a scene without cuts
‘unacceptable’ in the sense that speakers of a language find ungrammatical utterances unacceptable as
sentences; or that cuts which cross the axis of action are not ‘filmic’ (i.e., ‘structurally correct and therefore
well-formed’).15 One consequence of defining historical modes of film practice is thus to caution against
HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA 621
taking The Cinema as an unproblematic identity; too many theories have blindly repeated as axioms the
protocols of one (excessively obvious) cinema.
The historical hegemony of Hollywood makes acute and urgent the need to study film styles and modes of
production that differ from Hollywood’s. But a great deal more needs to be done in order to specify the
salient differences involved. Theorists usually discuss alternatives to the classical cinema in general and
largely negative terms. If the classical style is ‘invisible,’ we will then praise films that show the camera. To
the pleasure of the classical style, critics have counterposed a cinema of ‘unpleasure’ or frustration or
boredom; to a representation of depth, a cinema of flatness or ‘materiality.’ Working with such mighty
opposites, it becomes easy to claim that the favored filmmaker (Godard, Vertov, Stan Brakhage, whoever)
‘subverts’ or ‘deconstructs’ the dominant style. One task of this book has been to show that such polarities
lack nuance and precision. Moreover, one cannot simply oppose narrative or pleasure; one must at the same
time show how films can construct systematic alternatives.
Recently, theorists have begun to propose a subtler range of modes of film practice. In an essay on Vent d’est
(1969), Peter Wollen has drawn up a columnar set of oppositions between Godard’s ‘counter-cinema’ and
Hollywood filmmaking. Colin MacCabe has suggested a threefold typology: the classic realist text, the
progressive realist text, and the avant-garde text. Paul Willemen constructs a four-part scheme based on
whether the film prevents, allows, encourages, or requires an ‘active reading.’ Using a different four-part
taxonomy, Noël Burch and Jorge Dana distinguish among classical films, films with a ‘stylistic’ (e.g.,
Citizen Kane), films which intermittently escape ideological determination, and films which play upon
dominant codes in order to question them. The prototype of such typologies remains that of Jean Narboni
and Jean-Louis Comolli, which lists seven ways in which a film can relate to the dominant ideology.16
In the light of these attempts (none of which has been elaborated further), it may seem mandarin to
propose still another typology; but this book does suggest a systematic approach to the problem. We might
start with the functions that some alternative film styles have assigned to particular devices. Plainly, many
filmmakers have graded and discriminated formal factors which the classical style lumps together. Just as
Impressionist painters dissolved line in order to sharpen a sense of color differences, so have some films
promoted a single formal device to a level where we become sensitive to its more minute variations.
Because in the classical paradigm the camera can rest at any height, we seldom notice particular
differences. But when Yasujiro Ozu decides on a single camera height as the very basis of his scenography,
the most minute inflections of position register with great force. In the classical style, the close-up gains its
importance from its rarity; in certain Soviet films or in Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), the
close-up becomes the norm and the decoupage must adjust to the consequent fragmentation of the scene. In
the Hollywood style, lengthy camera movements alternate with fixed and shorter shots; when, however,
Jancsó refuses to contain the mobile take within a clearly segmented scene, every camera movement leaps
to our notice. Imagine the orthodox 180° conversation scene; now imagine the scene shot, as in Straub and
Huillet’s History Lessons (1973), from a series of symmetrically disposed high-angle positions moving in a
near half-circle around the characters.17 What one critic wrote of Mizoguchi applies to other filmmakers as
well: they emit ‘a note so pure that the slightest variation becomes expressive.’18
It is not enough, however, to see oppositional styles as the promotion of a formal device: this is only a
point of departure for recognizing alternative stylistic systems. Ozu’s camera height, Jancsó’s use of camera
movement, Eisenstein’s use of the close-up only make sense as forces within a definite and dynamic
interaction of story and narration. Consider Mizoguchi’s use of shot space in three of his 1936–40 films
(Naniwa Elegy, Sisters of Gion, and Story of the Last Chrysanthemums). The films might all be loosely
called melodramas, and the takes are very long (average shot lengths of 23 seconds, 33 seconds, and 59
seconds respectively). So far, this hardly distinguishes Mizoguchi’s work from that of the American John
Stahl, whose 1930s melodramas also use long takes (19 seconds average for Back Street [1932], 35 seconds
for Magnificent Obsession [1935]). But Mizoguchi’s work challenges the classical style in a way Stahl’s
does not: Mizoguchi systematically withholds our access to the character’s psychological behavior,
especially facial expression. The long take becomes only one instrument of this strategy. Mizoguchi
typically stages the scene’s action in long shot, using chiaroscuro lighting or aspects of the set to block our
vision of the characters. Stahl’s long takes, on the other hand, are clearlylit medium shots of the characters
in profile or three-quarters view; thus the shot is wholly at the service of the actor. Mizoguchi demotes the
actor’s body and face to a parity with other elements in the shot (lighting, architecture, props). In the
classical tradition, frontality of body position dominates, but Mizoguchi will play extensive scenes with all
characters, or the most important ones, turned away from the camera. The shape and rhythm of the
spectator’s activity is changed when the ‘establishing’ shot does not give way to nearer and clearer vantage
points, to a pattern of shot/reverse shots, to reaction shots, or to the final close-up that reveals the heart of
the action before we are whisked to the next scene. Mizoguchi’s scenography promotes values not present
in the classical film: separating the voice from the body and using the former as the chief carrier of
emotion; saturating shot duration with recollection and anticipation of gestures; exploring environment; and
creating an ambiguity of character psychology as well as of spatial depth. What enables these values to
emerge, however, is the rigorously systematic quality of Mizoguchi’s alternative narration, the way
camerawork, lighting, acting, setting, and causality function together.19
By using the three levels of generality suggested in Chapter 1, it would be possible to sort out alternative
styles. We could characterize any alternative by its specific devices, by its systems, and by the principles of
relations among systems. For instance, Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), Potemkin (1925), and October (1928)
constitute an opposition to Hollywood style at all three levels: an alternative set of techniques (e.g.,
overlapping and macaronic editing); different systems of narrative causality (the mass protagonist motivated
by class interests), of time (the dialectical laws of history), and of space (place treated as a locus of class
conflict); and a specific relation among these systems (narrative can be interrupted and qualified by a
rhetorical narration). Or Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1968) can be considered to foreground certain non-
classical devices (the jerky zoom, the colored superimpositions) and to change the hierarchy of systems in
the film’s overall form. Here space and time are not vehicles for story causality, and narrative elements
(character, action, suspense) enter only intermittently, with a spatio-temporal progression (the zoom)
providing the dominant shape of the film. As with the Hollywood cinema, we must not fetishize devices,
since any device can be appropriated by any style: television commercials borrow from Eisenstein, and
Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) borrows from Wavelength. The systemic level is the crucial contextual
link between particular elements and the most fundamental formal principles.
We could also use the theoretical account of narration offered in Chapters 2–7 to distinguish alternative
modes of filmmaking. Those chapters have drawn upon examples from non-classical traditions to suggest
specific ways in which narration could create new patterns of self-consciousness, knowledge, and
communicativeness and to show how the viewer’s gap-spotting and gap-filling activity could be guided
along different directions. Mizoguchi’s scenography would be a pertinent example: the refusal of frontality,
legible lighting, and analytical editing is effectively a self-conscious refusal of the omnipresence and
communicativeness of classical narration.
It would be tempting to mount an exhaustive typology of all possible alternatives to the classical
Hollywood style—a paradigm of paradigms, so to speak. Is there a middle course between simply calling
hundreds of films nonclassical (each in its own way) and mechanically deducing possible variants? Apart
from the dominant and long-lived Hollywood style, only a few other general modes of film practice have
existed. Three significant ones would be the ‘art cinema,’ the avant-garde cinema, and the ‘modernist’
cinema. We have already sketched out the art cinema as a group style. What we are calling the avant-garde
consists centrally of a rejection of narrative causality. Examples would be La région centrale (1971), Zorns
Lemma (1970), Scorpio Rising (1964), Mothlight (1963), Ballet Mécanique (1924), and Man With a Movie
Camera (1928). More positively, the avant-garde typically takes as its task the creation of film form out of
the spatial and temporal possibilities of the medium. The ‘modernist’ cinema could be described as one in
which spatial and temporal systems come forward and share with narrative the role of structuring the film.
That is, narration is no longer the most important aspect of plot; other structures can compete for our
attention. Hence these films often pose problems of how to unify themselves: a dynamic of unity and
fragmentation is set up within the text. The modernist category is very roomy—we could include most
works of Ozu, Dreyer, Jacques Tati, Mizoguchi, Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, Eisenstein, Godard,
Oshima, Straub/Huillet, Marguerite Duras, Yvonne Rainer, et al. One would need to make many more
distinctions, both historical and theoretical, to sort out various ways in which certain films could be called
‘modernist.’
There is a danger that someone might freeze these tendencies into rigid categories, sort or judge films
along these lines, even write articles advocating that Wim Wenders’s The Wrong Move (1975) is a
modernist film rather than art film. Although this typology is couched in an objectivist language, it is best
thought of as a set of roughly distinct viewing hypotheses. Every film offers some leeway: you can read
Dog Star Man (1965) as an art film (myth and autobiography become important here), and auteur criticism
usually consists of reading certain classical films as if they were art films. Yet the leeway is not infinite.
(Try to read Dog Star Man as a classical narrative film.) While alternative viewing hypotheses can activate
new aspects of a film, the object is not phantasmic; it solicits some readings and pretty definitely forecloses
others. The critic should be able to specify what viewing activities the film asks for and where his or her
analysis diverges from them, cuts into the film at a bias. (Surrealist critics have been exemplary in their
explicit recognition of when their readings ‘irrationally enlarge’ the operations of a film by Sternberg or Stuart
Heisler.20) One useful way to keep our sense of alternative styles at once flexible and precise is to use the
concept of mode of production to situate the styles historically.
Some alternative modes of production can be identified with characteristics of entire national film
industries. The Soviet system of filmmaking after 1930 is an instance of the overt insertion of State
ideological direction in the filmmaking process. Assuming the role of directors of capital, the Communist
Party assigned its members as top managers of the production studios. Picked because of his administrative
successes, the head of the studio might have no knowledge of filmmaking. Although he was the top
administrator, the actual power lay with the secretary that the Party also assigned to the studio. Under the
administrative head were two divisions: an ‘artistic-creative’ council of directors, cameramen, producers,
and writers, which formulated the scripts and supervised and approved their production; and a ‘technical’
division, which supplied materials and technicians. As in other Soviet factories, production groups made
open, competitive pledges to cut costs and to film efficiently, although world-famous directors such as
Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko exceeded budgets, particularly when handling a State-commissioned
project. In the United States, a firm made a film to make profits. In the USSR, the studios expected some
projects’ earnings to support the industry, but ideological correctness was more important than box-office
success. Such earnings did not come easy; there was a problem of slow output. In 1935–36, a committee
studied other production systems and suggested reorganization along ‘American lines.’ They set up a
division of labor and a production head as in the Hollywood mode, but the Party and committees remained
the top decision-makers in the studios.21
If the alternative practices of the Soviets produced a slow output, the Japanese film industry of the 1950s
involved fast mass-production. The typical film had a short production time, normally using only one take
and a lot of editing in the camera. Music might be written during the shooting without the composer even
seeing rushes of the film. The Japanese mode also included another laboç position—the lighting supervisor,
who controlled the placement of lamps. Following other Japanese industries, the film firms were unionized
but on an industrial basis, so jurisdictional disputes such as those in the United States did not occur. Rather
than starting anywhere in the structure, workers hoping to advance to directing expected to move slowly up
the hierarchy.22
Because of the world-wide imitation of Hollywood’s successful mode of production, however,
oppositional practices have generally not been launched on an industry-wide basis. Most alternatives have
sprung from the choice of individual filmmakers or filmmaking groups. One major area of variation involves
the status of the script. In examining the effects wrought by cinéma direct, Comolli has shown that there has
emerged a tendency to challenge the sovereignty of the script in the fiction film. Some filmmakers have
written scripts and then not used them; Tati claims to film and cut par coeur, while Straub and Huillet on
some films prepared a detailed script but then did not use it during shooting. Janscó typically uses no
conventional script, only a few notes, and he decides on the figure behavior and camera movement only
after pacing around the location. Some filmmakers habitually write the script on short order for each day’s
shooting. Wenders claims to have written Kings of the Road (1976) each night before shooting in order to
take advantage of changing situations; during the filming of Zabriskie Point (1970), Antonioni did not permit
his staff to discuss the constantly changing script because ‘political events go by too fast for the cinema to
keep up.’23
Other filmmakers have challenged the script more radically. Dziga Vertov’s conception of montage,
extended to include the acts of observation and shooting, forced the filmmaker to surrender the usual
distinctions between script and filming: for Vertov, scripting occurred throughout the production process.
Godard claimed to have a ‘dialectical’ notion of filmmaking: adapt the scenario against its source, shoot
against the scenario, edit against the footage, and mix sound against the images. One can employ group
methods of scripting as well. The makers of The Battle of Chile (1973–76) shot footage for two weeks with
no plan, then met to determine production roles and the film’s final argument. For My Night at Maud’s
(1969), director Eric Rohmer and the cast and crew worked and lived together. Although most of the script
was prepared before filming, each night everyone met to discuss and revise the dialogue.24
Alternative methods of shooting have often sought to promote ‘realism’ in the finished product or to
generate greater cooperation during production. One tactic, employed by Dreyer and Straub/Huillet, is to
shoot in continuity, that is, in the order in which the sequences will appear in the finished film. This practice
is often defended as a means to enhance actors’ performances. By building his films out of abnormally long
takes, Mizoguchi compelled his cast and crew to work together with a sustained attention that differed
considerably from the quick and routine totting up of shots demanded in Hollywood. A comparable process
was at work in the production of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), in which
the entire crew had to figure out ways to remain unseen during the several 360° pan shots. Such esprit de
corps prevailed in Rohmer’s production of My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee (1970). The production
team was small (no assistants or intermediaries), and all workers shared profits. Rohmer acted as prop man,
while the producer also did the electrical work. Shooting in continuity, the group took advantage of the
natural change of seasons and filmed at the time of day, place, and season specified by the script.25 ‘A scene
which occurs in the script at four in the morning will be shot then because Rohmer believes that the actor
will have a particular type of tension in his face befitting the hour.’26
Post-production phases of alternative modes of film practice often stress the contribution sound can bring
to the film. While a few Hollywood filmmakers preferred to have the music prepared before shooting was
finished,27 the traditional practice, as we have seen, was to add music and sound effects after editing. For
Pierrot le fou (1965), however, Antoine Duhamel wrote an untimed score from which Godard then used bits
and pieces at various points, sometimes cutting the image to fit. As for dialogue, filmmakers such as Tati
and Fellini often dispense with it during shooting and then insert it during the editing phase. Other
filmmakers prefer to use only direct sound and refuse to tamper with it in the post-filming process.
Alexander Kluge believes such direct sound creates ‘authenticity,’ while Straub and Huillet claim that it
provides an ‘obstacle’ for the actors that makes their performances more ‘concrete.’28 In such ways,
oppositional modes of filmmaking can suggest sonic possibilities which the smoothly embellished
Hollywood soundtracks cannot.
It would be naive to think that alternative styles necessarily lead to alternative production procedures,
still less to fundamental shifts in the mode of production. Yet just as we must define the classical mode
partly by its standardization of production and division of labor, so a historically specific description of
alternative modes must construct the ideological, technological, and economic bases that support them. In
general, most oppositional cinemas have handed over a great many production decisions to the director—
hence the commonplace notion of ‘personal’ filmmaking in Europe or in the avant-garde. But even if the
director has played a privileged role, she or he cannot be seen as simply the prime mover of the film. For
example, an analysis of the modernist cinema’s or the art cinema’s mode of production would have to trace
the ideological notion of the film d’art, the national styles that grew up in opposition to Hollywood after
World War I, the importance of the director’s taking over the role of the scriptwriter, the functions of the
independent and small-scale producer, the creation of an international audience of college-educated
viewers, the scope of international coproduction after World War II, and the link of cinema to modernism in
other arts (e.g., the post-Jamesian novel for the art cinema; Meyerhold, Brecht, or le nouveau roman for
various modernist filmmakers). The postwar American avant-garde can be seen to depend extensively upon
16mm technology, an ideology of personal expression cultivated in poetry and painting, a new audience in
colleges and art galleries, the growth of private and government arts foundations, and a recasting of
commercial division of labor (the film studio becoming more like a painter’s studio).
It is in the context of militant filmmaking that the most radical alternatives to the dominant mode of
production have been tried out. Here the directors’s role has not been so privileged. An early instance was
Kühle Wampe (1931), whose makers (scenarists, director, composer, producer, and lawyer) constituted
themselves as an ‘author’ in a legal sense. In explaining their aims, the participants pointed to a link
between their collective identity and their leftist political position. ‘We came more and more to treat
organization [of production tasks] as an essential component of artistic work. This was only possible
because the work as a whole was political work.’29 In the late 1960s, many militant filmmaking collectives
became active, and several claimed that sharing political goals within a non-hierarchical mode of production
affected the look and sound of the films. A famous manifesto by the Brazilians Octavio Getino and
Fernando Solanas called for a guerilla cinema that, among other things, changed the division of labor: ‘Each
member of the group should be familiar, at least in a general way, with the equipment being used: he must
be prepared to replace another in any phase of the production. The myth of irreplaceable technicians must
be exploded.’ The result was a ‘third cinema,’ experimental and technically imperfect by Hollywood
standards, and aiming at ‘unfinished, unordered, violent works.’30 Most famous of all militant collectives is
probably the Dziga Vertov Group, composed of Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and perhaps some other
members. The Group celebrated the death of the film author and claimed that on Group productions all
workers were paid equally and every shot was discussed politically. Shot on 16mm with limited sound
facilities, the Dziga Vertov Group films deliberately ‘started from zero,’ working from initially simple images
and sounds and testing them against one another for political functions. Godard commented on why he used
a group method: ‘It’s an attempt to smash the usual dictatorship of the director. To try to have other people
be in the movie on a little more equal basis than just as technicians or slaves. To try to make no
hierarchy.’31 One cannot reduce alternative styles to their productive contexts, but radical cinema, especially
of a modernist sort, has insistently demanded a revolutionizing of the means and relations of production in
ways that have affected film style.
Radical cinema has also been militant in addressing issues of consumption. Films are not conceived of as
commodities for exchange and generation of profits but as ideological instruments for social action. Brecht
reportedly wanted a sequence in Hangmen Also Die (1943) to be extractable for audience discussion of types
of social behavior. Cine Liberacíon, an Argentinian film collective, argued directly against Hollywood
where ‘man is viewed as a consumer of ideology, not as the creator of ideology.’32 With screenings and
discussions of their films, the group provides an arena for political discussion.
Finally, in constructing alternatives to Hollywood, we must recognize that the historical centrality of that
mode creates a constant and complex interchange with other modes. No absolute, pure alternative to
Hollywood exists. Godard’s use of Hollywood conventions (even in his post-1968 work), Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s borrowings from melodramas and gangster films, Rivette’s revision of Lang and Jancsó’s of
Ford— all attest to filmmakers’ impulse to use classicism as a reference point. Straub speaks of Fort
Apache (1948) as Brechtian and of Othon (1971) as Hitchcockian, while Brakhage remarks: ‘My childhood,
like that of Gregory [Markopoulos] and Kenneth [Anger], was saturated by Hollywood movies. Most of us
still go to them quite gratefully and enjoy them in the same milieus that we did as children. So we are all the
time borrowing possibilities from the Hollywood movie.’33 You can trace a Hollywood technical process
such as back projection from its classical use to its cubistic possibilities in films like The Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach (1968). Likewise, Hollywood’s mode of production continues to exert a power that can be
opposed only by a knowledge of its past and its functions. The historical and aesthetic importance of the
classical Hollywood cinema lies in the fact that to go beyond it we must go through it.
Envoi
From the speeches at the Society of Motion Picture Engineers banquet, Hotel Pennsylvania, New York,
22 October 1930
MR HAYS: The next presentation is Mr Paul Gulick, publicity director of Universal.
MR GULICK: Personally, I am very glad to meet face to face the gentlemen who caused the revolution
in the motion picture business. You don’t look revolutionary to me; you are able
spokesmen and leaders; you have talked rationally and seem to formulate plans which will
be helpful.
My business is that of press agent, and it is my business to make people like the
pictures and pay at the box-office that Mr Thompson told you about. I have never had
any ability to become an engineer. The only accomplishment I have attained is to get my
name mentioned on the program tonight so that I can tell my wife where I have been.
MR HAYS: The next, my friends, is a very great artist and most distinguished international
representative of this great business, Mr Sergei Eisenstein, the director who is here from
Russia.
MR EISENSTEIN: Mr President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: I don’t like to make speeches. Please don’t mind
if my speech is bad; my feelings are not—I am smiling.
You know, everybody asks the employees if they like the boss, ‘Hollywood.’ The
joke of that boss is that it will not smile. When you visit Hollywood you are shown the
marvelous installations and the results of research, and at the end you are always
invited to look at the pictures. The differences between the technical and artistic
accomplishments are tremendous. I don’t want to say that the pictures are not good,
but behind the screen production, from the artistic point of view you feel the lack of
research such as is behind every engineering achievement. When I arrived in
Hollywood I wanted to know: ‘Is there a university or high school of motion pictures?’
And I received the answer: ‘No, there is not; the business developed so quickly —but
we can have everybody outstanding on Broadway for our business; we can have the
best singers and artists so we don’t need a university.’ Now, I think that is not the way
to insure a really great development in art, and when we see such remarkable results on
the technical side, it is because there is a scientific basis for them. I will say that you
have some scientific organizations which work on this subject, such as Harvard and Yale.
I had the honor of speaking in both places and saw what use is made of research there,
but it is almost nothing. They are occupied with the theater drama, and I think that
these universities, isolated as they are from the real motion picture business, can never
provide the producers with the knowledge they must have. The only institution which
628 ENVOI
approaches what I have in mind is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I
want to say in leaving, that the greatest thing to be accomplished for the future of the
motion picture business is the foundation of a high school or university for research on
the artistic side.
MR HAYS: The next and last: A recent graduate of the University of Southern California, who has
come to New York on a visit, who is incidentally the star in a very great new picture
which I have thought enough of to see twice in the projection room, whose shooting is
as straight as his love is charming—Mr John Wayne.
MR WAYNE: I want you all to know that I consider it a very great honor to be presented here to
people who are creating and aiding in the adjustment of our industry. This occasion recalls
to mind the words of my partner in the picture, The Big Trail. One day we were
watching the movements of the wagons, horses, and cattle in the picture and he said, ‘We
actors are like that; we are driven and shoved, we don’t know where.’ It is you people
York, who are giving us something to work with, and I hope everything is going to be
‘ok’ with sound.
Reprinted from ‘Banquet Speeches,’ The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers, 16, no. 2 (February 1931), pp. 236–7. Copyright © 1931 by the Society of
Motion Picture Engineers, New York, New
Appendix A
The unbiased sample
To discover the norms of ordinary filmmaking in American studio features of the period 1915–60, we took
a sample. (See Chapter 1.) Our initial source was a list of 29,998 feature titles released in the United States
since 1915; this list is to be found in The 1961 Film Daily Yearbook of Motion Pictures, edited by Chester
B.Bahn (New York: Film Daily, 1961), pp. 281–395. After eliminating all films obviously not from an
American studio, we used a random-number table to select 841 titles. We located one hundred of these
films in the collections of 16mm distributors, of private collectors, and of four research archives: the Motion
Picture Division of the Library of Congress; the Museum of Modern Art Film Library; the Wisconsin
Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Film Archive of the
University of California at Los Angeles.
This was not, strictly speaking, a random sample. Every film made in American studios did not have an
equal chance to be viewed, since not every film has survived. None the less, our selection procedures
represent the closest a researcher can come to random sampling when dealing with historical artifacts. The
point remains that our choices were not biased by personal preferences or conceptions of influential or
masterful films.
The viewing procedures were uniform. Two collaborators viewed each film simultaneously on a
horizontal viewing table. One of us enumerated shots, scenes, and reframings, and tabulated reel lengths and
credits. The other viewer notated the film shot by shot, indicating shot scale and angle, figure movement
and expression, costume, camera movements, setting, lighting, optical devices, narrative motifs, music,
effects, and significant
Table: 1: The Unbiased Sample by periods and studios

1916 1917–28 1929–39 1940–49 1950–59 1960 Totals
Paramount 8 4 4 1 (17)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 5 4 4 1 (14)
Universal 4 1 1 (6)
Columbia 3 2 4 (9)
Warner Bros 13 4 (17)
RKO 1 1 2 (4)
Twentieth Century-Fox 1 4 2 1 (8)
Goldwyn 1 (1)
Monogram 1 (1)
United Artists 1 (1)
Edison 2 3 (5)
630 APPENDIX A
1916 1917–28 1929–39 1940–49 1950–59 1960 Totals

Triangle 1 (1)
Sennett 1 (1)
Other 8 3 3 1 (15)
2 30 30 25 12 1 (100)
dialogue. Notes on each film ran between twenty and sixty pages. In some cases, the films were reviewed
to check for errors.
Certain omissions in the sample were unavoidable. Because comparatively few silent films have survived,
those located were likely to be ‘quality’ products considered worth preserving. Similarly, the output of some
‘B’ studios was difficult to sample because most such films have not been preserved. The high
concentration of Warner Bros films during the period 1929–39 resulted from the fact that the studio’s
output for these years is completely preserved at three archives; no other studio’s output of these years is so
accessible to scholars. (It may also be relevant that between 1930 and 1937, Warner Bros typically released
more features than did any other studio.) Despite these qualifications, the resulting sample films break into a
broad representation of studios and periods, as Table 1 shows. On this table, silent cinema is represented by
the first two columns, sound by the next four, and totals by the last.
For reference purposes, a list of all Unbiased Sample films follows. Credits were taken from the films
themselves. Dates are those given in the Film Daily Yearbook. For 1920s releases, additional information on
some titles was supplied by The American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures Produced in the
United States: Feature Films, 1921–1930 (New York: Bowker, 1971).
Unbiased Sample Films

ADVENTURE ISLAND. 1947. Production: Pine-Thomas. Distributor: Paramount. Direction: Peter
Stewart. Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh. Script: Maxwell Shane. Source: story, R.L.Stevenson and
Lloyd Osborne. Art direction: F.Paul Sylos. Editing: Howard Smith. Music: Darrell Calker. Cast: Rory
Calhoun, Rhonda Fleming, Paul Kelly.
THE ADVENTUROUS BLONDE (Torchy Blane series). 1937. Production: First National. Distributor:
Warner Bros. Direction: Frank McDonald. Cinematography: Arthur Todd. Script: Robertson White and
David Diamond. Art direction: Max Parker. Editing: Frank Magee. Cast: Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane,
Anne Nagel.
AFFAIR IN HAVANA. Production: Dudley Pictures International Corporation of Cuba. Distributor:
Allied Artists. Direction: Laslo Benedek. Cinematography: Alan Stensvold. Script: Burton Lane and
Maurice Zimor. Source: original story, Janet Green. Art direction: Gabriel Scognamillo. Editing: Stefan
Arnsten. Music: Ernest Gold. Cast: John Cassavetes, Raymond Burr, Sara Shane.
AN AMERICAN ROMANCE. 1944. Production/ distribution: MGM. Direction: King Vidor.
Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Script: Herbert Dalmas and William Ludwig. Source: story by Vidor. Art
direction: Cedric Gibbons and Urie McCleary. Editing: Conrad A.Nervig. Music: Louis Gruenberg. Cast:
Brian Donlevy, Ann Richards, Walter Abel.
APPLAUSE. 1929. Production/distributor: Paramount. Direction: Rouben Mamoulian. Cinematography:
George Folsey. Script: Garrett Fort. Source: story, Beth Brown. Editing: John Bessler. Cast: Helen Morgan,
Joan Peers, Fuller Mellish Jr.
APPENDIX A 631
APPOINTMENT FOR LOVE. 1941. Production/ distributor: Universal. Direction: William A. Seiter.
Cinematography: Joseph Valentine. Script: Bruce Manning and Felix Jackson. Source: story, Ladislaus Bus-
Fekete. Art direction: Jack Otterson. Editing: Ted Kent. Music: Frank Skinner. Cast: Charles Boyer,
Margaret Sullavan, Rita Johnson.
THE ARKANSAS TRAVELER. 1938. Production/ distributor: Paramount. Direction: Alfred Santell.
Cinematography: Leo Tover. Script: Viola Brothers Shore, George Sessions Perry. Source: story, Jack
Cunningham. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick. Editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Boris Morris.
Cast: Bob Burns, Fay Bainter, John Beal.
AT SWORD’S POINT. 1952. Production/ distributor: RKO. Direction: Lewis Allen. Cinematography:
Ray Rennahan. Script: Walter Ferris, Joseph Hoffman. Source: story, Aubrey Wisberg, Jack Pollexfen. Art
direction: Albert S.D’Agostino, Jack Okey. Editing: Samuel E. Beetley, Robert Golden. Music: Roy Webb.
Cast: Maureen O’Hara, Cornel Wilde, Robert Douglas.
BALALAIKA. 1939. Production: MGM. Distributor: Loew’s. Direction: Reinhold Schunzel.
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg, Karl Freund. Script: Leon Gordon, Charles Bennett, Jacques Deval.
Source: play, Eric Maschwitz, George Posford, Bernard Grun. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Eddie Imazu.
Editing: George Boemler. Music: Herbert Stothart. Cast: Nelson Eddy, Ilona Massey, Charlie Ruggles.
BEGGARS OF LIFE. 1928. Production: Paramount Famous Lasky. Distributor: Paramount. Direction:
William A.Wellman. Cinematography: Henry Gerrard. Script: Benjamin Glazer. Source: story, Jim Tully.
Editing: Alyson Shaffer. Cast: Wallace Beery, Richard Arlen, Louise Brooks.
BLACK HAND. 1949. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: Richard Thorpe. Cinematography: Paul
C.Vogel. Script: Luther Davis. Source: story, Leo Townsend. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Gabriel
Scognamillo. Music: Alberto Columbo. Cast: Gene Kelly, J.Carrol Nalsh, Teresa Celli.
THE CADDY. 1953. Production: York Pictures. Distributor: Paramount. Direction: Norman Taurog.
Cinematography: Daniel L.Fapp. Script: Edmund Hartmann, Danny Arnold. Source: story, Arnold. Art
direction: Hal Pereira, Franz Bachelin. Editing: Warren Low. Music: Joseph J.Lilley. Cast: Dean Martin,
Jerry Lewis, Donna Reed.
THE CANTERVILLE GHOST. 1944. Production/ distributor: MGM. Direction: Jules Dassin.
Cinematography: Robert Planck. Script: Edith Harvey Blum. Source: story, Oscar Wilde. Art direction: Cedric
Gibbons, Edward Carfagno. Editing: Chester W.Schaeffer. Cast: Charles Laughton, Robert Young,
Margaret O’Brien.
CASBAH. 1948. Production: Marston. Distributor: Universal International. Direction: John Berry.
Cinematography: Irving Glassberg. Script: Ladislaus Bush-Fekete, Arnold Manoff. Source: novel, Detective
Ashelbe. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun. Editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: Harold Arlen. Cast: Yvonne
DeCarlo, Tony Martin, Peter Lorre.
THE CASE OF THE LUCKY LEGS (Perry Mason series). 1935. Production: First National. Distributor:
Warner Bros. Direction: Archie L. Mayo. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Script: Brown Holmes, Ben
Machson, Jerry Chodorov. Editing: James Gibbon. Cast: Warren William, Geneviève Tobin, Patricia Ellis.
CODE OF THE SEA. 1924. Production: Famous Players-Lasky. Distributor: Paramount. Direction:
Victor Fleming. Cinematography: Edgar Shoenbaum. Script: Bertram Millhauser. Source: story, Byron
Morgan. Cast: Rod La Rocque, Jacqueline Logan, George Fawcett.
CORPORAL KATE. 1926. Production: DeMille Pictures Corp. Distributor: Producers Distribution Corp.
Direction: Paul Sloane. Cinematography: Jacob Badaracco. Script: Albert Shelby LeVino. Source: story,
Zelda Sears, Marian Orth. Cast: Vera Renolds, Julia Faye, Kenneth Thomson.
THE COURAGE OF THE COMMONPLACE. 1917. Production: Edison. Direction: Ben Turbett.
Source: Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. Cast: Leslie Austin, Mildred Havens, Stanley Wheatcroft.
632 APPENDIX A
CRIME DOCTOR’S MAN HUNT (Crime Doctor series). 1946. Production/distributor: Columbia.
Direction: William Castle. Cinematography: Philip Tannura. Script: Leigh Brackett. Source: radio series,
Max Marcin; story, Eric Taylor. Art direction: George Montgomery. Editing: Dwight Caldwell. Music:
Mischa Bakaleinikoff. Cast: Warner Baxter, Ellen Drew, William Frawley.
DANCE CHARLIE DANCE. 1937. Production: First National. Distributor: Warner Bros. Direction:
Frank McDonald. Cinematography: Warren Lynch. Script: Crane Wilbur, William Jacobs. Source: play,
George S.Kaufman. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Editing: Frank Magee. Music: M.K.Jerome, Jack
Scholl. Cast: Stuart Erwin, Jean Muir, Allen Jenkins.
DEEP VALLEY. 1947. Production: Warner Bros-First National. Distributor: Warner Bros. Direction:
Jean Negulesco. Cinematography: Ted McCord. Script: Salka Viertel, Stephen Morehouse Avery. Source:
novel, Dan Totheroh. Art direction: Max Parker, Frank Durlauf. Editing: Owen Marks. Music: Max Steiner.
Cast: Ida Lupino, Dane Clark, Wayne Morris.
THE DEVIL BAT. 1940. Production: Jack Gallagher. Distributor: Producers Releasing Corp. Direction:
Jean Yarborough. Cinematography: Arthur Martinelli. Script: John Thomas Neville. Source: story, George
Bricker. Art direction: Paul Palmentola. Editing: Holbrook N.Todd. Music: David Chudnow. Cast: Bela
Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O’Brien.
DOWNSTAIRS. 1932. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: Monta Bell. Cinematography: Harold
Rosson. Script: Lenore Coffee, Melville Baker. Source: story, John Gilbert. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons.
Editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Cast: John Gilbert, Paul Lukas, Virginia Bruce.
EASY TO LOOK AT. 1945. Production/distributor: Universal. Direction: Ford Beebe. Cinematography:
Jerome Ash. Script: Henry Blankfort. Source: story, Blankfort. Art direction: John B.Goodman, Robert
Clatworthy. Editing: Saul A. Goodkind. Music: Charles Newman, Arthur Altman. Cast: Gloria Jean, Kirby
Grant, George Dolenz.
FIRE DOWN BELOW. 1957. Production: Warwick Films. Distributor: Columbia. Direction: Robert
Parrish. Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson. Script: Irwin Shaw. Source: novel, Max Catto. Art
direction: John Box. Editing: Jack Slade. Music: Arthur Benjamin, Kenneth V.Jones, Douglas Gamley.
Cast: Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon.
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. 1953. Production/ distributor: Columbia. Direction: Fred Zinneman.
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Script: Daniel Taradash. Source: novel, James Jones. Art direction: Cary
O’Dell. Editing: William Lyon. Music: Morris Stoloff. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah
Kerr.
GIDGET. 1959. Production/distributor: Columbia. Direction: Paul Wendkos. Cinematography: Burnett
Guffey. Script: Gabrielle Upton. Source: novel, Frederick Kohner. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Editing:
William Algon. Music: Morris Stoloff. Cast: Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson.
GOING HIGHBROW. 1935. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Robert Florey.
Cinematography: William Rees. Script: Edward Kaufman, Sy Bartlett. Source: story, Ralph Spence. Art
direction: Esdras Hartley. Editing: Harold McLernen. Music: Louis Alter, John Scholl. Cast: Guy Kibbee,
Zasu Pitts, Edward Everett Horton.
THE HASTY HEART. 1949. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Vincent Sherman.
Cinematography: Wilkie Cooper. Script: Ronald MacDougall. Source: play, John Patrick. Art direction:
Terence Verity. Editing: E.B.Jarvis. Music: Jack Beaver. Cast: Ronald Reagan, Patricia Neal, Richard
Todd.
HIGH TIME. 1960. Production: Bing Crosby Productions. Distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox.
Direction: Blake Edwards. Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks. Script: Tom Waldman, Frank Waldman.
APPENDIX A 633
Source: story, Garson Kanin. Editing: Robert Simpson. Music: Henry Mancini. Cast: Bing Crosby, Fabian,
Tuesday Weld.
HIS DOUBLE LIFE. 1933. Production: Eastern Service Studio. Distributor: Atlantic Pictures. Direction:
Arthur Hopkins. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Script: Arthur Hopkins, Clara Beranger. Source: novel
and play, Arnold Bennett. Art direction: Joe Schulze, Walter Keller. Editing: Arthur Ellis. Music: Karl
Stark, James Hanley. Cast: Roland Young, Lillian Gish, Montague Love.
HOUSEWIFE. 1934. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Alfred E.Green. Cinematography:
William Rees. Script: Manuel Seff, Lillie Hay ward. Source: story, Robert Lord, Hayward. Art direction:
Robert M.Haas. Editing: James Gibbon. Music: Mort Dixon, Allie Wrubel. Cast: George Brent, Bette Davis,
Ann Dvorak.
IMPACT. 1948. Production: Cardinal Pictures. Distributor: United Artists. Direction: Arthur Lubin.
Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Script: Dorothy Reid, Jay Dratler. Source: story, Dratler. Art direction:
Rudi Feld. Editing: Arthur H.Nadel. Music: Michel Michelet. Cast: Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Charles
Coburn.
INDIANAPOLIS SPEEDWAY. 1939. Production/ distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Lloyd Bacon.
Cinematography: Sid Hickox. Script: Sig Herzig, Wally Klein. Source: story, Howard Hawks. Art direction:
Esdras Hartley. Editing: William Holmes. Music: Adolph Deutsch. Cast: Ann Sheridan, Pat O’Brien, John
Payne.
THE INNOCENCE OF RUTH. 1916. Production: The Edison Studios. Distributor: Kleine-Edison.
Direction: John H.Collins. Cast: Edward Earle, T.Tamamoto, Viola Dana.
INTERLUDE. 1957. Production: Ross Hunter. Distributor: Universal. Direction: Douglas Sirk.
Cinematography: William Daniels. Script: Daniel Fuches, Franklin Coen, Inez Cook, Dwight Taylor.
Source: novel, James Cain. Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Robert E.Smith. Editing: Russell
E.Schoengarth. Music: Frank Skinner. Cast: June Allyson, Rossano Brazzi, Marianne Cook.
THE KING AND THE CHORUS GIRL. 1937. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Mervyn
LeRoy. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Script: Norman Krasna, Groucho Marx. Source: story. Art
direction: Robert M.Haas. Editing: Thomas Richards. Music: Werner R.Heymann. Cast: Fernand Gravet, Joan
Blondell, Edward Everett Horton.
KING OF THE RODEO. 1928. Production: Universal-Jewel. Distributor: Universal. Direction: Henry
MacRae. Cinematography: Harry Neumann. Script: George Morgan. Source: story, B.M.Bower. Art
direction: David Garber. Editing: Gilmore Walker. Cast: Hoot Gibson, Kathryn Crawford.
KING OF THE ZOMBIES. 1941. Production/ distributor: Monogram. Direction: Jean Yarbrough.
Cinematography: Mark Stengler. Script: Edmund Kelso. Art direction: Charles Clague. Editing: Richard
Currier. Music: Edward Kay. Cast: Dick Purcell, Joan Woodbury, Manton Moreland.
LADY AND GENT. 1932. Production/distributor: Paramount. Direction: Stephen Roberts.
Cinematography: Harry Fischbeck. Script: Grover Jones, William Slavens McNutt. Cast: George Bancroft,
Wynne Gibson, Charles Starrett.
THE LATE GEORGE APLEY. 1947. Production/ distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox. Direction: Joseph
L. Mankiewicz. Cinematography: Joseph La Shelle. Script: Philip Dunne. Source: play, John P.Marquand,
George S. Kaufman; novel, Marquand. Art direction: James Basevi, J. Russell Spencer. Music: Alfred
Newman. Cast: Ronald Colman, Vanessa Brown, Richard Hayden.
LORNA DOONE. 1921. Production: Thomas H. Ince Corp. Distributor: Associated First National
Pictures. Direction: Maurice Tourneur. Cinematography: Henry Sharp. Script: Katherine Speer Reed, Cecil
G. Mumford, Wyndham Gittens. Source: novel, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Art direction: Milton
Menasco. Cast: Madge Bellamy, May Giracci, John Bowers.
634 APPENDIX A
THE LOST EXPRESS. 1926. Production: Anchor Film Distributors. Distributor: Rayart Pictures Corp.
Direction: J.P.McGowan. Cast: Helen Holmes, Henry Barrows, Eddie Barry.
A LOST LADY. 1933. Production/distributor: First National. Direction: Alfred E.Green.
Cinematography: Sid Hickox. Script: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola. Source: story, Willa Gather. Art
direction: Jack Okey. Editing: Owen Marks. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Morgan, Ricardo Cortez.
LOVE AND THE LAW. 1919. Production: Edgar Lewis. Direction: Lewis [?]. Source: story, William
Hamilton Osborne. Cast: Glen White, Tom Williams, Arthur Bauer.
THE MAD MARTINDALES. 1942. Production/ distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox. Direction: Alfred
Werker. Cinematography: Lucien Andriot. Script: Francis Edwards Faragoh. Source: play, Wesley Tower.
Art direction: Richard Day, Lewis Creber. Editing: Nick De Maggio. Music: Emil Newman. Cast: Jane
Withers, Marjorie Weaver, Alan Mowbray, Jimmy Lydon.
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. 1928. Production/ distributor: Universal. Direction: Paul Leni.
Cinematography: Gilbert Warrenton. Script: J. Grubb Alexander. Source: novel, Victor Hugo. Art direction:
Charles D.Hall, Joseph Wright, Thomas O’Neil. Editing: Maurice Pivar, Edward Cahn. Cast: Conrad Veidt,
Mary Philbin, Olga Baclanova.
MANHANDLED. 1949. Production/distributor: Paramount. Direction: Lewis R.Foster. Cinematography:
Ernest Laszlo. Script: Foster, Whitman Chambers. Source: story, L.S. Goldsmith. Art direction: Lewis
H.Creber. Editing: Howard Smith. Music: Darrell Calker. Cast: Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden, Dan
Duryea.
MERRY-GO-ROUND. 1923. Production/distributor: Universal. Direction: Rupert Julian, Erich von
Stroheim. Cinematography: Charles Kaufman, William Daniels. Art direction: E.E. Sheeley. Editing: James
McKay. Cast: Norman Kerry, Dorothy Wallace, Anton Vaverka.
MERRY WIVES OF RENO. 1934. Production/ distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: H.Bruce
Humberstone. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Script: Robert Lord. Source: story, Lord, Joe Traub. Art
direction: Jack Okey. Editing: Thomas Pratt. Music: Leo Forbstein. Cast: Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell,
Donald Woods.
THE MICHIGAN KID. 1928. Production: Universal-Jewel. Distributor: Universal. Direction: Irvin
Willatt. Cinematography: Charles Stumar. Script: Peter Milne. Source: story, Rex Beach. Editing: Harry
Marker. Cast: Conrad Nagel, Renée Adorée, Lloyd Whitlock.
MICKEY. 1918. Production: Mack Sennett. Distributor: Film Booking Office. Direction: Richard Jones.
Cast: Mabel Normand, George Nichols, Wheeler Oakman.
THE MIRACLE WOMAN. 1931. Production/ distributor: Columbia. Direction: Frank R. Capra.
Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Script: Jo Swerling. Source: play, John Meehen, Robert Riskin. Editing:
Maurice Wright. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, David Manners, Sam Hardy.
MISS LULU BETT. 1921. Production: Famous Players-Lasky. Distributor: Paramount. Direction:
William C. deMille. Cinematography: L.Guy Wilky. Script: Clara Beranger. Source: novel and play, Zona
Gale. Cast: Theodore Roberts, Lois Wilson, Milton Sills.
MR. SKEFFINGTON. 1944. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Vincent Sherman.
Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Script: Julius J. and Philip G.Epstein. Source: story, ‘Elizabeth.’ Art
direction: Robert Haas. Editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Franz Waxman. Cast: Bette Davis, Claude Rains,
Walter Abel.
MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE. 1948. Production/ distributor: Paramount. Direction: George Marshall.
Cinematography: Lionel Linden. Script: Melvin Frank, Norman Panama. Source: novel, Booth Tarkington.
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick. Editing: Arthur Schmidt. Cast: Bob Hope, Joan Caulfield, Patrie
Knowles.
APPENDIX A 635
MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE. 1947. Production/ distributor: Paramount. Direction: Elliott Nugent.

Cinematography: Lionel Linden. Script: Edmund Belion, Jack Rose. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Earl
Hedrick. Music: Robert Emmett Dolan. Cast: Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre.
THE NARROW TRAIL. 1917. Production: Thomas H.Ince. Direction: William S.Hart. Cinematography:
Joe August. Script: Harvey S. Thew. Source: story, Hart. Cast: William S. Hart, Sylvia Bremer, Milton
Ross.
THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR. 1955. Production/ distributor: Columbia. Direction: Andrew Stone.
Cinematography: Fred Jackman, Jr. Script: Stone. Editing: Virginia Stone. Cast: Jack Kelly, Hildy Parks,
John Cassavetes.
NO LEAVE, NO LOVE. 1946. Production: MGM. Distributor: Loew’s. Direction: Charles Martin.
Cinematography: Harold Rosson, Robert Surtees. Script: Martin, Leslie Kardos. Source: original. Art
direction: Cedric Gibbons, Preston Ames. Editing: Conrad A.Nervig. Music: Georgie Stoll. Cast: Van
Johnson, Keenan Wynn, Pat Kirkwood.
ON DANGEROUS GROUND. 1917. Production: William A.Brady. Distributor: World. Direction:
Robert Thornby. Cinematography: Lucien Andriot. Source: novel, Burton E.Stevenson. Cast: Gail Kane,
Carlyle Blackwell, William Baily.
ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT. 1935. Production: Nat Levine. Distributor: Mascot. Direction: Christy
Cabanne. Cinematography: Ernest Miller, William Nobles. Script: Wellyn Totman. Source: story, Stuart
Palmer. Editing: Joseph H.Lewis, Ray Curtiss. Cast: Charley Grapewin, Mary Carlisle, Arthur Hohl.
ONE TOUCH OF NATURE. 1917. Production: Edison. Direction: Edward H.Griffith. Source: story,
Peter B.Kyne. Cast: John Drew Bennett, Viola Cain, George Henry.
PARACHUTE JUMPER. 1933. Production: Warner Bros-Vitaphone. Distributor: Warner Bros.
Direction: Alfred E.Green. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Script: John Francis Larkin. Source: story,
Rian James. Art direction: Jack Okey. Editing: Ray Curtiss. Cast: Doug Fairbanks, Jr., Bette Davis, Frank
McHugh.
PAROLE FIXER. 1939. Production/distributor: Paramount. Direction: Robert Florey. Cinematography:
George Barnes. Script: William R. Lipman, Horace McCoy. Source: book, J.Edgar Hoover. Art direction:
Hans Dreier, John Goodman. Editing: Harvey Johnston. Cast: William Henry, Virginia Dale, Robert Paige.
PARTNERS IN CRIME. 1928. Production: Paramount Famous Lasky. Distributor: Paramount. Direction:
Frank Strayer. Cinematography: William Marshall. Script: Grover Jones, Gilbert Pratt. Source: story, Jones,
Pratt. Editing: B.F.Zeidman. Cast: Wallace Beery, Raymond Hatton, Mary Brian.
PENTHOUSE. 1933. Production: Cosmopolitan. Distributor: MGM. Direction: W.S.Van Dyke.
Cinematography: Lucien Andriot, Harold Rosson. Script: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hacker. Source: story,
Arthur Somers Roche. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Editing: Robert J.Kern. Music: Dr. William Axt.
Cast: Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth.
PLAY GIRL. 1941. Production/distributor: RKO. Direction: Frank Woodruff. Cinematography: Nick
Musuraca. Script: Jerry Cady. Source: story, Cady. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Albert D’Agostino.
Editing: Harry Marker. Music: Paul Sawtell. Cast: Kay Francis, James Ellison, Mildred Coles.
PRINCE OF PLAYERS. 1954. Production: Philip Dunne. Distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox.
Direction: Philip Dunne. Cinematography: Charles G.Clarke. Script: Moss Hart. Source: book, Eleanor
Ruggles. Art direction: Lyle Wheeler, Mark Lee Kirk. Editing: Dorothy Spencer. Music: Bernard Herrmann.
Cast: Richard Burton, Maggie McNamara, John Derek.
RIVER OF NO RETURN. 1954. Production: Stanley Rubin. Distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox.
Direction: Otto Preminger. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Script: Frank Fenton. Source: story, Louis
636 APPENDIX A
Lantz. Art direction: Lyle Wheeler, Addison Hehr. Editing: Louis Loeffler. Music: Cyril J.Mockridge. Cast:
Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Rory Calhoun.
ROARING TIMBER. 1937. Production/distributor: Columbia. Direction: Phil Rosen. Cinematography:
James S.Brown, Jr. Script: Paul Franklin, Robert James Cosgriff. Source: story, Cosgriff. Art direction:
Dwight Caldwell. Cast: Jack Holt, Grace Bradley, Ruth Donnelly.
THE ROYAL PAUPER. 1917. Production: Edison. Distributor: K.E.S.E. Direction: Ben Turbett. Script:
Henry Albert Phillips. Cast: Francine Larrimore, Helen Strickland, William Wadsworth.
SARATOGA. 1937. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: Jack Conway. Cinematography: Roy June.
Script: Anita Loos, Robert Hopkins. Source: story, Loos. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Editing: Elmo
Veron. Music: Edward Ward. Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore.
THE SCARLET ROAD. 1916. Production: George Kleine Photodrama. Distributor: Kleine-Edison
Feature. Cast: Malcolm Duncan, Della Connor, Ira Shepard.
SH! THE OCTOPUS. 1937. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: William McGann.
Cinematography: Arthur Todd. Script: George Bricker. Source: two plays, Ralph Spence; Ralph Murphy,
Donald Gallagher. Art direction: Max Parker. Editing: Clarence Kolster. Cast: Hugh Herbert, Allen Jenkins,
Marcia Ralston.
SHALL WE DANCE. 1937. Production/distributor: RKO. Direction: Mark Sandrich. Cinematography:
David Abel. Script: Allan Scott, Ernest Pagano. Source: story, Lee Loeb, Harold Buchman. Art direction:
Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Editing: William Hamilton. Music: George Gershwin. Cast: Fred Astaire,
Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton.
THE SHOCK PUNCH. 1925. Production: Famous Players-Lasky. Distributor: Paramount. Direction:
Paul Sloane. Cinematography: William Miller. Script: Luther Reed. Source: story, John Monk Saunders.
Art direction: Ernest Fegte. Editing: William Le Baron. Cast: Richard Dix, Frances Howard, Theodore
Babcock.
THE SHOW. 1927. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: Tod Browning. Cinematography: John
Arnold. Script: Waldemar Young. Source: novel, Charles Tenny Jackson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons,
Richard Day. Editing: Errol Taggart. Cast: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Lionel Barrymore.
SHOW PEOPLE. 1928. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: King Vidor. Cinematography: John
Arnold. Script: Agnes Christine Johnston, Laurence Stallings. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Editing: Hugh
Wynn. Cast: Marion Davies, William Haines, Dell Henderson.
THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK. 1946. Production: California Pictures Corp. Direction: Preston
Sturges. Cinematography: Robert Pittack. Script: Sturges. Source: story, Sturges. Art direction: Robert
Usher. Editing: Thomas Neff. Music: Werner R.Heyman. Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jimmy Conlin, Raymond
Walburn.
THE SPEED SPOOK. 1924. Production: East Coast Films. Distributor: C.C.Burr. Direction: Charles
Hines. Cinematography: Charles E. Gilson, Johnny Geisel. Script: Raymond S. Harris. Source: story,
William Wallace Cook. Cast: Johnny Hines, Edmund Breese, Faire Binney.
SPEEDY. 1928. Production: Harold Lloyd Corp. Distributor: Paramount. Direction: Ted
Wilde. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Script: John Grey, Lex Neal, Howard Rogers, Jay Howe. Cast:
Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff.
STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. 1928. Production: Buster Keaton Productions. Distributor: United Artists.
Direction: Charles F.Reisner. Cinematography: Dev Jennings, Bert Haines. Script: Carl Harbaugh.
Technical direction: Fred Gabourie. Editing: Sherman Kell. Cast: Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion
Bryon.
APPENDIX A 637
SUNDAY DINNER FOR A SOLDIER. 1944. Production/distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox. Direction:

Lloyd Bacon. Cinematography: Joe MacDonald. Script: Wanda Tuchock, Melvin Levy. Source: story,
Martha Cheavens. Art direction: Lyle Wheeler, Russell Spencer. Editing: J.Watson Webb. Music: Alfred
Newman. Cast: Anne Baxter, John Hodiak, Charles Winninger.
SWEEPSTAKES WINNER. 1939. Production: First National. Distributor: Warner Bros. Direction:
William McGann. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Script: John Krafft, Albert DeMond. Art direction:
Stanley Fleischer. Editing: Frank Magee. Cast: Marie Wilson, Johnnie Davis, Allen Jenkins.
THE THREE MUST-GET-THERES. 1922. Production: Max Linder Productions. Distributor: Allied
Producers and Distributors. Direction: Max Linder. Cinematography: Harry Vallejo, Max Dupont. Script:
Linder. Source: novel, Alexandre Dumas. Cast: Linder, Frank Cooke, Caroline Rankin.
THE TIGER’S COAT. 1920. Production: The Dial Film Company. Distributor: W.W.Hodkinson Corp.
through Pathé Exchange, Inc. Direction: Roy Clements. Cinematography: R.E.Irish. Script: Jack
Cunningham. Source: book, Elizabeth De Jeans. Art direction: E.P. Hunziker. Cast: W. Butts, Myles
McCarthy, F. Weed.
UNCERTAIN GLORY. 1944. Production/distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Raoul Walsh.
Cinematography: Sid Hickox. Script: Laszlo Vadney, Max Brand. Source: story, Joe May, Vadney. Art
direction: Robert Haas. Editing: George Amy. Music: Adolph Deutsch. Cast: Erroll Flynn, Paul Lukas,
Lucille Watson.
VICTORY. 1919. Production: Maurice Tourneur. Distributor: Paramount/Artcraft. Direction: Maurice
Tourneur. Cinematography: René Guissart. Script: Stephen Fox. Source: novel, Joseph Conrad. Art
direction: Floyd Mueller. Cast: Jack Holt, Seena Owen, Wallace Beery.
WE GO FAST. 1941. Production/distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox. Direction: William McGann.
Cinematography: Harry Jackson. Script: Thomas Lennon, Adrian Scott. Source: story, Doug Welch. Art
direction: Richard Day, Lewis Creber. Editing: Fred Allen. Music: Emil Newman. Cast: Lyn Bari, Alan
Curtis, Sheila Ryan.
THE WHIP HAND. 1951. Production/distributor: RKO. Direction: William Cameron Menzies.
Cinematography: Nicolas Musuraca. Script: George Bricker, Frank L.Moss. Source: story, Roy Hamilton. Art
direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Carroll Clark. Editing: Robert Golden. Music: Paul Sawtell. Cast: Carla
Ralenda, Elliott Reid, Edgar Barrier.
WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS. 1928. Production: Cosmopolitan. Distributor: MGM.
Direction: W.S.Van Dyke. Cinematography: Clyde de Vinna, George Nogle, Bob Roberts. Script: Jack
Cunningham. Source: book, Frederick O’Brien. Editing: Ben Lewis. Cast: Monte Blue, Raquel Torres,
Robert Anderson.
WHITE ZOMBIE. 1932. Production: Victor Halperin. Distributor: United Artists. Direction: Victor
Halperin. Cinematography: Arthur Martinelli. Script: Garnett Weston. Source: story, Weston. Editing:
Howard McLernon. Cast: Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, Joseph Cawthorn.
THE WHOLE TOWN IS TALKING. 1935. Production/distributor: Columbia. Direction: John Ford.
Cinematography: Joseph August. Script: Jo Swerling, Robert Riskin. Source: story, W.R. Burnett. Editing:
Viola Laurence. Cast: Edward G.Robinson, Jean Arthur, Arthur Hohl.
WINE OF YOUTH. 1924. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: King Vidor. Cinematography: John
J.Mescall. Script: Carey Wilson. Source: play, Rachel Crothers. Art direction: Charles Cadwallader. Editing:
Hugh Wynn. Cast: Eleanor Boardman, William Haines, Ben Lyon.
WINGS OF THE NAVY. 1939. Production: Cosmopolitan. Distributor: Warner Bros. Direction: Lloyd
Bacon. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Script: Michael Fessier. Source: original. Art direction: Esdras
Hartley. Editing: George Amy. Cast: George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, John Payne.
638 APPENDIX A
A WOMAN OF THE WORLD. 1925. Production: Famous Players-Lasky. Distributor: Paramount.

Direction: Malcolm St Clair. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Script: Pierre Collings. Source: novel, Carl
Van Vechten. Cast: Pola Negri, Charles Emmett Mack, Holmes Herbert.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. 1939. Production: Goldwyn. Distributor: United Artists. Direction: William
Wyler. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Script: Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht. Source: novel, Emily
Brontë. Art direction: James Basevi. Music: Alfred Newman. Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, David
Niven.
YOU FOR ME. 1952. Production/distributor: MGM. Direction: Don Weis. Cinematography: Paul
C.Vogel. Script: William Roberts. Source: story, Roberts. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Eddie Imazu.
Editing: Newell P.Kimlin. Cast: Peter Lawford, Jane Greer, Gig Young.
YOUNG SINNERS. 1931. Production/distributor: Twentieth Century-Fox. Direction: John Blystone.
Cinematography: John Seitz. Script: William Conselman. Source: play, Elmer Harris. Art direction: Gordon
Wiles. Music: James F.Hanley. Cast: Hardie Albright, Thomas Meighan, Dorothy Jordon.
Appendix B
A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film
industry, 1896–1960
1896–1909
Between 1896 and 1909, the industry moved from a structure of pure competition in production,
distribution, and exhibition to a structure of an apparent monopoly in production with efforts to monopolize
distribution and exhibition. Thomas Edison filed a patent application on a moving picture camera and film
in 1891. That patent application was granted in 1897. Wasting no time, Edison filed patent infringement
suits against other manufacturers of moving picture cameras and projectors. At that point, Vitagraph, Selig
Polyscope, Lubin, American Mutoscope and Biograph, and others were already engaged in activities of
manufacturing and distributing film equipment and short film subjects. Between 1897 and 1907, Edison and
other patent holders sued one another, seeking to establish and enforce their patent privileges. In 1907, the
highest courts finally validated one of Edison’s camera patents. As a result, almost every camera generally
used was in the position of infringing that patent, and competitors recognized Edison’s legal strength. In
early 1908, Edison licensed the use of his patented inventions to Lubin, Selig Polyscope, Vitagraph, two
new manufacturers of films (Kalem and Essanay), and two film importers (Georges Méliès and Pathé
Frères). This group was the Film Service Association. The major remaining film manufacturer, Biograph,
purchased the Latham loop patent in February 1908. The Latham loop was necessary in projectors and
useful in cameras. With that patent and several others, Biograph licensed several importers, including
Kleine Optical Company, and filed suits against infringers of its patents.
By mid-1908, the situation boiled down to two equipment and film manufacturing combinations and
three major sets of patent—Edison’s which were important for the camera and film; Biograph’s, essential for
projection and useful in the camera; and Armat’s (a small firm), useful for projection. With the patent
situation essentially a stalemate, the companies not merely crosslicensed one another (a feasible and legal
solution), but they formed a patent pool which had the effect of a virtual monopoly in the production of
equipment and films. The Motion Picture Patents Company was incorporated in fall 1908 and began formal
operation in January 1909. Licensees of the Patents Company had the right to manufacture film commodities
providing they paid a fee. Selected distributors of films were also offered licenses to deal in these products
as were selected exhibitors.
1909–1912
Difficulties arose immediately, however. Many distributors and exhibitors resented having to pay fees. By
January 1909, a trade organization formed to fight the Patents Company. Members of the association
collectively sought supplies of films from European importers (who had been largely cut out of the US
640 APPENDIX B
market as a result of Patent Company’s policies). Members also formed new domestic film production
companies including the New York Motion Picture Company, the Independent Motion Picture Company
(Imp), Rex, Thanhouser, Powers, Nestor, American Flying A, and so on. These unlicensed manufacturers
became known as the independents.
Another difficulty for the Patents Company in its attempt to monopolize the industry was that the licensed
distributors were not always as diligent in securing license fees from exhibitors nor as efficiently organized
as they could be: profits were not all that the Patents Company believed they might be. Between early 1909
and spring 1910, the number of licensed exchanges dwindled from over one hundred to sixty-nine. In April
1910, the various licensed manufacturers formed the General Film Company. General Film was to engage
in the efficient distribution of licensed films and equipment and to collect fees and rentals from the
exhibitors. General Film proceeded to purchase the formerly licensed distribution exchanges. By fall 1911,
it had acquired fifty-eight exchanges and had cancelled the licenses of ten others, with one distributor left:
the Greater New York Film Rental Company owned by William Fox. Fox refused to sell his exchange or to
accept the cancellation of his license, and he filed suit against General Film.
Although Fox eventually lost the case, the situation of the obvious monopolistic activities of the Patents
Company members interested the federal government. The government filed charges in 1912 against
General Film and the Patents Company members under antitrust legislation. Although the independent film
manufacturers initially relied on their trade association, once the Patents members formed General Film, the
independents also organized a distribution alliance. In May 1910, the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales
Co. was organized to distribute product for the independents, but it did not attempt to purchase exchanges.
Thus, by mid-1910, the industry was characterized by an oligopoly at the distribution level: two alliances of
manufacturers effectively split the film business in the United States. Both alliances moved into
multinational distribution at this time as well.
This state of affairs was short-lived. Despite the strength of the distribution alliances, barriers to entry
were low enough to attract new firms. In addition, the independents realigned several times as members
sought a greater share of the market. In spring 1912, Majestic Film Company left the Sales Company. Its
owner and others set up Mutual Film to purchase exchanges and the Film Supply Company of America to
distribute the product of many of the independents. The remaining firms announced the formation of
Universal Film Manufacturing Company. During that year, alliances shifted several times; by the end of
1912, Mutual, Film Supply, and Universal were all separate independent distribution alliances competing
against General Film, which controlled about 60 per cent of the business.
1912–18
Between 1911 and 1916, the multiple-reel film was diffused and became the dominant product in the
exhibition market. Generally, outside the mainstream exhibition system at first, such films were often
distributed for roadshows (first-class theaters were hired for limited runs) or sold to states’-rights exchanges
(these exchanges bought the rights to exhibit the film in a specified geographical area). Multiple-reel films
released within the regular distribution system were problems. Since all the companies’ films were usually
sold at a uniform price per foot— regardless of negative cost—the more pretentious multiple-reelers, often
with expensive stars, were at a distinct disadvantage in recouping costs. Time for return on costs was thus
longer, too. Finally, longer runs for the feature films disrupted the distributors’ systems since the normal
format was a daily exchange of product.
Although both licensed and independent manufacturers went into multiple-reel production, many new
firms formed for that sole purpose. These firms needed a national system to facilitate their distribution.
APPENDIX B 641
Although attempted earlier, one of the first contenders to provide a regularized, national release of feature
films was Warners’ Features Company in late 1913. In spring 1914, several other multiple-reel manufacturers,
Famous Players, Jesse L.Lasky Feature Film Company, and Bosworth (producing Pallas and Morasco
films) allied with a new distribution firm, Paramount. The firm’s purpose was to release multiple-reelers on
a regular basis. World Film reorganized, offering another featurefilm supply source. By July 1914, three
major onereel distribution alliances—General Film, Universal, and Mutual—and four major feature
distribution alliances—Warners’, Paramount, World, and Film Box Office (Fox’s feature film company)
dominated the industry.
While new distribution alliances formed, those of the Patents Company reorganized. Although fighting
the charges of antitrust violations and filing new patent suits against competitors, General Film companies also
constructed new distribution alliances to release their feature product. In April 1915, Vitagraph, Lubin,
Selig, and Essanay incorporated V-L-S-E to distribute feature product made by those firms; Kleine and
Edison formed Kleine-Edison Feature Film Service later that year. In fall 1915, the US district court decided
against the Patents Company in regard to the antitrust suit. An appeal was denied, and in 1918 a decree
forbidding a patent pool went into effect. A major patent suit also was decided against the Patents Company
in January 1916, with the decision affirmed on appeal. Vitagraph purchased the interests of the other V-L-S-
E members, and in May 1916 formed Greater Vitagraph, a feature film producer and distributor. Selig and
Essanay signed with Kleine-Edison, forming KESE to distribute feature product while General Film
continued to release their one-reelers.
The independent alliance also reorganized once again. Mutual changed when part of its manufacturers
left to form Triangle in summer 1915. Although Triangle eventually failed, it was an initial attempt at
vertical integration: production and distribution was combined in one firm, and the company leased
showcase theaters which provided an entry into the exhibition sector of the film industry.
Famous Players combined with the Lasky Corporation and organized Famous Players-Lasky as a holding
company in summer 1916. In the fall, Morosco and Pallas merged into it, and Artcraft was formed to
distribute special feature product. In December, Famous Players-Lasky acquired the assets of Paramount.
This firm reorganized a year later (December 1917), merging in many of its subsidiaries. Thus, by 1917,
feature film companies were merging and vertically integrating their production and distribution sectors.
One-reel distribution alliances declined in market power as the industry shifted to the multiple-reel film.
1918–48
The period of 1918–48 witnessed full integration and many mergers of film companies. In addition,
ownership shifted from private hands to public stock ownership. From a multitude of production firms and
exhibitors and a set of distribution alliances developed five fully integrated, powerful film companies. Three
other firms were large enough to merit inclusion in the industrial oligopoly.
In fall 1916, Vitagraph, Famous Players-Lasky, and Triangle, among others, were integrated into at least
two levels of the industry and provided national distribution of the most important feature films. Exhibitors,
contesting prices asked by the distributors for the product, formed First National Exhibitors’ Circuit in
spring 1917. As a franchise and buying agent for twenty-four of the largest exhibitors with major first-run
theaters, First National offered to purchase independently-produced films. In fact, it threatened Paramount’s
(and the others’) access to some of the better first-run theaters. Although considering other options, in 1919,
Famous Players-Lasky financed a stock issue of ten million dollars, using the proceeds to purchase a string
of theaters. As such, it became a fully integrated firm with producing, distributing, and exhibiting
642 APPENDIX B
operations within the same company. In the next several years, First National and Paramount vied for
control of theaters.
In the early 1920s, theater acquisition slowed down, but company purchases and mergers of firms picked
up in the second half of the decade. Warners Bros purchased control of Vitagraph (1925), Stanley Theater
chain (1928), and First National (1928). Paramount bought controlling interest in the Publix Theater chain
(1926). Loew’s, a New York City theater chain, acquired Metro Pictures Corporation (1920) and merged
with Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B.Mayer Pictures (1924). Fox Film Corporation and a subsidiary
purchased West Coast Theaters (1925) and the Roxy Circuit and Poli chain (1927–8). Fox even worked in
1929 toward acquisition of controlling interest in Loew’s, only to have the US government and events of the
depression halt that. RKO formed in 1928 out of Film Booking Company (a distributor and then producer)
and the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Theater circuits. In 1931, RKO purchased the studio and exchanges of
Pathé. Universal purchased some second-run houses in 1929, and Columbia organized a national
distribution system. By 1930, six fully integrated firms, one producer-distributor, and United Artists (a
distributor for independent product, formed in 1919) lead the industry, with an oligopolistic control of the
major product and of first- and many second-run theaters. Unaffiliated exhibitors might be organized into
circuits and into a vocal trade association, but the major companies controlled the structure and conduct of
the industry. Small independent producing companies supplied films, but their market strength was minor
compared to the leading firms.
When the depression hit the industry, the film companies found themselves in a precarious situation.
Attendance (and box office receipts) declined. Film producers cut costs, and exhibitors tried double-features
and give-aways to lure the consumer back into the theaters. Companies with short-term notes from recent
acquisitions and from the costs of the conversion to sound equipment could not meet their scheduled
payments. Fox was in trouble by the end of 1929, and the firm had to reorganize (which it did by 1933). In
1935, Fox merged with a small independent, forming Twentieth Century-Fox. Paramount went into
receivership in 1933, then bankruptcy. Under a protective committee, it had reorganized by 1936. Loew’s was
controlled by Fox when Fox went into receivership; under court action, Loew’s stock was put into a trust,
and eventually the stock was sold to the public. RKO went into bankruptcy in 1934. After a reorganization,
the courts approved the new company format in 1939. Warners, Columbia, and United Artists managed to
avoid bankruptcy despite serious problems. When the depression affected it, Universal sold most of its
theaters. In 1933 it went into receivership until new owners reorganized the firm in 1936. In 1946,
Universal participated in the firm’s first merger since the company’s formation in 1912: it acquired the
independent production company International Pictures.
1948–60
Subject to federal investigation of its structure and conduct since 1912, the film industry was eventually
required to divorce its production-distribution sectors from its exhibition holdings (for more details, see
Chapter 26). Although some firms were slow to capitulate, eventually they did. Paramount divorced its
theater sector in 1949; RKO, 1950; MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox, 1952; and Warners, 1953. Although
there were still oligopolies in each sector (production-distribution and exhibition), the major firms were no
longer fully integrated. Independent production companies became more dominant, for a number of
reasons, and most turned to the major firms’ release networks as the means to achieve national and
international distribution. Although independent production characterized the production sector, financing
came primarily from the major producer-distributors which still controlled the industry.
Appendix C
Principal structures of the US film industry, 1894–1930
644 APPENDIX C
Chart 1 The members of the Motion Picture Patents Company, 1894–1917

APPENDIX C 645
Chart 2 The independents, 1909–16

646 APPENDIX C
Chart 3 The formation of the major studios, 1912–30

Appendix D
Lighting plots and descriptions
Note: These plots have been redrawn following the originals. In each case the camera’s field is represented
by dotted lines.
Diagram 1 This plot, published in 1914, was done by H.M.Lomas, a British lighting expert who
nevertheless used many examples from American films in his discussion. In diagram la, the entire set is lit
by floodlights—overhead arcs and ‘guillotine’ floorstand units at the sides. Each guillotine unit would have
either four diffused arcs or a row of twenty-four mercury-vapor tubes. Lomas assumes here that the light is
motivated as coming from a window offscreen left, so there are more floor units on that side than on the
right. As the side view (diagram 1b) shows, the overhead arcs are hung lower toward the front of the set,
and they are closer together (as shown in the overhead view); this makes the light on the foreground figures
more intense than that on background figures and objects,
Diagram 2 Also done in 1914 by Lomas, this plot shows how to achieve a strong side light on a moving
figure. The actor moves from position 1, 10 feet away from the light source, and stops at 2, 20 feet away. With
a strong enough light, the side light on the figure will not diminish appreciably, (Note the early use of an ‘L-
shaped’ set. There would usually be other lights in use in addition to the two pairs of arcs.)1
Diagrams Diagrams 3 through 7 are from L.G. Harkness Smith’s 1915 survey of different types of
lighting possibilities, mostly for box sets. Smith’s plots provide a large amount of overall diffused fill light
and include a key light for accentuation, placed in each case offscreen right. Diagram 3 represents a small,
10ř x 12ř set, with sixteen arc floods (represented by dots) hanging in rows 12 feet above the set (A through
D) and a twin-arc broadside 5 feet in front of the set, angled toward the foreground figures to provide
highlights (E). The overhead lights are placed ‘sufficiently far forward to project the light backward and
downward at an angle of 45 deg. upon the scene.’2
Diagram 4 A larger box set, 20ř x 20ř, with three rows of overhead arcs (A through C), again 12 feet
above the floor. A larger key light is provided by two diffused quadruple-arc floor-stands (D and E) at the
side.
Diagram 5 A still larger set, 25’x 25', with seven rows of overhead arcs (A through G). Two diffused
twin-arc stands (H and K) provide highlights from the sides. (Compare diagrams 3 through 5 with
figure 20.15.)
Diagram 6 Smith considers the combination of mercury-vapors and arcs more satisfactory than either
type used alone, and this plot shows such a combination. Here one bank of ten mercury-vapor tubes (A)
hangs at a 45° angle to the set, 10 feet above the floor. Three floor units (B through E) contain eight tubes
each. Floor units of quadruple diffused arcs (F and G) again provide highlights.
Diagram 7 Here the set is L-shaped and smaller, 10ř x 15ř, to demonstrate a standard way of doing
fireplace scenes, the most common light effect of the pre-1915 period. For this set-up, the lighting consists
entirely of twin-arc portable floods. One lamp unit (A) is situated behind the fireplace (E), shining an
648 APPENDIX D
Diagram 1a
undiffused light onto the actor (D). One bank of four diffused twin-arc lamps hangs above the set (C), and a
diffused twin-arc floor unit is angled in from offscreen right (B). The relatively small amount of fill light
will allow the harsh, undiffused arc to cast a distinct glow to simulate firelight.3
Diagrams 8a and 8b These diagrams were published in 1915 in The Illuminating Engineer, they show the
typical scheme for lighting a large stage in an American glass studio using CooperHewitt lamps. The
purpose here is to supplement daylight with artificial diffused light in order to prolong the hours during
which it was possible to do filming. The keystone-shaped area represents the playing space. Rectangular
shapes show the racks of tubular lamps hung at a 30° angle, directly over the stage; parallelograms
represent additional units placed high and at a 45° angle to the side of the stage; the long narrow rectangles
signify floor units; and the small circles show the position of smaller quartz mercury lamps (an improved unit
introduced in 1913 and designed especially for film work). The total number of tubes in such an
arrangement might typically be 208, with 136 overhead (about 8 per unit), 32 in the units at a 45° angle (5–6
tubes each), and 48 in the floor stands (with 12 tubes each). Note that the angled and floor units are all
placed to one side to provide a sort of crude key light, giving some modelling to the figures.
APPENDIX D 649
Diagram 1b
Diagram 8b is a side view of the set. As with the overhead arcs in Diagram 1b, these lamps are placed
higher toward the back of the stage: the overhead units closest to the camera are about 8 feet above the front
line, while the rear units are 18 feet off the floor.4
Diagram 9 In a major 1919 address to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, William Roy Mott
discussed the use of white flame arcs for lighting an L-shaped set. By now, the conception of lighting had
changed drastically: in this case many of the light rays are sent into the set from the side, and even from
slightly behind the figures. The plot does not show the overhead lights which would be used in such a scene
(arc floods or mercury-vapors, as in earlier diagrams), but does indicate optional lamps placed outside the
doors, to be directed onto the set as from a motivated source. According to Mott, there should be 50 per
cent more light coming from the sides than from the top, and the L-shaped arrangement is better for
achieving this than the box set. The large white-flame arc floor units at the sides direct light into the set
slightly away from the camera, but the reflectors placed beside them direct a portion of the light toward the
front of the set:5
This gives a good reflection on surfaces sidewise to the light because the light is reflected so obliquely
that a large amount is carried to the camera from side surfaces, and this arrangement gives the much
desired line and Rembrandt effects, or as better known to the motion picture artist as molding and
modelling effects.
Mott is describing rim light here. With such floods of oblique light, the figures could move about the set
without ever losing their bright outlines.6
Diagram 10 Diagrams 10 through 12 are from a 1925 lecture before the SMPE, in which Wiard B. Ihnen
and D.W. Atwater gave suggestions for avoiding flat, frontal lighting in a simple box set 12 feet wide. Light
such a set with broadside arcs from the front and sides, they said, and ‘the result is a flat picture with no
detail, distance, or separation between actors and background. Each arc would cast a separate shadow on the
650 APPENDIX D
Diagram 2
opposite wall.’7 Their first alternative, Diagram 10, simply adds a couple of overhead spotlights on the top
of the set walls; these help eliminate the shadows and add a bit of modelling on the figures.
Diagram 11 Another simple solution involves moving the actors from the corner out into the middle of
the set and moving the camera closer in. This leaves room for a pair of spotlights to be placed on either side
of the actors; sidelight will also help model the figures,
Diagram 12 This plot illustrates a more complex, but more common solution to the problem. By adding
openings in the set walls (doors, windows), the filmmakers could motivate the placement of spotlights
outside the set, aiming in at the actors in the corner. This last approach involves considerable planning in
the design of the set to accommodate the lighting instruments. By having specialized knowledge of both
APPENDIX D 651
Diagram 3
Diagram 4
lighting and set design, the art director could provide a practical arrangement combining the two
effectively.8
652 APPENDIX D
Diagram 5
Diagram 6
APPENDIX D 653
Diagram 7
654 APPENDIX D
Diagram 8a
APPENDIX D 655
Diagram 8b
656 APPENDIX D
Diagram 9
APPENDIX D 657
Diagram 10
658 APPENDIX D
Diagram 11
APPENDIX D 659
Diagram 12
Notes
In notes and bibliographic entries, frequently cited items are abbreviated as follows:
AC American Cinematographer
AMPAS Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences
EK Edison Kinetogram
IP International Photographer
IPro International Projectionist
JSMPE Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
JSMPTE Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers
MPH Motion Picture Herald
MPN Moving Picture News/Motion Picture News
MPW Moving Picture World/Motion Picture World
NKL The Nickelodeon
NYDM New York Dramatic Mirror
PTD The Photodramatist
TSMPE Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
Asterisked note numbers indicate substantive notes containing additional discussion.
Preface
1 Quoted in Anthony Slide, ‘Film Fan Monthly Interviews Ruth Waterbury,’ in Leonard Maltin (ed.), Hollywood:
The Movie Factory (New York: Popular Library, 1976), p. 239; T.W.Adorno, Minima Moralia, tr. E.F.N.
Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 201; Will H.Hays, ‘Introduction,’ Cora W.Taylor, Masters and
Masterpieces of the Screen (New York: Collier, 1927), p. 6; quoted in Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie
Colony, The Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), p. 368; John Ford in a 1964 BBC television
interview.
2 George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 1962), p. 6.
3 See David Bordwell, ‘Textual analysis, etc.,’ Enclitic, nos 10–11 (1982): 125–36.
4 Among the most important of the revisionist film historians are J.Douglas Gomery, Robert C.Allen, Vincent
Porter, and Tom Gunning.
5 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory,’ in his Problems in Materialism and
Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980), pp. 47–8.
NOTES TO PAGES 18–30 661
6 On this point, see Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 45–8.
Part One
1 E.H.Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1971), p. 98.
Chapter 1
An excessively obvious cinema
1 Leading accounts of group style in art history are James S.Ackerman and Rhys Carpenter, Art and Archaeology
(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 164–86; E.H.Gombrich, ‘Style,’ in International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 352–61; Meyer
Schapiro, ‘Style,’ in A Modern Book of Aesthetics, ed. Melvin Rader, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, &
Winston, 1973), pp. 270–80. See also Berel Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1979).
2 A. Haut-Pré, ‘Les moving pictures américaines,’ Ciné-Revue, no. 32 (11 September 1925): 10; Marcel Zahar and
Daniel Burret, ‘Une visite à Jean Renoir,’ Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, no. 59 (15 April 1926): 15.
3 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 29.
4 André Bazin, ‘La Politique des auteurs,’ in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp.
143, 154.
5 ‘Sept hommes à débattre,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 150–51 (December 1963-January 1964): 20.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 16.
8 See Jan Mukařovský, ‘The aesthetic norm,’ in Structure, Sign, and Function, ed. and tr. John Burbank and Peter
Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp.49–54.
9 Ibid., p. 54.
10 See Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 67–77; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film
Art: An Introduction (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979); David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor
Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 1–8.
11 See, for example, Martin Walsh, ‘Brecht and Straub-Huillet: The frontiers of language,’ Afterimage, no. 7
(Summer 1978): 13–19.
12 Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer (Berkeley University of California Press, 1979), p. 19.
13 R.L.Gregory, The Intelligent Eye (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) and R.L.Gregory and E.H. Gombrich, (eds.),
Illusion in Nature and Art (London: Duckworth, 1973), pp. 54–95, 193–243.
14 Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), pp. 50–3.
15 E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 93–178.
16 Ibid., p. 60.
17 Beth Day, This Was Hollywood (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1960), pp. 13–18. See also Richard Griffith,
Anatomy of a Motion Picture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1959), pp. 5–14, 91–111.
18 Roman Jakobson, ‘Entretien sur le cinéma,’ in Cinéma: Théorie, Lectures, ed. Dominique Noguez (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1973), p. 65.
19 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The purloined letter,’ The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern
Library, 1938), p. 222.
Chapter 2
Story causality and motivation
662 NOTES TO PAGES 4–18
1 Roman Jakobson, ‘The dominant,’ in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971), p. 82.
2 See Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics,’ in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism:
Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 66–8; Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Some approaches to
Russian Formalism,’ 20th Century Studies, 7/8 (December 1972): 6–19.
3 Francis Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), p. 5.
5 Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 93–4.
6 David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 183–95.
7 lan Watt, The R ise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 13–32.
8 Quoted in Peter Milne, Motion Picture Directing (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922), p. 116.
9 Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: Van Nostrand, 1933), pp. 7–10.
10 Max Ophuls, ‘Hollywood, petite îl…,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 54 (Noël 1955), pp. 5–7.
11 Quoted in Eric Sherman, Directing the Film: Film Directors on their Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 50.
12 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), pp. 110–50.
13 On this point, see ‘Morocco de Joseph von Sternberg,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 225 (November-December 1979):
9–13. For an excellent analysis of a star’s persona, see Wade Jennings, ‘Nova: Garland in A Star is Born,’
Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 321–37.
14 Frederick Palmer, Technique of the Photoplay (Hollywood: Palmer Institute of Authorship, 1924), pp. 67–8.
15 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, p. 62.
16 Ferdinand Brunetière, ‘The law of the drama,’ in European Theories of the Drama, ed. Barrett H. Clark (New York:
Crown, 1961), p. 407.
17 Walter S.Bloem, The Soul of the Moving Picture (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924), p. 132.
18 Quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.
26.
19 Patterson, Craftsmanship, p. 117.
20* These prescriptions have hardly changed. A 1980 essay on screenwriting tells us that the story must center upon
consistent changes in a relationship from start to finish (‘Change. Obstacles surmounted or not surmounted.’) and
that each event must grow out of the preceding one (‘Event A generates Event B. A and B combine to make C.
Get it?’). See David Freeman, ‘The great American screenplay competition,’ Esquire, 93, no. 6 (June 1980): 28.
21 Tom Terris, Writing the Sound and Dialogue Photoplay (Hollywood: Palmer Institute of Authorship, 1930), p.
11.
22 John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays, (Philadelphia: George W.Jacobs & Co., 1920), p. 11.
23 Barrett C.Kiesling, Talking Pictures (Richmond, Virginia, Johnson Publishing Co., 1937), p. 2.
24 Lewis Herman, A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and Television Films (New York: New
American Library, 1974), p. 88.
25 Bertolt Brecht, Ecrits sur le theatre I (Paris: L’Arche, 1972), p. 275.
26 See Stephen Heath, ‘Lessons from Brecht,’ Screen, 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 122.
27 Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics,’ pp. 77–87.
28 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 140–60.
29 Gérard Genette, Figure II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 72–6.
30 Howard T.Dimick, Modern Photoplay Writing (Franklin, Ohio: James Knapp Reeve, 1922), pp. 233–4.
31 Frances Marion, ‘Scenario writing,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York:
Dodge, 1938), p. 33.
32 Quoted in Sherman, Directing the Film, p. 28.
33 Alvin Wyckoff, ‘Motion picture lighting,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 128,
no. 217 (November 1926): 64; John Arnold, ‘Shooting the movies,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy
Naumburg (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 160.
34 Frederick Foster, ‘High key vs. low key,’ AC, 38, no. 8 (August 1957): 506.
35 Marc Vernet, ‘Freud: effets spéciaux; mise en scène: USA,’ Communications, 23 (1975): 223–34.
36 Ibid., p. 229.
37 See Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics,’ pp. 84–7.
38 Kiesling, Talking Pictures, p. 115.
39 Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 12.
40 See, for example, Ezra Goodman, ‘A director who realizes the importance of cinematographers,’ AC, 26, no. 7
(July 1945): 243; Herb A. Lightman,‘“The Killers”: teamwork on film production,’ AC, 27, no. 12 (December
1946): 458; Lightman, ‘Exponent of the moving camera,’ AC, 29, no. 11 (November 1948): 376.
41* The Russian Formalist concept of baring the device is a marked improvement upon the currently fashionable idea
of ‘reflexivity’; according to the Formalists, even the most ‘realistic’ art works find ways to point to their own
artificiality, since all art works aim (in different ways) to heighten the viewer’s perception of art’s specific
materials and methods. On ‘laying bare the device,’ see Victor Shklovsky, ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic
Commentary,’ in Lemon and Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism, pp. 25–57. Kristin Thompson has shown that
Hollywood films may make baring of the device central to their structure; see ‘The duplicitous text: an analysis
of Stage Fright,’ Film Reader, 2 (January 1977): 52–64; ‘Closure within a dream: point-of-view in Laura,’ Film
Reader, 3 (February 1978): 90–105.
Chapter 3
Classical narration
1 John Cromwell, ‘The voice behind the megaphone,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumburg (New York:
Norton, 1937), p. 60.
3 Arthur Edwin Krows, The Talkies, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1930), pp. 168–9.
4 Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, tr. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 110–13. See also Burch,
‘De “Mabuse” à “M”,’ in Cinéma: Théorie, Lectures, ed. Noguez, pp. 228–9.
5 Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), pp. 56–7.
6 The term ‘narrator’ has uncomfortably human overtones and is easily confused with the author of the narrative
text. These problems have been cogently examined in Edward Branigan’s Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory
of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (New York: Mouton, 1984).
7 Sternberg, Expositional Modes, pp. 236–305.
8 Ronald Levaco and Fred Glass, ‘Quia ego nominor Leo,’ in Le cinéma américain, ed. Raymond Bellour (Paris:
Flammarion, 1980), pp. 21–2.
9 Thierry Kuntzel, ‘Le travail du film 2,’ Communications, no. 23 (1975): 142, 188.
10 John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (Philadelphia: George W.Jacobs & Co., 1920), p. 29.
11 Ibid., pp. 36, 66. See also Frederick Palmer, Photoplay Writing (Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay Corporation,
1921), p. 29.
12 Francis Patterson, Scenario and Screen (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), p. 69.
13 Krows, The Talkies, p. 109.
14 A. Haut-Pré, ‘Les moving pictures américaines,’ Ciné-Revue, no. 32 (11 September 1925), pp. 8–9.
15 Sternberg, Expositional Modes, pp. 39–58.
16 Emerson and Loos, Photoplays, p. 94.
17 Ibid., p. 95.
18 See Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 53–64.
19 See Herb Lightman, ‘The magic of montage,’ AC, 30, no. 10 (October 1949): 361; Don Livingston, Film and the
Director (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 56–7.
20 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Quand Hollywood veut faire penser,’ L’écran français, no. 5 (3 August 1945): 3.
21 A. Lindsley Lane, ‘The camera’s omniscient eye,’ AC, 16, no. 3 (March 1935): 95.
22 Quoted in Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Why Hollywood,’ Monogram, no. 1 (April 1971): 8.

23 Lane, ‘The camera’s omniscient eye,’ p. 95. See also Frederick Y.Smith, ‘The cutting and editing of motion
pictures,’ in The Technique of Motion Picture Production, ed. Society of Motion Picture Engineers (New York:
Interscience, 1944), pp. 130–9.
24 On ‘impossible’ camera angles, see Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative space,’ Screen, 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 95–7.
25 See Editors of Cahiers du cinéma, ‘John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,’ Screen, 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1972): 34
26 On repetition in the classical film, see Ben Brewster, ‘Notes on the text, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln”’ by the
editors of Cahiers du cinéma,’ Screen, 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1973): 29–43; Raymond Bellour, ‘Le blocage
symbolique,’ Communications, no. 23 (1975): 347; Bellour, ‘Ciné-repetitions,’ Screen, 20, no. 2 (Summer 1979):
65–72.
27 Eugene Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972), p. 37; Frances
Marion, How to Write and Sell Film Stories (New York: Covici, Friede, 1937), p. 144.
29 ‘Casey Robinson on “Dark Victory,”’ Australian Journal of Screen Theory, no. 4 (1978): 6.
30 ‘Igor Stravinsky on film music as told to Ingolf Dahl,’ Cinema [Hollywood], 1, no. 1 (June 1947): 7.
31 Clarence E.Sinn, ‘Music for the picture,’ MPW, 8, no. 1 (7 January 1911): 27.
32 Leonid Sabaneev, Music for the Films, tr. S.W. Pring (London: Pitman, 1935), pp. 20–1,29.
33 Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Dobson, 1947), pp. 10, 61; Bertolt Brecht, Ecrits sur le théâtre
I (Paris: L’Arche, 1972), pp. 468–9.
34 James L.Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 1–5, 31; Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), pp. 81, 118, 159.
35 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, tr. Rodney Livingstone (London: New Left Books, 1981), pp. 43–6.
36 Sinn, ‘Music for the picture,’ p. 76. See also Sinn’s columns in MPW, 8, no. 3 (21 January 1911): 135, and
MPW, 8, no. 8 (25 February 1911): 409; and W. Stephen Bush, ‘Giving musical expression to the drama,’ MPW,
9, no. 5 (12 August 1911): 354–5.
37 G.P.Von Harleman and Clarke Irvine, ‘News of Los Angeles and vicinity,’ MPW 29, no. 4 (22 July 1916): 620.
38 Roy Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 10, 39; Mark Evans, Soundtrack:
The Music of the Movies (New York: Da Capo, 1979), p. 22. See also Claudia Gorbman, ‘The Drama’s Melos,’
Velvet Light Trap, no. 19 (1982): 35–9.
39 Evans, Soundtrack, p. 27.
40 Hugo Riesenfeld, ‘Music and motion pictures,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
128, no. 217 (November 1926): 60.
41 Brecht, Ecrits I, p. 468.
42 Quoted in Roy Pickard, The Hollywood Studios (London: Muller, 1978), p. 140.
43 See Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 76; Bertolt Brecht, Journal de travail (Paris: L’Arche, 1976), p. 270.
44 Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 155.
45 Quoted in Lawrence Morton, ‘An interview with George Antheil,’ Film Music Notes, 10, no. 1 (September-
October 1950): 5.
46 ‘Constantin Bakaleinikoff,’ Film Music Notes, 2, no. 2 (November 1942): n.p.
47 Robert Nelson, ‘Film music: color or line?,’ Hollywood Quarterly, 2, no. 1 (October 1946): 59–62. See also
Leonard Rosenmann, ‘Notes on the score to East of Eden,’ Film Music, 14, no. 5 (May-June 1955): 3–12.
48 Miklós Rózsa, ‘Lust for Life,’ Film and TV Music, 16, no. 1 (Fall 1956): 3–6.
49 Nelson, ‘Film music: Color or line?’ p. 59.
50 Aaron Copland, ‘Second thoughts on Hollywood,’ Modern Music, 16, no. 3 (March-April 1940): 141–7.
51 Thierry Kuntzel pointed this out in a colloquium on film analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Fall 1975.
52 Marion, Film Stories, pp. 85–6.
53 Emerson and Loos, Photoplays, pp. 104–5.
54 Raymond Bellour, ‘To analyze, to segment,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1, no. 3 (August 1976): 331.
55 Mortimer J.Adler, Art and Prudence (New York: Longmans Green, 1937), p. 533; Cedric Gibbons, ‘The set as an
actor,’ AC, 12, no. 10 (February 1932): 30; see also Charles G.Clarke, Professional Cinematography
(Hollywood: American Society of Cinematographers, 1964), p. 84.
56 See, for example, Christian Metz, Film Language tr. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford, 1974), p. 195; Stephen
Heath, ‘Film performance,’ Ciné-Tracts, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 8–9, 16; Stephen Heath, ‘On screen in frame,’
Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1, no. 3 (August 1976): 261.
57 See Sternberg,. Expositional Modes, p. 71.
58 Ibid., pp. 93–6.
59 Howard T.Dimick, Modern Photoplay Writing (Franklin, Ohio: James Knapp Reeve, 1922), pp. 155–60.
60 Richard Mealand, ‘Hollywoodunit,’ in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1947), p. 300.
61 Sternberg, Expositional Modes, p. 94.
62 Ibid., pp. 243–6.
63 Ibid.
64 Roland Barthes, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), pp. 75–7, 84–8.
65 Sternberg, Expositional Modes, pp. 51, 240–1.
66 Henry Albert Phillips, The Photodrama (Larchmont, New York: Stanhope-Dodge, 1914), p. 64.
67 Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972), p. 81.
Chapter 4
Time in the classical film
1 Jean Epstein, ‘Art d’événement,’ Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Lherminier, 1974), pp. 181–2.
2 Eugene Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972), p. 64.
3 Ibid.
4 E.H.Gombrich, ‘Moment and movement in art,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964): 299.
5 Kuntzel, ‘Le travail du film, 2,’ Communications, no. 23 (1975): 152.
6 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays (Philadelphia: George W.Jacobs & Co., 1920), p. 48.
7 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Narrative cinema and audience-oriented aesthetics,’ unpublished seminar paper (London:
British Film Institute/SEFT seminar, n.d.).
8 See ‘Exit dissolves?,’ Cinemeditor, 6, no. 3 (September 1956): 2.
9 Ed Gibbons, ‘Montage marches in,’ IP, 9, no. 9 (October 1937): 28.
10 See Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, p. 82; I.J.Wilkinson and W.H.Hamilton, ‘Motion picture
editing,’ JSMPE, 36, no. 1 (January 1941): 103–4. For a discussion of issues around the match-on-action, see
Jean-François Tarnowski, ‘De quelques problèmes de mise-en-scène,’ Positif, no. 158 (April 1974): 46–60;
‘Courriers des lecteurs,’ Positif, no. 173 (September 1975): 77–8; Jean-François Tarnowski, ‘De quelques points
de théorie du cinéma,’ Positif, no. 188 (December 1976): 47–55.
11 Sidney Cole, ‘The film editor,’ in Working for the Films, ed. Oswald Blakeston (London: Focal Press, 1947), pp.
156–7.
12 See Barry Salt, ‘Film style and technology in the Thirties,’ Film Quarterly, 30, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 20.
13 Maury Hughes, ‘Laps’n Wipes,’ IP, 12, no. 5 (June 1940): 9.
14 Tamar Lane, The New Technique of Screenwriting (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936), pp. 72–3.
15 Arthur Erwin Krows, The Talkies (New York: Holt, 1930), p. 130.
16 Gombrich, ‘Moment and Movement,’ p. 302.
17 For example, in Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (New York: Hastings House,
1968), pp. 323–36; Lewis Herman, A. Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and Television Films
(New York: New American Library, 1974), pp. 107–8.
18 On the use of silence for rhythm, see David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1981), pp. 148–53; on the Navajo films, see Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 142–207.
19 Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing, p. 53.
20 See, for example, ‘The language of music,’ What’s Happening in Hollywood, no. 17 (13 January 1945): 2–3;
Herb A. Lightman, ‘Staging musical routines for the camera,’ AC 28, no. 1 (January 1947): 9.
21 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, p. 81.
22 Julian C.Hochberg, Perception, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 209.
23 Robert Parrish, Growing Up in Hollywood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 183.
24 Christian Metz, Film Language tr. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 128–9.
25 A.Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Gawick to Griffith (Cambridge, Mass.: Haward
University Press, 1949), pp. 27, 47, 65.
26 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, tr. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1957), pp. 195–255.
27 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, pp. 32–3.
28 See, for example, Krows, The Talkies, pp. 130–1.
Chapter 5
Space in the classical film
1 Ranald MacDougall, ‘Sound—and fury,’ The Screen Writer, 1 (September 1945): 1.

2 Don Livingston, Film and the Director (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 30. On ‘bad’ cuts, see Julian Hochberg
and Virginia Brooks, ‘The perception of motion pictures,’ in Handbook of Perception, vol. 10: ‘Perceptual
ecology,’ ed. Edward C.Carterette and Martin P.Friedman (New York: Academic Press, 1978), p. 283.
3 Arthur Hardy and R.W.Conant, ‘Perspective considerations in taking and projecting motion pictures,’ TSMPE,
12, no. 33 (1928): 117. See also Alfred Guzzetti, ‘Narrative and the film image,’ New Literary History, 6, no. 2
(Winter 1975): 384.
4 Cecil B.DeMille, ‘The public is always right,’ in Hollywood Directors 1914–1940, ed. Richard Koszarski (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 168.
5 Robert Surtees, ‘Color is different,’ AC, 29, no. 1 (January 1948): 11; Jean Douchet, ‘Rencontre avec Leon
Shamroy,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 147 (September 1963): 34; Cecil B.DeMille, ‘Motion picture directing,’
TSMPE, 12, no. 34 (1928): 295– 309; Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen (London: Thames & Hudson,
1970), pp. 35–6, 38.
7 See, for example, Lewis W.Physioc, ‘Pictorial composition,’ AC, 9, no. 2 (May 1928): 20–1.
8 See Samuel Y.Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Harper & Row,
1976), p. 26.
9 In conversation with the author.
10 See ‘Unique photographic assignment,’ IP, 22, no. 7 (July 1950): 5–6.
11 Welford Beaton, ‘Grouping characters to make them face camera,’ The Film Spectator, 5, no. 7 (26 May 1928): 6.
12 Quoted in Andrew Sarris (ed.), Interviews With Film Directors (New York: Avon, 1967), pp. 106–7.
13 James Mitchell Leisen, ‘Some problems of the art director,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 76.
14 Victor Milner, ‘Painting with light,’ Cinematographic Annual, vol. 1, ed. Hal Hall (Hollywood: American
Society of Cinematographers, 1930; rep. New York: Arno Press, 1972), p. 93.
15 Don Livingston, Film and the Director (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 70.
16 See Bazin, What Is Cinema?, p. 33, and Claude Bailblé, ‘Programming the look,’ Screen Education, nos 32/33
(Autumn/Winter 1979/80): 127–8.
17 For a discussion of Ozu’s use of shallow focus, see Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, ‘Space and Narrative
in the Films of Ozu,’ Screen, 17, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 46–7.
18 Milner, ‘Painting with light,’ p. 94; Max Factor, ‘Standardization of motion picture make-up,’ JSMPE, 28, no. 1
(January 1937): 61.
19 Carlyle Ellis, ‘Art and the motion picture,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 128,
no. 217 (November 1926): 55.
20 Morton Eustis, ‘Designing for the movies,’ Theatre Arts, 21 (October 1937): 786–92; Barrett C.Kiesling, Talking
Pictures: How They Are made, How to Appreciate Them (Richmond, Virginia: Johnson, 1937), pp. 96–7; A.B.
Laing, ‘Designing motion picture sets,’ Architectural Record, 74 (July 1933): 63; Hal Herman, ‘Motion picture
art direction,’ AC, 28, no. 11 (November 1947): 397; Herman Blumenthal, ‘Cardboard counterpart of the motion
picture setting,’ Production Design, 2, no. 1 (January 1952): 2–21; Hans Dreier, ‘Designing the sets,’ in We
Make the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumburg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937), p. 86.
21 Quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Dwan (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 86.
22 See Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective.
23 Hans Dreier, ‘Motion picture sets,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 5 (November 1931): 789–91; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, p.
97; Ray Hoadley, How to Make a Motion Picture (New York: Crowell, 1939), p. 25. Sometimes miniatures and
forced perspectives were used to make sets appear larger than they were. See Dreier, ‘Designing the sets,’ in We
Make the Movies, ed. Naumburg, p. 84, and, as a case study, Herb Lightman, ‘Shooting “Oklahoma!” in Todd-
A0,’ AC, 36, no. 4 (April 1955): 244.
24 Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 59–65.
25 Leon S.Becker, ‘Technology in the art of producing motion pictures,’ in The Technique of Motion Picture
Production, ed. SMPE (New York: Interscience, 1944), pp. 5–6.
26 On sound perspective, see Hardy and Conant, ‘Perspective,’ pp. 117–18; E.A. Wolcott, ‘Recent improvements in
equipment and technic in the production of motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 23, no. 3 (October 1934): 211–12; Carl
Dreher, ‘Recording, re-recording and editing of sound,’ JSMPE, 16, no. 6 (June 1931): 757; J.P. Maxfield,
‘Acoustic control of recording for talking motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 1 (January 1930): 85–7; Ralph
H.Townsend and A.P.Hill, ‘Sound stages,’ in Recording Sound for Motion Pictures, ed. Lester Cowan (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), pp. 242–3; H.B.Santee, ‘Western Electric sound projection systems for use in motion
picture theatres, Part II,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 35 (1928): 683; Earl I. Sponable, ‘Some technical aspects of the
Movietone,’ TSMPE, 11, no. 31 (1927): 473. On stereophonic sound, see J.E.Ney, ‘Stereophonic,’ IP, 9, no. 7
(August 1937): 5; Lorin D.Grignon, ‘Experiment in stereophonic sound,’ JSMPTE, 61, no. 3 (September 1953):
366–8; Loren Ryder, ‘Expanded sound and picture at Paramount,’ International Sound Technician, 1 (August
1953): 41.
27 Alan Williams, ‘Is sound recording like a language?’ Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 58. See also Colin
MacCabe et al., Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 112.
28 Herman, Practical Manual of Screen Play writing, p. 101.
29 Fred Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 193;
John Arnold, ‘Shooting the movie,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, p. 166; John Arnold,
‘Cinematography—professional,’ in The Complete Photographer, vol. 2, ed. W.D.Morgan (New York: National
Education Alliance, 1943), p. 764; John Boyle, ‘Black and white cinematography,’ in Technique of Motion
Picture Production, ed. SMPE, pp. 14–15.
30 For examples of this position see Heath, ‘Narrative space,’ pp. 73–90, and Guy Fihman, ‘D’où viennent les
images claires?’ in Cinéma: Théorie, lectures, ed. Noguez, pp. 200–2.
31 See Julian Hochberg, ‘The psychophysics of pictorial perception,’ Audio-Visual Communications Review, 10
(1962): 39–40.
32 B.Schlanger, ‘A method of enlarging the visual field of the motion picture,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 5 (May 1938): 504.
33 E.H.Gombrich, ‘The “What” and the “How”: perspective representation and the phenomenal world,’ in Logic
and Art, ed. Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler (Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 143.
34 On Hollywood’s eye-level camera, see Krows, The Talkies, pp. 158–9, and Herman, Practical Manual of Screen
Play writing, p. 119.
35 E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 179.
36 See Pascal Bonitzer, ‘“Réalité” de la dénotation,’ Cahiers du cinéma no. 229 (May 1971): 39–41.
37 Jan and Cora Gordon, Star-Dust in Hollywood (London: Harrap, 1930), pp. 105–6.
38 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, pp. 31–2.
39 Quoted in Sherman, Directing the Film, p. 105. For the most scholastic spelling out of the continuity rules, see
Daniel Arijohn, Grammar of the Film Language (New York: Hastings House, 1976).
40 MacCabe et al., Godard, p. 68.
41 See Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1967), pp. 72–7.
42 Edward Branigan, ‘Formal permutations of the point-of-view shot,’ Screen, 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 57–8.
43 King Vidor, On Film Making (New York: McKay, 1972), p. 137.
44 On Dreyer, see Bordwell, Films of Dreyer, pp. 120– 4; on Bresson, see Jean-Pierre Oudart, ‘Cinema and suture,’
Screen, 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–8): 35–47.
45 Martha Robinson, Continuity Girl (London: Hale, 1937), p. 47.
46 See Hochberg and Brooks, ‘Perception of motion pictures,’ pp. 282–6.
47 Julian C.Hochberg, Perception, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978) p. 208.
48* Readers familiar with contemporary film theory will have noticed that my account of the shot/ reverse-shot
pattern both overlaps with and diverges from Jean-Pierre Oudart’s analysis of the ‘suture.’ Like Oudart, I have
emphasized that an implicit, offscreen space opens and closes a gap and thus implies a process of narration; like
Oudart (and unlike most commentators upon Oudart), I have treated the ‘Absent One’ entailed by the image as
the narration, not another character in the fiction. The most significant difference is this: Oudart implies that the
‘suturing’ effect of editing is best explained as an activity of the viewer’s unconscious. The process I have
described works in the preconscious, as Noël Carroll has pointed out, and we can bring its operations to light in a
straightforward fashion. See Oudart, ‘Cinema and suture,’ pp. 35–47; Stephen Heath, ‘Notes on suture,’ Screen,
18, no. 4 (Winter 1977/78): 66–76; Jean-Pierre Oudart, ‘L’effet de réel,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 228 (March-
April 1971): 19–26; Noël Carroll, ‘Toward a theory of film editing,’ Millennium Film Journal, no. 3 (1978): 93–
5.
49 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 222.
50 E.H.Gombrich, ‘Standards of truth: the arrested image and the moving eye,’ Critical Inquiry, 7, no. 2 (Winter
1980): 248–9.
Chapter 6
Shot and scene
1 André Bazin, ‘La technique de Citizen Kane,’ Temps modernes, 2, no. 17 (1947): 945.
2 Theodor W.Adorno, ‘Scientific experiences of a European scholar in America,’ in The Intellectual Migration:
Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1969), p. 366.
3 Vladimir Nilsen, The Cinema as a Graphic Art, tr. Stephen Carry (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959), p. 185.
4 Barry Salt, ‘Statistical style analysis of motion pictures,’ Film Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–5): 13–22. Note
(p. 14) that Salt’s figures are not derived from an unbiased sample and were not obtained by watching each film
in its entirety.
5 See L.E.Clark, ‘Sound stage equipment and practice,’ AC, 11, no. 6 (October 1930): 23; James R. Cameron,
Sound Motion Pictures: Recording and Reproducing (Woodmont, Conn.: Cameron Publishing Co., 1934), p. 93;
‘Questions and answers,’ IP, 9, no. 1 (February 1937): 23; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 180, 231;
‘Cinematographers show how to achieve production economies,’ AC, 21, no. 8 (August 1941): 360–2.
6 See Raymond Bellour, ‘To analyze, to segment,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1, no. 3 (August 1976): 336–
45.
7 ‘Sept hommes à débattre,’ Cahiers du cinéma, nos 150–1 (December 1963-January 1964): 16.
8 Metz, Film Language, pp. 131–3.
9 Walter B.Pitkin and William M.Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures (New York: Appleton, 1930), p. 98.
10 Kuntzel, ‘Le travail du film, 2,’ p. 153.

11 Raymond Williams, ‘A lecture on realism,’ Screen, 18, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 66.
12 Cited in O. Eyquem, ‘Otto Ludwig Preminger,’ in Dictionnaire du cinéma, ed. Raymond Bellour and Jean-
Jacques Brochier (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1966), p. 568.
13 See Cromwell, ‘The voice behind the megaphone,’ in We Make the Movies, ed., Naumburg, p. 60.
14 A good discussion is in Livingston, Film and the Director, pp. 41–4.
15 I.James Wilkinson and W.H.Hamilton, ‘Motion picture editing,’ JSMPE, 36, no. 1 (January 1941): 102.
16 Quoted in Sherman, Directing the Film, p. 99.
17 Barthes, S/Z, p. 160.
Chapter 7
The bounds of difference
1 Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative space,’ Screen, 17, no. 3 (Autumn, 1976): 71.
2 Diane Waldman, ‘Horror and domesticity: the modern Gothic romance film of the 1940s’ (Madison, Wisconsin:
unpublished PhD dissertation, 1981), pp. 164–93.
3 Tyler, Hallucination, pp. 15–19; Parker Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970), p. 248; Richard Dyer, Stars (London, British Film Institute, 1979), pp. 146–9.
4 Tyler, Hallucination, p. 161.
5 David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 234–40.
6 Alan Williams, ‘The musical film and recorded popular music’ (unpublished essay), p. 11.
7 Frank Krutnik, ‘The Shanghai Gesture: the exotic and the melodrama,’ Wide Angle, 4, no. 2 (1980): 36– 42;
Griselda Pollock, ‘Report on the Weekend School,’ Screen, 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 105–13; Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith, ‘Minnelli and melodrama,’ Screen, 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 113–18. The source of most contemporary
analyses of melodrama is Thomas Elsaesser’s essay, ‘Tales of sound and fury,’ Monogram, no. 4 (1972): 2–15.
8 Elsaesser, ‘Tales of sound and fury,’ p. 12.
9 Daniel Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist theories of melodrama,’ Journal of American Culture, no. 1 (1978): 158.
10 Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and melodrama,’ Movie, no. 25 (Winter 1977/78): 53–7.
11 S.J.Perelman, The Best of S.J. Perelman, with a critical introduction by Sidney Namlerep (New York: Modern
Library, 1947), pp. 51–2.
12 Quoted in Roy Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 45–6.
13 Ibid., pp. 80–4, 119–20.
14 Leonard Rosenmann, ‘Notes on the score to East of Eden,’ Film Music, 14, no. 5 (May-June 1955): 11.
15 Louis and Bebe Barron, ‘Forbidden Planet,’ Film Music, 15, no. 5 (Summer 1956): 18.
16 Carlyle Ellis, ‘Art and the motion picture,’ Annals of the American Academy of Politica and Social Science, 1928,
128, no. 217 (November 1926): 56.
17 Interview with Charles G.Clarke, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 12 June and 3 July 1980
in Hollywood, California.
18 Ira B.Hoke, ‘Akeley has wide range of adaptability,’ AC, 9, no. 9 (December 1928): 30.
19 Linwood G.Dunn, ‘Explaining “Montage,”’AC, 23, no. 8 (August 1942): 359. See also Rudolf Messel, This Film
Business (London: Ernest Bess, 1928), pp. 261–3.
20 See M.L.Tandon, ‘Montage,’ IP, 6, no. 10 (November 1934): 2–3; Paul E.Bowles, ‘The relation between
continuity and cutting,’ IP, 6, no. 9 (October 1934): 10–11, and IP, 6, no. 12 (January 1935): 10–11, 28–9; Ed
Gibbons, ‘Montage marches in,’ IP, 9, no. 9 (October 1937): 25–9; Vernon L. Walker, ‘Rhythmic optical effects
for musical pictures,’ AC, 17, no. 12 (December 1936): 504, 514; Karl Freund, ‘Just what is “Montage”?’ AC,
15, no. 5 (September 1934): 204, 210.
21 Slavko Vorkapich, ‘The psychological basis of effective cinematography,’ in ‘Transitions and time lapses,’ AMP
AS Academy Technicians’ Branch Technical Digest, no. 10 (28 September 1934): 8.
22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 See also Lewis Jacobs, ‘Montage for motion pictures,’ The Complete Photographer, vol. 7, ed. Willard
D.Morgan (New York: Education Alliance, 1943): 2609–19; Herb A. Lightman, ‘The magic of montage,’ AC, 30,
no. 10 (October 1949): 382; and Vladimir Petric, ‘Soviet revolutionary film in America (1926–1935)’ (PhD
dissertation, New York University, 1973), pp. 404–9.
24 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américain (Paris: Editions d’aujourd’hui,
1976); Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style
(Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1979); Raymond Durgnat, ‘The family tree of film noir,’ Cinema
[Britain], no. 6/7 (August 1970): 49.
25 E.H.Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 88.
26 Jean-Pierre Chartier, ‘Les américains aussi font des films “noirs,”’Revue du cinéma, no. 2 (November 1946): 67–
70. See also Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama, p. 155.
27 Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama, pp. 1–2.
28 Silver and Ward, Film Noir, p. 323.
29 See E.Ann Kaplan, ‘Introduction,’ Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 4; Christine
Gledhill, ‘Klute,’ in Women in Film Noir, ed. Kaplan, pp. 14–19.
30 Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama, pp. 185–6.
31 Paul Schrader, ‘Notes on film noir,’ Film Comment, 8, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 11–13.
32 Janey Place and L.S.Peterson, ‘Some visual motifs of film noir,’ Film Comment, 10, no. 1 (January 1974): 31.
33 See Boileau-Narcejac, Le roman policier (Paris: Payot, 1964), p. 154.
34 Ibid., pp. 123–6; Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama, pp. 17–29; Raymond Chandler, ‘The simple art of murder,’
in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), pp. 222–37.
35 Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 133–8, 178–89.
36 See Howard Haycraft, ‘The whodunit in World War II and after,’ in Mystery Story, ed. Haycraft, pp. 536– 42.
37 James Wong Howe, ‘Visual suggestion can enhance “rationed” sets,’ AC, 23, no. 5 (June 1942): 236–7; Harry
B.Warner, ‘Waste more deadly than sabotage,’ IP, 14, no. 2 (March 1942): 25; ‘Cinematographers show how to
achieve production economies,’ AC, 21, no. 8 (August 1941): 360–2; Ezra Goodman, ‘A cinematographer
speaks,’ AC, 26, no. 4 (April 1945): 120–1; Robert Joseph, ‘Filming a motion picture in one set,’ AC, 25, no. 10
(October 1944): 336; Joseph Valentine, ‘Using an actual town instead of movie sets,’ AC, 23, no. 10 (October
1942): 440–1; Ezra Goodman, ‘Post-War motion picture,’ AC, 26, no. 5 (May 1945): 160; James Wong Howe,
‘The documentary film and Hollywood techniques,’ in Proceedings of the Conference Held in 1943 Under the
Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1944), pp. 94–6; James Wong Howe, ‘Documentary technique in Hollywood,’ AC, 25, no. 1
(January 1944): 10, 32. See also Paul Kerr, ‘Out of what past? Notes on the B film noir,’ Screen Education, no.
32/33 (Autumn 1979–80): 45–65.
38 Leon Shamroy, ‘Future of cinematography,’ AC, 28, no. 10 (October 1947): 358. See also Herb Lightman, ‘13
rue Madeleine,’ AC, 28, no. 3 (March 1947): 89; Herb A.Lightman, ‘Mood in the motion picture,’ AC, 28, no. 2
(February 1947): 48–9, 69.
39 Cited in John Baxter, ‘Something more than night,’ The Film Journal, 2, no. 4 (1975): 9.
40 See John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (London: Penguin, 1966). For an attempt to see authorship
in the cinema as a constructed ‘biographical legend,’ see David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 9–24.
41 Leonard B.Meyer, ‘Toward a theory of style,’ in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1979), p. 27.
42 See Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, tr. Helen R.Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. xviii.
43 V.F.Perkins, Film as Film (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 130.
44 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 77.
45 Ibid., p. 170.
46 Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), pp. 98–158.
47 Pascal Kané, ‘Sylvia Scarlett: Hollywood cinema reread,’ Sub-stance, no. 9 (1974): 37–40; Jean-Pierre Oudart,
‘Un discours en default,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 232 (October 1971): 5–6.
48 See, for example, Kané, ‘Sylvia Scarlett,’ pp. 37–8; Oudart, ‘Un discours,’ pp. 6–7; and Claudine Eizykman, La
jouissance-cinéma (Paris: 10/18, 1975), pp. 10–21.
49 Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 214.
50 Quoted in Christian Braad Thomsen, ‘Five interviews with Fassbinder,’ in Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns, 2nd ed.
(London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 82.
51 See David Bordwell, ‘Happily ever after, part two,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 19 (1982): 2–7.
52 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J.Arthur (New York: International Publishers,
1977), pp. 108–9.
53 See Lewis Herman, A Practical Manual of Screen Playwriting for Theater and Television Films (New York: New
American Library, 1974), p. 126; Martha Robinson, Continuity Girl (London: Hale, 1937), p. 26; Bowles, The
relationship between continuity and cutting,’ p. 10; and Jack Russell, ‘What is an insert?’ IP, 11, no. 12 (January
1940): 9, 44.
54 Gibbons, ‘Montage marches in,’ p. 29.
55 Nick Grinde, ‘Pictures for peanuts: a study from Hollywood,’ Penguin Film Review, no. 1 (1946): 14.
56 See Anne Bauchens, ‘How we use these devices to increase production value,’ in ‘Transitions and time lapses,’
AMPAS Technical Digest: 6–8; Gordon Jennings, ‘Special effects and montage for Cleopatra,’ AC, 15, no. 8
(December 1934): 350–4; ‘Montage,’ IP, 12, no. 12 (January 1941): 3, 13; Robert Parrish, Growing Up in
Hollywood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 163–6.
Chapter 8
The Hollywood mode of production: its conditions of existence
1 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Technique et idéologie,’ Cahiers du cinéma, nos 229, 230, 231, 233, 234–5, and 241 (May
1971-September-October 1972).
2 John Ellis, ‘The institution of cinema,’ Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, no. 2 (1977), 56–66; Geoffrey NowellSmith,
‘On the writing of the history of the cinema: some problems,’ Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, no. 2 (1977), 8–12. Also
see: John Hill, ‘Ideology, economy and the British cinema,’ in Ideology and Cultural Production, ed. Michèle
Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), pp. 112–34;
Michèle Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff, ‘Representation and cultural production,’ in
Ideology and Cultural Production, pp. 9–24.
3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 182. Also see
The German Ideology and Capital in particular. More recent theorists include Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and the
ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation),’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans.
Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86; Terry Eagleton, Criticism & Ideology: A
Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso Edition, 1978); Barry Kindness and Paul Q.Hirst, Pre-
Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Antony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul
Hirst, and Athar Hussain, Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977 and
1978). Outside the scope of my question (although an important problem) is the determination of classes and the
methods by which certain classes appropriate surplus value. On these problems, see Hindess and Hirst, Pre-
Capitalist Modes of Production, and Talal Asad and Harold Wolpe, ‘Concepts of modes of production,’ Economy
and Society, 5, no. 4 (November 1976), 470–506.
4 Peter F.Drucker, ‘Work and tools,’ in Technology, Management & Society (New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1970), pp. 43–54.
5 Historical background for this section comes from: John Chamberlain, The Enterprising Americans: A Business
History of the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974); Alex Groner, The American
Heritage History of American Business & Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1972);
David F.Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York:
Alfred A.Knopf, 1977); Harry N.Scheiber, Harold G.Vatter, and Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Economic
History, 9th ed., rev. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1976); Monte Calvert, The Mechanical
Engineer in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); John Perry, The Story of
Standards (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1955).
6 Henry Ford cited in Scheiber, et al., American Economic History, p. 225.
7 Perry, The Story of Standards, p. 126.
8 Frank L.Eidmann, Economic Control of Engineering and Manufacturing (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc., 1931), p. 204.
9 John D.Rockefeller cited in Chamberlain, Enterprising Americans, p. 150.
10 Eidmann, Economic Control, p. 261.
11 This section relies heavily on Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). On social division of labor, see pp. 70–5.
12 Ibid., pp. 63–4.
13 Also see: Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, 1887, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New
York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 350–6.
14 Marx, Capital, 1, chs 13, 14, and 15, particularly pp. 336–86.
15* The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Modern Economics defines these. ‘Vertical Integration: the operation of a single
firm at more than one stage of production. The most comprehensive type of vertical production would include
productive stages from the processing of the raw material to the completion and distribution of the finished
product.’ ‘Diversification: the participation by a single firm in the production or sale of widely divergent kinds of
goods and services.’ ‘Horizontal Integration: the situation existing in a firm whose products or services are
competitive with each other. The term also applies to the expansion of a firm into the production of new products
that are competitive with older ones.’ The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Modern Economics: A Handbook of Terms
and Organizations, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), pp. 263, 174–5, and 275.
16 Marx, Capital, 1, p. 420. Marx also deals with the consequent segregation of jobs by genders; see Marx, Capital,
1, pp. 459–503.
17 Cutler, et al., Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, vol. 2, p. 190, and vol. 1, pp. 304–10. An earlier discussion
of the manager is in James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 1941).
18 Alfred D.Chandler, Jr, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1962), pp. 11–12. On the problem of the class of the professional
manager, see Pat Walker, ed. Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Nicos Poulantzas,
‘The problems of the capitalist state,’ in Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed.
Robin Blackburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 238–62; Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State
(n.p.: NLB, 1978), pp. 30–110.
Chapter 9
Standardization and differentiation: the reinforcement and dispersion of Hollywood’s practices
1 William C. de Mille, Hollywood Saga (New York: E.P.Dutton & Co., Inc., 1939), p. 123.
2 John Perry, The Story of Standards (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1955), p. 125.
3 Ralph K.Davidson, Vernon L.Smith, and Jay W. Wiley, Economics: An Analytical Approach, rev. ed.
(Homewood, Illinois: Richard D.Irwin, Inc., 1962), pp. 28–9.
4 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974), p. 266.
5 Information for this section is from: John Chamberlain, The Enterprising Americans: A Business History of the
United States, rev. ed (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974); Alex Groner, The American Heritage
History of American Business & Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1972); Harry
N.Scheiber, Harold G.Vatter, and Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Economic History 9th ed., rev. (New
York: Harper & Row, 1976).
6 Motion Picture Patents Co., ‘Memorandum for the Motion Picture Patents Company and the General Film
Company concerning the investigation of their business by the Department of Justice,’ submitted by M.B.Phillipp
and Francis T.Homer, 18 May 1912, TS (New York: Museum of Modern Art), p. 42.
7 Edison Films, Supplements 168, 185, and 200 (Orange, New Jersey: Edison Manufacturing Company, February
1903, October 1903, January 1904), pp. 2–3, 5, and 5–7, respectively, rpt. in Spellbound in Darkness: A History
of the Silent Film, ed. George C.Pratt, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973),
pp. 29–30, 34, and 34–6.
8 ‘“The Iced Bullet” a novel and thrilling detective story,’ The Triangle, 3, no. 11 (6 January 1917), 5; L.F. Cook,
‘Of interest to the trade,’ NKL, 3, no. 1 (January 1910), 21.
9 ‘The Motion Picture Story Magazine,’ MPW, 8, no. 5 (4 February 1911), 228.
10 ‘Film stories in Sunday papers,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1725 (10 January 1912), 30; Harold MacGrath, The Adventures
of Kathlyn, Kathlyn Williams De Luxe Edition (Indianapolis: The Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1914).
11 ‘Cleveland,’ MPW, 8, no. 20 (20 May 1911), 1126.
12 Howard Thompson Lewis, Cases on the Motion Picture Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
Inc., 1930), p. 63.
13 R.R.Nehls, ‘The efficiency plan of film salesmanship,’ MPW, 14, no. 3 (19 October 1912), 237; David Sherrill
Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American School of Correspondence, 1911), I, pp. 276–
82. ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1692 (4 January 1911), 28.
14 Cited in Benjamin B.Hampton, History of the American Film Industry from its Beginnings to 1931 (1931; rpt,
New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p. 37.
15 ‘Doings in Los Angeles,’ MPW, 12, no. 11 (15 June 1912), 1014; ‘Comments on the films,’ MPW, 8, no. 2 (14
January 1911), 88.
16 Sybil Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield,
1973), pp. 76–8; Oscar G.Brockett, The Theatre: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964),
pp. 246–55.
17 Ad, MPW, 11, no. 7 (17 February 1912), between 570 and 571; Samuel Goldwyn cited in James P. Cunningham,
‘Asides and interludes,’ MPHerald, 142, no. 3 (18 January 1941), 35. Russell Merritt astutely points out how the
historian may be trapped by the fascination of these profihnic details used to establish an exchange-value; see his
‘On first looking into Griffith’s Babylon: a reading of a publicity still,’ Wide Angle, 3, no. 1 (1979), 12–21.
18 Glenn Loney, ‘Heyday of the dramatized novel [1900–1906],’ Educational Theatre Journal, 9, no. 3 (October
1957), 194–200; ‘Noted dramatists to write moving picture plays,’ MPW, 2, no. 13 (28 March 1908), 263;
‘Motion picture play writing as an art,’ EK, 1, no. 3 (1 September 1909), 12. Also see the Kinetograms for 15
December 1909 and 1 January 1910.
19 Alfred L.Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932
(New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1932), p. 27; ‘The Edison Stock Company,’ EK, 1, no. 4 (15 September 1909),
13; ‘Our Stock Company,’ EK, 1, no. 5 (1 October 1909), 13–4; Anthony Slide, The evolution of the film star,’ Films
in Review, 25 (December 1974), 591–4; ‘Marion Leonard Shanghaid,’ MP News, 5, no. 1 (6 January 1912); ad,
MPNews, 5, no. 4 (27 January 1912), 35.
20 Anthony Slide, Aspects of American Film History Before 1920 (Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press,
Inc., 1978), p. 1.
21 ‘Gem tells when!’ MP News, 4, no. 52 (30 December 1911), 24–6; C.B. Clapp, ‘Florence Lawrence famous picture
star,’ NYDM, 68, no. 1754 (31 July 1912), 13.
22 ‘The Essanay Company out West,’ The Denver Post, rpt. in Spellbound in Darkness, ed. Pratt, pp. 127– 30;
‘From tyranny to liberty,’ EK, 3, no. 2 (15 August 1910), 11.
23 ‘Spectator,’ ‘ “Spectator’s” Comments,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1721 (13 December 1911), 28; ‘Will present play
productions,’ MPW, 11, no. 2 (13 January 1912), 109–10; ‘The independent situation,’ MPW, 12, no. 11 (15 June
1912), 1016.
24 ‘Motion picture nomenclature,’ AC, 3, no. 2 (1 May 1922), 25.

25 Magnus W.Alexander, The Economic Evolution of the United States: Its Background and Significance (New
York: National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., 1929), pp. 36–8; Groner, American Heritage History, pp. 92,
262. Information about the theatrical trade association, the National Association of Producing Managers, which
organized in the early 1900s to effect stronger copyright protection is in Arthur Edwin Krows, Play Production in
America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), pp. 276–7.
26 ‘The independent movement,’ NKL, 1, no. 1 (February 1909), 39–40; William Horsley, ‘From pigs to pictures,’
(part 1), IP, 6, no. 2 (March 1934), 3; Ralph Cassady, Jr, ‘Monopoly in motion picture production and
distribution: 1908–1915,’ Southern California Law Review, 32, no. 4 (Summer 1959), 363, 371–2; Laurence
F.Cook, ‘Convention of the independent alliance,’ NKL, 2, no. 4 (October 1909), 105–10; ‘Motion Picture
Distributing and Sales Co.,’ MP News, 4, no. 15 (15 April 1911), 25–6.
27 ‘The Motion Picture Exhibitors’ League of America,’ MPW, 13, no. 7 (17 August 1912), 621; ‘Motion Picture
Exhibitors’ Association of Greater New York goes on record in favor of a national convention of exhibitors,’
MPW, 8, no. 14 (8 April 1911), 753; Edward Hobday, ‘Importance of trade organizations,’ MPW, 9, no. 6 (19
August 1911) 444; M.A.Neff, ‘Big meeting of Ohio exhibitors,’ MPW, 8, no. 18 (6 May 1911), 1007; ‘Local
organization necessary to a national convention’ and ‘Exhibitors’ league meeting,’ MPW, 8, no. 20 (20 May
1911), 1114–15, 1122; ‘National organization,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12 August 1911), 365; ‘Exhibitors form national
league: report of organization meeting,’ MPW, 9, no. 6 (19 August 1911), 440–3; ‘The goat man,’ ‘On the
outside looking in,’ Motography, 6, no. 5 (November 1911), 237–8.
28 ‘The first international exposition,’ MPW, 17, no. 3 (19 July 1913), 324–7; also see ‘Manufacturers organize,’
MPW, 21, no. 11 (12 September 1914), 1488.
29 Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: D.Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1933), p. 267n;
‘Renters organize for protection,’ MPW, 20, no. 9 (30 May 1914), 1242; ‘Exchanges correct abuses legally,’
MPW, 30, no. 4 (28 October 1916), 526–7.
30 ‘A commendable step,’ Moving Picture Publicity, 2, no. 5 (July 1914), 18; ‘Standards of practice for adfilmers,’
Moving Picture Publicity, 2, no. 5 (July 1914), 22–3; ‘Ad. film folks meet to discuss organization,’ MPW, 29,
no. 9 (24 August 1914), 1221; ‘M.P. advertising men organize,’ MPW, 29, no. 7 (12 August 1916), 1089;
‘Motion publicity men organize,’ MPW, 29, no. 8 (19 August 1916), 256.
31 ‘Independents propose organization,’ MPW, 21, no. 11 (12 September 1914), 1521.
32 ‘Our man about town,’ ‘Observations,’ MPW, 21, no. 13 (26 September 1914), 1764; W.Stephen Bush, ‘The
Motion Picture Board of Trade of America,’ MPW, 25, no. 13 (26 September 1915), 2156; Bernard M.Corbett,
‘Cash in advance vs. open account,’ MPW, 27, no. 1 (1 January 1916), 67; ‘Decision in Vitagraph-Metro case,’
MPW, 27, no. 13 (25 March 1916), 2015; ‘Film men discuss organization,’ MPW, 28, no. 13 (24 June 1916),
2210; ‘Film men form temporary organization,’ MPW, 29, no. 4 (22 July 1916), 612–13; ‘The great get-together
meeting,’ MPW, 29, no. 7 (12 August 1916), 1074.
33 G.P.Von Harleman and Clarke Irvine, ‘News of Los Angeles and vicinity,’ MPW, 27, no. 3 (15 January 1916),
408–9.
34 Frederick James Smith, ‘The evolution of the motion picture, VIII: from the standpoint of the film censor,’
NYDM, 70, no. 1807 (6 August 1913), 25, 33; Martin Field, ‘A short history of film censorship,’ The Screen
Writer, 3, no. 2 (July 1947), 9–11; Lewis, Motion Picture Industry, pp. 366–91; ‘Motion Picture Exhibitors’
Association of Greater New York goes on record in favor of a national convention of exhibitors,’ MPW, 8, no. 14
(8 April 1911), 753; ‘Report of the National Board of Censorship,’ MPW, 8, no. 19 (13 May 1911), 1066–7;
‘National Board changes its name,’ MPW, 28, no. 3 (15 April 1916), 446; R.V.S., ‘Scenario construction,’
MPW, 8, no. 6 (11 February 1911), 294; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The scenario writer,’ MPW, 11, no. 4 (27
January 1912), 294.
35 Charles R.Metzger, ‘Pressure groups and the motion picture industry,’ in The Motion Picture Industry, ed.
Gordon S.Watkins (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947), pp. 110–15;
‘Among the exhibitors,’ MPW, 8, no. 13 (1 April 1911), 705; Richard V.Spencer, ‘Los Angeles Notes,’ MPW, 8,
no. 11 (18 March 1911), 586; Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York: The
Moving Picture World, 1913), p. 116.
36 F.H.Richardson, ‘Projection department,’ MPW, 12, no. 10 (8 June 1912); George Blaisdell, ‘Nicholas Power
urges standardization,’ MPW, 21, no. 2 (11 July 1914), 222–3; Frank M.Byam, ‘Standardization,’ MPW, 21, no.
5 (1 August 1914), 690; Frank M.Byam, ‘Standardization and the motion picture camera,’ MPW, 21, no. 7 (15
August 1914), 946.
37 ‘Plans of Bureau of Standards,’ MPW, 28, no. 10 (3 June 1916), 1673; ‘Society of Motion Picture Engineers,’
MPW, 29, no. 7 (12 August 1916), 1086; Society of Motion Picture Engineers, The Society of Motion Picture
Engineers (New York: Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 1930), pp. iii-iv; Kemp R.Niver, ‘Motion-picture
film widths,’ JSMPTE, 77 (August 1968), 814; ‘Society of Motion Picture Engineers,’ MPW, 30, no. 4 (28
October 1916), 533; Loyd A.Jones, ‘A historical summary of standardization in the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers,’ JSMPE, 21, no. 4 (October 1933), 280–93.
38 Groner, American Heritage History, pp. 70, 217–18; Scheiber, et al., American Economic History, pp. 167–70,
251–6, 311–12.
39 ‘An operators’ league, and why?’ MPW, 1, no. 1 (9 March 1907), 21; Phil Whitman, ‘Western correspondent,’ MP
News, 5, no. 3 (20 January 1912), 35; F.H.Richardson, ‘Trouble department,’ MPW, 8, no. 4 (28 January 1911),
187–8; ‘Moving Picture Workers’ Local No. 422,’ MPW, 8, no. 11 (18 March 1911), 591; ‘Enthusiastic meeting
of New York operators,’ MPW, 8, no. 13 (1 April 1911), 700; ‘Moving Picture Machine Operators, Local 186,
I.A.T.S.E. (Springfield, Mass.) wage schedule of 1910 and 1911,’ and ‘Scale of wages of Local 35, New York
City,’ MPW, 8, no. 19 (13 May 1911), 1079.
40 ‘The Screen Club is a fact,’ MPW, 13, no. 12 (21 September 1912), 1163; ‘Doings at Los Angeles,’ MPW, 14,
no. 12 (21 December 1912), 1175; P.M. Powell, ‘Doings at Los Angeles,’ MPW, 15, no. 2 (11 January 1913),
142; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1735 (20 March 1912), 25; William Lord Wright,
‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’ MP News, 5, no. 14 (6 April 1912), 21; ‘The photoplay dinner,’
MPW, 13, no. 12 (21 December 1912), 1169; William Lord Wright, Photoplay Writing, (New York: Falk
Publishing Co., Inc., 1922), pp. 217–18; ‘Woods heads Authors’ League,’ NYDM, 70, no. 1840 (25 March 1914),
31.
41 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 19, no. 13 (28 March 1914).
42 ‘The League Protective Bureau,’ The Script, 1, no. 6 (October 1914), 6.
43 ‘The editor,’ ‘Motion picture cameramen’s organizations in America,’ IP, 7, no. 9 (October 1935), 3; Static Club
Constitution (October 1915) (Los Angeles: American Cinematographers), p. 51.
44 Fred F.Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 146.
45 ‘Static Club,’ MPW, 25, no. 2 (10 July 1915), 272. Also see Minutes of Static Club, particularly 11 May 1915
(Los Angeles: American Cinematographers).
46 ‘Static Club,’ MPW, 25, no. 2 (10 July 1915), 272–3; Lewis W.Physioc, ‘The history of the Cinema Camera
Club,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 5 (15 February 1917), 5–6; ‘The editor,’ ’Motion picture cameramen’s organizations
in America,’ IP, 7, no. 9 (October 1935), 3; George Blaisdell, ‘Arnold again head of A.S.C.,’ AC, 20, no. 5 (May
1939), 198; Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week, p. 123.
47 Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).
48 John Francis Barry and Epes W.Sargent, Building Theatre Patronage: Management and Merchandising (New
York: Chalmers Publishing Company, 1927), p. iii; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Technique of the photoplay,’ MPW,
9, no. 2 (22 July 1911), 108–9; Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay; ‘The art of writing scenarios,’ MPW, 8,
no. 8 (25 February 1911), 419.
49 Archer McMackin, ‘How moving picture plays are written,’ NKL, 2, no. 6 (December 1909), 171–3.
50 ‘Letters and questions,’ NYDM, 68, no. 1753 (24 July 1912), 25–6.
51 ‘Reviews of licensed films,’ NYDM, 62, no. 1618 (25 December 1909); 15; S.M.Spedon, How and Where
Moving Pictures Are made by The Vitagraph Company of America (New York: Vitagraph Company of America,
[1912]), [p. 13]; James Slevin, On Picture-Play Writing: A Hand-Book of Workmanship (Cedar Grove, New
Jersey: Farmer Smith Incorporated, 1912), p. 86; Louis Reeves Harrison, Screencraft (New York: Chalmers
Publishing Co., 1916), pp. 115–18; ‘Heard in studio and exchange,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 24 (28 February 1914), 8;
‘The practical side of pictures,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 3 (4 April 1914), 25.
52 Clarence E.Sinn, ‘Music for the pictures,’ MPW, 8, no. 3 (21 January 1911), 135.
53 F.H.Richardson, ‘The advancement of projection,’ MPW, 21, no. 2 (11 July 1914), 218–19; Epes Winthrop
Sargent, ‘Advertising for exhibitors,’ MPW, 9, no. 11 (23 September 1911), 876–7; Epes Winthrop Sargent,
Picture Theatre Advertising (New York: The Moving Picture World Chalmers Publishing Company, 1915);
Clyde Martin, ‘Working the sound effects,’ MPW, 10, no. 4 (28 October 1911), 283; Mark Evans, Soundtrack:
The Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1975), p. 8; Carl Louis Gregory, ‘Motion picture
photography,’ MPW, 25, no. 2 (10 July 1915), 283–4.
54 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory,’ New Left Review, 82 (November-
December 1973), 8–9.
55 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Photoplay criticism,’ The Writer’s Monthly, 29, no. 5 (May 1927), 391–2. Also see
Frances Taylor Patterson, Scenario and Screen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928), p. 82.
56 Rouben Mamoulian, ‘Common sense and camera angles,’ AC, 12, no 10 (February 1932), 26.
57 Harry C.Carr, ‘What next—?,’ Photoplay, 11 (March 1917), 62.
58 Hugo Ballin, ‘The scenic background,’ The Mentor, 9, no. 6 (1 July 1921), 22.
59 Cedric Gibbons, ‘The art director,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York:
Dodge Publishing Company, 1938), p. 41.
60 George Cukor, ‘The director,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, pp. 21–2.
61 Lee Garmes, ‘Photography,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, p. 107.
62 Ibid., p. 108.
63 Frederick Foster, ‘High key vs. low key,’ AC, 38, no. 8 (August 1957), 506.
64 Hunt Stromberg, ‘The producer,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, p. 8.
65 Gregg Toland, ‘I broke the rules in Citizen Kane,’ Popular Photography, 8, no. 6 (June 1941), 55, 90–1.
66 Vincent Sherman in Directing the Film: Film Directors on their Art, ed. Eric Sherman (Boston: Little, Brown &
Company, 1976), p. 293.
67 Stanley Cortez in Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light (London: Thames & Hudson,
1970), p. 98.
68 Joe Henry, ‘Techniques of Hollywood cinematographers,’ AC, 38, no. 1 (January 1957), 34.
69 John Davis, ‘When will they ever learn? A tale of mad geniuses, scientists, artists, and a director (also mad),’ The
Velvet Light Trap, no. 15 (Fall 1975), 13.
70 Tim Onosko, ‘53: The new era: A brief history of the three-dimensional film,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 11
(1974), 13; ‘No women in John Ford’s Fox Picture,’ The Ohio Showman, 5, no. 19 (14 December 1929), 28.
71 George Stevens in William R.Weaver, ‘Seek new ways, says Stevens,’ MPHerald, 168, no. 2 (12 July 1947), 33.
Chapter 10
The director system: management in the first years
1 Alfred L.Bemheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932
(New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932), pp. 37–40; John L.Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), p. 8; ‘A combination scheme,’ NYDM, 35, no. 895 (22 February 1896), 17;
Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1957), pp. 1–44; Russel
Blaine Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1970).
2 Robert C.Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno Press, 1980),
pp. 23–92; A.R.Fulton, ‘The machine,’ rpt. in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 27–31; ‘Edison’s Vitascope,’ NYDM, 35, no. 905 (2 May 1896), 19, rpt. in
Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film, ed. George C.Pratt, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Connecticut: New
York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 16 (both accounts of the Vitascope presentation give details of the coloring of
the films); Robert C.Allen, ‘Contra the Chaser Theory,’ Wide Angle, 3, no. 1 (1979), 4; Brett Page, Writing for
Vaudeville (Springfield, Mass.: The Home Correspondence School, 1915), pp. 7–10.
3 Allen, Vaudeville and Film, pp. 112–13; ‘The evolution of exhibition,’ MPW, 29, no. 3 (15 July 1916), 367–425.
4 ‘The art of moving photography,’ Scientific American, 76, no. 16 (17 April 1897), 249–50.
5 ‘The evolution of exhibition,’ MPW, 29, no. 3 (15 July 1916), 367–425; Allen, ‘Contra the Chaser Theory,’ 4–
11; George Pratt, ‘No magic, no mystery, no sleight of hand,’ Image, 8 (December 1959), 192– 211, rpt. in The
American Film Industry, ed. Balio, p. 54; Raymond Fielding, ‘Hale’s Tours: ultrarealism in the pre-1910 motion
pictures,’ Cinema Journal, 10, no. 1 (Fall 1970), 34–47. The Pratt source is an excellent recovery of the types of
films shown in one city during the first years of commercial cinema.
6 Frederick James Smith, ‘The evolution of the motion picture, I: from the standpoint of the film producer,’
NYDM, 69, no. 1792 (23 April 1913), 26, 30; Terry Ramsaye, ‘The motion picture,’ The Annals (of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science), 128 (November 1926), 7–9; Earl Theisen, ‘Part of the story of
lighting,’ IP, 6, no. 3 (April 1934), 10; Pratt, ‘No magic, no mystery,’ p. 55.
7 Garth S. Jowett, ‘The first motion picture audiences,’ Journal of Popular Film, 3 (Winter 1974), 39–54.
8 William F.Hellmuth, Jr, ‘The motion picture industry,’ in The Structure of American Industry, ed. Walter Adams,
rev. ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954), p. 362; ‘The evolution of exhibition,’ MPW, 29, no. 3 (15
July 1916), 367– 425; Benjamin B.Hampton, History of the American Film Industry from its Beginnings to 1931
(1931; rpt, New York: Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 44–5; Robert C.Allen, ‘Film history: the narrow
discourse,’ in Film: Historical-Theoretical Speculations, The 1977 Film Studies Annual, (Part Two), ed. Ben
Lawton and Janet Staiger (Pleasantville, New York: Redgrave Publishing Co., 1977), p. 14; ‘Growth of the film
business,’ Billboard, 18, no. 37 (15 September 1906), 16, rpt in Spellbound in Darkness, ed. Pratt, pp. 42–3;
Robert C.Allen, ‘Motion picture exhibition in Manhattan, 1906– 1912: beyond the nickelodeon,’ Cinema
Journal, 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979), 11; Lucy Frances Pierce, ‘The nickelodeon,’ NKL, 1, no. 1 (January 1909), 10;
‘Copyright laws vs. moving pictures and the cameraphone,’ MPW, 2, no. 14 (4 April 1908), 290.
9 Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916 (1916; rpt, New York: Dover
Publications, 1970), pp. 9–10.
10 Harry C.Carr, ‘What next—?’ Photoplay, 11, no. 4 (March 1917), 60.
11 Allen, ‘Film history,’ pp. 13–15.
12 W.K.L.Dickson, The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South African War Related with Personal Experiences
(London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1901), p. 157.
13 Besides Dickson, descriptions of this system are in: G.W.Bitzer, Billy Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1973), pp. 7–69; Albert E. Smith, Two Reels and a Crank (Garden City, New York: Doubleday
& Co., 1952), pp. 1–159; Fred F. Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967); Charles Musser, ‘The early cinema of Edwin Porter,’ Cinema Journal, 19, no. 1 (Fall
1979), 1–38; Kemp R.Niver, The First Twenty Years: A Segment of Film History (Los Angeles: Artisan Press,
1968); Paul C.Spehr, ‘Filmmaking at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company,’ The Quarterly Journal
of the Library of Congress, 37, no. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 1980), 413–21.
14 Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer: A Survey and Interviews with Five Masters, rev. ed. (New
York: Dover Publications, 1978), p. 77.
15 ‘How the cinematographer works, and some of his difficulties,’ MPW, 1, no. 11 (18 May 1907), 165.
16 Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, pp. 7–69; Smith, Two Reels, pp. 1–159; Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week;
‘Manufacture of moving pictures is a science,’ The Show World (6 July 1907), 17; W.W. Winters, ‘Moving
pictures in the making,’ NKL, 1, no. 1 (January 1909), 25–6.
17 Oscar Brockett, The Theatre: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), p. 279.
18 Besides Brockett, pp. 279–84, see Helen Krich Chinoy, ‘The emergence of the director,’ in Directors on
Directing, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963), pp. 1–77;
Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly: An Account of the Late Nineteenth Century American Stage
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 17; Oral Sumner Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr, The
American Stage New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1929), pp. 234–62. For an excellent description
of the US theatrical mode of production a few years later (1916), see Arthur Edwin Krows, Play Production in
America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916), pp. 239–341.
19 ‘Manufacture of moving pictures is a science,’ The Show World (6 July 1907); 17; Kalton C.Lahue, Motion
Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (Cranbury, New Jersey: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1973), p. 14; The
1933 Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publishing Co., 1933).
20 ‘How the cinematographer works, and some of his difficulties,’ MPW, 1, no. 11 (18 May 1907), 165–6; ‘How the
cinematographer works and some of his difficulties,’ MPW, 1, no. 14 (8 June 1907), 212–13; ‘How the
cinematographer works and some of his difficulties,’ MPW, 1, no. 15 (15 June 1907), 230; ‘How the
cinematographer works,’ MPW, 1, no. 19 (13 July 1907), 298, 300; ‘How the cinematographer works,’ MPW, 1,
no. 34 (27 October 1907), 536–7; ‘How the cinematographer works,’ MPW, 1, no. 41 (14 December 1907), 660–
3; ‘How moving pictures are made,’ MPW, 2, no. 20 (16 May 1908), 434–5.
21 Edward W.Townsend, ‘Picture plays,’ Outlook, 93 (27 November 1909), 704.
22 ‘How the cinematographer works,’ MPW, 1, no. 41 (14 December 1907), 660–3; ‘How moving pictures are
made,’ MPW, 2, no. 20 (16 May 1908), 434–5.
23* Peter F.Drucker in his study of the interconnections among a task, its tools, and a work organization notes that
the introduction of certain tools may make a traditional organization of work untenable. Others see technologies
as a method of reinforcing class divisions. Pat Walker argues that divisions of labor created through the
introduction of new technology 1) can deprive a worker of the understanding of a production process, making it
seem that mental labor is more valuable than manual; 2) can physically separate the workers; and 3) can
fragment jobs into ‘an arbitrary hierarchy of skill levels.’ Generally, this seems to have been the case in the US
film industry. See Peter F.Drucker, ‘Work and tools,’ in Technology, Management & Society (New York: Harper
& Row, 1970), pp. 43–54; Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. xvi.
24 ‘Gregory is Fleming’s aide,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 21 (7 February 1914), 2; ‘Studio and exchange notes,’ Reel Life, 3,
no. 5 (18 October 1913), 3.
25 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 14, no. 11 (14 December 1912), 1075. On the division of
labor also see: David Sherrill Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American School of
Correspondence, 1911), vol. 2, pp. 75–6.
26 Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York: The Moving Picture World, 1913),
p. 8.
27 Gene Gauntier, ‘Blazing the trail,’ Woman’s Home Companion, 55, no. 11 (November 1928), p. 181; Edward
W.Townsend, ‘Picture plays,’ Outlook, 93 (27 November 1909), 706.
28 W.W.Winters, ‘Moving pictures in the making,’ NKL, 1, no. 1 (January 1909), 25–6.
29 ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1718 (22 November 1911), 24; ‘Spectator,’ '“Spectator’s”
comments,’ NYDM, 68, no. 1757 (21 August 1912), 24.
Chapter 11
The director-unit system: management of multiple-unit companies after 1909
1 Eugene Dengler, ‘Wonders of the Diamond-S Plant,’ Motography, 6, no. 1 (July 1911), 7–19, rpt. in Kalton
C.Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (Cranbury, New Jersey: A.S.Barnes & Co.,
1973), p. 83.
2 ‘Advice to Hollywood,’ MP Herald, 167, no. 8 (24 May 1947), 61.
3 ‘New schedule of Edison releases,’ EK, 3, no. 7 (1 November 1910), 2; J.Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds,
Writing the Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: The Home Correspondence School, 1913), pp. 16–17; David Sherrill
Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American School of Correspondence, 1911), vol. 2, pp.
113–15.
4* At this point several women directors such as Lois Weber, Jeanne Macpherson, Alice Guy-Blaché, and Gene
Gauntier had made films, but just as now, they were in the vast minority. George C.Pratt, Spellbound in
Darkness: A History of the Silent Film, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p.
83; Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer, p. 13.
5 Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema (New York: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1970), p. 53; Lahue, Motion Picture
Pioneer, p. 13; Richard Dale Batman, ‘The founding of the Hollywood motion picture industry,’ Journal of the
West, 10 (October 1971), 611.
6 ‘The Imp Company invades Cuba,’ MPW, 8, no. 3 (21 January 1911), 146.
7 Ad, MP News, 4, no. 6 (11 February 1911), 26; ‘Our roving commissioner,’ ‘A chat with Mr. David Horsley,’
MP News, 5, no. 5 (3 February 1912), 19.
8 Slide, Early American Cinema, pp. 47–56; Batman, ‘Founding,’ 611; ‘A dozen Lubin favorites,’ NYDM, 67, no.
1728 (31 January 1912), 55; ‘American plans in the West,’ MPW, 8, no. 1 (7 January 1911), 31; Margaret
I.MacDonald, ‘Trip to New Rochelle to the Thanhouser Plant,’ MP News, 5, no. 3 (20 January 1912), 28–30;
‘Roving commissioner,’ ‘A visit to the offices of the Powers Motion Picture Company’, MP News, 5, no. 12 (23
March 1912), 34.
9 Richard V.Spencer, ‘Los Angeles as a producing center,’ MPW, 8, no. 14 (8 April 1911), 768; ‘Los Angeles the
Mecca,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1679 (22 February 1911), 29–30; Batman, ‘Founding,’ 611–22; the Los Angeles number
of MPW, 25, no. 2 (10 July 1915); Robert Florey, Filmland (Paris: Editions de cinémagazine, 1923), pp. 31–42;
W.Wallace Clendenin, ‘Hollywood studios of the early years,’ IP, 6, no. 1 (February 1934), 12–13; Clifford M.
Zierer, ‘Hollywood—world center of motion picture production,’ in The Motion Picture Industry, ed. Gordon
S.Watkins (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947), pp. 12–17; Albert Marple,
‘Making pictures in California,’ The Motion Picture Supplement, 2, no. 2 (April 1916), 37–9, 73; Richard Alan
Nelson, ‘Movie mecca of the South: Jacksonville, Florida, as an early rival to Hollywood,’ Journal of Popular
Film and Television, 8, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 38–51.
10 ‘Four Vitagraph reels,’ MPW, 8, no. 26 (1 July 1911), 1506; ‘A glimpse behind the scenes,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12
August 1911), 380; P.M.Powell, ‘Doings in Los Angeles,’ MPW, 15, no. 2 (11 January 1913), 142; ‘Griffith
surrounds himself with screen notables,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 10 (22 November 1913), 1; ‘Where the movies are
made,’ Reel Life, 6, no. 9 (15 May 1915), 22; Richard V.Spencer, ‘Los Angeles notes,’ MPW, 8, no. 13 (1 April
1911), 704; Fred F. Balshofer and Arthur C. Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), p. 77; ‘Great activity at Keystone Studios in Edendale, Los Angeles, California,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 7 (1
November 1913), 3; ‘Heard in studio and exchange,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 4 (11 April 1914), 14; ‘Three companies
added to Keystone Organization,’ The Triangle, 1, no. 21 (11 March 1916), 3; ‘“More Keystones,” says Sennett,’
MPW, 27, no. 12 (18 March 1916), 1831.
11 Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week, p. 67; ‘Amicus,’ ‘Artistic directions of the photoplay,’ MPW, 10, no. 5 (4
November 1911), 369–70; ‘Separate producers for drama and comedy,’ MPW, 8, no. 14 (8 April 1911), 755–6;
Louis Reeves Harrison, ‘The reject manuscript,’ MPW, 8, no. 13 (1 April 1911), 695.
12 H.O.Stechhan, ‘Efficiency in studio management,’ Motography, 14, no. 8 (21 August 1915), 353.
13 On the changing physical arrangement of factories in the United States for a comparison to the film industry, see
Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States 1880–1920
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 11–33.
14 ‘The new Solax plant: A modern structure representing the last word in moving picture plant architecture,’
MPNews, 6, no. 12 (21 September 1912), 10–11.
15 H.Z.Levine, ‘Exchange Assets,’ MPW, 17, no. 7 (16 August 1913), 734.
16 ‘Improved facilities at Triangle-Fine Arts,’ The Triangle, 2, no. 8 (16 December 1916), 3; ‘Motion picture colony
under one roof,’ Scientific American, 120, no. 25 (21 June 1919), 651; also see on the 1919 Fox studio, ‘The Fox
film building,’ Architecture and Building, 52, no. 5 (May 1920), 53–4. ‘New Horsley Plant completed,’ Reel
Life, 6, no. 10 (31 July 1915), 21; Marple, ‘Making pictures in California,’ 37–9, 73.
17 ‘S. Lubin’s latest,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1718 (22 November 1911), 25; ‘Doin’ things at Lubin’s,’ MPW, 10, no. 7 (18
November 1911), 545; Nelson, Managers and Workers, pp. 101–21.
18 ‘Los Angeles letter,’ MPW, 25, no. 8 (21 August 1915), 1301.
19 S.M.Spedon, How and Where Moving Pictures are made by The Vitagraph Company of America (Brooklyn, New
York: Vitagraph Company of America, [1912]), [p. 13]; ‘Artisans of the motion picture film,’ Scientific
American, 115, no. 10 (2 September 1916), 210–11, 224–5; ‘Los Angeles letter,’ MPW, 25, no. 8 (21 August
1915), 1301; Carl Louis Gregory, ‘Motion picture photography,’ MPW, 25, no. 4 (24 July 1915), 654; ‘New
Inceville Studios represent millions,’ The Triangle, 2, no. 6 (27 May 1916), 6; ‘Thomas H.Ince in New York with
big plans for the future,’ The Triangle, 2, no. 5 (20 May 1916), 1; ‘Ince talks of Culver City,’ MPW, 28, no. 10 (3
June 1916), 1697; Frederick S.Mills, ‘Film lighting as a fine art,’ Scientific American, 124, no. 8 (19 February
1921), 148.
20 Spedon, How and Where, p. 13; Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week, p. 143.
21 Homer Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made (New York: Harper & Bros, 1918), pp. 134, 200; H.H.Van Loan,
‘How I Did It,’ (Los Angeles: The Whittingham Press, 1922), pp. 148–54; ‘Artisans of the motion picture films,’
Scientific American, 115, no. 10 (2 September 1916), 225; James Hood MacFarland, ‘Architectural problems in
motion picture production,’ American Architect, 118, no. 2326 (21 July 1920), 68–9; Jerome Lachenbruch, ‘The
photoplay architect,’ American Architecture, 120, no. 2377 (28 September 1921), 221; Edward Carrick, ‘Moving
picture sets: a medium for the architect,’ Architectural Record, 67, no. 5 (May 1930), 441.
22 ‘The ambiguous picture—some causes,’ MPW, 8, no. 1 (7 January 1911), 4.
23 Clara F.Beranger, ‘The photoplay—a new kind of drama,’ Harper’s Weekly, 56, no. 2907 (7 September 1912),
13; Eustace Hale Ball, The Art of the Photoplay (New York: Veritas Publishing Co., 1913), pp. 28, 38–9, 52–3;
Ernest A.Dench, Making the Movies (New York: Macmillan, 1915), pp. 2–3; C.G.Winkopp, How to Write a
Photoplay (New York: C.G.Winkopp, 1915), p. 9; Esenwein and Leeds, Writing the Photoplay, p. 200; Frances
Agnew, Motion Picture Acting (New York: Reliance Newspaper Syndicate, 1913), p. 79; John B. Rathbun,
‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’ Motography, 9, no. 11 (31 May 1913), 405–8. On inter-titles and
crosscutting see: Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Technique of the photoplay,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12 August 1911), 363–4;
Esenwein and Leeds, Writing the Photoplay, p. 180; Everett McNeil, ‘Outline of how to write a photoplay,’
MPW, 9, no. 1 (15 July 1911), 27; Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York:
The Moving Picture World, 1913), p. 49; reviews from 1909 excerpted and reprinted in Spellbound in Darkness,
ed. Pratt, pp. 59–60; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The technique of the photoplay,’ MPW, 9, no. 7 (26 August 1911),
525; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 18, no. 12 (20 December 1913), 1405.
24 Archer McMackin, ‘How moving picture plays are written,’ NKL, 2, no. 6 (December 1909), 172–3; Edward
W.Townsend, ‘Picture plays,’ Outlook, 93 (27 November 1909), 704–6.
Chapter 12
The central producer system: centralized management after 1914
1 Douglas Gomery, ‘The economics of U.S. film exhibition and practice,’ Ciné-Tracts, no. 12 (Winter 1981), 36–
40.
2 ‘Keith’s Union Square—Vaudeville,’ NYDM 33, no. 858 (8 June 1895), 10.
3 Joseph Medill Patterson, ‘The nickelodeons: the poor man’s elementary course in the drama,’ The Saturday
Evening Post, 180, no. 21 (23 November 1907), 10–11, 38, rpt in Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent
Film, ed. George C.Pratt, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 46, 48–52; Russell
Merritt, ‘Nickelodeon theaters 1905–1914: building an audience for the movies,’ in The American Film Industry,
ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 59–79; Douglas Gomery, Lectures, Seminar
in Social and Economic Problems in American Film History (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fall 1977);
Robert C.Allen, ‘Motion picture exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: beyond the nickelodeon,’ Cinema Journal,
18, no. 2 (Spring 1979), 2– 15.
4 Allen, ‘Motion picture exhibition,’ 12; Patterson, ‘The nickelodeons,’ p. 48.
5 ‘Construction/decorations,’ MPW, 8, no. 2 (14 January 1911), 82. Also see: ‘A matter of evolution,’ NYDM, 65,
no. 1672 (4 January 1911), 3.
6 Robert Grau, ‘The theatre of cinematography,’ MPW, 8, no. 17 (29 April 1911), 936; ‘Achievements of
“Nineteen-Eleven,”’MPW, 11, no. 2 (13 January 1912), 106–7; ‘Observations by our man about town,’ MPW, 9,
no. 6 (19 August 1911), 453.
7 Ad, MPW, 8, no. 4 (28 January 1911), 203; David Sherrill Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago:
American School of Correspondence, 1911), vol. 2, p. 171; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Buying a theater,’ MPW, 11,
no. 12 (23 March 1912), 1047; C.B. Crain, Jr, ‘Choosing the location,’ MPW, 21, no. 8 (22 August 1914), 1088–
9; Richard V.Spencer, ‘The “Liberty Theater,” Los Angeles,’ MPW, 8, no. 13 (1 April 1911), 701; ‘Proper
illumination of moving picture and other theaters,’ MPW, 8, no. 4 (28 January 1911), 184; Frederick A. Taylor,
Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, new ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1914), pp. 139–
40; Clarence E.Sinn, ‘Music for the picture,’ MPW, 8, no. 8 (25 February 1911), 409; Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Music
and the movies,’ Musical Quarterly, 15, no. 2 (April 1929), 281–96; ‘The voice with the picture,’ MPW, 8, no.
13 (1 April 1911), 706; ‘A screen suggestion,’ MPW, 8, no. 14 (8 April 1911), 754; ‘Checking room in moving
picture houses,’ MPW, 8, no. 23 (10 June 1911), 1312; ‘Theater chair signalling,’ MPW, 24, no. 13 (26 June
1915), 2104.
8 ‘About moving picture films,’ Complete Illustrated Catalog of Moving Picture Films, Stereopticons, Slides,
Films (Chicago: Kleine Optical Co., October 1904), pp. 30–1, rpt in Spellbound in Darkness, ed. Pratt, pp. 36–7.
9 W.Stephen Bush, ‘Feature programs,’ MPW, 14, no. 6 (9 November 1912), 529. Also see ‘The Kinetogram,’ EK,
3, no. 3 (1 September 1910), 2.
10 Exhibitors still had advertising problems, particularly the daily change. Samples of contemporary analyses are
throughout the trade papers but see: L.F. Cook, ‘Advertising the picture theater,’ NKL, 3, no. 9 (1 May 1910),
331–2; John M.Bradlet, ‘The open market,’ MPW, 8, no. 7 (10 February 1911), 349–51; ‘How he got them
coming,’ MPW, 8, no. 5 (4 February 1911), 252; ‘The will o’ the wisp,’ MPW, 8, no. 23 (10 June 1911), 1294;
Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Advertising for exhibitors,’ MPW, 9, no. 11 (23 September 1911), 876. These are
symptomatic as well of how the discourse of the industry diffused particular economic and ideological/signifying
practices.
11 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), p. 386. Brownlow gives
background information on the theatrical presentation.
12 Ralph Cassady, Jr, ‘Monopoly in motion picture production and distribution: 1908–1915,’ Southern California
Law Review, 32, no. 4 (Summer 1959), 375–6; Georges Sadoul, Histoire de l’art du cinéma: Des origines a nos
jours, 3rd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1949), pp. 71–3; ‘Noted dramatists to write moving picture plays,’ MPW, 2,
no. 13 (28 March 1908), 263; ‘Motion picture play writing as an art,’ EK, 1, no. 3 (1 September 1909), 12.
13 Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness, p. 86; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1676 (1 February
1911), 29; ‘Higher ideals,’ MPW, 8, no. 24 (17 June 1911), 1355.
14 ‘Facts and comments,’ MPW, 9, no. 6 (19 August 1911), 436.
15 ‘Reviews of notable films,’ and W.Stephen Bush, ‘Standard fiction in films,’ MPW, 9, no. 12 (30 September
1911), 954–6, 950–3; W.Stephen Bush, ‘Do longer films make better show?’ MPW, 10, no. 4 (28 October 1911),
275; ‘Another step forward,’ MPW, 9, no. 2 (22 July 1911), 102; ‘Mabel Taliaferro on new years,’ NYDM, 66,
no. 1721 (13 December 1911), 29; ‘Mildred Holland in pictures,’ MPW, 10, no. 11 (16 December 1911), 881.
16 W.Stephen Bush, ‘Do longer films make better show?’ MPW, 10, no. 4 (28 October 1911), 275.
17 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 386; Jeanne Allen, ‘Copyright protection in theatre, vaudeville and early
cinema,’ Screen,21, no. 2 (Summer 1980), 79–91.
18 K.S.Hover, ‘The Ben Hur copyright case,’ NKL, 2, no. 3 (September 1909), 82.
19 Gene Gauntier, ‘Blazing the trail,’ Woman’s Home Companion, 55, no. 10 (October 1928), 186; K.S. Hover,
‘The “Ben Hur” copyright case,’ NKL, 2, no. 3 (September 1909), 81–2; ‘Ben-Hur case finally decided,’ NYDM,
66, no. 1718 (22 November 1911), 26; Epes W.Sargent, ‘The Ben Hur Case,’ MPW, 10, no. 10 (9 December
1911), 793. This decision was reaffirmed in Famous Players v. Selig Polyscope (1913); see ‘Famous Players film
company wins legal battle,’ MPNews, 7, no. 3 (18 January 1913), 17.
20 Epes W.Sargent, ‘The Ben Hur case,’ MPW, 10, no. 10 (9 December 1911), 793; William Lord Wright, ‘William
Lord Wright’s page,’ MP News, 5, no. 2 (13 January 1912), 32.
21 Richard V.Spencer, ‘Los Angeles notes,’ MPW, 8, no. 11 (18 March 1911), 587; ‘For those who worry o’er plots
& plays,’ MP News, 6, no. 3 (20 July 1912), 20–1; ‘Eclair Co. gets exclusive rights to O.Henry stories,’ MP
News, 7, no. 4 (25 January 1913), 15; ‘Lubin gets Klein plays,’ MPW, 15, no. 6 (8 February 1913), 552; ‘Adolph
Zukor, the benefactor of posterity,’ MP News 7, no. 4 (25 January 1913), 14–15; ‘Lasky gets Belasco plays,’
MPW, 10, no. 10 (6 June 1914);W.Stephen Bush, ‘Belasco on motion pictures,’ MPW, 20, no. 11 (13 June 1914),
1513.
22 William Lord Wright, ‘For photoplay authors real and near,’ NYDM, 75, no. 1934 (15 January 1916), 35; ‘Woods
buys The Cheat,’ Variety, 42, no. 8 (21 April 1916), 3; Alfred A.Cohn, ‘The author gets his,’ Photoplay, 13
(February 1918), 79–80, 122.
23 William Lord Wright, ‘For photoplay authors, real and near,’ NYDM, 74, no. 1910 (28 July 1915), 30; Walter
Prichard Eaton, ‘The latest menace of the movies,’ The North American Review, 212 (July 1920), 80–7.
24 ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1676 (1 February 1911), 29; ‘Three reel pictures a
success,’ MPW, 8, no. 12 (25 March 1911), 639; ‘Romeo and Juliet in two reels,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12 August
1911), 380; ‘Three reel subjects in one day,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1708 (13 September 1911), 22; ‘Spectator,’
‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1709 (20 September 1911) 26; ‘Bison-101 feature pictures,’ MPW,
11, no. 4 (27 January 1912), 298; W.Stephen Bush, ‘The feature of the single reel,’ MPW, 16, no. 3 (19 April
1913), 256; ‘Facts and comments,’ MPW, 17, no. 5 (2 August 1913), 511; ‘Facts and comments,’ MPW, 19, no. 1
(3 January 1914), 22; W.Stephen Bush, ‘Feature programs,’ MPW, 14, no. 6 (9 November 1912), 529; John M.
Bradlet, ‘Exhibitors’ meeting at Columbus, Ohio— national league proposed,’ MPW, 8, no. 20 (20 May 1911),
1124.
25 Ad, ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ MPW 8, no. 27 (8 July 1911), 1594–5; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 66,
no. 1703 (9 August 1911), 20.
26 ‘A great triumph,’ MPW, 9, no. 7 (26 August 1911), 530.
27 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The feature and the price,’ MPW, 13, no. 5 (3 August 1912), 431; ‘Enoch Arden’ and
‘Lectures for superior plays,’ MPW, 8, no. 24 (17 June 1911), 1358–9; ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic—
Vitagraph,’ MPW, 8, no. 26 (1 July 1911), 1497; James S.McQuade ‘The Coming of Columbus; MPW,
(September 1912), rpt. in Kalton C.Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (Cranbury,
New Jersey: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1973), pp. 124–7; James S.McQuade, ‘The Belasco of motion picture
presentations,’ MPW, 10, no. 10 (9 December 1911), 796–8; James S. McQuade, ‘A de luxe presentation of
Cinderella,’ MPW, 11, no. 4 (24 January 1912), 288.
28 ‘Will present big productions,’ MPW, 11, no. 2 (13 January 1912), 109–10; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s”
comments,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1739 (17 April 1912), 24–5.
29 ‘Roving commissioner,’ ‘Great Northern Special Feature Film Co.,’ MP News, 5, no. 1 (6 January 1912), 13.
Also see: J.Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, Writing the Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: The Home
Correspondence School, 1913), p. 145; William Lord Wright, ‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’ MP
News, 8, nos. 12 and 13 (20 September 1913 and 27 September 1913), 16 and 22.
30 ‘Picture and stage realism,’ MPW, 15, no. 5 (1 February 1913), 477.
31 Robert Grau, ‘Is the two-dollar-a-seat picture theater in sight?’ MPW, 9, no. 12 (30 September 1911), 959; ‘The
listener chatters,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 3 (4 April 1914), 6; C.W.Garrison, ‘Fortunes in the movies’, Photoplay, 6, no.
5 (October 1914), 169; ‘The listener chatters,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 4 (11 April 1914), 6.
32 ‘Birth of a Nation closes New York run,’ MPW, 27, no. 2 (8 January 1916), 250; ‘Griffith engages theater,’
MPW, 23, no. 8 (20 February 1915); Richard Dale Batman, ‘The founding of the Hollywood motion picture
industry,’ Journal of the West, 10 (October 1971), 623; William Lord Wright, ‘For photoplay authors, real and
near,’ NYDM, 74, no. 1908 (14 July 1915), 30; ‘Long runs more general,’ MPW, 26, no. 1 (2 October 1915),
114; ‘Production values of certain film dramas,’ The Triangle, 1, no. 1 (30 October 1915), 4.
33 Don D.Lescohier, ‘Working conditions,’ in History of Labor in the United States, ed. John R.Commons (1935; rpt,
New York: Augustus M.Kelley, 1966), vol. 3, pp. 303–15. I am following Lescohier but also see Harry
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 85–137; David F.Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the
Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 82–3; Daniel Nelson, Managers and
Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1975), pp. 48–78. Richard Edwards has written an excellent account of the types of control over the
worker, moving from simple control to technical and bureaucratic control. See his Contested Terrain: The
Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
34 Thomas Nixon Carver, ‘The economic foundations: the condition of large-scale production,’ in Scientific
Foundations of Business Administration, ed. Henry Clayton Metcalf (New York: Williams & Wilkins Co.,
1926), p. 73.
35 ‘Putting the move in the movies,’ Saturday Evening Post, 188, no. 46 (13 May 1916), 14–15, 96–8, 100–1.
36* The term ‘unit’ has continued, however, to describe the production personnel assigned to any particular project.
Thus, although in subsequent years the industry spoke of units, they were either temporary, one-film groupings
or a holdover from the multiple-unit production system. In the 1940s, when the majors started moving into financing
and supplying rental space for independent projects (see chapter 26), those groups were also called units.
37 ‘Universal issues a strong program,’ MP News, 5, no. 23 (8 June 1912), 20; ‘H.O.Davis talks system,’ MPW, 28,
no. 7 (13 May 1916), 1142.
38 W.E.Wing, ‘Tom Ince, of Inceville,’ NYDM, 70, no. 1827 (24 December 1913), 34.
39 Janet Staiger, ‘Dividing labor for production control: Thomas Ince and the rise of the studio system,’ Cinema
Journal, 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979), 16–25.
40 E.W.S., ‘Changes in Lubinville,’ MPW, 16, no. 8 (24 May 1913), 790; ‘For those who worry o’er plots and
plays,’ MPNews, 7, no. 25 (21 June 1913), 16.
41 ‘Studio efficiency,’ MPW, 17, no. 6 (9 August 1913), 624.
42 ‘Studio management,’ MPW, 26, no. 6 (30A October 1915), 982; ‘The higher efficiency,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 1
(15 December 1916), 6; ‘Here’s efficiency for you,’ Motography, 19, no. 15 (13 April 1918), 707.
43 ‘Jesse L.Lasky announces plans,’ NYDM, 77, no. 2003 (12 May 1917), 22.
44 William S.Hart, My Life East and West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 211. Kevin Brownlow lists some of
the famous teams in the silent period in The Parade’s Gone By, p. 71.
45 Aitken Brothers Papers, 1909–39, Boxes 1–9: Scripts and Scenarios, TS and MS (Madison, Wisconsin:
Wisconsin State Historical Society and Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research).
46 Peter Milne, Motion Picture Directing (New York: Falk, 1922), p. 136.
47 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, pp. 85–93, 282; on the theatrical work procedure of that period see: Arthur
Edwin Krows, Play Production in America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916). Charles Chaplin also
employed this scripting method until The Great Dictator, see Timothy J.Lyons, ed., ‘Roland H.Totheroh
interviewed: Chaplin films,’ Film Culture, nos. 53–54–55 (Spring 1972), 238–46.
48 Milne, Motion Picture Directing, p. 76.
49 Besides Brownlow and Milne, see Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith, ed. Kevin Brownlow (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973); C. Blythe Sherwood, ‘The art director is accredited: the vision that makes Dream
Street come true,’ Arts and Decoration, 15 (May 1921), 36–7.
50 Milne, Motion Picture Directing, pp. 42–3, 52; Cecil B.DeMille, ‘Building a photoplay,’ in The Story of the
Films, ed. Joseph P. Kennedy (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Co., 1927), pp. 123–50; Frances Taylor Patterson, Scenario
and Screen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928), pp. 91–4; Bert Glennon, ‘Cinematography and the
talkies,’ AC, 10, no. 11 (February 1930), 7, 45.
51 ‘Playing the end game,’ Time, 30 July 1979, p. 84.
52 ‘Chaplin seeks to enjoin Carmen,’ MPW, 28, no. 6 (6 May 1916), 949; ‘Essanay vs. Chaplin,’ MPW, 28, no. 10
(3 June 1916), 1704; ‘No injunction for Chaplin,’ MPW, 28, no. 11 (10 June 1916), 1897; ‘Chaplin loses Carmen
suit,’ MPW, 29, no. 2 (8 July 1916), 236. On employer-employee law for the period, see: Louis D.Frohlich and
Charles Schwartz, The Law of Motion Pictures Including the Law of the Theater (New York: Baker, Voorhis, &
Co., 1918), pp. 26–7, 109, 169, 205–6.
53 Charles Higham, Warner Brothers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), p. 23.
54 Jon Tuska, The Detective in Hollywood (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978), pp. 296–7.
Chapter 13
The division and order of production: the subdivision of the work from the first years through the
1920s
1 ‘A Bird’s-eye view of the Lasky studio at Hollywood, California,’ Photoplay, 13, no. 6 (May 1918), 30–1; ‘From
forest to film,’ Photoplay, 13, no. 5 (April 1918), 94.
3 For background on US advertising history, see Alex Groner, The American Heritage History of American
Business & Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 255, 262.
4 ‘Giving the public what it wants,’ Motography, 15, no. 3 (15 January 1916), 113–14; William W. Hodkinson,
‘Stage stars must prove their worth,’ Motography, 15, no. 5 (29 January 1916), 235–6; ‘New department
installed,’ Motography, 18, no. 2 (14 July 1917), 98; Jesse L. Lasky, ‘Production problems,’ in The Story of the
Films, ed. Joseph P. Kennedy (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Co., 1927), p. 118; Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture
Industry (New York: D.Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1933), pp. 37–44, 87–9; Howard Thompson Lewis, Cases on the
Motion Picture Industry (Harvard Business Reports, vol. 8) (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1930), pp. 132–
7.
5 Cecil B.DeMille, ‘Building a photoplay,’ in The Story of the Films, ed. Kennedy, pp. 134–5; Lewis, the Motion
Picture Industry, pp. 37–40.
6 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 15, no. 1 (4 January 1913), 44; Frederick James Smith, ‘The
evolution of the motion picture, V: from the standpoint of the player,’ NYDM, 69, no. 1800 (18 June 1913), 24–5;
Eustace Hale Ball, The Art of the Photoplay (New York: Veritas Publishing Co., 1913), p. 26; William Lord
Wright, Photoplay Writing (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922), pp. 171–3; George Landy, ‘The mysterious
assistant director,’ PTD, 4, no. 6 (November 1922), 17–18, 42.
7 ‘Twentieth Century-Fox,’ Fortune, 12 (December 1935), 85.
8 Price, Waterhouse & Co., Memorandum on Moving Picture Accounts (New York: Price, Waterhouse & Co.,
1916), pp. 11–18.
9 Price, Waterhouse & Co., Memorandum, pp. 11–18; Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema (New York:
A.S.Barnes & Co., 1970), p. 23; Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, new
ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1914), pp. 172–4; Kalton C.Lahue, Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig
Polyscope Company (Cranbury, New Jersey: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1973), pp. 128–9; Wright, Photoplay Writing,
pp. 105–8; Walter B. Pitkin and William M.Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures (New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1930), pp. 274–9; Earl Theisen, ‘Hollywood notebook,’ IP, 7, no. 1 (February 1935), 10.
10 Cedric Gibbons, ‘The art director,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made (New York: Dodge Publishing
Co., 1938), p. 47.
11 Homer Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made (New York: Harper & Bros, 1918), pp. 148–50.
12 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 14, no. 11 (14 December 1912), 1075; ‘Studio gossip,’
NYDM, 66, no. 1708 (13 September 1911), 23; ‘A lady scenario editor,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1726 (17 January 1912),
29; ‘With the western producers,’ MPW, 9 (19 August 1911), 449.
13 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The earmark on the film,’ MPW, 9, no. 7 (26 August 1911), 521; Joseph Medill
Patterson, ‘The nickelodeon, the poor man’s elementary course in the drama,’ The Saturday Evening Post, 180,
no. 21 (23 November 1907), 10–11, 38, rpt. in Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film, ed. George
C.Pratt, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 46, 48– 52; Archer McMackin, ‘How
moving picture plays are written,’ NKL, 2, no. 6 (December 1909), 171–3; ‘Motion picture play writing as an
art,’ EK, 1, no. 3 (1 September 1909), 12; ‘Giving credit where credit is due,’ MPW, 6, no. 10 (12 March 1910),
370; R.V.S., ‘Scenario construction,’ MPW, 8, no. 6 (11 February 1911), 294; Eugene Dengler, ‘Wonders of the
Diamond-S Plant,’ Motography, 6, no. 1 (July 1911), 7–19; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’
MPW, 13, no. 11 (14 September 1912), 1073; Lawrence S.McCloskey, The professional writer and the
photoplay,’ MPW, 14, no. 4 (26 October 1912), 341; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 14,
no. 9 (30 November 1912), 874; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 14, no. 10 (7 December
1912), 973. Even in the ‘high’ period of purchasing manuscripts from unknowns (1908–14), the usual acceptance
rate was generally given as 1 per cent of submissions; see, for instance, Frederick James Smith, ‘The evolution of
the motion picture, IV: from the standpoint of the scenario editor,’ NYDM, 69, no. 1798 (4 June 1913), 25, 32. On
selling a script in the mid-1920s, see Laurence D’Orsay, ‘Can I sell my scenario?’ The Writer’s Monthly, 28, no.
4 (October 1926), 301.
14 Frederick James Smith, ‘The evolution of the motion picture, IV: from the standpoint of the scenario editor,’
NYDM, 69, no. 1798 (4 June 1913), 25; ‘The technical difficulties of scenario writing,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 9 (15
November 1913), 3; ‘Noted authors to write for Mutual,’ MPW, 19, no. 1 (3 January 1914), 29; ‘The listener
chatters,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 5 (18 April 1914), 6; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 23, no. 4
(23 January 1915), 510.
15 S.M.Spedon, How and Where Moving Pictures are made by The Vitagraph Company of America (Brooklyn, New
York: Vitagraph Company of America [1912]), [p. 20]; William E.Wing quoted in William Lord Wright, ‘For
photoplay authors, real and near,’ NYDM, 74, no. 1908 (14 July 1915), 30.
16 Wright, Photoplay Writing, p. 219.
17 Clifford Howard, ‘Author and talkies,’ Close Up, 5, no. 3 (September 1929), 222–3; Wright, Photoplay Writing,
p. 219; Clifford Howard, ‘A Hollywood close-up,’ Close Up, 2, no. 1 (January 1928), 12–22.
18 Backgrounds are in: The 1933 Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publishing Co., 1933); ‘The
Personal Side of the Pictures,’ Reel Life, 5, no. 12 (5 December 1914), 18.
19 Arthur Edwin Krows, ‘Once more—consider the status of motion pictures,’ The Triangle, 3, no. 3 (4 November
1916), 15; Joseph Henabery quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf,
1968), pp. 50–6; Lee Royal The Romance of Motion Picture Production (Los Angeles: Royal Publishing Co.,
1920), p. 32; Melvin Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 8 (January 1922), 35–7; G.Harrison Wiley,
‘Solving Your Photoplay Puzzles,’ PTD 4, no. 9 (February 1923), 21–4.
20 Lewis S.Physioc, ‘The scenic artist (the cameraman’s new ally),’ IP, 8, no. 2 (March 1936), 3, 22– 3; David
Sherrill Hulfish, Cyclopedia of MotionPicture Work (Chicago: American School of Correspondence, 1911), vol.
2, p. 28.
21 ‘Freelance,’ ‘Seen on the curtain,’ MPW, 8, no. 20 (20 May 1911), 1120–1. Specific background on
contemporary theatrical sets is in Brander Matthews, A Book about the Theater (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1916), pp. 127–40; Brooks McNamara, ‘Scene design: 1876–1965: Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg,’ Drama
Review, 13, no. 2 (Winter 1968), 77–91; Elizabeth R.Hunt, ‘Acting scenery,’ The Drama, no. 8 (November
1912), 153– 62; and histories of the theater in general.
22 Lucy Frances Pierce, ‘The nickelodeon,’ NKL, 1, no. 1 (January 1909), 7–10; Mabel Condon, ‘What happens to
the scenario,’ Motography, 9, no. 5 (1 March 1913), 149, 151; Epes Winthrop Sargent, The Technique of the
Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York: Moving Picture World, 1913), p. 21; ‘The technical director,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 6
(25 April 1914), 26; Fred F.Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel A Week (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), p. 130; ‘Scene building for our Mutual girl,’ Reel Life, 5, no. 1 (19 September 1914), 23.
23* Before coming to screen work, Brunton had been the technical director and property master for the Boston Opera
Company and had designed for A.L. Erlanger, Alfred A.Aarons, and Florenz Ziegfeld. He did the scenery and
stage effects for the 1914, 1915, and 1916 Follies. See The 1933 Motion Picture Almanac.
24 On ‘new stagecraft’ and lighting conventions which started in the US in 1911, see William Leigh Sowers, ‘The
progress of the new stagecraft in America,’ The Drama, no. 28 (November 1917), 570– 89; Arthur Pollock,
‘Illumination and the drama,’ The Drama, no. 13 (February 1914), 93–109; Francis Lament Pierce, ‘Youth, Art,
and Mr. Belasco,’ The Drama, no. 26 (May 1917), 176–91; Arthur Edwin Krows, Play Production in America
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916), p. 157; Oral Sumner Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr, The American Stage (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929), p. 337. ‘Artisans of the motion picture films,’ Scientific American,
115, no. 10 (2 September 1916), 224; Arthur Edwin Krows, ‘Once more—consider the status of motion pictures,’
The Triangle, 3, no. 3 (4 November 1916), 15; Edwin Jay Herts, ‘The importance to the film of interior details,’
MPW, 26, no. 5 (30 October 1915), 781; Alfred A.Cohn, ‘The art director,’ Photoplay, 10, no. 3 (August 1916),
43–6, 177; Kenneth MacGowan, ‘As the movies mend,’ The Seven Arts, 2 (September 1917), 665–7; The 1933
Motion Picture Almanac; J.C. Jessner, ‘In and out of Los Angeles studios,’ MP News, 11, no. 24 (19 June 1915),
48. Also see: John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (1920; rpt, Philadelphia: George W.Jacobs
& Co., 1923), p. 87; Austin Celestin Lescarboura, Behind the Motion Picture Screen, 2nd ed. (New York:
Scientific American Publishing Co., 1921), pp. 116–20; G. Harrison Wiley, ‘The dream factory,’ PTD, 3, no. 4
(September 1921), 21–4; Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 8 (January 1922), 35–7; Jack
Grant, ‘Hollywood’s art director,’ AC, 22, no. 5 (May 1941), 219.
25 James Hood MacFarland, ‘Architectural problems in motion picture production,’ American Architect, 118, no.
2326 (21 July 1920), 67–8.
26 Ibid., 65–6; ‘The architecture of motion picture settings,’ American Architect, 118, no. 2324 (7 July 1920), 1–5;
The 1933 Motion Picture Almanac.
27 Jerome Lachenbruch, ‘The photoplay architect,’ American Architect, 120, no. 2377 (28 September 1921), 220.
28 Ball, The Art of the Photoplay, pp. 20–2; Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made, pp. 120–1; Lescarboura, Behind
the Motion Picture Screen, p. 32; Melvin M. Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 11 (April 1922), 25–
6; Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 4, no. 3 (August 1922), 9–10.
29 H.H.Van Loan, ‘How I Did It; (Los Angeles: Whittingham Press, 1922), pp. 149–53; Clifford Howard, ‘A
Hollywood close-up,’ Close Up, 2, no. 1 (January 1928), 21; Tim Onosko, ‘Made in Hollywood, USA: a
conversation with A. Arnold Gillespie,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 18 (Spring 1978), 46–50.
30 Frances Agnew, Motion Picture Acting (New York: Reliance Newspaper Syndicate, 1913), p. 76; Sargent, The
Technique of the Photoplay, p. 21; ‘Making wardrobes for the movies,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 2 (28 March 1914), iii.
31 ‘Los Angeles letter,’ MPW, 25, no. 8 (21 August 1915), 1301; Slide, Early American Cinema, p. 70; Melvin
M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 9 (February 1922), 29–30; Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to
silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 10 (March 1922), 31–2.
32 Joseph Henabery in Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 44; Agnew, Motion Picture Acting, pp. 49–51; Croy,
How Motion Pictures Are Made, pp. 114–15; ‘Casting efficiency,’ MPW, 26, no. 11 (11 December 1915), 1985;
Mary Pickford in Cinema: A Practical Course in Cinema Acting (London: Standard Art Book Co., [1919]), p.
29; Royal, The Romance of Motion Picture Production, pp. 30–4; Lescarboura, Behind the Motion Picture
Screen, p. 32; Wright, Photoplay Writing, pp. 170–3; Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 3, no. 12
(May 1922), 25–6; Edgar J.Kelly and Muro, Acting for Pictures: How Its [sic] Done and How To Do It (New
Orleans: Coste & Frichter Publishing Co., 1916), p. 14; Inez and Helen Klumph, Screen Acting: Its Requirements
and Rewards (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922), p. 165.
33 Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp.
64–88; ‘Academy discourages would-be celebrities,’ The Ohio Showman, 8, no. 3 (24 February 1931), 1.
34 Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 4, no. 1 (June 1922), 25–6; James Barker, ‘Make-up for fast
film,’ AC, 12, no. 7 (November 1931), 11; Earl Theisen, ‘The Max Factor make-up factory,’ IP, 6, no. 6 (July
1934), 9. On make-up standards during the orthochromatic period, see: Agnew, Motion Picture Acting, pp. 77–8;
William Lord Wright, ‘William Lord Wright’s page,’ MPNews, 7, no. 2 (11 January 1913), 14; Frederick James
Smith, ‘The evolution of the motion picture, VII: from the standpoint of the photoplaywright,’ NYDM, 70, no.
1805 (23 July 1913), 31; Catherine Carr, ed., The Art of Photoplay Writing (New York: Hannis Jordon Co.,
1914), p. 46; Frank Westmore and Murial Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (New York: Berkeley
Publishing Corporation, 1976), pp. 35, 402, 60–3.
35 Ball, The Art of the Photoplay, p. 22; John H. Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’ Motography, 9,
no. 8 (19 April 1913), 275–8; ‘The new Solax Plant,’ MP News, 6, no. 12 (21 September 1912), 10–11; Epes
Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 17, no. 8 (23 August 1913), 837; Karl Brown, Adventures with
D,W. Griffith, ed. Kevin Brownlow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 16; Maltin, The Art of the
Cinematographer, p. 82.
36* Cinematographers have been much more traditional than their colleagues in the training of their craftspeople.
Many started at the ‘bottom,’ working in the laboratories and moving up to assistants and finally head
cameramen. Coming from a family of still photographers, Tony Gaudio first worked in Vitagraph’s laboratory
and in 1911 took charge of all the cameramen at IMP in Los Angeles. Besides Brown, Sidney Hickox, Jackson
Rose, Gregg Toland, and many others also progressed through a semi-formal apprenticeship. The early formation
in 1914 of cinematographers’ clubs also indicates the same concern for craft tradition and training. See The 1933
Motion Picture Almanac.
37 Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith, pp. 14–18; Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 4, no. 5
(October 1922), 9–10. Also see: Carl Louis Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, ed. Herbert C.McKay, 2nd
ed. (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1927), p. 25; William Luhr and Peter Lehman, ‘“Would you mind just
trying it?’: an interview with special effects artist Linwood Dunn, ASC,’ Wide Angle, 1, no. 1 (rev. ed.) (1979),
78–9.
38 Carl Louis Gregory, ‘Motion picture photography,’ MPW, 25, no. 8 (21 August 1915), 1315; H. Lyman
Broening, ‘The cinematographer’s investment,’ AC, 4, no. 7 (October 1923), 4; Gregory, Motion Picture
Photography, p. 92.
39 ‘Special order no. 20,’ 26 November 1924, Thomas Ince Papers (New York: Museum of Modern Art); George
Landy, ‘The mysterious assistant director,’ PTD, 4, no. 6 (November 1922), 17–18, 42; C.H. Mitchell, Assistant
Director’s Compendium (Hollywood: Jesse L.Lasky Feature Play Company, April 1916).
40 Agnew, Motion Picture Acting, p. 79; John B. Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’ Motography, 9,
no. 11 (31 May 1913), 407; J.Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, Writing the Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: Home
Correspondence School, 1913), p. 200; Klumph and Klumph, Screen Acting, p. 175.
41 ‘How the cinematographer works,’ MPW, 1, no. 19 (13 July 1907), 298, 300; Peter Milne, Motion Picture
Directing (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922), pp. 162–3; ‘Spoor adds orchestra,’ MPW, 26, no. 5 (30
October 1915), 805; ‘Music for Equitable players,’ MPW, 27, no. 4 (22 January 1916), 605; Croy, How Motion
Pictures Are Made, p. 130.
42 James E.McQuade, ‘Making “Selig” Pictures,’ The Film Index, 4, no. 47 (20 November 1909), 4–6, rpt in Lahue,
Motion Picture Pioneer, p. 58; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1681 (8 March 1911), 29;
Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made, pp. 110, 120.
43* Stars had been insured for the production period from at least mid-1914. Thomas Ince’s studio bought a $25,000
policy on George Beban when ‘Beban nearly lost his life under a street car, after falling from an automobile.’ In
October 1915 the New York Motion Picture Co. took out a policy on Ince’s life for $250,000 which they
announced ‘marks a new epoch in the taking of precautionary measures against financial loss.’ The beneficiary was
the company. By 1925, ‘freak insurance policies’ also had publicity value. Photoplay listed some: Louise
Fazenda had her $100,000 policy that her braids would not be hurt or cut; Cecille Evans was ‘the first girl to have
her legs insured’—for $100,000; Ramon Novarro was insured for $3,000,000 to protect the investment in Ben
Hur; and Ben Turpin would collect $100,000 if his eyes went straight. ‘In and out of Los Angeles studios,’
MPNews, 10, no. 19 (14 November 1914), 35–7; ‘Los Angeles film brevities,’ MPW, 26, no. 4 (23 October
1915), 604; Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made, p. 120; ‘Some freak insurance policies,’ Photoplay, 28, no. 6
(November 1925), 40–1.
44 ‘Manufacture of moving pictures is a science,’ The Show World (6 July 1907), 17; Lescarboura, Behind the
Motion Picture Screen, p. 28; Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work, vol. 2, pp. 106, 138 (Hulfish says
that multiple cameras with different makes were also used to confuse Patents Company’s detectives); Croy, How
Motion Pictures Are Made, p. 126.
45 Alice Eyton,‘“Unknown” women of the films,’ The Story World and Photodramatist, 4, no. 10 (April 1923), 38;
L.C.MacBean, Kinematograph Studio Technique (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1922), p. 15; ‘Long shot,
medium shot and close-up,’ Photoplay, 21, no. 3 (February 1922), 30; Klumph and Klumph, Screen Acting, p. 49;
Frances Taylor Patterson, Scenario and Screen (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1928), p. 94; Virgil E.Miller,
Splinters from Hollywood Tripods (New York: Exposition, 1964), between pp. 62–3; Helen Starr, ‘Putting it
together,’ Photoplay, 14, no. 2 (July 1918), 52–4; ‘Following the magic camera on locations east and west,’
Photoplay, 21, no. 5 (April 1922), 29.
46 Eugene Dengler, ‘Wonders of the “Diamond-S” Plant,’ Motography, 6, no. 1 (July 1911), 15; ‘A glimpse behind
the scene,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12 August 1911), 380.
47 Ball, The Art of the Photoplay, pp. 26–8; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 15, no. 1 (4
January 1913), 44; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 17, no. 8 (23 August 1913), 837; ‘The
cutting of a moving picture,’ Reel Life, 3, no. 26 (14 March 1914), vi; Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer, p.
78; ‘Ince’s big picture completed,’ MPW, 27, no. 10 (11 March 1916), 1638; Starr, ‘Putting it together,’ 52–3;
Jack G.Leo, ‘Greater scenario department,’ MPW, 33, no. 3 (21 July 1917), 382; Royal, Romance of Motion
Picture Production, p. 42; Emerson and Loos, How To Write Photoplays, pp. 38–9; Frances Taylor Patterson,
Cinema Craftsmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1921), pp. 92–4;
Wright, Photoplay Writing, pp. 73–4; Bradley King, ‘More studio secrets,’ PTD, 3, no. 12 (May 1922), 5–6;
Melvin M.Riddle, ‘From pen to silversheet,’ PTD, 4, no. 7 (December 1922), 9–10.
48 Harry E.Aitken, ‘Out of quantity—quality,’ MPW, 21, no. 2 (11 July 1914), 211; ‘Metro-GoldwynMayer,’
Fortune, 6 (December 1932), 51–8+, rpt in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison, Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 258; also see for a case of extensive revisions after previews: Robert E.
Sherwood, ‘The phantom jinx,’ Photoplay Magazine, 29, no. 2 (January 1926), 113, rpt in Spellbound in
Darkness, ed. Pratt, pp. 394–6.
49 ‘Incidental music for Edison pictures,’ EK, 1, no. 4 (15 September 1909), 12–13; Clarence E.Sinn, ‘Music for the
picture,’ MPW, 8, no. 24 (17 June 1911), 1370; Clarence E.Sinn, ‘Music for the picture,’ MPW, 9, no. 2 (22 July
1911), 116; Max Winkler, ‘The origin of film music,’ Films in Review, 2, no. 10 (December 1951), 34–42; Carl
Van Vechten, Music and Bad Manners (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1916), p. 53.
Part Three
The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28
1 Robert Herring, ‘Enthusiasm?,’ Close Up, 9, no. 1 (March 1932): 23–4.
Chapter 14
From primitive to classical
1 André Gaudreault, ‘Temporalité et narrative: le cinéma des premiers temps (1895–1908),’ Etudes littéraires, 13,
no. 1 (April 1980): 109.
2* William K.Everson includes a chapter on ‘The birth of film grammar’ in American Silent Film (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 30– 53; Kevin Brownlow has one on ‘The experimenters’ in The Parade’s
Gone By (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 21–8. Both of these authors maintain that Griffith was the prime
mover in the introduction of cinematic techniques. Other authors dispute this view, but mainly with the purpose of
calling attention to other, less famous directors. Barry Salt suggests Reginald Barker as ‘the missing link’ in the
development of analytical editing in ‘The early development of film form,’ Film Form, 1, no.1 (Spring 1976):
102. There has been a move recently to bring forward other names from the oblivion into which most of the early
teens’ cinema has fallen, as in Richard Koszarski’s anthology The Rivals of D.W. Griffith (Minneapolis: Walker
Art Center, 1976). This re-assignment of credit, however, does little to alter the traditional view of the classical
cinema as a teleological growth toward a natural film grammar waiting to be discovered.
3 Gaudreault, ‘Temporalité et narrative,’ p. 111.
4 For sample scripts of skits and other vaudeville forms, see Brett Page’s Writing for Vaudeville (Springfield, Mass.:
Home Correspondence School, 1915).
5 Eileen Bowser, ‘The Brighton project: an introduction,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, no. 4 (Fall 1979):
523.
6 Robert C.Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction (PhD dissertation, University of
Iowa, 1977; rep. New York: Arno Press, 1980), p. 43; Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville (New York:
Whittlesley House, 1940), p. 6.
7 Nicholas Vardac hardly leaves room for doubt that the film owes a great deal to the play, with his stills from a
stage production juxtaposed to frames of the film. See figures 61 through 64 in his Stage to Screen (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949).
8 Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915, pp. 214–25.
9* The percentage of narratives in the total US output increased rapidly after 1902. In 1904, documentaries were
barely holding their own; figures for copyrighted films of 1904 show these proportions of genres: documentaries,
42 per cent, comedies, 45 per cent, dramas, 8 per cent, and trick films 5 per cent. From 1906, the new institution
of the nickelodeon increased the pressure on producers, leading to a decisive domination of the field by fiction
films a few years later. In 1907, drama was up to 17 per cent of the total, with comedy at 50 per cent, and in 1908,
drama increased to 66 per cent, with comedy trailing at 30 per cent. These figures are based upon copyrighted
films only. (See ibid., pp. 181, 212.)
Current work being done by Charles Musser seems to confirm the claim that fiction films became the
dominant product of the industry before the nickelodeon era began in 1906. He has found evidence to suggest that
in 1904 at least some fiction films sold in greater numbers of prints than did scenics and topicals from the same
producer. See Charles Musser, ‘The nickelodeon era begins: establishing the foundations for Hollywood’s mode
of representation,’ Framework, nos. 22/23 (Autumn 1983): 11. Musser’s extensive work in progress on the
primitive period is tentatively entitled The Emergence of Cinema in America: Edwin Porter and the Edison
Manufacturing Company.
10 Allen, Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915, pp. 214–15.
11 Walter Prichard Eaton, ‘Canned drama,’ American Magazine, 68, no. 5 (September 1909): 494.
12 Gaudreault, ‘Temporalité et narrative,’ p. 113.
13* For examples of such narrative films, see Kemp Niver’s description of the multiply copyrighted shots for The Ex-
Convict (1904, Edison), Rip (1902, AM&B), and others, in Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper
Print Collection 1894– 1912 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 182, 212, 164, 142–3.
Documentaries handled in a similar way include the twenty views of the Westinghouse Works and Westinghouse
Air Brake Company (1904, AM&B), which add up to a lengthy series, and the four different films of Kicking
Horse Canyon, Canada (1901, Edison). In his forthcoming work on the primitive cinema, The Emergence of
Cinema in America, Charles Musser deals with the production and exhibition of films made as series of
separately released shots.
14* Film lengths increased slowly for several reasons. Producers had to build up a sufficient base to support more
expensive films (and hence potentially to generate greater profits). Also, it appears that many exhibitors resisted
longer films, believing that a greater variety of short films would draw more viewers. See Complete Illustrated
Catalog of Moving Picture Machines, Stereopticons, Slides, Films (Chicago: Kleine Optical Co., 1905); rep. in
George Pratt (ed.), Spellbound in Darkness, rev. ed. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 41.
15 Gaudreault finds additional examples from the primitive period in his ‘Temporalité et narrative,’ pp. 119–20.
16* For example, Kid Canfield, Notorious Gambler (1912, Champion) contains a scene in which Canfield goes into a
side room of his gambling den and straps on what an inter-title identifies as a ‘sleeve machine,’ a mechanism for
cheating at cards. Two non-diegetic shots follow, close shots illustrating the workings of the machine. The next
shot returns us to the main room of the gambling den, with Canfield already back at the table and engaged in a
game. The non-diegetic insert was a rare device for American filmmakers, but here audience understanding of the
sleeve machine’s workings is vital to the narrative, and the filmmakers settled upon a novel method of conveying
information. I take this scene to be somewhat comparable to the earlier films’ repeated actions—a solution to a
problem, but one which did not prove widely acceptable within the guidelines of the Hollywood system.
17 Gaudreault, ‘Temporalité et narrative,’ p. 116. Emphasis in original.
18 ‘The Weakness of the strong,’ MPN, 11, no. 1 (9 January 1915): 29.
19 Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces 1870–1967 (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1968), p. 26.
20* The touring theater company, the touring vaudeville act, and the film can all be seen as ways of distributing a
theatrical entertainment to a farflung mass audience. Poggi attributes the rise of the touring theater company in
part to the expanding railroad system of the 1860s, which for the first time enabled groups to haul people and sets
around the country efficiently. The invention of cinema created a similar change; like the railroads, the cinema
made wide distribution of a standard product possible. Film did not begin to compete with theater immediately
because, as we have seen, producers could not organize an entire production, distribution, and exhibition system
all at once; they depended initially upon vaudeville, which began to decline in the teens as a result of film’s
competition. By this point, early film entrepreneurs—e.g., Marcus Loew, William Fox, Adolph Zukor—were
building distribution and exhibition circuits which would eventually lead to the industry’s vertical integration.
These men were able to build up the industry because they took advantage of problems in the touring system of
theater. Poggi sees the rise of features around 1912 as coinciding with ‘the very time when production costs in
the legitimate theater were becoming burdensome.’ Between 1913 and 1928, the transportation costs alone rose
80 per cent for theatrical troupes. See ibid., pp. 6, 78, 36.
21 C.Alphonse Smith, The American Short Story (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1912), p. 39; Fred Lewis Pattee, The
Development of the American Short Story (New York: Harper & Bros, 1923), pp. 81, 130.
22 Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story, pp. 31, 70–5, 145, 150, 167, 191, 310.
23 Brander Matthews, ‘The study of fiction,’ [1898], in his The Historical Novel and Other Essays (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), p. 81; for further discussion of the increasingly lucrative field of professional
writing in the 1890s, see also Matthews, ‘Literature as a profession,’ pp. 203–4 in this same volume.
24 Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction (Boston/New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902), p. 330; Pattee, The
Development of the American Short Story, p. 337.
25 Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction, p. 65.
26 Charlton Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing (Springfield, Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1915), p.
230.
27 At least one book-length guide appeared to dispense advice on writing playlets and other vaudeville forms:
Page’s Writing for Vaudeville.
28 Gilson Willets [Selig staff writer], ‘Photoplay writing not an easy art,’ Motography, 16, no. 14 (30 September
1916): 763.
29 Edward Azlant, ‘The theory, history, and practice of screenwriting, 1897–1920’ (PhD dissertation, University of
Wisconsin, 1980).
30 Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story, p. 337.
31 Vardac’s Stage to Screen remains the major study of nineteenth-century theater and early film. Concentration on
film and the nineteenth-century novel has come more recently, stemming primarily from Colin MacCabe’s
‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses,’ Screen, 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 7–27. In Film and
the Narrative Tradition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), John L.Fell relates early film to a variety
of nineteenth-century narrative arts.
32 Besides his manuals on The Photodrama (Larchmont, New York: Stanhope-Dodge Publishing Co., 1914) and
The Feature Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: The Home Correspondence School, 1921), Henry Albert Phillips also
authored The Plot of the Short Story and Art in Short Story Narration (both advertised in The Photodrama as
publications of the Stanhope-Dodge Publishing Co.). J.Berg Esenwein was editor of the Home Correspondence
School’s ‘Writer’s Library.’ In addition to coauthoring Writing the Photoplay (with Arthur Leeds [Springfield,
Mass., 1913]), he contributed many works on short fiction to the series.
33 ‘Film stories change rapidly,’ Motography, 18, no. 16 (20 December 1917): 813; Clifford Howard, ‘The cinema
in retrospect,’ Close Up, 3, no. 5 (November 1928): 18; Azlant, The Theory, History, and Practice of
Screenwriting.
34 ‘The need for more originality,’ Motography, 13, no. 5 (30 January 1915): 167.
35 William A. Johnston, ‘About stories,’ MPN, 11, no. 21 (29 May 1915): 35. Emphases in original.
36 See also, ‘The story writers’ opportunity,’ Motography, 14, no. 20 (13 November 1915): 1025; ‘The weakness of
the strong,’ MPN, 11, no. 1 (9 January, 1915): 29, 48.
37 Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story, p. 364.
38 Clayton Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1918), p.
61.
39 Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story, p. 135; Pattee reprints Poe’s review in full, pp. 134–7.
40 Brander Matthews, ‘The philosophy of the shortstory,’ [1885], rep. in his Pen and Ink (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1902), pp. 75–106.
41 J.Berg Esenwein and Mary Daroven Chambers, The Art of Story-Writing (Springfield, Mass.: Home
Correspondence School, 1913), p. 107.
42 Quoted in Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction, p. 177.
43 Esenwein and Chambers, The Art of Story-Writing, p. 106; Phillips, The Photodrama, p. 134.
44 Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction, p. 186.
45 For a survey of the well-made play, see Stephen S. Stanton, ‘Introduction,’ Camille and Other Plays (New York:
Hill & Wang, A Mermaid Dramabook, 1957), pp. vii-xxxix.
46 For examples, see Elizabeth Woodbridge, The Drama: Its Laws and Its Techniques (Boston/ Chicago: Allyn &
Bacon, 1898), p. 77; Alfred Hennequin, The Art of Play Writing (Boston/New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1897), p. 98; W.T. Price, The Technique of the Drama (New York: Brentano’s, 1892), pp. 76–109. For the
original formulation, see Gustav Freytag, Freytag’s Technique of the Drama, trans. Elias J.MacEwan, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co., 1896), pp. 114–40.
47 Hennequin, The Art of Play Writing, p. 89. For similar discussions, see Price, The Technique of the Drama, p. 64,
and Woodbridge, The Drama, p. 20.
48 William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1912), pp. 331, 214–
15.
49 Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, pp. 75– 106.
50 See, for examples, Archer, Play-Making, p. 85; Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, p. xi.
51 Archer, Play-Making, p. 191.
52 Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, pp. 122–3.
53 Archer, Play-Making, pp. 201, 207.
54 Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, pp. 122–3.
56 Esenwein and Chambers, The Art of Story-Writing, p. 108.
57 Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction, p. 309.
58 Matthews, ‘The Study of Fiction,’ p. 105.
59 Andrews, The Technique of Play Writing, p. 32.
60 Woodbridge, The Drama, p. 15.
61 Hennequin, The Art of Play Writing, p. 86.
63 Matthews, ‘The study of fiction,’ p. 94.
64 Brander Matthews, ‘The art of the stage-manager,’ in his Inquiries and Opinions (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1907), pp. 301–2.
Chapter 15
The formulation of the classical narrative
1 David S.Hulfish, The Motion Picture, Its Making and Its Theater (Chicago: Electricity Magazine Corporation,
1909), p. 55.
2* Throughout the silent period, the prevalent term for what we would today call the ‘shot,’ was ‘scene.’ This arose
from the fact that most scenes were only one shot long in early fims. Even when scenes began to be broken up
regularly into several shots, ‘scene’ kept its initial meaning. Surprisingly, there seems to have been no word
during this period to designate the extended dramatic unit we term a ‘scene’ or ‘sequence.’ Scenarios labelled
shots ‘Scene 1’ and so on, with perhaps a gap between shot descriptions to indicate a major change of action.
3 John Nelson, The Photo-play (Los Angeles: Photoplay Publishing Co., 1913), p. 167.
4 Eileen Bowser, ‘The Brighton Project: an introduction,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, no. 4 (Fall 1979):
p. 520.
5 ‘How to write a scenario,’ Photoplay, 2, no. 2 (March 1912): 71.
6 Herbert Case Hoagland, How to Write a Photoplay (New York: Magazine Maker Publishing Co., 1912), p. 6.
7 Peter Milne, ‘The Regeneration,’ MPN, 12, no. 13 (2 October 1915): 83.
8 Quoted in William Lord Wright, ‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’ MPN, 8, no. 13 (27 September 1913):
22.
9 Frederick Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Palmer Institute of Authorship, 1921), p. 27.
10 Louis Reeves Harrison, ‘Characterization,’ MPW, 8, no. 17 (29 April 1911): 937. Emphasis in original.
11 James Kirkwood, ‘Motion picture stories scarce,’ Motography, 16, no. 2 (8 July 1916): 80.
12 Henry Albert Phillips, The Photodrama (Larchmont, New York: Stanhope-Dodge Publishing Co., 1914), pp. 75–
6.
13* A ‘split-reel’ is a short (500 feet) film, spliced together with and rented with another split-reel to make up a
standard, 1,000-foot length. These were usually minor films—often comedies, animated films, or newsreels. The
fact that classical devices appear in split-reels is one of the best indications that the new guidelines were being
standardized throughout the industry—not just in the most expensive, outstanding films.
14 Jesse L.Lasky, ‘Production problems,’ in Joseph P. Kennedy, ed., The Story of the Films (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Co.,
1927), p. 121.
15 Eustace Hale Ball, The Art of the Photoplay, 2nd ed. (New York: G.W. Dillingham Co., 1913), p. 50.
16 Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook, p. 38.
17 Nelson, The Photo-play, p. 167.
18* The contemporary term was not ‘inter-title.’ During the early teens, writers called inserted titles ‘leaders’ or ‘sub-
titles’ (the latter because the credits were the main titles). By the mid-teens, ‘leader’ had largely been dropped in
favor of ‘sub-title,’ which persisted through the silent period.
19 Kemp Niver, The First Twenty Years (Los Angeles: Artisan Press, 1968), pp. 34, 80, 91, 98, 101.
20 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘Technique of the photoplay,’ MPW, 9, no. 5 (12 August 1911): 363.
21 Robert Saunders Dowst, ‘Technicalities of scenario writing,’ Motography, 7, no. 1 (January 1912): 16.
22* The four dialogue titles in A Tale of Two Cities (1911, Vitagraph) all come where spoken, and the same is true of
the single dialogue title in A Daughter of Dixie (1911, Champion). On the other hand, the following films use one
to four dialogue titles, all placed before the shot where spoken: The Dynamiters (1911, Imp), A Friendly
Marriage (1911, Vitagraph), In Old Madrid (Thomas H. Ince, 1911, Imp), and The Loafer (1911, Essanay).
23* In The Bells (1913, Edison), two of the three titles are placed where spoken; in A Comedy of Errors (1912,
Solax), the titles divide two and two in placement; in The House of Discord (James Kirkwood, 1912, Biograph),
five of the six dialogue titles precede the shots in which the lines occur.
24* Barry Salt has suggested that the placement of dialogue titles at the point in the scene where they are spoken was
minority practice around 1911 to 1913, adding, ‘It is doubtful that the principle had yet been realized.’ (See Barry
Salt, The early development of film form,’ Film Form, 1, no. 1 [Spring 1976]: 99.) Yet, as we have seen, both
placements were in equal use, and contemporary accounts demonstrate that commentators were aware of the
difference.
Salt’s claims tend to perpetuate the notion that the early teens was a relatively crude period, with filmmakers
groping toward the discovery of a preordained film grammar. In general, Salt’s admirable attempts to outline the
usage of various techniques in the early American cinema are limited by a neglect of evidence from written
sources. Although one can learn much from the films—as Salt does—certain aspects of contemporary awareness
of style can emerge only from documents.
25 Sargent, ‘Technique of the Photoplay,’ p. 363.
26 Quoted in William Lord Wright, ‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’ MPN, 6, no. 26 (28 December
1912): 12.
27 Nelson, The Photo-play, p. 181. Emphasis in original.
28 ‘The Reviewer,’ ‘Views of the Reviewer,’ NYDM, 68, no. 1752 (17 July 1912): 27.
29 Phillips, The Photodrama, p. 53.
30 Marc Edmund Jones, ‘Why my photoplays do not sell,’ Photoplay, 4, no. 3 (August 1913): 8.
31 George Blaisdell, ‘Adolf Zukor talks of Famous Players,’ MPW, 15, no. 2 (11 January 1913): 136.
32 Genevieve Harris, ‘The Aryan,’ Motography, 15, no. 14 (1 April 1916): 766.
1916): 13.
34 Robert Emmett Welsh, A-B-C of Motion Pictures (New York: Harper & Bros., 1916), p. 100.
35 ‘Unique captions in Road o’ Strife,’ Motography, 13, no. 13 (27 March 1915): 470.
36* William C.deMille’s The Bedroom Window (1924, Famous Players-Lasky) has one or two expository titles in nine
of its eleven sequences, none in the other two. It uses an average of ten dialogue titles per sequence. Peter Pan
(Herbert Brenon, 1924, Famous Players-Lasky) goes further, with only seven expository titles spread over its
nine scenes (with none in five scenes), yet 277 dialogue titles. Relatively small numbers of expository titles are
used in such films as: Are Parents People? (Malcolm St Clair, 1925, Famous Players-Lasky), The Goose Woman
(Clarence Brown, 1925, Universal-Jewel), Lady Windermere’s Fan (Ernst Lubitsch, 1925, Warner Bros), Ella
Cinders (Alfred E.Green, 1926, John McCormick Productions), La Boheme (King Vidor, 1926, MGM), Exit
Smiling (Sam Taylor, 1926, MGM), A Gentleman of Paris (Henry d’Abbadie D’Arrast, 1927, Paramount
Famous Lasky), and Hula (Victor Fleming, 1927, Paramount Famous Lasky). These are mostly fairly prestigious
films by major directors, but the practice filtered down to some of the more standard films as well, as is evident
in Footloose Widows, a Louise Fazenda comedy (Roy del Ruth, 1926, Warner Bros), which has only nine
expository inter-titles among a total of 184.
37 Nelson, The Photo-play, p. 177.
39 See, for examples, William Lord Wright, ‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’ MPN, 6, no. 16 (19 October
1912): 16; Nelson, The Photo-play, p. 178; and Phillips, The Photodrama, p. 56.
40 Victorin Jasset, ‘Le cinéma contemporain,’ Ciné journal (October-November 1911), quoted in Jean Mitry,
Histoire du cinéma Vol. 1 (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1967), p. 413.
41 Quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), p. 16.
42 Robert E.Welsh, ‘David W.Griffith speaks,’ NYDM, 71, no. 1830 (14 January 1914): 49, 54, rep. in Pratt,
Spellbound in Darkness, pp. 110–11.
43 ‘Temptations of a great city,’ MPW, 8, no. 24 (17 June 1911): 1367.
45 ‘Too near the camera,’ MPW, 8, no. 12 (25 March 1911): 633.
46 H.F.Huffman, ‘Cutting off the feet,’ MPW, 12, no. 1 (6 April 1912): 53.
47* Even this can only be inferred from the film’s title and opening, although Eileen Bowser suggests there may have
been an insert of the ad itself at the beginning, missing from existing prints. Bowser, ‘The Brighton project: an
introduction,’ p. 523.
48 Henry King, ‘Too much action,’ Cinema News (March 1918): 9.
Chapter 16
The continuity system
1 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 23, no. 7 (13 February 1915): 977.
2 Herbert Case Hoagland, How to Write a Photoplay (New York: Magazine Maker Publishing Co., 1912), p. 12.
Emphasis in original.
3 H.Kent Webster, ‘Little stories of great films,’ The Nickelodeon, 3, no. 1 (1 January 1910): 13.
4 ‘How to write a scenario,’ Photoplay, 2, no. 2 (March 1912): 71; John Nelson, The Photo-play (Los Angeles:
Photoplay Publishing Co., 1913), p. 78; Henry Albert Phillips, The Photodrama (Larchmont, New York:
Stanhope-Dodge Publishing Co., 1914), p. 52; Capt Leslie T.Peacocke, ‘Logical continuity,’ Photoplay, 11, no. 5
(April 1917): 111.
5 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 18, no. 12 (20 December 1913): 1405.
6 S.S. Hutchinson, ‘From the master producer’s standpoint,’ Motography, 14, no. 1 (3 July 1915): 5.
7 Thomas H.Ince, ‘Ince makes war on inconsistency,’ Motography, 19, no. 8 (23 February 1918): 361.
8 Pierre V.R.Key, ‘Continuity is important factor,’ Motography, 18, no. 20 (17 November 1917): 1034.
10 For discussions of this non-linear pattern, see Noël Burch, ‘Porter, or ambivalence,’ Screen, 19, no. 4 (Winter
1978/79): 91–105, and Charles Musser, ‘The early cinema of Edwin S.Porter,’ Cinema Journal, 19, no. 1 (Fall
1979): 1–38.
11 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 20, no. 1 (4 April 1914): 56.
12 ‘Hellfire and brimstone,’ Camera!, 1, no. 19 (18 August 1918): 7.
13* Throughout the teens, the term ‘long shot’ was the principal one used to designate the overall view of the set.
Mae Marsh’s 1920 Screen Acting guide defines the long view’s function: The long shot is usually taken to
establish the atmosphere and setting of a scene.’ A 1922 guidebook glossary defined ‘establish’ as: ‘To make
known the relationship of a character to other characters or to his environment, or to make known his identity and
type.’ This is essentially the meaning the term has had ever since. This usage appears in reviews as well; one
writer criticized The Perfect Sap in 1926: ‘There is one entire sequence played entirely in close-ups. It is an
interior scene, played in a room, but the room is not established. There are four characters in it, but at no time is
their relation to one another shown. It is just a succession of faces.’ These uses of the term ‘establishing’ confirm
that filmmakers and critics were aware of this specific function of the long shot, but such awareness preceded the
term itself. See Mae Marsh, Screen Acting (New York: Frederick A.Stokes Co., 1921), p. 91; Opportunities in the
Motion Picture Industry (Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922), p. 110; Welford Beaton, ‘This one
killed by poor direction,’ The Film Spectator, 3, no. 4 (16 April 1927): 9.
15* Eileen Bowser claims that the display of facial expression ‘remains the most common use of close views for the
whole period 1900–1906.’ (‘The Brighton project: an introduction,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, no. 4 (Fall
1979): 518.)
16 Barry Salt, ‘Film form 1900–06,’ Sight and Sound, 47, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 150.
17 Cecil B.De Mille, ‘What psychology has done to pictures,’ in Ruth Wing, ed., The Blue Book of the Screen
(Hollywood: The Blue Book of the Screen, Inc., 1923), p. 380.
18 Phillips, The Photodrama, p. 60; Peacocke, ‘Logical continuity,’ p. 112.
19 Frederick Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Palmer Institute of Authorship, 1921), pp. 101,
100.
20 Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The photoplaywright,’ MPW, 23, no. 4 (23 January 1915): 510.
21 Frank Atkinson, ‘Pause before you become a film cutter,’ in Laurence A.Hughes (ed.), The Truth about the
Movies by the Stars (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers, 1924), p. 343.
22* Historians have argued persuasively that the chase film originated in England with such films as Fire! and Stop
Thief (both J.H.Williamson, 1901 and 1900)—see particularly Barry Salt, ‘Film form 1900–06,’ p. 149. Certainly
the popular import, Rescued by Rover (Cecil Hepworth, 1905) keeps perfect screen direction, with the dog
moving always out from the rear to exit foreground left as it goes to the gypsy’s lair. Rover then goes in exactly
the opposite direction as he returns home.
23 Nicholas A.Vardac, Stage to Screen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 32.
24 ‘Spectator’ [Frank Woods], ‘Spectator’s Comments,’ NYDM, 65, no. 1681 (8 March 1911): 29. Emphasis in
original.
25 Interview with Charles G.Clarke, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 12 June and 3 July 1980,
26 Nelson, The Photo-play, p. 219, emphasis in original; John B.Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’
Motography, 9, no. 13 (28 June 1913): 472.
27 John H.Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’ Motography, 9, no. 8 (19 April 1913): 278.
28 Interview with Charles G.Clarke.
29 Quoted in Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), pp. 79–80.
30 Helen Starr, ‘Putting it together,’ Photoplay, 14, no. 2 (July 1918): 54.
31* William Hornbeck has confirmed that Starr was right in claiming that editors sometimes turned the negative over
to correct for errors:
Yes. You would have to be careful about haircombs and be sure that there wasn’t a design on one arm
that wasn’t on the other. You had to be very careful. But often, if there was no identification to show that
everything was lefthanded instead of righthanded, that was done a lot.
Interview with William Hornbeck, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 9 July 1980,
Ventura, California.
32 Ibid.
33 Starr, ‘Putting it together,’ pp. 53–4.
34 Peacocke, ‘Logical continuity,’ p. 112.
35 Barry Salt, ‘The early development of film form,’ Film Form, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 98.
36* Noël Burch has claimed that the SRS lagged behind other guidelines within the continuity system of editing. At
one point he states that ‘the system thus constituted as a visual entity had become fully operational in the United
States before the end of World War I,’ with the exception of the ‘full head-on reverse-angle’ (his term for what I
have been calling the shot/reverse shot); see Noël Burch, ‘Film’s institutional mode of representation and the Soviet
response,’ October, no. 11 (Winter 1979): 83. Elsewhere he specifies further how he considers the development
of the SRS to have proceeded: ‘from alternating views of characters facing one another in profile shots, to head-
on views of them facing each other “through” the camera spectator.’ More importantly, Burch claims that the
reason the SRS eyelines did not obey screen-direction guidelines was that such guidelines did not yet exist. The
move into the story space involving analytical editing and the SRS pattern was, he says, fraught ‘with moments
of contradiction, one of the most significant, perhaps, being the period (around 1915) when the possibility of face-
to-face opposing shots had begun to appear, but not yet the concept of the eyeline match.’ Burch cites no
examples from the period. See Noël Burch, Correction Please, Or How We Got Into Pictures (Arts Council of
Great Britain, n.d.), p. 8.
Doubtless there are many SRSs from the teens that mismatch eyeline direction, but most do not. As we have
seen, the directional eyeline match existed as minority practice from at least 1910, and certainly by 1915, SRSs
would usually obey the 180° rule. If Burch were correct in his claim that the principle of the eyeline match was
not known by 1915, the scene from Detective Burton’s Triumph described in the text would have been
impossible. I have found no films from the silent period in which SRS patterns consistently involve characters
looking into the camera; there may be some such films, but head-on SRS would certainly be exceptional. In
general Burch’s claims about this period are hampered by a lack of evidence, both from the films and from
contemporary sources. For an analysis of his historical work on American film, see David Bordwell’s and my
‘Linearity, materialism, and the study of the early American cinema,’ Wide Angle, 5, no. 3 (1983): 4–15.
37 According to the recently discovered shot order of the original negative; see Eileen Bowser, ‘Addendum to “The
reconstitution of A Corner in Wheat,’” Cinema Journal, 19, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 101–2.
39 Leroy Stone, ‘The importance of film editing,’ AC, 3, no. 12 (March 1923): 4.
40 ‘Hellfire and brimstone,’ Camera!, 1, no. 20 (18 August 1918): 7.
41 ‘A film satire,’ Photoplay, 14, no. 1 (June 1918): 61.
42 Del Andrews, ‘The film editor: his training and qualifications,’ in Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry
(Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922), p. 77.
43 Milton Sills, ‘The actor’s part,’ in Joseph P. Kennedy, The Story of the Films (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Co., 1927),
pp. 184–5.
Chapter 17
Classical narrative space and the spectator’s attention
1 John B.Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibition,’ Motography, 9, no. 13 (28 June 1913): 471.
2 Untitled, MPW, 8, no. 15 (15 April 1911): 815. Recall that this journal published several articles opposing
framings that showed anything less than full figures.
3 ‘The Reviewer,’ ‘Views of the Reviewer,’ NYDM, 68, no. 1761 (18 September 1912): 24.
4 Mae Marsh, Screen Acting (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1921), p. 92.
5 Frederick A.Talbot confirms that ‘A photograph at a distance of twelve feet presented people of normal height.’
See his Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, new ed. (London: William Heinemann, 1914), p.
201.
6 David S.Hulfish, The Motion. Picture: Its Making and Its Theater (Chicago: Electricity Magazine Corporation,
1909), p. 36.
7 For descriptions and a diagram of a vaudeville stage’s areas, see Brett Page, Writing For Vaudeville (Springfield,
Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1915), pp. 27–31.
8 Arthur Edwin Krows, Equipment for Stage Production (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1928), p. 31.
9 C.H.Claudy, ‘Pictorial possibilities in movingpictures,’ Photo-era, 22, no. 4 (April 1909): 173; ‘Spectator’
[Frank Woods], ‘Spectator’s comments,’ NYDM, 66, no. 1723 (27 December 1911): 28; ‘The Scarlet Letter
(Imp),’ MPW, 8, no. 16 (22 April 1911): 881–2.
10* The practice of shooting into a corner rather than perpendicularly toward a backdrop may have moved cinema away
from vaudeville, but comparable things were going on in the popular theater of the period. In 1916, Arthur Edwin
Krows wrote of the ‘now-familiar “V-shape”—that is, the walls of the room being slanted backward to meet each
other, so as apparently to show just a corner of the interior.’ See Arthur Edwin Krows, Play Production in
America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916), p. 174. This did not mean that film and theater devices were
identical in effect, however, since the theater spectator could never have a sense of the side walls extending out to
surround him or her. But by cutting in and placing the camera close to a section of the playing space, the
filmmaker could create that sense.
11* Again, attempts to suggest space beyond the walls of the set parallel similar tendencies in the theater. Stage
settings used backing flats to suggest adjacent rooms and exteriors beyond doors and windows; the cyclorama for
representing sky and other atmospheric effects was becoming common usage. Several contemporary critics and
historians made much of the production of Clyde Fitch’s The City (1909) for its use of space beyond the back
wall. A door in the main room opened onto a hallway and staircase; when one central character exited through
this door, his subsequent collapse and death were conveyed entirely through sound and glimpses of neighbors
hurrying past in the hall. See Clayton Hamilton, Studies in Stagecraft (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1914), pp.
20–1; Krows, Play Production in America, p. 174.
12 Marc Edmund Jones, ‘Why my scenarios do not sell,’ Photoplay, 4, no. 3 (August 1913): 91; John Nelson, The
Photo-play (Los Angeles: Photoplay Publishing Co., 1913), p. 79.
13 Marc Edmund Jones, ‘The photoplay forum,’ Photoplay, 4, no. 4 (September 1913): 108.
14 ‘Six-room “set,”’ Motography, 16, no. 14 (30 September 1916): 752; ‘Artisans of the motion picture films,’
Scientific American, 115, no. 10 (2 September 1916): 225.
15 Hugo Ballin, ‘The scenic background,’ The Mentor, 9, no. 4 (1 July 1921): 22. Emphasis in original.
16 Max Parker. ‘The art director—his duties and qualifications,’ Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry (Los
Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922), p. 58.
17 ‘Artisans of the motion picture films,’ p. 225.
18 For an interesting account of one disastrous attempt to shoot on location—the 1926 Ben Hur production—see
Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), Ch. 36.
19* The size and hence the great depth of some of these sets were economically feasible in part because some of them
could be used more than once. These were the standing sets, kept on the back lot for use over a stretch of time.
For example, the Ford Theater set from The Birth of a Nation also appears in The Regeneration (Raoul Walsh,
1915, Fox); similarly, the same kitchen set shows up in at least two Charles Ray films, His Mother’s Boy and The
Hired Hand (both Victor Schertzinger, 1917 and 1918, Ince; this set is visible in fig 16–25 through 16–28). In the
late twenties, Paramount had a standing set representing half of a full-sized ocean liner; this set figures in such
Paramount films as The Docks of New York (Joseph Von Sternberg, 1928, Paramount), but could be rented out to
other studios. It also served as a storehouse. See Chapter 13 for a discussion of the advantages of standing sets
for studio economy.
But most sets were built for one film only. According to Thomas Brierley, the Christie Film Company’s
technical director:
Sets are seldom used over and over. Practical studio managers and technical men have found that it is in
the long run more economical to ‘strike’ a set after it is finished and build the new one all over again, than
to dismantle and go to the trouble and expense of storing.
A great number of standing sets would be uneconomical because it is financially advantageous to a

company to keep as much of its physical plant continually busy as possible. A set which occupied
space but was used only at wide intervals would waste money. Hence standing sets were only of the
type likely to be used frequently, such as restaurants, theaters, and western streets. See Jan and Cora
Gordon, Star-Dust in Hollywood (London: George G.Harrap and Co., 1930), p. 92. This page has a
sketch of the ship set. Thomas Brierley, ‘The construction of settings,’ in Laurence A.Hughes (ed.),
The Truth about the Movies by the Stars (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers, 1924), p. 321.
20 ‘A big set required,’ Motography, 10, no. 4 (23 August 1913): 140.
21 Harold Grieve, ‘Background stuff,’ The Motion Picture Director, 3, no. 3 (November-December 1926): 28.
22 Wilfred Buckland, ‘The art director,’ in Hughes (ed.), The Truth about the Movies by the Stars, p. 320.
23 C.H.Claudy, ‘The degradation of the motionpicture,’ Photo-era, 21, no. 4 (October 1908): 163–4.
24 ‘Some recent films reviewed: criticism by the fans,’ The Nickelodeon, 3, no. 4 (15 February 1910): 96.
25 Frederick Talbot, Practical Cinematography and Its Applications (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1913), p. 47; How to
Take and Make Moving Pictures (Denver: Ford’s [An equipment-manufacturing firm]), p. 25.
26 ‘Too near the camera,’ MPW, 8, no. 12 (25 March 1911): 633.
27 H.M.Lomas, Picture Play Photography (London: Ganes, 1914), p. 26.
28 For excellent illustrations of glass shots, see Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 218, and William K.Everson,
American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 246–7.
29 Dr Alfred B.Hitchins, ‘A method of using miniatures or models for the introduction of extra detail in motion
pictures,’ TSMPE, no. 15 (9–12 October 1922): 41.
30* Patrick Ogle’s article, ‘Technological and aesthetic influences upon the development of deep focus
cinematography in the United States,’ Screen Reader (London: SEFT, 1977), pp. 81–108, is an important
examination of the subject in relation to the silent period, but it has perpetuated this notion about early deep
focus. Ogle’s data on the silent period are sketchy, and he draws incorrect conclusions several times from his
facts. Ignoring the pre-1915 period altogether, he implies that cinematography from The Birth of a Nation to the
softfocus period (which Ogle dates as beginning in the late twenties) may have had a tendency to use more depth
of field because of the contrastiness of orthochromatic film stock in comparison with panchromatic. He notes the
introduction of panchromatic stock in 1913, but dismisses it as having not ‘proved popular’ (p. 85). He assumes
that the simple fact of the invention of panchromatic stock meant cinematographers immediately had a choice of
using it, but preferred ortho for its familiarity and contrastiness. Yet, as we shall see in greater detail in
Chapter 21, early panchro was hardly the desirable alternative to ortho that it later became. It was far slower,
more expensive, and highly unstable physically; during the silent period, deep focus was indeed easier to achieve
with ortho, more because of ortho’s speed than its supposed contrastiness.
31 ‘On light effects,’ reprinted from MPW in Cinema News, 2, no. 11/12 (November-December 1918): 12.
32 Kenneth MacGowan, ‘On the screen,’ The New Republic, 12, no. 150 (15 September 1917): 188.
33 Advertisement, Reel Life (6 January 1917): 11.
34 L.G.Harkness Smith, ‘Electric lighting for motionpicture studios,’ Electrical World, 65, no. 17 (24 April 1915):
1040.
35 ‘Lasky praises The Cheat,’ Motography, 14, no. 24 (11 December 1915): 1223.
36 W.Stephen Bush, ‘Analyzing a winner,’ MPW, 17, no. 3 (15 January 1916): 432.
37 Edwin Thanhouser, The great development in lighting,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 5 (15 February 1917): 12.
38 Frederick S.Mills, ‘Film lighting as a fine art,’ Scientific American, 124, no. 8 (19 February 1921): 148.
39 Wiard B.Ihnen and D.W.Atwater, ‘The artistic utilization of light in the photography of motion pictures,’ TSMPE,
no. 21 (18–21 May 1925): 30.
40 Norbert F.Brodin, ‘Something about the cameraman,’ in Hughes (ed.), The Truth about the Movies by the Stars,
pp. 327–8.
41 Jon Gartenberg, ‘Camera movements in Edison and Biograph films, 1900–1906,’ Cinema Journal, 19, no. 2
(Spring 1980): 1–16.
42 Henry Albert Phillips, The Photodrama (New York: Stanhope-Dodge Publishing Co., 1914), p. 104.
43 Billy Bitzer, ‘Intolerance: the sun play of the ages,’ IP, 7, no. 9 (October 1934): 24.
44 Will M.Ritchey, ‘Tricks of the trade,’ Motography, 16, no. 10 (2 September 1916): 542.
45* These include producer Fred Balshofer in making The Second in Command (1915, Quality Pictures) and Allan
Dwan for David Harum (1915, Famous Players). Hal Mohr claims to have used a platform on tracks in 1914 for a
film called The Daughter of the Gods (not the Herbert Brenon film A Daughter of the Gods, done in 1916). By
1918, one historian discussed the moving platform with inflated tires as a common device for filming large sets.
See Fred J. Balshofer and Arthur Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1967), p. 118; Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 34;
Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), p. 78; Homer Croy,
How Motion Pictures Are Made (New York: Harper & Bros, 1918), pp. 130–2.
46 Frederick Palmer, Palmer Plan Handbook, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Palmer Institute of Authorship, 1921), p. 162.
47 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 232.
Chapter 18
The stability of the classical approach after 1917
1 Henry Albert Phillips, The Feature Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1921), p. 11.
2 Madeleine Matzen, ‘The high price continuity writer,’ The Film Spectator, 5, no. 9 (23 June 1928): 26. Note that
Matzen refers precisely to the pre1917 period here.
3 ‘Laemmle explains “diploma system” for his directors and cameramen,’ MPW, 43, no. 7 (14 February 1920):
1104.
4 Karl Brown, Adventures With D.W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973); Kevin Brownlow, The
Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), p. 202.
5 Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, pp. 286 and 308; Interview with William Hornbeck, conducted by David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 9 July 1980, Ventura, California; Clarence C.Badger, ‘Reminiscences of the
early days of movie comedies,’ in Marshall Deutelbaum (ed.), ‘Image’ on the Art and Evolution of the Film (New
6 King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953), p. 28; Elaine Sterne, ‘Writing for the
movies as a profession,’ Photoplay, 6, no. 5 (October 1914): 156.
7 Capt. Leslie T.Peacocke, ‘Logical continuity,’ Photoplay, 11, no. 5 (April 1917:114.
in Hollywood, California; Untitled, AC, 3, no. 3 (1 June 1922): 12.
9 Quoted in Leonard Malton, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), p. 64;
interview with Charles G.Clarke.
10 Peter Milne, Motion Picture Directing (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922), p. 21.
11 Austin C.Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1920), p. 406.
12 Lewis W.Physioc, Twenty-five years of motion pictures,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 16 (1 November 1917): 12, 16.
13 Harold Lloyd, ‘The hardships of fun making,’ Ladies Home Journal (May 1926), rep. in Richard Koszarski (ed.),
Hollywood Directors 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 132.
14 Alfred A.Cohn, ‘The art director,’ Photoplay, 10 , no. 3 (August 1916): 46.
15 Pierre V.R.Key [scenario writer and ad and sales manager, Huffman-Foursquare Pictures], ‘Continuity is
important factor,’ Motography, 18, no. 20 (17 November 1917): 1033; Helen Starr, ‘Putting it together,’
Photoplay, 14, no. 2 (July 1918): 52.
16 Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, pp. 408, 410.
17 Jan and Cora Gordon, Star-Dust in Hollywood (London: Harrap & Co., 1931), pp. 105–6. This book was not
written by Hollywood practitioners, but by a British couple, one an artist, the other a writer, who gained entry to
the Paramount studio through their friendship with a writer employed there. They had access to the departments,
and, being new to filmmaking, they evidently described all its stages as explained to them by the studio staff. The
result is an unusually explicit presentation of classical production methods (as this quotation indicates).
Chapter 19
Technology, style, and mode of production
1 Otto Durholz, ‘Durholz describes his novel lens,’ IP, 6, no. 3 (April 1932): 10.
2 E.G. Lutz, The Motion-Picture Cameraman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927; rep. New York: Arno,
1972), p. 125.
3 David F.Noble, America By Design (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 5–6. See also J.D.Bernai, Science and
Industry in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 153–60, and Thomas
C.Cochrane and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New York: Harper & Bros, 1961), p. 306.
4 J.Douglas Gomery, ‘The coming of the talkies: invention, innovation, and diffusion,’ in The American Film
Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 193–211.
5 Lorin D.Grignon, ‘Experiment in stereophonic sound,’ JSMPE, 6l, no. 3 (September 1953): 375.
6 ‘“Realife” in Billy the Kid new departure in pictures,’ The Ohio Showman, 7, no. 7 (23 September 1930): 10.
7 William Stull, ‘Seventy millimetres,’ AC, 10, no. 11 (February 1930): 43.
8 Joseph Valentine, ‘Make-up and set painting aid new film,’ AC, 20, no. 2 (February 1939): 54.
9 ‘Report of the studio lighting committee,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 3 (March 1938): 295.
10 David S.Hulfish, ‘Some questions answered,’ The Nickelodeon, 1, no. 6 (June 1909): 156; David S. Hulfish, The
Motion Picture: Its Making and Its Theater (Chicago: Electricity Magazine Corporation, 1909), pp. 118–22; Tim
Onosko, ‘1953: the new era: a brief history of the three-dimensional film,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 11 (1974):
12–16; ‘Germans make gains,’ AC, 18, no. 9 (September 1937): 377; V.Solyev, ‘Soviets working in new
stereoscopic pictures,’ AC, 18, no. 12 (December 1937): 502, 504–5, 524.
11 J.A.Norling, ‘Stereoscopic motion pictures,’ AC, 33, no. 2 (February 1952): 66, 78–80. See also Arthur Gavin,
‘All Hollywood studios shooting 3-D films,’ AC, 34, no. 3 (March 1953): 108–10, 134–6; Charles G.Clarke,
‘Practical filming techniques for threedimensional and wide-screen motion pictures,’ AC, 34, no. 3 (March
1953): 107, 128–9, 138.
12 ‘Is 3-D dead?’ AC, 34, no. 12 (December 1953): 585– 6, 608–12.
13 Marguerite G.Ortman, Fiction and the Screen (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1935), p. 82; ‘Directors of stage in
exodus to coast,’ The Ohio Showman, 3, no. 16 (24 November 1928): 3; Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes:
Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 30.
14 C.J. North and N.D. Golden, ‘Meeting sound film competition,’ JSMPE, 15, no. 6 (December 1931): 757–8.
15 ‘Two directors,’ The Ohio Showman, 4, no. 18 (15 June 1929): 5; Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry
(New York: D.Van Nostrand Co., 1933), p. 45; MPPDA, ‘The motion picture industry,’ in The Development of
American Industries, ed. John George Glover and William Bouck Cornell (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1932), p.
754; Margaret Booth, ‘The cutter,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York:
Dodge Publishing Co., 1938), p. 149.
16 Verna Arvey, ‘Present day musical films and how they are made possible,’ Etude, 49 (January 1931): 16–17;
Max Winkler, ‘The origin of film music,’ Films in Review, 2, no. 10 (December 1951): 42.
17 Walter Blanchard, ‘Aces of the camera XXIX: Sol Polito, A.S.C.,’ AC, 24, no. 6 (June 1943): 212; Bert
Glennon, ‘Cinematography and the talkies,’ AC, 10, no. 11 (February 1930): 7, 45; Charles Higham, Hollywood
Cameramen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 40; ‘How lighting units are developed today,’
AC, 18, no. 5 (May 1937): 189.
18 Carl Dreher, ‘Sound personnel and organization,’ in Recording Sound for Motion Pictures, ed. Lester Cowan
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), p. 340.
19 Ibid., pp. 340–54.
20 Ibid.
21 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, tr. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 17–
40.
22 V.F.Perkins, Film as Film (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 56.
23 J.-L. Comolli, ‘Technique et idéologie,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 229 (May 1971): 4–5. See also Dugald
Williamson, ‘Technique and ideology,’ Australian Journal of Screen Theory, nos 5–6 (1978): 67–81.
24 Leonard Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 99.
25 Ibid., p. 128.
26 On the importance of functional concepts in the history of art, see Yuri Tynianov, ‘On literary evolution,’
Russian Poetics in Translation, no. 4 (1977): 32.
27 Yuri Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, ‘Problems of research in literature and language,’ Russian Poetics in
Translation, no. 4 (1977): 50.
28 Comolli, ‘Technique et idéologie,’ pp. 12–15.
29 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 49.
30 Ibid., p. 48.
31 Norman O.Dawn, ‘Innovations in cinematography,’ The American Film Institute/Louis B. Mayer Oral History
Collection (Glen Rock, New Jersey: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1977), p. 187.
32 Comolli, ‘Technique et idéologie,’ pp. 4–15.
33 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980), p. 38.
34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1963), p. 45.
35 See Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis, and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 23.
36 Farciot Edouart, ‘The Paramount transparency process projection equipment,’ in Technique of Motion Picture
Production, ed. SMPE (New York: Interscience, 1944), pp. 104–9.
37 See H.G.Stechnan, ‘Efficiency in studio management,’ Motography, 14, no. 8 (21 August 1915): 353; ‘Motion
picture colony under one roof,’ Scientific American, 120, no. 25 (21 June 1919): 651; ‘The Fox film building,’
Architecture and Building, 52, no. 5 (May 1920): 53–4; James G.Stewart, ‘The evolution of cinematic sound: a
personal report,’ in Sound and the Cinema: The Coming of Sound to American Film, ed. Evan William Cameron
(Pleasantville, New York: Redgrave, 1980), p. 42; William Stull, ‘Twentieth Century-Fox holds preview for its
big camera,’ AC, 21, no. 9 (September 1940): 396–8; Arthur Edeson, ‘Utility features new light crane,’ AC, 15,
no. 1 (May 1934): 10. The most active studio-based research departments were at MGM, where John Arnold and
Douglas Shearer won fame for their technical innovations. See ‘Industry news,’ AC, 37, no. 9 (September 1956):
514; ‘Color, recording gains cited in SMPE progress report,’ IPro, 11, no. 1 (July 1936): 14, 22–6; ‘First pix with
all sound aids,’ IP, 9, no. 3 (April 1937): 14.
38 Reese V.Jenkins, Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839 to 1925
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 147, 179–80, 277–9, 302–11. See also C.E.K. Mees,
From Dry Plates to Ektachrome (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1961), pp. 43–58.
39 C.E.K. Mees, The Organization of Industrial Scientific Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1920), pp. 2–10.
40 Quoted in Jenkins, Images, p. 310.
41 See George A.Blair, ‘The development of the motion picture raw film industry,’ Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 128, no. 217 (November 1926): 50–1; Emery Huse, ‘Sensitometry,’
Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), p. 115; Gordon Chambers and lan D.Wratten, ‘The Eastman Type lib
Sensitometer as a control instrument in the processing of motion picture film,’ JSMPE, 21, no. 3 (September
1933): 218–23.
42 On Du Pont, see Noble, America by Design, pp. 115– 17; George R.Rocher, ‘Motion picture film,’ AC, 8, no. 9
(December 1927): 4. On Western Electric, see Noble, America by Design, pp. 114–15. On National Carbon
Company, see ‘National Carbon’s new labs,’ IPro, 31, no. 12 (December 1956): 21. On Bausch and Lomb, see
Earl Theisen, ‘Science steps into optics,’ IP, 8, no. 7 (August 1936): 10, 26–7; W.B. Rayton, ‘New lenses for
projecting motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 35, no. 1 (July 1940): 89–97; ‘Bausch and Lomb new Cinephor f:2 lens
series,’ IPro, 15, no. 5 (May 1940): 24. On RCA, see Robert C.Bitting, ‘Creating an Industry,’ JSMPE, 74, no. 11
(November 1965): 1015–17.
43 Donald Bell, ‘A letter from Donald Bell,’ IP, 2, no. 1 (February 1930): 18–20; Donald Bell, ‘Motion picture film
perforation,’ TSMPE, no. 2 (1916): 8–10; Earl Theisen, ‘The story of Bell and Howell,’ IP, 5, no. 9 (October
1933): 6–7, 24–5; ‘40 Years for Bell and Howell,’ AC, 28, no. 12 (December 1947): 434–5; Joseph A.Dubray,
‘The evolution of motion picture film processing apparatus,’ Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931), pp. 271–90;
A.S.Howell, B.E. Stechbart, and R.F.Mitchell, ‘The Bell and Howell fully automatic sound picture production
printer,’ JSMPE, 19, no. 4 (October 1932): 305–28; ‘Automatic sound and picture printers,’ IP, 8, no. 12
(January 1936): 25; Bell & Howell Engineering Department, ‘Magnetic striping techniques and characteristics,’
International Sound Technician, 1, no. 11 (January 1954): 16–17.
44 ‘With the pioneers,’ IP, 1, no. 6 (July 1929): 28; Sol Polito, ‘BNC Mitchell silent camera,’ IP, 11, no. 4 (May
1934): 7; ‘Silencing the Bell & Howell camera for sound work,’ AC, 9, no. 12 (March 1929): 13–16; A.S.Howell
and J.A.Dubray, ‘The motion picture camera in sound pictures,’ TSMPE, 13, no. 37 (1929): 135–49; Edward
T.Estabrook, ‘New camera marvel unveiled,’ IP, 5, no. 2 (March 1933): 8; ‘Silencing the camera,’ AC, 9, no. 19
(January 1929): 6; ‘New type Mitchell camera,’ IP, 9, no. 1 (February 1938): 9; Earl Theisen, ‘The evolution of
the motion picture camera,’ IP, 5, no. 6 (June 1933): 42; Edmund M.Digiulio, E.E.Manderfield, and George
A.Mitchell, ‘An historical survey of the professional motion picture camera,’ JSMPTE, 76, no. 7 (July 1967):
666.
45 ‘Two men of Tek-Nik-Towne,’ IP, 2, no. 5 (June 1930): 88; Keva Marcus, ‘20 years of starlighting,’ IP, 19, no.
12 (December 1947): 5; ‘Pan and sound put inkies on top,’ IP, 10, no. 3 (April 1938): 43; Mary Eunice
McCarthy, Hands of Hollywood (Hollywood: Photoplay Research Bureau, 1929), pp. 60–1; Peter Mole, ‘Will
there always be a need for carbon arcs?’ AC, 31, no. 2 (February 1951): 72; Peter Mole, ‘Twice the light and
twice the carrying power,’ AC, 32, no. 3 (March 1951): 93, 111.
46 ‘Studio contacts aid lamp design,’ IP, 10, no. 7 (August 1938): 15.
47 Earl Theisen, ‘The Max Factor make-up factory,’ IP, 6, no. 6 (July 1934): 8–9; Max Factor, ‘Movie make-up,’
AC, 9, no. 1 (April 1928): 8; undated press release, Max Factor Company, pp. 1–2; Max Factor, ‘Standardization
of motion picture makeup,’ JSMPE, 38, no. 1 (January 1937): 60; Vern Murdock, ‘Make-up: now an exact art,’
IP, 10, no. 3 (April 1938): 48–9; Max Factor, ‘Make-up, the cameraman’s ally,’ Cinematography, 1, no. 5
(August 1930): 6, 25; Max Factor, ‘Coordinating makeup with film,’ AC, 16, no. 7 (July 1935): 286, 297; Max
Factor, ‘Make-up for the new Technicolor process,’ AC, 17, no. 8 (August 1936): 331, 334; Nancy Smith, ‘The new
Max Factor Technicolor make-up,’ IP, 8, no. 5 (June 1936): 10; Fred Basten, Glorious Technicolor (New York:
A.S.Barnes, 1980), p. 71; Eva Gardiner, ‘Trends in film makeup,’ IP, 28, no. 5 (May 1956): 18–19; Walter
Ramsey, ‘Make-up magic for today’s color films,’ AC, 36, no. 9 (September 1955): 526–9.
48 Genevieve Hauge, ‘The evolution of the Moviola,’ unpublished manuscript at Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS
(c. 1938); ‘Moviola expansion plans,’ AC, 27, no. 1 (January 1946): 18; interview with Sidney P.Solow,
conducted by David Bord well, Hollywood, California, on I July 1980; Pan and sound,’ p. 48; Louis Hockman,
‘Come-apart cars let camera in,’ Popular Science, 155, no. 4 (October 1949): 153–6; Earl Theisen, ‘In the motion
picture prop and research department,’ IP, 6, no. 7 (August 1934): 5.
49 Jenkins, Images, pp. 287–91; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 32, 47, 90–1; ‘Bell & Howell builds for
tomorrow,’ AC, 12, no. 5 (September 1931): 1; ‘Sure advance coming in sound,’ AC, 20, no. 4 (April 1939): 163;
‘Hollywood’s service army,’ IP, 10, no. 2 (March 1938): 11–13.
50 ‘Studio contacts,’ p. 16.
51 R.D.Sangster, ‘Hollywood—Ye Old Tek-Nik Towne,’ IP, 8, no. 9 (October 1936): 10.
52 Mole, ‘Will there always…,’ p. 72.
53 Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945); Will H.Hays, The Memoirs of Will
H.Hays (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955).
54 Halsey, Stuart, and Company, ‘The motion picture industry,’ in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 175.
55 H.Lyman Broening, ‘Beginning of the ASC,’ AC, 9, no. 1 (April 1928): 28, 35; Fred W.Jackman, ‘Birthday of
the ASC,’ AC, 23, no. 1 (January 1942): 5.
56 Quoted in ‘Six decades of “Loyalty, progress, art,”’AC, 60, no. 6 (June 1979): 596.
57 Charles G.Clarke, History of the American Society of Cinematographers (Hollywood: ASC, 1977), pp. 5– 6. See
also Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 145–6.
58 ‘ “Loyalty, progress and art” is slogan of West Coast club of cinematographers,’ MPW, 44, no. 13 (26 June
1920): 1777.
59 ‘ASC School,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 14 (18 September 1928): 7; letter from John F. Seitz to John Arnold (16
October 1930), on file at the American Society of Cinematographers.
60 Victor Milner, ‘ASC inaugurates research on photography for television,’ AC 30, no. 3 (March 1949): 86, 100–2.
61 Lewis W.Physioc. quoted in ‘Six decades,’ p. 576.
62 Ralph B.Farnham, ‘Mercury cadmium lamps for studio set lights,’ AC, 30, no. 2 (February 1949): 47, 58–60;
letter from Fred Jackman to Charles Rosher (29 October 1950), on file at the American Society of
Cinematographers; ‘Hollywood Bulletin Board,’ AC, 34, no. 4 (April 1953): 150.
63 Clarke, History of the ASC, p. 10.
64 ‘Society of American Cinematographers,’ AC, 14, no. 3 (July 1933): 85; ‘ASC recommends fast film,’ AC, 12,
no. 3 (July 1931): 19; Jack McCoskey, ‘The new Bell & Howell camera,’ IP, 16, no. 1 (February 1944): 13–14;
‘Lighting equipment received for ASC experimental library,’AC, 7, no. 5 (August 1926): 6.
65 Walter Blanchard, ‘Aces of the camera XV: “Tony” Gaudio,’ AC, 23, no. 3 (March 1942): 112, 137; Alex
Evelove, ‘Long record and more honor for Tony Gaudio in his screen work,’ AC, 19, no. 6 (June 1938): 230–1;
Lars Moen, ‘New “Spectra” meter,’ IP 20, no. 12 (December 1948): 7–8, 17; Linwood Dunn, ‘The new Acme-
Dunn optical printer,’ AC, 25, no. 1 (January 1944): 11, 29; W.G.C.Bosco, ‘Aces of the camera: Jackson J.Rose,’
AC, 25, no. 7 (July 1944): 228, 248, 250; Fred W. Jackman, ‘Birthday of the ASC,’ AC 23, no. 1 (January 1942):
5; Jackson Rose, ‘Color rendition,’ IP, 2, no. 5 (June 1930): 9–16, 28; Fred W.Jackman, ‘Patents and the
cinematographer,’ AC, 14, no. 9 (January 1934): 358, 380; Herb A.Lightman, ‘Changing trends in
cinematography,’ AC, 30, no. 1 (January 1949): 11.
66 Noble, America By Design, p. 70.
67 C.Francis Jenkins, ‘Chairman’s address,’ TSMPE, no. 2 (1916): 3.
68 E.A.Williford, Twenty-four years of service in the cause of better projection,’ JSMPE, 36, no. 3 (March 1941):
295; J.W.McNair, ‘Do standards inhibit progress?’ JSMPTE, 66, no. 9 (September 1957): 525; ‘The SMPE—its
aims and accomplishments,’ Projection Engineering, 2, no. 12 (December 1930): 18.
69 ‘The Society of Motion Picture Engineers: its aims and accomplishments,’ JSMPE: Index, July 1916May 1926
(New York: SMPE, 1926), p. 5.
70 J.L.Crabtree, ‘The Society of Motion Picture Engineers and its relation to production during the past year,’
International Review of Educational Cinematography, 3, no. 1 (January 1931): 35; ‘Sustaining members,’
JSMPTE, 58, no. 5 (May 1952), part 2:71–2; ‘Fall 1936 Convention,’ JSMPE, 27, no. 5 (October 1936): 473.
71 G.F.Rackett, ‘Pacific Coast Section, SMPE, Minutes of Meeting February 27, 1930,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 4 (April
1930): 465.
72 A.N.Goldsmith, ‘Problems in motion picture engineering,’ JSMPE, 23, no. 6 (December 1934): 350–4.
73 W.W.Lozier, ‘Foreword: screen brightness symposium,’ JSMPE, 61, no. 2 (August 1943): 213– 4.
74 Goldsmith, ‘Problems,’ p. 350.
75 Ibid.
76 ‘Banquet speeches,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 2 (February 1931): 223–38.
77 Pierre Normon Sands, A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927 1947) (New
York: Arno Press, 1973), pp. 29, 37–8, 82–4; Statement of Policy for the Reorganized Academy (Hollywood:
AMPAS, 1937), pp. 2–3; ‘Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shows growth,’ Projection
Engineering, 4, no. 3 (March 1932): 20. On the academy and labor, see Ross, Stars and Strikes, pp. 27–57;
Dudley Nichols, ‘Report to the Screen Writers’ Guild,’ Authors’ League of America Bulletin, no. 22 (November
1938): 11; Herbert Kline, ‘The Academy’s Last Supper,’ New Theatre, 3, no. 4 (April 1936): 32–3; Frank Woods,
‘The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 27–8; Nancy Lynn Schwartz,
The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 8–12.
78 Sands, Historical Study, pp. 197–8; ‘The Motion Picture Producers Association research laboratory,’ AC, 9, no. 2
(May 1928): 34; ‘Technical bureau transformed,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 28 (29 January 1930): 1; ‘The Hollywood
scene,’ Motion Picture Herald, 167, no. 6 (10 May 1947): 28; William Koenig, ‘The organization and activities
of the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 5 (November
1937): 484–5; W.F.Kelley, ‘Motion Picture Research Council,’ JSMPE 51, no. 4 (October 1948): 418–19.
79 Mees, Organization, p. 49.
80 Quoted in Sands, Historical Study, p. 87.
81 W.F.Kelley and W.V.Wolfe, ‘Technical activities of the Motion Picture Research Council,’ JSMPTE, 56, no. 2
(February 1951): 178.
82 Fred Westerberg, The Academy’s Symposium,’ IP, 2, no. 9 (October 1930): 14–15; ‘The Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences,’ Projection Engineering, 5, no. 2 (February 1933): 10–11; John K.Hilliard, ‘The
theatre standardization activities of the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’
JSMPE, 35, no. 4 (October 1940): 388–96.
83 Motion Picture Research Council, ‘3-D projection requisites,’ IPro, 28, no. 3 (March 1953): 12–13; Motion
Picture Research Council, ‘Addendum: 3-D projection,’ IPro, 28, no. 4 (May 1953): 14–15; ‘Hollywood bulletin
board,’ AC, 34, no. 5 (May 1953): 202; Gavin, ‘All Hollywood studios,’ p. 135; Armin J.Hill, ‘The Motion
Picture Research Council 3-D calculator, AC, 34, no. 8 (August 1953): 373, 398.
84 Sands, Historical Study, pp. 87–8; ‘Research in Hollywood,’ Projection Engineering, 4, no. 11 (November 1932):
9.
85 ‘Draft of new by-laws,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 14 (22 June 1933): 1.
86 Richard Shale, Academy Awards (New York: Ungar, 1978), p. 15.
87 Kelley, ‘Research Council,’ p. 423.
88 ‘Research Council,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 42 (8 February 1932): 7; Darryl F.Zanuck, ‘First meeting of Research
Council,’ AMPAS Technical Bulletin, supplement no. 12 (20 August 1932): 3–4; AMPAS Technical Bulletin,
supplement no. 19 (17 December 1932): 7; AMPAS Research Council, ‘Report on the arc lamp noise tests,’
JSMPE, 36, no. 5 (May 1941): 559–71.
89 ‘Wanger pic important for process work,’ IP, 19, no. 12 (January 1939): 16–18; Academy Research Council,
Recommendations on Process Projection Equipment (Hollywood: AMPAS, 1939); Farciot Edouart, The work of
the Process Projection Equipment Committee of the Research Council, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences,’ JSMPE 33, no. 3 (September 1939): 253; ‘Magnetic recording symposium by Academy,’ IPro, 22, no.
3 (March 1947): 9, 28–9.
90 Kelly, ‘Research Council,’ p. 422.
91 Andre Crot, ‘Research Council small camera crane,’ JSMPE, 52, no. 3 (March 1949): 273, 279; Frank E. Lyon,
‘The Research Council camera crane,’ AC, 30, no. 7 (July 1949): 242; Kelly, ‘Research Council,’ p. 422.
92 ‘Report of the Color Committee,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 1 (July 1937): 54–6; ‘Report of the Standards and
Nomenclature Committee,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 3 (September 1931): 431–3; ‘Report of the Standards Committee,’
JSMPE, 31, no. 6 (December 1938): 619–22.
Chapter 20
Initial standardization of the basic technology
1* We find it in titles of books—Katton Lahue’s Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (New
York: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1973) and Hollywood: The Pioneers by Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal (New York:
Alfred A.Knopf, 1979) and in chapter headings—‘The pioneering age of the film,’ in ‘Image’ on the Art and
Evolution of the Film, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum (New York: Dover Publications, 1979) and ‘The lawless film
frontier,’ in A Million and One Nights by Terry Ramsaye (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926)—as well as in
innumerable passages of prose.
2* The House of Fear used the recently introduced Panchroma Twin Arc Light, a 19-pound lamp designed to fold up
into a suitcase, which ran on AC or DC current. See ‘New lamp for night pictures,’ Photoplay, 7, no. 4 (March
1915): 160; Ernest Dench, Making the Movies (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 116; Hanford C.Judson, ‘In
search of The House of Fear,’ MPW, 22, no. 19 (5 December 1914): 1388–9.
3 ‘Action in 9 rooms shown at once in film by director Tourneur of World-Equitable,’ MPN, 13, no. 13 (1 April
1916): 1903; see also Victor Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 43.
4 Donald J.Bell, ‘A letter from Donald Bell,’ IP, 2, no. 1 (February 1930): 19.
5* As W.Wallace Clendenin describes this perforation, ‘These holes were always exactly placed in relation to the
aperture, no matter what the spacing of the frames might be.’ The Biograph printers used ‘feeler’ pilot pins which
would slide along the edges of the moving negative until the perforations passed, at which point the pins slipped
in and stopped the negative and pre-perforated positive (sandwiched together in the aperture) while the frame
was printed. This perforation in the camera produced the steady image. See W.Wallace Clendenin, ‘Cameras of
yesteryear,’ Pt 2, IP, 21, no. 2 (February 1949): 14.
6 Billy Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, His Story (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), pp. 20–1.
7 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 2, pp. 12–13.
8 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 2, p. 13; Fred J.Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 52; Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 2, p. 13; quoted in
Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), pp. 74–5.
9 Charles G.Clarke, Early Film Making in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Bookshop, 1976), p. 17;
Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 2, p. 12; W.Wallace Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 1, IP, 21, no.
1 (January 1949): 20–1. On Debrie cameras, see ‘Milestone movie cameras,’ AC, 50, no. 1 (January 1969): 79;
and ‘New features announced on latest models of Debrie cameras,’ AC, 7, no. 2 (May 1925): 23.
10 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 1, pp. 18, 20.
11 Balshofer and Miller’s One Reel a Week provides one of the best extended descriptions of this period.
12 ‘Loop litigation ends,’ Motography, 8, no. 5 (31 August 1912): 186; for excellent summaries of the ruling in
MPPC vs Independent Motion Picture Company of America (IMP) in the latter’s favor, and of the final decision
later the same year upholding that ruling, see ‘Important patent decision,’ MPW, 11, no. 7 (17 February 1912):
560, and ‘Latham loop patent adjudicated,’ MPW, 13, no. 8 (24 August 1912): 747.
13 ‘Questions and answers,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 8 (1 April 1917): 7.
14* A Bell & Howell outfit, including a tripod, one lens, one magazine, and a carrying case, cost about $1,000 in the
early teens. In 1922, the Motion Picture Apparatus Co. advertised a Pathé outfit, with a tripod, lens, and six
magazines, for $850. See Bell, ‘A letter from Donald Bell,’ p. 20; advertisement, The Motion Picture Apparatus
Co., AC, 3, no. 6 (September 1922): 17.
15 Bell, ‘A letter from Donald Bell,’ p. 19.
16 Ibid.
17 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 3, IP, 21, no. 3 (March 1949): 18.
18 Herbert C.McKay, Handbook of Motion Picture Photography (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1927), pp. 65–6.
For a demonstration of this focusing process in action, see the final sequence of Von Sternberg’s The Last
Command (1927, Paramount).
19 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), p. 213. This may even be an
underestimate; several times in King Vidor’s Show People (1928, MGM) cameramen release their cranks, which
go on turning for some time with no visible slowdown.
20* Aside from the higher price of the camera, patent infringement may have affected Bell & Howell sales. The fact
that the loop patent was invalidated in 1912 may have increased the company’s business. Bell remarked in
passing that the Patents Company ‘made a claim against us for infringement, asked many thousands of dollars
from us, and gladly took one thousand, which was paid to avoid further annoyance.’ See Bell, ‘A letter from
Donald Bell,’ p. 20.
21 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 3, p. 17; Untitled, The Static Club Bulletin, 1, no. 6 (16 November 1915):
3–4.
22 Harry F.Perry, with Oscar G.Estes, Jr., ‘40 years behind a motion picture camera, (unpublished typescript on file
at the American Film Institute’s Louis B.Mayer Library, Los Angeles; dated March, 1960), pp. 13, 92.
23 Clendenin, ‘Cameras of yesteryear,’ Pt 3, p. 18.
24 Carl Louis Gregory, ‘Motion picture photography,’ MPW, 32, no. 5 (3 May 1917): 792; Roe Fleet, ‘Aces of the
camera: Wilfred M.Clines,’ AC, 28, no. 4 (April 1947): 123.
25 Ira B.Hoke, ‘An erect image-finder for the Akeley,’ AC, 9, no. 3 (June 1928): 36.
26 ‘The Akeley specialists,’ AC, 8, no. 7 (October 1927): 7; Charles G.Clarke, ‘Amateur camera makes intimate shots
possible,’ AC, 7, no. 2 (May 1926): 19.
27 ‘Milestone movie cameras,’ p. 116.
29 ‘A camera out of the West,’ AC, 2, no. 18 (1 October 1921): 13.
30 ‘Mitchell appoints agents in North and East,’ AC, 3, no. 5 (August 1922): 7; ‘Mitchell increases production
program; to build new plant,’ AC, 4, no. 3 (June 1923): 22.
31 J.H.McNabb [President, Bell & Howell], ‘A new camera for screen news cinematographers,’ TSMPE, no. 23 (5–
8 October 1925): 79–81; advertisement, Bell & Howell, AC, 7, no. 2 (May 1926): 14– 15; H.Mario Raimondo
Souto, The Technique of the Motion Picture Camera (New York: Hastings House, 1977), pp. 128–9; Victor
Milner, ‘A.S.C. member answers amateurs,’ AC, 7, no. 1 (April 1926): 5.
32 Carl L.Gregory and G.J.Badgley, ‘Attachments to professional cinematograph cameras,’ TSMPE, no. 8 (14–16
April 1919): 80, 82.
33 George C.Keech, ‘Mercury lamps for moving pictures,’ The Nickelodeon, 3, no. 9 (May 1910): 233.
34 Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 15.
35 Peter Mole, ‘The evolution of arc broadside lighting equipment,’ JSMPE, 32, no. 4 (April 1939): 399; Balshofer
and Miller, One Reel à Week, p. 6.
36* Fred Balshofer refers in his memoirs to using muslin to diffuse sunlight on sets at the Crescent Film Co. in 1908.
In his book Early Filmmaking in Los Angeles, Charles G.Clarke also dates the use of muslin over sets
representing interiors as being about 1908. This date may be approximate, but certainly the diffusion of sunlight
had become a standard practice by the early teens. See Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week, p. 20; Clarke,
Early Filmmaking in Los Angeles, p. 22.
37 ‘New diffusion system,’ Motography, 9, no. 12 (14 June 1913): 436.
38 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., ‘The motion picture industry,’ in John George
Glover and William Bouck Cornell (eds), The Development of American Industries (New York: Prentice-Hall,
1932), p. 746; Anthony Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, New Jersey:
Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 14; Kalton C.Lahue (ed.), Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company
(Cranbury, New Jersey: New York: A.S.Barnes & Co., 1973), p. 43; ‘American secures remarkable lens,’
Motography, 7, no. 4 (April 1912): 180.
39 Mole, ‘The evolution of arc broadside lighting equipment,’ p. 399.
40 Dr Alfred B.Hitchins, ‘Artificial lighting of motion picture studios,’ AC, 3, no. 6 (September 1922): 22.
41 ‘Cooper-Hewitt lights,’ Cinema News, 2, no. 11 (October 1918): 19.
42 Sarah Pressey Noreen, Public Street Illumination in Washington, D.C. (Washington: G.W.Washington Studies,
n.d.), p. 23; Eddy S.Feldman, The Art of Street Lighting in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop,
1972), p. 17; Paul W.Keatin, Lamps for a Brighter America (New York: McGrawHill, 1954), p. 7.
43 Theodore Fuchs, Stage Lighting (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1929), pp. 45, 47; Gösta M.Bergman, Lighting in
the Theater (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1977), pp. 273–88.
44 Barry Salt, ‘A letter to the editor,’ Screen, 17, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 120.
45 Earl Theisen, ‘Part of the story of lighting,’ IP, 4, no. 3 (April 1934): 10.
47 ‘The A-B flaming arc,’ The Nickelodeon, 2, no. 4 (October 1910): 128–9; ‘The evolution of motion picture
lighting,’ AC, 50, no. 1 (January 1969): 95; William Roy Mott, ‘White light for motion picture photography,’
TSMPE, no. 8 (14–16 April 1919): 34.
49 Jack Grant, ‘Hollywood’s first art director,’ AC, 22, no. 4 (May 1941): 238; Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a
Week, pp. 126–7; ‘Apfel has a patent,’ MPW, 21, no. 13 (26 September 1914): 1760.
50 Advertisement, Cinema News, 2, no. 3 (February 1918): back cover.
51 J. Justice Harmer, ‘Artificial sunlight,’ Cinema News, 2, no. 2 (January 1918): 9.
52 P.R.Basset [of the Electrical Illuminating Engineers Society], ‘Flexibility and uses of light,’ AC, 4, no. 3 (June
1922): 12, 23–4.
53* An excellent close view of this process in action appears in the publicity documentary, A Tour of the Thomas
H.Ince Studio (c. 1923, Ince). This film in general gives a good account of the various departments and shows a
few candid (not staged) views of units filming on interior stages.
54 Maxwell Harper Hite, Lessons in How to Become a Successful Moving Picture Operator (Harrisburg, 1908), pp.
71–7; David Sherrill Hulfish, Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American Technical Society, 1915; rep. New York:
Arno, 1970), p. 79; Earl J. Denison, ‘My troubles, your troubles and our troubles and how we can get around
them without trouble,’ The American Projectionist, 4, no. 7 (July 1926): 4.
55 ‘What happens when the film breaks,’ Photoplay, 16, no. 5 (5 October 1919): 60; Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone
By, p. 283; McKay, Handbook of Motion Picture Photography, p. 165.
56 Earl J.Denison, ‘Sprockets and splices,’ TSMPE, no. 17 (1–4 October 1923): 180.
57* The projectionists generally believed that a wide splice was necessary for strength and holding power. A 1914
projectionist-advice column suggested: ‘The best place to cut the film for splicing is below the first perforation
below the printing line [i.e., frame line], say about halfway between that perforation and the one below.’ Such a
splice would be about 3/16 of an inch wide, with an entire sprocket hole of one strip of film lined up over one from
the other strip. (This would be termed a ‘fullhole’ splice in the twenties.) Some projectionists even made two-
hole overlaps (with the splice line visible in the center of the frame!), but this column cautions against this,
pointing out that the one-hole splice would go ‘through the sprocket wheels with less commotion.’ See The
Operator, ‘The practical side of pictures,’ Reel Life, 4, no. 17 (11 July 1914): 20.
By the twenties, formal tests began to be made, and these revealed that even a one-hole overlap caused too
wide a splice. In going through the sprocket gears, a wide, thick splice was less flexible, would pull more, and
hence would cause a break more easily. In 1922, the SMPE heard evidence that a beveled splice only 1/32-inch (.
03řř) wide was sufficient for negatives, but that one 5/64-inch (.078řř) wide was necessary for positives. The
Society also got the results of Eastman’s tests of splice strength in 1926, which found that unspliced film’s tensile
strength was 14.2 kilograms, while that of a .078-inch (5/64řř) splice was 10.5 KG, and of a larger .156-inch (5/32řř,
or full-hole) splice was actually smaller, at 10.4 KG. But since projectionists could not be persuaded to give up
the full-hole splice, in 1926 the Society finally gave its recommendations on standard splice widths as follows: .
03-inch (1/32řř) for negatives, .156-inch (5/32řř) for positive prints. See J.H.McNabb, ‘Film splicing,’ TSMPE, no.
14 (1–4 May 1922) 43; S.E.Sheppard and S.S.Sweet, ‘Note on the strength of splices,’ TSMPE, no. 25 (3–6 May
1926): 145; ‘Report of Standards and Nomenclature Committee,’ TSMPE, no. 27 (4–7 October 1926): 20.
59 Bogdonovich, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, p. 24; Clifford Howard, ‘The cinema in retrospect,’ Close Up, 3,
no. 6 (December 1928): 38; David Sherrill Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American
School of Correspondence, 1911): vol. 2, p. 111.
60 McKay, Handbook of Motion Picture Photography, p. 170.
61 J.I.Crabtree, ‘The motion-picture laboratory,’ JSMPTE, 64, no. 1 (January 1955): 14.
62 ‘Motion pictures in the making,’ NYDM, 70, no. 1806 (30 July 1913): 25–6.
63 Hulfish, Motion-Picture Work (1915), Pt. 2, p. 140.
64 John Harvith, ‘Karl Struss remembers,’ in Susan and John Harvith (eds), Karl Struss: Man with a Camera
(Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Academy of Art/Museum, 1976), p. 11.
65 Quoted in Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer, p. 80.
Chapter 21
Major technological changes of the 1920s
1 Homer Croy, How Motion Pictures Are Made (New York: Harper & Bros., 1918), pp. 354–5.
2* The assumption that panchro was innately superior to ortho has given rise to some inaccurate accounts of
panchro’s introduction. Jean Mitry dates the introduction of panchro as 1918, thereby suggesting that its adoption
progressed smoothly into the twenties (Histoire du cinéma, vol. 3 [Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973], p. 490).
Eric Rhode ignores the existence of panchro before the twenties and credits its entire introduction to Robert
Flaherty’s Moana, as late as 1926 (A History of the Cinema From Its Origins to 1970 [New York: Hill & Wang,
1976], pp. 248–9.). Charles Harpole assumes that because panchro was an experimental stock for Eastman in
1913, it was not available to filmmakers until 1923, when it became a regular product; as we shall see, however,
filmmakers could get panchro if they cared to order it from 1913 on (Gradients of Depth in the Cinema Image
[New York: Arno Press, 1978], p. 56). We have seen that Patrick Ogle correctly dates the introduction of panchro
in 1913, but he concludes simply that it ‘had not proved popular,’ without giving reasons (‘Technological and
aesthetic influences upon the development of deep focus cinematography in the United States,’ Screen Reader,
[London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977], p. 85).
3 S.D.Levings, ‘Urban-Smith Kinemacolor demonstration,’ The Nickelodeon, 3, no. 1 (1 January 1910): 7; for
accounts of Kinemacolor of America, see D.B.Thomas, The First Colour Motion Pictures (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969), p. 30, and Gorham Kindem, ‘The demise of Kinemacolor: technological,
legal, economic, and aesthetic problems in early color cinema history,’ Cinema Journal, 20, no. 2 (Spring 1981):
9–12.
4 Earl Theisen, ‘The history of nitrocellulose as a film base,’ JSMPE, 20, no. 3 (March 1933): 261; Earl Theisen,
‘Tracing the history of silver grain,’ IP, 4, no. 10 (November 1932): 24; J.I.Crabtree, ‘The motion-picture
laboratory,’ JSMPTE, 64, no. 1 (January 1955): 19.
5 C.E.Kenneth Mees, ‘History of professional blackand-white motion-picture film,’ JSMPTE, 63 (October 1954),
rep. Raymond Fielding (ed.), A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Tele vision (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967), p. 125.
6 Frederick A.Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, new ed. (London: William Heinemann,
1914), pp. 292–4.
7 Mees, ‘History of professional black-and-white motion-picture film,’ p. 125; see also Emery Huse and Gordon
A.Chamber, ‘Three new Eastman negative emulsions: Background X, Plus X, and Super XX,’ AC, 19, no. 12
(December 1938): 487.
8 See Roderick T.Ryan, A History of Motion Picture Color Technology (London/New York: Focal Press, 1977), pp.
26–35, for a discussion of Kinemacolor and four other American companies of this period.
9 Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), p. 78.
10 Jonas Howard, ‘There are no “motion” pictures!’ Photoplay, 16, no. 5 (October 1919): 60.
11 Carl L.Gregory and G.S. Badgley, ‘Attachments to professional cinematographic cameras,’ TSMPE, no. 8 (14–16
April 1919): 84–5.
12 ‘The log of a great picture,’ AC, 2, no. 20 (1 November 1921): 10.
13 ‘Report of the Committee on Progress,’ TSMPE, no. 14 (1–4 May 1922): 175.
14 ‘Report of the Committee on Films and Emulsions,’ TSMPE, no. 16 (7–10 May 1923): 260.
15 ‘Director advocates panchromatic stock,’ AC, 7, no. 7 (October 1926): 6.
16 John Grierson, ‘Putting richness into the photoplay,’ AC, 8, no. 7 (October 1927): 22.
17 Editor’s note introducing Grierson, ‘Putting richness into the photoplay,’ p. 4. Emphases in original.
18 Eastman Panchromatic Negative Film For Motion Pictures (Rochester, New York: Eastman Kodak, 1925), pp.
5, 7–8.
19 Renée Van Dyke, ‘Paragraphs pertaining to plays and players,’ Cinema Art, 5, no. 8 (October 1926): 54; Daniel
B.Clark [President of ASC], ‘A cinematographic forecast for 1927,’ AC, 7, no. 10 (January 1927): 10, 21–2.
20* Up to 1927, the additional negative for export prints had been shot by a second camera on the set. Duplication in
the lab rendered an excessively contrasty negative. But that year Eastman introduced its Duplicating Film,
containing a yellow dye; used in combination with filters, this stock held down contrast to an acceptable level and
made it unnecessary to shoot two negatives. See J.I. Crabtree, ‘The motion-picture laboratory,’ JSMPTE, 64, no.
1 (January 1955): 21–2.
21 ‘Record lectures held on new film subjects,’ AC, 7, no. 11 (February 1927): 6, 21.
22 Scott Eyman, ‘An interview with Karl Struss,’ The Journal of Popular Film, 4, no. 4 (1975): 314; Herbert
C.McKay, ‘Panchromatic versus ordinary film,’ Photo-Era, 61, no. 1 (July 1928): 58.
23* Ortho continued to be manufactured until July of 1942. After 1936, Eastman apparently ceased manufacturing it
as a regular studio negative, for it had clearly been replaced by the faster panchro stocks. It lingered on as a stock
for certain special purposes, however: it still would be used in negative for the blue strip in bi- or tri-pack color
systems, and was occasionally used for such purposes as positive back projection prints (where its extremely fine
grain would be advantageous). But improvements in various panchro stocks eventually eliminated even these
minor uses. See Mees, ‘History of professional black-and-white motionpicture film,’ p. 125; Emery Huse, ‘The
characteristics of Eastman motion picture negative films,’ AC, 17, no. 5 (March 1936): 192; Motion Picture
Laboratory Practice and Characteristics of Eastman Motion Picture Films (Rochester, New York: Eastman
Kodak Co., 1936), pp. 42–4; Jackson J. Rose, American Cinematographer Hand Book and Reference Guide
(Hollywood: ASC, 1942), pp. 31–2.
24 Ned Van Buren, ‘Light filters and their use in cinematography,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930): 127.
25 Earl Theisen, ‘The story of the Moviola,’ IP, 7, no. 19 (November 1935): 4.
26 Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1968), p. 304.
27 Interview with William Hornbeck, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 9 July 1980, Ventura,
California.
28* In 1919, Serrurier registered the name ‘Moviola’ as a trademark. His intention was to create a machine for home
projection of 35mm films. As a result, the first model was a self-contained cabinet with a small screen extending
toward the front. This backprojection system resembled an upright cabinet Victrola—the machine from which
Serrurier derived the name. He apparently sold only three of these machines during the period 1923–4. The
machine was certainly a failure as far as its intended purpose went, but in September 1924 an editor at the
Douglas Fairbanks Studio told Serrurier he was interested in the Moviola’s mechanism; Serrurier then discarded
the bulky cabinet and screen, attaching the modified mechanism to a board. In this form, the Fairbanks company
purchased it; sales to Universal and Pickford followed. With this success, Serrurier devised a model which could
be manufactured on a regular basis, the Midget. The Mitchell Camera Co. made twelve, of which the first went to
MGM in November 1924. Sales were brisk enough to necessitate a second manufacturer, machineshop operator
W.S.Austin, to participate with Mitchell. See Mark Serrurier, ‘The origins of the Moviola,’ JSMPTE, 75, no. 7
(July 1966): 702, 707; Theisen, ‘The story of the Moviola,’ p. 4.
29 J.H.McNabb, ‘Film splicing,’ TSMPE, no. 14 (1–4 May 1922): 41–2.
30 Ibid., p. 21; Harry A.Mount, ‘Developing motion picture film with automatic machinery,’ Scientific American,
125, no. 11 (10 September 1921): 181.
31 Alfred B.Hitchins [Technical Director, Duplex Motion Picture Industries, Inc.], ‘Machine development of
negative and positive motion picture film,’ TSMPE, no. 22 (18–21 May 1925): 52.
33 Interview with Stanley Cortez, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 3 July 1980, in Hollywood,
California; interview with Charles G. Clarke, conducted by Bordwell and Thompson, 12 June and 3 July 1980, in
Hollywood, California.
34 ‘Fifty years—or more—of evolving camera technique,’ AC, 50, no. 1 (January 1969): 53; Fred J. Balshofer and
Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 140; Arthur C.Miller,
‘Setting the record straight,’ IP, 32, no. 5 (May 1960): 108.
35 How To Take and Make Moving Pictures (Denver: Ford’s [an equipment manufacturer], 1914), p. 24.
36 Henry Clay Foster, ‘Cinematography and the public,’ Cinema News, 1, no. 15 (1 October 1917): 1.
1916): 13.
38* The Marriage of Molly O was supervised by Griffith at Triangle-Fine Arts. An account in 1926 stated that Powell
‘had the lens made (to fit motion picture camera requirements) and experimented with it before using it
(legitimately and effectively) to tell an inserted fairy story in an Irish photoplay released by Triangle’—presumably
The Marriage of Molly O. In a much later account, John Harvith states in Karl Struss: Man With a Camera that
the Struss Pictorial Lens was the ‘first soft-focus lens used in motion pictures’; Harvith quotes a 1922 American
Cinematographer article which claimed that a three-inch version of the lens had been built for John Leezer in
1916. Leezer was a cameraman at the Triangle-Fine Arts studio under Griffith. Finally, Struss recently explained
that he had licensed a company in Brooklyn to make his Pictorial lens, and that they made a few in shorter
lengths for motion picture work. See Carlyle Ellis, ‘Art and the motion picture,’ Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, 128 (November 1926): 56; John Harvith, ‘Karl Struss: man with a camera,’ in
Susan and John Harvith (eds.), Karl Struss: Man With a Camera (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook
Academy of Art/Museum, 1976), pp. 1–2; interview with Karl Struss, conducted by David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson, 10 July 1980, in Hollywood, California.
39 Austin C.Lescarboura,‘ “Shooting” the photoplay,’ Scientific American, 117, no. 11 (15 September 1917): 199.
40 Karl Brown, ‘Modern lenses,’ Pt 2, AC, 3, no. 3 (1 June 1922): 12.
41 Ibid., p. 4.
42 Karl Brown, ‘Modern lenses,’ Pt 3, AC, 3, no. 4 (1 July 1922): 4.
43 Ibid.
44* In 1909, David Hulfish mentioned standard lenses as 2 to 4 inches; in 1913, John H.Rathbun repeated this, saying
that ‘the usual focal length’ was 3 inches. American Cinematographer surveyed the studios in 1922 and found
typical lens lengths as 32 mm (approximately 11/4 řř), 40mm (11/2řř), 50mm (2řř) and 75mm (3řř). See David
S.Hulfish, The Motion Picture, Its Making and Its Theater (Chicago: Electricity Magazine Corporation, 1909), p.
18; John H.Rathbun, ‘Motion picture making and exhibiting,’ Motography, 9, no. 8 (19 April 1913): 277; Glenn
Robert Kershner, ‘Lens angles of the cinema camera,’ AC, 3, no. 8 (November 1922): 14– 15.
45 Interview with Charles G.Clarke; Herbert C. McKay, Handbook of Motion Picture Photography (New York:
Falk Publishing Co., 1927), pp. 60, 123.
46 Interview with Karl Struss.
47 Quoted in Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 230.
48 Higham, Hollywood Cameramen, pp. 124–5.

49 Leonard Maltin, The Art of the Cinematographer (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), p. 81.
51* Gish was Ufa’s first choice to play Gretchen in the 1926 German film of Faust, but according to the film’s
designer, Robert Herlth, she would only take the role on the condition that Rosher would film her. Since Herlth
and his collaborator Walter Rohrig insisted on a different Cinematographer, the entire plan to use Gish fell
through. See Lotte Eisner, Murnau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 69.
52 Erique J.Rebel et al., ‘Great cameramen,’ Focus on Film, no. 13 (1973): 67.
53 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 104.
54 For additional examples of the gum bichromate method, see Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 103, and
Helmut and Alison Gernheim, A Concise History of Photography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), pp. 173–
8.
55 Brown, ‘Modern lenses,’ Pt 2, p. 12.
56 Ellis, ‘Art and the motion picture,’ pp. 55–6.
57 Karl Brown, ‘Modern lenses,’ Pt 5, AC 3, no. 5 (August 1922): 5, 20; Advertisement, William Horsley’s Film
Laboratories, AC, 3, no. 1 (1 April 1922): 12; ‘Among the laboratories,’ AC 3, no. 1 (1 April 1922): 13.
Chapter 22
The Mazda tests of 1928
1 Frederick S.Mills, ‘Film lighting as a fine art,’ Scientific American, 124, no. 8 (19 February 1921): 158.
2 Benjamin B.Hampton, History of the American Film Industry, From Its Beginnings to 1931 (New York: Dover,
1970), pp. 369–74; Jan and Cora Gordon, Star-Dust in Hollywood (London: Harrap, 1930), pp. 269–74;
J.Douglas Gomery, The coming of sound to the American cinema: a history of the transformation of an industry’
(Unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Wisconsin: Madison, 1975), pp. 219–22.
3 Daniel B.Clark, ‘A cinematographic forecast for 1927,’ AC, 7, no. 10 (January 1927): 10; Peter Mole, ‘The use
of globe lamps,’ AC, 8, no. 8 (November 1927): 18; R.E.Farnham, ‘Motion picture lighting with incandescent
lamps,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), p. 253; ‘A new era in lighting,’ AC, 8, no. 5 (August 1927): 22;
Peter Mole, ‘The tungsten lamp situation in the studio,’ TSMPE, 11, no. 3 (September 1927): 582–4; Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Academy Reports No. 1: Transactions, Enquiries, Demonstrations, Tests, Etc.,
on the Subject of Incandescent Illumination as Applied to Motion Picture Production (Hollywood, California:
AMPAS, 1928), pp. 10–14.
4 AMPAS, Academy Reports No. 1, pp. 5–6; ‘Technicians hold important meeting,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 5 (25
November 1927): n.p.
5 K.C.D.Hickman, ‘Hollywood and the Motion Picture Engineers,’ TSMPE, 11, no. 29 (April 1927): 36.
6 Ibid., p. 29.
7 AMPAS, Academy Reports No. 1, p. 7.
8 ‘First of incandescent meetings held; shots made by John Arnold,’ Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World,
90, no. 4 (28 January 1928): 31; ‘A Mazda marathon,’ AC, 8, no. 11 (February 1928): 24; ‘Mazda lighting,’
AMPAS Academy Bulletin, no. 7 (1 February 1928): 1; AMPAS, Academy Reports no. 1, pp. 5, 10–11, 23–7;
Max Factor, ‘The art of motion picture make-up,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), pp. 157–71.
9 Earl Theisen, Part of the story of lighting,’ IP, 6, no. 3 (April 1934): 12; AMPAS, Academy Reports No. 1, pp. 5–
9, 18–21; ‘Mazda lighting,’ AMPAS Academy Bulletin, no. 8 (1 March 1928): 1–2; ‘Mazda enquiries close,’
AMPAS Academy Bulletin, no. 10 (3 May 1928): 3.
10 For technical results of the tests, see Research Committee of the American Society of Cinematographers,
‘Incandescent tungsten lighting in cinematography,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 34 (1928): 453–63.
11 ‘Report on experiments on Mazda lighting sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and
prepared by the Research Committee of the American Society of Cinematographers,’ AC, 9, no. 2 (May 1928): 8.
12 ‘The Mazda tests,’ AC, 9, no. 1 (April 1928): 30–2; ‘Academy Secretary’s Annual Report,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no.
16 (22 November 1928): 10–13; R.E. Farnham, ‘Incadescent lighting improving,’ AC, 10, no. 1 (April 1929): 31–
2; Technicians investigate arcs,’ AC, 10, no. 12 (March 1930): 221.
13 See ‘Plan and sound put inkies on top,’ IP, 10, no. 3 (April 1938): 45.
15 The set is illustrated in AC, 8, no. 12 (March 1928): 19. The footage is described in detail in AMPAS, Academy
Reports No. 1, pp. 18–21.
16 Quoted in AMPAS, Academy Reports No. 1, p. 16.
17 Max Factor, ‘Panchromatic make-up,’ AC, 9, no. 2 (May 1928): 22; E.W.Beggs, ‘Motion picture studio lighting,’
Motion Picture Projection, 2, no. 5 (February 1929): 7, 30.
18 W.B.Cook, ‘Presidential address,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 15.
19 ‘Speeches presented at the banquet given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in honor of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 19–24.
20 AMPAS, Academy Reports No. 1, p. 63.
21 ‘Technical bureau started,’ AMPAS Academy Bulletin, no. 13 (11 August 1928): 5.
Chapter 23
The introduction of sound
1 Frank Woods, ‘The sound motion picture situation in Hollywood,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 35 (1928): 629.
2 Edward W.Kellogg, ‘History of sound motion pictures,’ in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and
Television, ed. Raymond Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 174–220; J.Douglas
Gomery, ‘The coming of the talkies: invention, innovation, and diffusion,’ in The American Film Industry, ed.
Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 193–211.
3 ‘Survey of sound problems,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 23 (9 July 1929): 4–5; ‘What sound has done,’ Variety (13
March 1929): 1; Hatto Tappenback, ‘Practical exposure meters under present photographic conditions,’
Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931), pp. 233–6; Virgil E.Miller, ‘Camera-department organization and
maintenance,’ AC, 13, no. 6 (October 1932): 6–7, 40–1; ‘The magic of the cutting room,’ IP, 1, no. 7 (August
1929): 20. See also Rick Altman, ‘Introduction,’ Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 5–11.
4 L.A.Hawkins, ‘Research in industry,’ AC, 9, no. 2 (May 1928): 35–8; ‘Banquet speeches,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 3
(September 1931): 423–4; ‘Biggest stage on earth devoted to special process work,’ AC, 10, no. 1 (April 1929):
20–1, 35; ‘Columbia moves ahead,’ IP, 8, no. 4 (May 1936): 31; Gordon A.Chambers, ‘Process photography,’
Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931), pp. 223–7; Elmer C.Richardson, ‘A microphone boom,’ JSMPE, 15, no. 1
(July 1930): 41–5. See also Chapter 19, note 37.
5 ‘Brulator-Eastman technical service lab,’ AC, 9, no. 12 (March 1929): 7; ‘Eastman research lab opened in
Hollywood,’ AC, 10, no. 2 (May 1929): 23; Eastman Kodak, An Eastman Service (Rochester: Eastman Kodak,
n.d.); ‘Smith and Aller provide experimental stage for cameramen,’ AC, 10, no. 6 (September 1929): 21, 43; ‘The
Dupont baby set,’ IP, 1, no. 8 (September 1929): 6; ‘Mole-Richardson expand,’ AC, 9, no. 6 (September 1928):
32; ‘Two men of Tek-Nik Towne,’ IP, 2, no. 5 (June 1930): 88, 120; ‘The Mitchell’s new home,’ AC 9, no. 11
(February 1929): 34; ‘Eastman’s processing plant most completely equipped,’ IP, no. 9 (October 1930): 37;
‘Progress in the motion picture industry,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 2 (February 1930): 233.
6 Advertisement for Bell & Howell IP 1, no. (September 1929): 13. See also ‘Bell & Howell expand,’ IP, 1, no. 8
(September 1929): 16; ‘New engineering laboratory for Bell & Howell completed,’ AC, 10, no. 6 (September
1929): 45.
7 ‘What is the Academy doing?’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 14 (18 September 1928): 1–2.
8 ‘Academy Secretary’s Annual Report,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 16 (22 November 1928): 10–13; ‘Writers in
Hollywood give varied views on “talkers,” ’ Variety (9 May 1928): 9; ‘Directors and talkers,’ Variety (16 May
1928): 9, 42; Harold B.Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), pp. 223–4;
‘Sound development programs,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 24 (15 August 1929): 1; Irving Thalberg, ‘Technical
activities of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ JSMPE, 15, no. 1 (July 1930): 5;
‘Producerstechnicians meeting,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 32 (7 June 1930): 4; Pierre Norman Sands, A Historical
Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927–1947) (New York: Arno Press, 1973), pp. 133–
5; ‘Academy sound school a success,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 26 (30 October 1929): 2–3; Frank Woods, ‘The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its service as a forum for the industry,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 4
(April 1930): 437–40.
9 Sands, Historical Study, pp. 187–93; AMPAS Producers-Technicians Committee, Acoustic Analysis of Set
Materials (Hollywood: AMPAS, 1930); ‘Practical problems basis for technical programs,’ AMPAS Bulletin, (21
September 1931): 9, 12; ‘Technical committees active,’ AMPAS Bulletin no. 29 (27 February 1930): 5.
10 ‘Sound men and cinematographers discuss their mutual problems,’ AC, 10, no. 5 (August 1929): 8; Pat Dowling,
‘Bringing the art back,’ AC, 10, no. 8 (November 1929): 21; C.W.Handley, ‘Color carbons,’ AC, 8, no. 11 (February
1928): 22; ‘A tribute to the engineer,’ IP, 2, no. 4 (May 1930): 48; ‘echnicians investigate arcs,’ AC, 10, no. 12
(March 1930): 22; ‘How arcs are silenced,’ Cinematography, 1, no. 4 (July 1930): 12, 25–6; ‘Silence with arc
lamps,’ IP, 1, no. 12 (January 1930): 8–10, and 2, no. 1 (February 1930): 44; AMPAS, Methods of Silencing Arcs
(Hollywood: AMPAS, 1930); E.W. Beggs, ‘Motion picture studio lighting,’ Motion Picture Projection, 2, no. 5
(February 1929): 96.
11 AMPAS, Camera Silencing Devices (Hollywood: AMPAS, 1930), pp. 1–30; ‘Quarterly technical meeting,’
AMPAS Bulletin, no. 30 (18 April 1930): 4; Gordon S.Mitchell, ‘Camera noise silencing blimps,’ Projection
Engineering, 3, no. 3 (March 1931): 12–14; L.E.Clark, ‘Some considerations in the design of sound-proof
camera housings,’ JSMPE, 15, no. 2 (August 1930): 165–70; ‘Camera silencing devices,’ Cinematography, 1,
no. 4 (July 1930): 10–11; ‘Analysis of camera silencing devices,’ Projection Engineering, 2, no. 3 (March 1930):
13; ‘Development of silent camera given suport,’ AMPAS Bulletin (14 May 1931): 14; ‘Camera silencing,’
Projection Engineering, 3, no. 5 (May 1931): 13.
12 ‘Synopsis of technical reports and action authorized by the Research Council,’ AMPAS Technical Bulletin,
supplement no. 12 (20 August 1932): 7.
13 William Koenig, The organization and activities of the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 5 (November 1937): 485–6.
14 E.G.Wente, ‘Contributions of telephone research to sound pictures,’ JSMPE, 27, no. 2 (August 1936): 189–93;
J.Douglas Gomery, ‘The coming of sound to the American cinema: A history of the transformation of an
industry’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975), pp. 118–34, 175–8; Patrick
Ogle, The development of sound systems: the commercial era,’ Film Reader, 2 (1977): 199–212; ‘The ribbon
microphone,’ Projection Engineering, 4, no. 7 (July 1932): 18–19; Cecil B. Fowler, ‘A new recording system,’
Motion Picture Projection, 6, no. 1 (November 1932): 22–4; F.L. Hopper, ‘Wide-range recording,’ JSMPE, 22,
no. 4 (April 1934): 253–9; H.G.Tasker, ‘Slide-rule sketches of Hollywood,’ JSMPE, 28, no. 2 (February 1937):
158; J.K.Hilliard, ‘Push-pull recording,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 2 (February 1938): 156, 161; William Stull, ‘Ultra-
violet recording with “black light,” ’AC, 17, no. 8 (August 1936): 329, 335–6; ‘The influence of sound
accompaniment on the dramatic value of pictures,’ IPro, 15, no. 4 (April 1940): 20–1; ‘Push-pull ultra-violet
recording,’ IPro, 15, no. 2 (February 1940): 23–4; ‘One Hundred Men and a Girl,’ Cinema Progress, no. 2
(August 1937): 24; ‘Progress in the motion picture industry,’ JSMPE, 24, no. 5 (May 1940): 455–84; ‘Report on
the adaptation of fine-grain films to variable-density sound technics,’ JSMPE, 34, no. 1 (January 1940): 3–11;
Koenig, ‘Organization and activities,’ pp. 485– 7; Jack Duerst, ‘An outline of the work of the Academy Research
Council Subcommittee on Acoustical Characteristics,’ JSMPE, 36, no. 3 (March 1941): 282–3; John K.Hilliard,
‘Notes on the procedure for handling high volume release prints,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 2 (February 1938): 209–14;
‘Academy recommendations on theatre sound reproducing equipment,’ IPro, 13, no. 7 (July 1938): 14– 15, 29–
30; ‘Sound track standards revised,’ IPro, 15, no. 7 (July 1940): 17, 28; Douglas Shearer, ‘The voice of the
screen,’ The Lion’s Roar, 3, no. 4 (July 1944): n.p.
15 J.P.Maxfield, ‘Technic of recording control for sound pictures,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), p. 412.
16 Charles Felstead, ‘Monitoring sound motion pictures,’ Projection Engineering, 2, no. 12 (December 1930): 10–
11, 14; ‘Technicians’ branch meeting,’ AMPAS Bulletin, no. 21 (12 May 1929): 2; Carl Dreher, ‘Recording, re-
recording, and editing of sound,’ JSMPE, 16, no. 6 (June 1931): 756–7; Wesley C.Miller, ‘The illusion of reality
in sound pictures,’ in Recording Sound for Motion Pictures, ed. Lester Cowan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931),
p. 214. See also Mary Ann Doane, ‘Ideology and the practice of sound editing and mixing,’ in The Cinematic
Apparatus, ed. Stephen Heath and Teresa De Lauretis (New York: St Martins, 1980), pp. 47–56.
17 Charles Felstead, ‘Motion picture sound recording,’ IP, 6, no. 2 (March 1934): 24.
18 Alexander Walker, The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay (New York: William Morrow & Co.,
1979), p. 194. See also John L.Cass, ‘The illusion of sound and picture,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 3 (March 1930): 323–6;
and Dreher, ‘Recording, rerecording,’ p. 758.
19 Harold Lewis, ‘Getting good sound is an art,’ AC, 15, no. 2 (June 1934): 65, 73–4.
20 L.E.Clark, ‘Accessory and special equipment,’ in Recording Sound, ed. Cowan, pp. 123–44.
21 Benjamin Glazer, ‘The photoplay with sound and voice,’ in Introduction to the Photoplay, ed. John Tibbetts
(Shawnee Mission, Kansas: National Film Society, 1977), p. 95.
22 William deMille, ‘Talkie technic,’ AC 9, no. 12 (December 1929): 17. See also Mordaunt Hall, ‘The reaction of
the public to motion pictures with sound,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 35 (1928): 613; ‘Open forum,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 36
(1928): 1129; Wesley C. Miller, ‘Sound pictures the successful production of illusion,’ AC, 10, no. 9 (December
1929): 5, 20–1; L.E.Clark, ‘Accessory and special equipment,’ p. 127.
23 George Groves, ‘Motion picture sound recording,’ American Film Institute/Louis B.Mayer Oral History
Collection(Glen Rock, New Jersey: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1977), pp. 19–21, 50–60; James
G.Stewart, ‘The evolution of cinematic sound: a personal report,’ in Sound and the Cinema: The Coming of
Sound to American Film, ed. Evan William Cameron (Pleasantville, New York: Redgrave, 1980), p. 44;
L.E.Clark, ‘Sound stage equipment and practice,’ AC 11, no. 6 (October 1930): 22; ‘New lighting, electrical and
set units developed during 1930,’ AC, 11, no. 9 (January 1931): 24–5; Charles Felstead, ‘Monitoring sound
motion pictures,’ Projection Engineering, 3, no. 1 (January 1931): 15; Earl Theisen, ‘Hollywood ofifstage,’ IP,
8, no. 10 (October 1936): 14; ‘Micks and mikes,’ IP, 1, no. 12 (January 1930): 30; ‘Light boom,’ IP, 9, no. 6
(July 1937): 20–1; L.D.Grignon, ‘Light-weight stage pick-up equipment,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 2 (August 1937): 191–
6; Jean Epstein, quoted in Realism in the Cinema, ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980), pp. 193–7.
24 Harold Lewis, ‘Getting good sound is an art,’ AC, 15. no. 2 (June 1934): 65, 73–4.
25 Kenneth Lambert, ‘Sound re-recording: its effects upon reproduction,’ IPro, 4, no. 1 (November 1932): 16. 28–9.
26 ‘Sounder sounds,’ Business Week (29 February 1936): 27. See also James R.Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures:
Recording and Reproducing (Woodmont, Conn.: Cameron Publishing Co., n.d.), p. 116.
27 H.G.Tasker, ‘Multiple-channel recording,’ JSMPE, 31, no. 4 (October 1938): 381–5.
28 Maurice Pivar, ‘Sound film editing,’ AC, 13, no. 1 (May 1932): 11–12; H.W.Anderson, ‘Re-recording, or
dubbing film for sound pictures,’ Projection Engineering, 2, no. 12 (December 1930): 12; Kenneth Lambert,
‘Sound re-recording,’ AMPAS Technical Bulletin, supplement no. 9 (20 July 1932): 11; H.J.McCord, ‘The sound
film editor,’ AC, 12, no. 12 (April 1932): 41; Dreher, ‘Recording, rerecording,’ p. 759; Maurice Pivar, ‘Sound
film editing,’ American Photography, 27, no. 9 (September 1933): 560–1; ‘New Moviola,’ IP, 5, no. 4 (May
1933): 18; F.D.Williams, ‘Methods of blooping,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 1 (January 1938): 105–6; ‘Glossary of
technical terms used in the motion picture industry,’ TSMPE, 13, no. 37 (1929): 49; M.W.Palmer, ‘Film-
numbering device for cameras and recorders,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 3 (March 1930): 327– 31; Earl Theisen, ‘The story
of the Moviola,’ IP, 7, no. 10 (November 1935): 4.
29 Quoted in Roy Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 42.
30 Quoted in Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies (New York: Da Capo, 1979), p. 26.
31 Bernard Herrmann, ‘Reminiscence and reflection,’ in Sound and the Cinema, ed. Cameron, p. 120.
32 Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 222.
33 Ibid., p. 224.
34 Elmer C.Richardson, ‘Progress in studio illumination during 1929,’ AC, 10, no. 9 (December 1929): 41; Leigh
M.Griffith, ‘The technical status of the film laboratory,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 173–94; C.Roy Hunter, ‘A
negative developing machine,’ TSMPE, 12, no. 33 (1928): 195–8; Arthur Reeves, ‘How to simply develop sound
film,’ IP, 4, no. 4 (May 1932): 14.
35 Wesley Miller, ‘Illusion of reality’, in Recording Sound, ed. Cowan, p. 210. See also Fitzhugh Green, The Film
Finds Its Tongue (New York: Putnam’s, 1929), pp. 66–7.
36 See Green, Tongue, pp. 166–7, 220–40; Armand Falnieres, ‘Enter—the silent director,’ Cinema Art, 6, no. 2
(April 1927): 26–7; ‘Fresh details on “Vitaphone” filming,’ AC, 7, no. 11 (February 1927): 11, 15; Fred
J.Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel a Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 174.
37 See Lewis W.Physioc. ‘Technique of the talkies,’ AC, 9, no. 5 (August 1928): 24–5; J.P.Maxfield, ‘Technic of
recording control for sound pictures,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), p. 417; Karl Struss, ‘Photographing
with multiple cameras,’ TSMPE, 13, no. 38 (1929): 477–8; Victor Milner, ‘Painting with light,’ Cinematographic
Annual, 1, (1930), p. 92; J.Garrick Eisensberg, ‘Mechanics of the talking movies,’ Projection Engineering, 1, no.
3 (November 1929): 22–4; Charles Felstead, ‘Monitoring sound motion pictures,’ Projection Engineering, 3, no.
1 (January 1931): 15; James R.Cameron and Joseph A.Dubray, Cinematography and Talkies (Woodmont, Conn.:
Cameron Publishing Company, 1930), p. 186; ‘Progress Committee Report,’ JSMPE, 19, no. 2 (August 1932):
123. See also Edward Bernds, ‘The birth of the talkies,’ American Film, 6, no. 10 (September 1981): 34–6, 65.
38 ‘What they use in Hollywood,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), pp. 549, 575; ‘Analysis of camera silencing
devices,’ Projection Engineering, 2, no. 3 (March 1930): 13–14; Elmer C.Richardson, ‘Tilt heads and rolling
tripods for camera blimps,’ JSMPE, 15, no. 1 (July 1930): 46–52.
39 A.Lindsley Lane, ‘Cinematographer plays leading part in group of creative minds,’ AC, 16, no. 2 (February
1935): 58. See also Walter B. Pitkin and William M.Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures (New York: Appleton,
1930), pp. 121–6.
40 Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures, p. 230.
41 Tamar Lane, The New Technique of Screenwriting (New York: Whittlesey, 1936), p. 37.
42 ‘A new Mole-Richardson production,’ IP, 2, no. 4 (May 1930): 6; ‘Mole-Richardson construct perambulator to
eliminate shifting on travel shots,’ IP, 2, no. 11 (December 1930): 45.
43 ‘Report of the Progress Committee,’ JSMPE 20, no. 6 (June 1933): 468; Lewis W.Physioc. ‘Unterrified inventors
show work,’ IP, 4, no. 5 (June 1932): 4; John F.Seitz, ‘New camera-carriage saves time,’ AC, 14, no. 1 (May
1933): 8, 35; J.Henry Kline, ‘Kamera kiddie kars,’ IP, 5, no. 5 (May 1933): 44–5; Frank Graves, ‘The Universal
camera crane,’ TSMPE, 13, no. 38 (1929): 303–7; ‘Devises “rotary shot,” ‘IP, 2, no. 10 (November 1930): 45;
‘Progress in the motion picture industry,’ JSMPE, 27, no. 1 (July 1936): 11–12.
44 Gordon S.Mitchell, ‘The camera crane used in making intricate shots,’ Projection Engineering, 3, no. 2 (February
1931): 14.
45 J.A.Ball, ‘Scientific foundations,’ in Introduction to the Photoplay, ed. Tibbetts, p. 10.
46 Joseph Dubray, ‘The rotambulator—a new motion picture camera stand,’ JSMPE, 22, no. 3 (March 1934): 201.
47 A.Lindsley Lane, ‘Rhythmic flow—mental and visual,’ AC, 16, no. 4 (April 1935): 138.
48 Roe Fleet, ‘Aces of the camera: Ed B.DuPar, ASC,’ AC, 27, no. 12 (December 1946): 456.
49 See Balshofer and Miller, One Reel, pp. 184–98; Michael Killanin, ‘Poet in an iron mask,’ Films and Filming, 4,
no. 5 (February 1958): 9.
50 A.Lindsley Lane, ‘Cinematographer plays,’ p. 49; Mary Eunice McCarthy, Hands of Hollywood (Hollywood:
Photoplay Research Bureau, 1929), p. 31; Karl Struss, ‘The camera battery,’ IP, 1, no. 6 (July 1929): 17; Barrett
C.Kiesling, Talking Pictures (Richmond, Virginia: Johnson, 1937), p. 181; Anne Bauchens, ‘Cutting the film,’ in
We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumberg (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 213; Carl Dreher, ‘Stage technique in
the talkies,’ AC, 10, no. 9 (December 1929): 16; Eric Sherman, Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art
(Boston: .Little Brown & Co. 1976), pp. 104–5, 120; Nick Grinde, ‘Pictures for peanuts,’ Penguin Film Review,
no. 1 (1946): 48–9; Don Livingston, Film and the Director (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 44–5. ‘Covering’
footage is still a mainstay of Hollywood production; see Ralph Rosenblum, When the Shooting Stops . . The
Cutting Begins (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 135–6.
Chapter 24
The labor-force, financing and the mode of production
1* Bargaining power is reflected in terms of salaries and contractual rights. It is difficult to find comparable
statistics on this from reliable sources. William S.Hart claimed that in the mid-teens his average cowboy actor
earned $5 plus board per week, his leading actress received $40 per week, as star and director he made $125 per
week, while some other ‘new stars’ were making $1,800 to $3,500 per week just for acting. In the first part of the
1920s, two other listings also indicate a wide range of pay schedules. See William S.Hart, My Life East and West
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1929), p. 214; Robert Florey, Filmland (Paris: Editions de ciné-magazine, 1923),
pp. 45–6; Laurence A.Hughes, ed., The Truth About the Movies by the Stars (Hollywood: Hollywood Publishers,
1924), p. 293. On actors’ salaries in 1933, see Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 108.
2 Ross, Stars and Strikes; early evidence of labor action is in: Richard V.Spencer, ‘Los Angeles notes,’ MPW, 8,
no. 12 (25 March 1911), 644; F.H. Richardson, ‘Projection department,’ MPW, 9, no. 4 (5 August 1911), 286;
F.H.Richardson, ‘Projection department,’ MPW, 15, no. 2 (11 January 1913), 155–6; ‘Trade board holds regular
meeting,’ MPW, 28, no. 4 (22 April 1916), 601; ‘Studio extras would organize,’ MPW, 29, no. 10 (9 September
1916), 1673; O.P. Von Harleman and Clarke Irvine, ‘News of Los Angeles and vicinity,’ MPW, 29, no. 10 (9
September 1916), 1677.
3 On jurisdictional disputes in the 1930s and 1940s, besides Ross, see: Robert Joseph, ‘Re: unions in Hollywood,’
Films, 1, no. 3 (Summer 1940), 34–50; ‘More trouble in paradise,’ Fortune, 34, no. 5 (November 1946), 154–9,
215+; Murray Ross, ‘Labor relations in Hollywood,’ in The Motion Picture Industry, ed. Gordon S.Watkins
(Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947), pp. 58–64; Anthony A.P.Dawson,
‘Hollywood’s labor troubles,’ Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1, no. 4 (July 1948), 638–47; US
Education and Labor Committee, House, ‘Jurisdictional disputes in motion-picture industry,’ hearings before
special subcommittee, 80th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), vols
1, 2, and 3.
4 Earl Theisen, ‘The evolution of the motion picture story,’ IP, 8, no. 4 (May 1936), 12; ‘Our new titles,’ EK, 3,
no. 4 (1 September 1910), 2; Earl Theisen, ‘The story of slides & titles,’ IP, 5, no. 11 (December 1933), 4–6;
‘Aida (Edison),’ MPW, 8, no. 20 (20 May 1911), 1140 (specific reference as ‘notable’ is given to the cast list on
the titles); J.Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, Writing the Photoplay (Springfield, Mass.: Home Correspondence
School, 1913), pp. 90– 3; Epes Winthrop Sargent, ‘The scenario writer,’ MPW, 10, no. 13 (28 December 1911),
1062; William Lord Wright, ‘William Lord Wright’s page,’ MPNews, 5, no. 2 (13 January 1912), 32; ‘Credit for
scenarios,’ EK, 6, no. 1 (1 February 1912), 15; William Lord Wright, ‘For those who worry o’er plots and plays,’
MPNews, 5, no. 9 (2 March 1912), 22; ‘Spectator,’ ‘“Spectator’s” comments,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1735 (20 March
1912), 25; ‘Reliance to publish authors’ names,’ NYDM, 67, no. 1735 (20 March 1912), 25.
5 ‘Revised administrative procedure for credits to screen authors,’ Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
Bulletin, 1934, no. 8 (9 August 1934), p. 21. Later descriptions of this are in Maurice Rapf, ‘Credit arbitration isn’t
simple,’ The Screen Writer, 1, no. 2 (July 1945), 31–6; Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory
(New York: Little Brown & Co., 1950), pp. 154–5.
6 Price, Waterhouse & Co., Memorandum on Moving Picture Accounts (New York: Price, Waterhouse & Co.,
1916), p. 26; Paul H.Davis, ‘Financing the movies,’ Photoplay, 11, no. 3 (February 1917), 66.
7 US Interstate Commerce Committee, Senate, ‘Compulsory block-booking and blind selling in motion-picture
industry,’ hearings before subcommittee, 74th Cong., 2nd sess., on S. 3012, February 27, 28, 1936 (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), p. 15; Howard Thompson Lewis, Cases on the Motion Picture Industry
(Harvard Business Reports, vol. 8) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930), pp. 68–79.
8 Lewis, Cases, p. 71.
9 Maurice Barber, ‘Requirements of financing,’ AC, 3, no. 1 (1 April 1922), 20–1; Benjamin B.Hampton, History
of the American Film Industry from its Beginnings to 1931 (1931; rpt, New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p.
380; Lewis, Cases, pp. 46–51; Attilio H.Giannini, ‘Financial aspects,’ in The Story of the Films, ed. Joseph
P.Kennedy (Chicago: A.W.Shaw Co., 1927), pp. 77–97; Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association,
‘The motion picture industry,’ in The Development of American Industries, ed. John George Glover and William
Bouck Cornell (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1932), p. 758; Halsey, Stuart & Co., ‘The motion picture industry as a
basis for bond financing,’ in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1976), pp. 172, 190.
10 Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), vol. 2,
pp. 393–440; Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks,
1942), pp. 239–328; Paul A.Baran and Paul M.Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic
and Social Order (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1966).
11 Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, vol. 2, pp. 413– 33.
12 F.D.Klingender and Stuart Legg, Money Behind the Screen (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), pp. 68–79.
13 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1976),
pp. 156–65.
14 John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 92. See
in particular Fox and Paramount: The case of William Fox,’ Fortune, 1 (May 1930), 48–9+; ‘Formation of
trusteeship announced by Wm. Fox,’ The Ohio Showman, 5, no. 19 (14 December 1929), 25; ‘Body and Soul is
(here) put together,’ Fortune, 4 (August 1931), 26–34+; Daniel Bertrand, W. Duane Evans, and E.L.Blanchard,
‘Investigation of concentration of economic power: study made for the temporary national economic committee,’
monograph no. 43, ‘Motion picture industry—pattern of control’ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1941), p. 60; ‘Theatres and motion pictures,’ Standard Trade and Securities, 75, no. 22 (20 February 1935),
TH-52–54; Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: D.Van Nostrand Co., 1933), pp. 361–3;
‘Paramount,’ Fortune, 15 (March 1937), 87–96+; US Securities and Exchange Commission, ‘Report on study
and investigation of work, activities, personnel and functions of protective and reorganization committees,
pursuant to sec. 211 of securities exchange act of 1934’ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936–8),
vol. 1, pp. 6–64; and vol. 2, pp. 78–121, 196– 200; William T.Raymond, ‘SEC probes Paramount
reorganization,’ Barron’s, 15, no. 15 (24 June 1935), 24; Douglas Gomery, ‘The coming of the talkies:
invention, innovation, and diffusion,’ in The American Film Industry, ed. Balio, p. 207.
15 Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, pp. 267, 242–4; also see Galbraith, The New Industrial State, p.
101; Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 96–152.
16 Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, pp. 15–16; James Early in Baran and Sweezy, pp. 25–8.
17 Richard Caves, American Industry: Structure, Conduct, Performance, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 4; Rubin Marris, ‘A model of the “managerial” enterprise,’ Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 77, no. 2 (May 1963), p. 188; Oliver E.Williamson, ‘Managerial discretion and business behavior,’
American Economic Review, 53, no. 5 (December 1963), p. 1049.
18 Mae D.Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study in Industrial Organization
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), pp. 100–1.
19* In a case study of management at A & P, the managers measured the success of the firm not by profit on sales
but by return on investments. In fact, they became concerned over ‘excessive profits’ which indicated that
retained earnings were not being rechanneled into growth. See M.A.Adelman, A & P: A Study in Price-Cost
Behavior and Public Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 30, 36; Galbraith, The New
Industrial State, p. 88.
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 11; Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the
Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 21; Galbraith, The New Industrial State,
pp. 92–7.
21 ‘Paramount: Oscar for profits,’ Fortune, 35, no. 6 (June 1947), 218.
22 Price, Waterhouse & Co., Memorandum, p. 9.
23 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
24 Hampton, History, pp. 187, 320; William Marston Seabury, The Public and the Motion Picture Industry (New
York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 280–1, 286; Maurice Barber, ‘Requirements of financing,’ AC, 3, no. 1 (1 April
1922), 20–1.
25 George Landy, ‘The “independent” film studio,’ PTD, 4, no. 4 (September 1922), 7–8, 42; Hampton, History, p.
205; Lee Royal, The Romance of Motion Picture Production (Los Angeles: Royal Publishing Co., 1920), pp. 66–
7.
26 Hampton, History, pp. 318–19; Geoffrey Shurlock, ‘“Versions,”’ AC, 11, no. 9 (January 1931), 22; Gomery,
‘The coming of the talkies,’ p. 208; David O.Selznick, Memo from David O.Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (1972;
rpt, New York: Avon Books, 1973), p. 72; Pat Bowling, ‘Independents burst into sound,’ AC, 10, no. 7 (October
1929), 7, 40.
27 ‘100 features from independents in new season as market opens,’ MPHerald, 103, no. 5 (2 May 1931), 12.
28 ‘Independents to do 192 features,’ MPHerald, 103, no. 8 (23 May 1931), 24; ‘Curtailment by larger studios prompts
independents to expand,’ MPHerald, 106, no. 2 (9 January 1932), 9; ‘Independent producers unite to capitalize
on wider market,’ MPHerald, 106, no. 4 (23 January 1932), 21; US Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee,
‘Motion-picture films,’ hearing before subcommittee, 74th Cong., 2nd sess., March 9–26, 1936 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1936), p. 242; Charles Flynn and Todd McCarthy, ‘The economic imperative: why
was the B movie necessary?’ Kings of the Bs (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1975); ‘Theatres and motion pictures,’
TH-51; Tim Onosko, ‘Monogram: its rise and fall in the forties,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 5 (Summer 1972), 5–
9; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, Radio, Television, Motion Pictures (New York: Merrill Lynch, Pierce,
Fenner & Beane, 1950), pp. 21, 24.
29 Edward Buscombe, ‘Bread and circuses: economics and the cinema,’ Conference on Cinema Histories, Cinema
Practices, Asilomar, California, 25–29 May 1981, p. 4.
Chapter 25
The producer-unit system: management by specialization after 1931
1 Florabel Muir, ‘Hollywood considers the unit,’ MPHerald, 104, no. 7 (15 August 1931), 12.
2 Dore Senary and Charles Palmer, Case History of a Movie (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 56.
3 W.C.Harcus, ‘Making a motion picture,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 5 (November 1931), 802–4; ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,’
Fortune, 6 (December 1932), rpt in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 260; David Gordon, ‘Mayer, Thalberg, and MGM,’ Sight and Sound, 45 (Summer
1976), 187.
4 Howard T.Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: D.Van Nostrand Co. 1933), pp. 98–106.
5 ‘New associated director group for unit production is proposed,’ MPHerald, 103, no. 13 (27 June 1931), 29.
6 ‘Industry to test unit producing to shave cost, improve quality,’ MPHerald, 104, no. 5 (1 August 1931), 9.
7 Ibid., 9, 23; Florabel Muir, ‘Hollywood considers the unit,’ MPHerald, 104, no. 7 (15 August 1931), 12, 35.
8 $200,000 Top Film Cost,’ Variety 104, no. 4 (6 October 1931), 3; ‘Producers agree to bar unfair bidding in star
contract raids,’ MPHerald, 106, no. 3 (26 January 1932), 19; ‘3 directing teams replace John Ford at Fox—
drawing but half his salary,’ Variety, 104, no. 8 (3 November 1931), 2; ‘Thalberg orders story department cut at
M-G-M,’ Variety, 104, no. 8 (3 November 1931), 3; ‘Fox cuts off readers dept.,’ Variety, 104, no. 7 (27 October
1931), 4; ‘Fox salary slash from 5% to 25% covering all depts. and executives,’ Variety, 104, no. 7 (27 October
1931), 4; ‘Fox budget now $225,000 per picture, first studio near discussed figure,’ Variety, 104, no. 7 (27
October 1931), 5.
9 ‘Columbia adopts unit production,’ MPHerald, 105, no. 5 (31 October 1931), 17; also see: ‘Unit production for
Col. includes new personnel,’ Variety, 104, no. 7 (27 October 1931), 5.
10 ‘Radio and Pathe sales forces consolidate under Lee Marcus,’ MPHerald, 105, no. 6 (7 November 1931), 9, 30;
‘Holding brands,’ Variety, 104, no. 9 (10 November 1931), 4; ‘Fox starts unit production plan; Sheehan at head,’
MPHerald, 105, no. 7 (14 November 1931), 26; ‘Fox Studio heads stay, says Tinker,’ MPHerald, 105, no. 11 (12
December 1931), 17; ‘Cohen’s economy plan at Par for Zukor’s OK,’ Variety, 104, no. 9 (10 November 1931),
5; ‘Cohen favors unit system for Par,’ Variety, 104, no. 10 (17 November 1931), 2; ‘Schulberg proposal changed
by Zukor,’ Variety, 104, no. 11 (24 November 1931), 5; ‘Paramount names seven associates for unit system,’
MPHerald, 105, no. 9 (28 November 1931), 13.
11 Alfred D.Chandler, Jr, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprises
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962), pp. 320–3.
12 On story and writing practices, see: William James Fadiman, ‘Selling books to movies,’ The Publishers’ Weekly,
126, no. 12 (22 September 1934), 1085–7; William J.Fadiman, ‘The sources of movies,’ in The Motion Picture
Industry, ed. Gordon S.Watkins (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947), pp. 37–
40; Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, pp. 30–3; Samuel Marx, ‘Looking for a story,’ in We Make the Movies,
ed. Nancy Naumberg (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1937), pp. 16–31; Frances Marion, How to Write and
Sell Film Stories (New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1937), pp. 14–16; Marguerite G.Ortman, Fiction and the
Screen (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1935); pp. 77–8; Barrett C.Kiesling, Talking Pictures: How They are
Made, How to Appreciate Them (Richmond, Virginia: Johnson Publishing Co., 1937), pp. 39–53; ‘Paramount:
Oscar for profits,’ Fortune, 35, no. 6 (June 1947), 216–18; Motion Picture Producers Association, 1956 Annual
Report on the Motion Picture Producers Association (New York: Motion Picture Producers Association, 1956),
p. 15; Sidney Howard, ‘The story gets a treatment,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 32–52; Ray Hoadley,
How They Make a Motion Picture (New York: Thomas Y.Crowell, 1939), pp. 14–15; Martin Field, ‘Type-casting
screen-writers,’ Penguin Film Review, no. 6 (April 1948), 29–31; William J.Fadiman, ‘The type-writer jungle,’
Films and Filming, 7, no. 3 (December 1960), 8.
13 Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Technical Bulletin, Supplement no. 19 (23 December 1932).
14 On research and legal departments, see: Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 81–91; ‘Research in motion pictures,’ IP,
13, no. 12 (January 1942), 16; Fred Stanley, ‘Film tune sleuths,’ The New York Times, rpt in Film Music Notes,
8, no. 3 (January-February 1949), 17–18; Schary and Palmer, Case History, pp. 30–2.
15 On casting, see: Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 127– 47; Phil Friedman, ‘The players are cast,’ in We Make the
Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 106–16; Jimmy Stewart in Kodak ad, American Film, 5, no. 5 (March 1980), 9; Earl
Theisen, ‘Eyes toward Hollwood,’ IP, 7, no. 8 (September 1935), 22–3; Hoadley, How They Make a Motion
Picture, p. 37; Frank Westmore and Murial Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (New York: Berkeley
Publishing Corp., 1976).
16 On agencies, see: ‘The Morris Agency: put their names in lights,’ Fortune, 18 (September 1938), 67+.
17 On script timing, see: H.G.Tasker, ‘Current developments in production methods in Hollywood,’ JSMPE, 24, no.
1 (January 1935), 4–5. An American in Paris (1951, MGM) was also timed, resulting in the loss of several pre-
planned numbers; see, Donald Knox, The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1973).
18 On cinematography, see: AC and IP throughout; John Arnold, ‘Shooting the movies,’ in We Make the Movies, ed.
Naumberg, pp. 143–72; Virgil E.Miller, ‘Camera-department organization and maintenance,’AC, 13, no. 6
(October 1932), 6–7, 40–1; ‘CloseUps,’ IP, 11, no. 5 (June 1939), 12–13; C.W. Handley, ‘The advanced technic
of Technicolor lighting,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 2 (August 1937), 174–5; William H.Daniels, ‘Camera script clerk
experiment by Daniels at MGM real success,’ AC, 19, no. 3 (March 1938), 102–6; ‘Just what is so mysterious
about color,’ AC, 17, no. 10 (October 1936), 414, 424–6; Jimmie Stone, ‘The assistant cameraman’s job,’ IP, 11,
no. 11 (December 1939), 12–13, 22–3; ‘Lighting-sets,’ IP, 9, no. 5 (June 1937), 31–2; John Alton, Painting with
Light (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 1–3; Nathan Levinson, ‘Recording and re-recording,’ in We Make the
Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 173–98; James R.Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures Recording and Reproducing:
With Chapters on Motion Picture Studio and Film Laboratory Practices, 8th ed. (Coral Gables, Florida: Cameron
Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 314–51.
19 On make-up, see: Max Factor, ‘The Art of motion picture make-up,’ in Cinematographic Annual 1930, vol. 1,
ed. Hal Hall (Hollywood, California: American Society of Cinematographers, 1930), pp. 157–71; Kiesling,
Talking Pictures, pp. 148–54; James Barker, ‘Make-up for fast film,’ AC, 12, no. 7 (November 1931), 11, 24;
Max Factor, ‘Standardization of motion picture make-up,’ JSMPE, 28, no. 1 (January 1937), 52–62; Perc
Westmore, ‘Cooperation bulks big in work of make-up,’ AC, 18, no. 12 (December 1937), 496–7.
20 Marion, How to Write and Sell Film Stories, pp. 59– 60.
21 William R.Weaver, ‘Studios use audience research to learn what pleases customers,’ MPHerald, 164, no. 3 (20
July 1946), 37; William R.Weaver, ‘Audience research has Hollywood renaissance,’ MPHerald, 175, no. 6 (7
May 1949), 29; Leo A, Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950),
pp. 4–7.
22 On special effects, see: ‘Biggest stage on earth devoted entirely to special process work,’ AC, 10, no. 1 (April
1929), 20–1, 35; Hans Dreier, ‘Motion picture sets,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 5 (November 1931), 789–91; Fred W.Jackman,
‘The special-effects cinematographer,’ AC, 13, no. 6 (October 1932), 12– 13, 42–4; ‘Close-ups,’ IP, 11, no. 8
(September 1939), 21–2; William Luhr and Peter Lehman, ‘“Would you mind just trying it”: an interview with
special effects artist Linwood Dunn, ASC,’ Wide Angle, 1, no. 1 (rev. ed.) (1979), 80; Don Jahraus, ‘Making
miniatures,’ AC, 12, no. 7 (November 1931), 9–10, 41; ‘R-K-O trick departments consolidated,’ AC, 13, no. 6
(October 1932), 45; ‘Rear projection big advance,’ IP, 9, no. 3 (April 1938), 30–3; ‘Winter made to order,’ IP, 8,
no. 2 (March 1936), 23; R. Seawright and W.V.Draper, ‘Photographic effects in the feature production of
Topper,’ JSMPE, 32 (January 1939), 60+.
23 On production departments, unit managers, and assistant directors, see: W.C.Harcus, ‘Making a motion picture,’
JSMPE, 17, no. 5 (November 1931), 805; Clem Beauchamp, ‘The production takes shape,’ in We Make the
Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 64–79; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 93–5, 159–63; [Paul R.Harmer], ‘Estimating
the cost of a motion picture production—the work sheet,’ IP, 8, no. 9 (October 1934), 12–13; Robert Presnell,
‘Preparing a story for production,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 350–5; Robert Edward Lee, ‘On the spot,’
in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 90–105; Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures, pp. 308–9; Carlisle Jones,
‘Why and what is an assistant director,’ IP, 6, no. 4 (May 1934), 20; John Van Pelt, ‘The assistant director,’ IP, 8,
no. 12 (January 1937), 26–7; Leslie Wood, The Romance of the Movies (London: William Heinemann, Ltd.,
1937), pp. 311–14.
24 On art direction, see: Hans Dreier, ‘Motion picture sets,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 5 (November 1931), 789–91; Ralph
Flint, ‘Cedric Gibbons,’ Creative Art, 11 (October 1932), 116–19; James Wong Howe, ‘Visual suggestion can
enhance “rationed” sets,’ AC, 23, no. 6 (June 1942), 246–7; Hans Dreier, ‘Designing the sets,’ in We Make the
Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 80– 9; Cedric Gibbons, ‘The art director,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are
Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York: Dodge Publishing Co., 1938), pp. 41–50; Hoadley, How They Make a
Motion Picture, pp. 18– 20; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 92–111; Hal Herman, ‘Motion picture art direction,’
AC, 28, no. 11 (November 1947), 396–7, 416–17; Gordon Wiles, ‘Imagination in set design,’ AC, 13, no. 3 (July
1932), 8–9, 31; Gordon Wiles, ‘Small sets,’ AC, 13, no. 5 (September 1932), 11–12, 28; Donald Deschner,
‘Edward Carfagno: MGM art director,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 18 (Spring 1978), 30–4; Donald Deschner,
‘Anton Grot: Warners art director 1927–1948,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 15 (Fall 1975), 18–22; John Harkrider,
‘Set design from script to stage,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 358–60; Earl Theisen, ‘In the motion picture
prop and research department,’ IP, 6, no. 7 (August 1934), 4–5, 23; Lewis W.Physioc, ‘The scenic artist,’ IP, 8,
no. 2 (March 1936), 3, 22–3; Lansing C. Holden, ‘Designing for color,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg,
pp. 239–52; Natalie M. Kalmus, ‘Color consciousness,’ JSMPE, 25, no. 2 (August 1935), 139–47.
On William Cameron Menzies, see: Ezra Goodman, ‘Production designing,’ AC, 26, no. 3 (March 1945), 82–3,
100; ‘The layout for Bulldog Drummond,’ Creative Arts, 5 (October 1929), 729–34.
25 For descriptions of work practices in other areas during this period, see the following:
On producers: Hunt Stromberg, ‘The producer,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, pp. 1–12; Jesse L. Lasky, ‘The
producer makes a plan,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 1–15; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 48–54;
David O.Selznick, ‘The functions of the producer and the making of feature films,’ excerpts from a lecture, 1
November 1937, rpt in David O.Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (1972; rpt, New
York: Avon Books, 1973), pp. 545–5.
On the special problems of low-budget productions: Robert Presnell, ‘Preparing a story for production,’
JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 350–5; Nick Grinde, ‘Pictures for peanuts,’ The Penguin Film Review, no. 1
(August 1946), rpt in Hollywood Directors 1941–1976, ed. Richard Koszarski (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp. 56–67.
On costuming: Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 112–18; Hoadley, How They Make a Motion Picture, pp. 40–2;
Adrian, ‘Clothes,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, pp. 53–7.
On pre-scoring: Bernard Brown, ‘Prescoring for song sequences,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 356–67;
Herb A.Lightman, ‘Staging musical routines for the camera,’ AC, 28, no. 1 (January 1947), 8–9, 32.
On shooting practices: ‘How lighting units are developed today,’ AC, 18, no. 5 (May 1937), 189; Robert
Edward Lee, ‘On the spot,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, p. 100; John W.Boyle, ‘Black and white
cinematography,’ JSMPE, 39, no. 8 (August 1942), 83–92; H.G.Tasker, ‘Slide-rule sketches of Hollywood,’
JSMPE, 28, no. 2 (February 1937), 159–60 (on synching methods at various studios).
On direction: John Cromwell, ‘The voice behind the megaphone,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp.
53–63; Clem Beauchamp, ‘The production takes shape,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 70–1;
Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures, pp. 78–83.
On laboratory work: ‘Theatres and motion pictures,’ Standard Trade and Securities, 75, no. 22 (20 February
1935), TH-51; ‘The laboratory,’ IP, 5, no. 5 (June 1933), 14; James R.Wilkinson, ‘Motion picture laboratory
practices,’ JSMPE, 39, no. 9 (September 1942), 166–85.
On editing: Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures, pp. 78–83; James Wilkinson and E.W.Reis, ‘Editing and
assembling the sound picture,’ in Recording Sound for Motion Pictures, ed. Lester Cowan (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1931), pp. 196–209; W.C. Harcus, ‘Finishing a motion picture,’ JSMPE, 19, no. 6 (December 1932), 553–
60; Frederick Y.Smith, ‘The cutting and editing of motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 39, no. 10 (November 1942), 284–
93; Maurice Pivar, ‘Sound film editing,’ AC, 13, no. 1 (May 1932), 11–12, 46; ‘The laboratory,’ IP, 5, no. 5
(June 1933), 14; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, pp. 216– 26; Maurice Pivar, ‘Film editing,’ JSMPE, 19, no. 4
(October 1937), 363–72; Anne Bauchens, ‘Cutting the film,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 199–
215; Susan Dalton and John Davis, ‘John Cromwell,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 10 (Fall 1973), 23–5; Allan
Balter, ‘After the last shot is made,’ AC, 36, no. 7 (July 1955), 398–9, 431–3; Ralph Dawson, ‘How Anthony
Adverse was cut,’ AC, 17, no. 8 (August 1936), 345, 356.
On music composition, recording, and rerecording: Cameron, Sound Motion Pictures, pp. 352–411; George
Antheil, ‘On the Hollywood front,’ Modern Music, 14, no. 1 (November-December 1936), 46–7; George
Antheil, ‘Breaking into the movies,’ Modern Music, 14, no. 2 (January-February 1937), 82–6; Charles Previn,
‘Setting music to pictures,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 372–3; Edwin Wetzel, ‘Assembling a final sound-
track,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 374–5; Kiesling, Talking Pictures, p. 210; Bernard B.Brown,
‘Prescoring and scoring,’ JSMPE, 39, no. 9 (October 1942), 228–31; L.T. Goldsmith, ‘Re-recording sound
motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 39, no. 10 (November 1942), 277–83; Adolph Deutsch, ‘Three strangers,’ Pts 1 and 2,
Film Music Notes, 5, nos, 7 and 8 (March and April 1946), 16–19, 19–22; ‘Information on film music in the
United States,’ Film Music Notes, 8, no. 4 (March-April 1949), 12–14; C.Sharpless Hickman, ‘Movies and music,’
Film Music, 13, no. 1 (September-October 1953), 21–2; Hans W. Heinsheimer, Menagerie in F Sharp (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1947), pp. 236–56; Selznick, Memo, p. 157; Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The
Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1975), p. 144; Roy M.Prendergast, Film Music: A
Neglected An (New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 1977).
On previews and audience testing: Deutsch, ‘Three strangers,’ Pt 2; pp. 21–2; Bernard D.Cirlin and Jack
N.Peterman, ‘Pre-testing a motion picture: a case history,’ Journal of Social Issues, 3, no. 3 (Summer 1947), 39–
41.
On publicity materials: George Blaisdell, ‘How moving pictures are moved by stills,’ AC, 20, no. 10 (October
1939), 438–40; Howard Dietz, ‘Public relations,’ in Behind the Screen, ed. Watts, pp. 158– 65.
26 Mae D.Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry: A Study in Industrial Organization
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), pp. 88–92.
27 ‘Body and Soul (here) put together,’ Fortune, 4 (August 1931), 26–34+.
28 Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, pp. 98–106; ‘Twentieth Century-Fox,’ Fortune, 12 (December 1935), 85–93
+; Gordon Wiles, ‘Imagination in set design,’ AC, 13, no. 3 (July 1932), 8–9, 31; Gordon Wiles, ‘Small sets,’
AC, 13, no. 5 (September 1932), 11–12, 28; US Interstate Commerce Committee, Senate, ‘Anti “block booking”
and “blind selling” in the leasing of motion picture films,’ hearings on S. 280, 76th Cong., 1st sess., April 3–17,
1939 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 322–32; US Interstate and Foreign Commerce
Committee, House, ‘Motion-picture films (compulsory blockbooking and blind selling),’ hearings on S. 280, 76th
Cong., 3rd sess., May 13-June 4, 1940 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), p. 451; Fred
J.Balshofer and Arthur C.Miller, One Reel A Week (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 189,
192; Walter Blanchard, ‘Aces of the camera XVI: Arthur Miller, A.S.C.,’ AC, 23, no. 4 (April 1942), 183;
Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), pp. 134–5, 150–
2; Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 92–109;
‘Research in motion pictures,’ IP, 13, no. 12 (January 1942), 16; Allan Balter, ‘After the last shot is made,’ AC,
36, no. 7 (July 1955), 398–9, 431–3; ‘Name Adler to Zanuck post,’ MPHerald, 202, no. 6 (11 February 1956), 18.
29 ‘Warner—F.N.production is combined; Zanuck in charge,’ MPHerald, 103, no. 8 (23 May 1931), 32.
30 ‘Juarez declared really great picture,’ AC, 20, no. 4 (April 1939), 167–70; ‘Warner Brothers,’ Fortune, 16, no. 6
(December 1937), 110–13, 206–20.
31 Deschner, ‘Anton Grot,’ 18–22; ‘Moving mountain at Warner Brothers,’ IP, 13, no. 4 (May 1941), 26–7; Perc
Westmore, ‘Cooperation bulks big in work of make-up,’ AC, 18, no. 12 (December 1937), 496–7; Nathan
Levinson, ‘Recording and re-recording,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 173–98; Selznick,‘The
functions of the producer,’ p. 545; Tom Flinn, ‘William Dieterle: the plutarch of Hollywood,’ The Velvet Light
Trap, no. 15 (Fall 1975), 23–8; ‘Biggest stage on earth devoted entirely to special process work,’ AC, 10, no. 1
(April 1929), 20–1, 35; William Stull, ‘Fred Gage creates great lab at Warners’ Burbank studio,’ AC, 19, no. 3
(March 1938), 96, 105–6; G.M. Best and F.R. Gage, ‘A modern studio laboratory,’ JSMPE, 35, no. 3 (September
1940), 294–314; Ralph Dawson, ‘How Anthony Adverse was cut,’ AC, 17, no. 8 (August 1936), 345–6; Adolph
Deutsch, ‘Three strangers,’ Pts. 1 and 2, 16–19, 19–22; Vincent Sherman in Directing the Film: Film Directors
on their Art (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976), pp. 112, 246; ‘Outside producers for Warners; 11 “Names” in
new studio jobs,’ MPHerald, 138, no. 6 (10 February 1940), 60; Rudy Behlmer, ‘Introduction: from legend to
film,’ The Adventures of Robin Hood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), pp. 11–41.
32 ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,’ Fortune, pp. 256–70; W. Dixon Powell, ‘MGM: The studio at its zenith,’ The Velvet
Light Trap, no. 18 (Spring 1978), 1–7; Samuel Marx, Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (New York:
Random House, 1975); Howard Sharpe, ‘The private life of a talking picture,’ Photoplay, 49, no. 2 (February
1936), 32–3, 101–3 (the first of six articles by Sharpe on how films were made at MGM; the last is in Photoplay,
50, no. 1 [July 1936]); Marion, How to Write and Sell Film Stories; Marx, ‘Looking for a story,’ pp. 16–31;
Behind the Screen, ed. Watts (devoted entirely to short pieces by key MGM personnel); Arnold, ‘Shooting the
movies,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Naumberg, pp. 156–60; Gordon, ‘Mayer, Thalberg, and MGM,’ 187;
William H.Daniels, ‘Camera script clerk experiment by Daniels at MGM real success,’ AC, 19, no. 3 (March
1938), 102, 106; ‘Loew’s, Inc.,’ Fortune, 20 (August 1939), 25–30+, rpt in The American Film Industry, ed.
Balio, pp. 278–94; Dennis Giles, ‘The ghost of Thalberg: MGM 1946– 1951,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 18
(Spring 1978), 8–14; US Judiciary Committee, Senate, ‘Motion pictures and juvenile delinquency,’ interim
report from subcommittee pursuant to S.Res. 1973, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1956), pp. 52–3; Schary and Palmer, Case History.
33 Knox, The Magic Factory, pp. 117, 120.
34 ‘How motion pictures are made,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 4 (October 1937), 350–75; Maurice Pivar, ‘Sound film
editing,’ AC, 13, no. 1 (May 1932), 11–12, 46; ‘Deanna Durbin,’ Fortune, 20 (October 1936), 66+; Joseph
Valentine, ‘Make-up and set painting aid new film,’ AC, 20, no. 2 (February 1939), 54–7, 82–5; Jack Otterson,
‘Simplifying of set design brings production value,’ AC, 20, no. 8 (August 1939), 357– 8; ‘Why 100 Men and a
Girl makes a hit on screen,’ AC, 18, no. 11 (November 1937), 453, 458–60.
35 Lutz Bacher, interview with James Pratt, 2 September 1978.
36 Jesse L.Lasky, ‘Production problems,’ in The Story of the Films, ed. Joseph P.Kennedy (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Co.,
1927), pp. 99–102.
37 ‘2,000 move Bagdad to Broadway,’ MPHerald, 104, no. 6 (8 August 1931), 86–7, 92; ‘From the script to the
screen,’ MPHerald, 104, no. 6 (8 August 1931), 90, 99; Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, pp. 30– 47, 98–106;
‘Paramount,’ Fortune, 15 (March 1937), 87–96+; Ortman, Fiction and the Screen, pp. 86–8; ‘Warner Brothers,’
Fortune, 216; Bauchens, ‘Cutting the film,’ pp. 199–215; Dreier, ‘Designing the sets,’ pp. 80–9; ‘Close-ups: Guy
Bennett, operative cameraman,’ IP, 11, no. 3 (April 1939), 5–6; C. Sharpless Hickman, ‘Movies and music,’ Film
Music, 13, no. 1 (September-October 1953), 21–2; ‘Paramount: Oscar for profits,’ Fortune, 218–21.
38 Dannis Peary, ‘Mark Robson remembers RKO, Welles, and Val Lewton,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 10 (Fall
1973), 32–7; Russ Merritt, ‘R.K.O.Radio: the little studio that couldn’t,’ Marquee Theatre (Madison, Wisconsin:
WHA-TV Channel 21, n.d.), pp. 7–25; Ellen Spiegel, ‘Fred & Ginger meet Van Nest Polglase,’ The Velvet Light
Trap, no. 10 (Fall 1973), 17–22; John Davis, ‘A studio chronology,’ The Velvet Light Trap, no. 10 (Fall 1973), 6–
12; Beauchamp, ‘The production takes shape,’ pp. 64– 79; Friedman, ‘The players are cast,’ pp. 106–16;
‘Koerner gets new 7-year RKO contract,’ MPHerald, 151, no. 5 (1 May 1943), 45; ‘RKO has 18 films completed
now, Schary reports,’ MPHerald, 167, no. 6 (10 May 1947), 19; ‘RKO: it’s only money,’ Fortune, 47 (May 1953),
122–7+ ; Luhr and Lehman, ‘ “Would you mind just trying it,” ’80.
39 Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, pp. 98–106; Edward Buscombe, ‘Notes on Columbia Picture Corporation
1926–1941,’ Screen, 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 65–82.
41 Balshofer and Miller, One Reel A Week, pp. 189, 192; Higham, Hollywood Cameramen, pp. 150–2.
42 Vincent Sherman in Directing the Film, ed. Sherman, p. 112.
43 Knox, The Magic Factory, pp. 172–3.
44 Ibid., p. 109.
45 Ibid., p. 39.
Chapter 26
The package unit system: unit management after 1955
1 For an expanded version of the economic and ideological factors in this shift, see Janet Staiger, ‘Individualism
versus collectivism,’ Screen, 24, no. 4–5 (July-October 1983), 68–79.
2 Good summaries of the events surrounding United States v. Paramount, et al., are in Ernest Borneman, ‘United
States versus Hollywood: the case study of an antitrust suit,’ Sight and Sound, 19 (February and March 1951),
418–20+, 448–50+, rpt in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1976), pp. 332–45; Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1945), pp. 206–12; US
Select Committee on Small Business, Senate, ‘Motion-picture distribution trade practices, 1956,’ report, 27 July
1956 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), pp. 5–6; Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion
Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). For a summary
and excerpts of the 1940 consent decree, see Daniel Bertrand, W.Duane Evans, and E.L.Blanchard, ‘Investigation
of concentration of economic power study made for the Temporary National Economic Committee,’ monograph
no. 43, ‘Motion picture industry—pattern of control,’ 76th Cong., 3rd sess. (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1941), pp. 73–85.
3 ‘Hollywood places greater value on stars in blocks-of-5 selling,’ MPHerald, 142, no. 9 (1 March 1941), 12;
‘Mandatory block-of-five sales end for 5 majors,’ MPHerald, 148, no. 10 (5 September 1942), 17; ‘Majors to sell
in blocks with decree big “if,” ’ MPHerald, 151, no. 11 (12 June 1943), 17–18.
4 ‘Hollywood in uniform’, Fortune, 25 (April 1942), 92– 5+; Playdates on top films increase 30 per cent,’
MPHerald, 151, no. 12 (19 June 1943), 14; ‘Through the editor’s finder,’ AC, 24, no. 6 (June 1943), 213;
‘Monogram to offer 40 for 1943–44,’ MPHerald, 151, no. 12 (19 June 1943), 40.
5 ‘War booming market for independent product,’ MPHerald, 153, no. 7 (13 November 1943), 14; ‘Cagney, U.A.
in five-year pact,’ MPHerald, 152, no. 12 (18 September 1943), 44; ‘Wallis sets five year Paramount production
deal,’ MPHerald, 155, no. 9 (27 May 1944), 36; Ernest Borneman, ‘Rebellion in Hollywood: a study in motion
picture finance,’ Harper’s, 193 (October 1946), 337–43; Frederic Marlowe, ‘The rise of the independents in
Hollywood,’ Penguin Film Review, no. 3 (August 1947), 72; ‘Review of the film news,’ AC, 26, no. 10 (October
1945), 33; Frank Capra, ‘Breaking Hollywood’s “pattern of sameness,” ‘The New York Times, 5 May 1946, rpt in
Hollywood Directors, ed. Koszarski, pp. 83–9; ‘Paramount: Oscar for profits,’ Fortune, 35, no. 6 (June 1947), 90–
5, 208–21; ‘Talent planning to fight capital gains tax ruling,’ MPHerald, 164, no. 5 (3 August 1946), 73. On
financing methods during this period through the early 1960s, see, as a start, besides Borneman, Donald
M.Nelson, ‘The independent producer,’ in The Motion Picture Industry, ed. Gordon S.Watkins (Philadelphia:
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947), pp. 49–75; ‘Movies: end of an era?’ Fortune, 39
(April 1949), pp. 99–102+; Terry Sanders, ‘The financing of independent feature films,’ The Quarterly of Film,
Radio, and Television, 9, no. 4 (1955), 380–9; Freeman Lincoln, The comeback of the movies,’ Fortune, 51, no.
2 (February 1955), 127–31, 155–8; ‘The derring-doers of movie business,’ Fortune, 57 (May 1958), 137–41+;
William Fadiman, ‘Cowboys and Indies,’ Films and Filming, 10, no. 6 (March 1964), 51–2.
6 ‘Industry must readjust price and cost: Cowdin,’ MPHerald, 168, no. 3 (19 July 1947), 13; ‘Pressures force
issues down on stock market,’ MPHerald, 169, no. 13 (27 December 1947), 13.
7 ‘Editorial,’ The Screen Writer, 4, no. 3 (September 1948), 4; Anthony A.P.Dawson, ‘Hollywood’s labour
troubles,’ Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1, no. 4 (July 1948), 642; William R.Weaver, ‘Studio employment
—a 12-year study,’ MPHerald, 174, no. 6 (5 February 1949), 15; ‘Employment at studios hit 13-year low in
1949,’ MPHerald, 178, no. 8 (25 February 1950), 35; Norman Keane, ‘Jigsaw filmed without sound or sets,’ AC,
29, no. 12 (December 1948), 412, 427–8; William R.Weaver, ‘Studios hold gains with six pictures starting,’
MPHerald, 170, no. 6 (7 February 1948); 25; Fred Hift, ‘Those big city scenes are really shot on the spot,’
MPHerald, 177, no. 13 (24 December 1949), 25; ‘Hollywood is traveling abroad for production,’ MPHerald,
170, no. 3 (17 January 1948), 13; ‘Seek to melt frozen funds,’ MPHerald, 174, no. 13 (26 March 1949), 36;
‘British pact signed and U.S. ready to deliver,’ MPHerald, 170, no. 12 (20 March 1948), 13; William R.Weaver,
‘Impact of British-U.S. deal on production is worrying Hollywood,’ MPHerald, 171, no. 7 (15 May 1948), 27;
‘Report 20th-Fox will make 12 top films in Europe,’ MPHerald, 172, no. 10 (4 September 1948), 12; ‘20th-Fox
to offer 32 in month-by-month schedule,’ MPHerald, 172, no. 12 (18 September 1948), 17; ‘Shoot more films
abroad,’ MPHerald, 176, no. 4 (23 July 1949), 16.
8 ‘Video hurts, survey says,’ MPHerald, 178, no. 6 (11 February 1950), 22; US Select Committee on Small Business,
‘Motion-picture distribution trade practices, 1956,’ report, 27 July 1956 (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1956), pp. 22–31. For overall studies of the 1946–52 period, see: William F.Hellmuth, Jr, ‘The motion
picture industry,’ in The Structure of American Industry, ed. Walter Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan,
1954), p. 379; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, Radio, Television, Motion Pictures (New York: Merrill
Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, 1950), pp. 2–5; US Select Committee on Small Business, Senate, ‘Problems of
independent motion picture exhibitors, 1953,’ report, 83rd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1953), p. 3; Chris Hugo, ‘The economic background,’ Movie, 27/28 (Winter 1980/Spring 1981),
43–9.
9 ‘Six majors plan 7 films sold at advanced prices,’ MPHerald, 168, no. 9 (30 August 1947), 23; ‘Importers seek
theatre outlets,’ MPHerald, 166, no. 6 (8 February 1947), 50.
10 ‘New special effects company formed,’ AC, 28, no. 2 (February 1947), 66; ‘Motion picture center: Hollywood’s
newest studio,’ AC, 28, no. 9 (September 1947), 314–15; Fred Hift, ‘Coast talent poised over television pond,’
MPHerald, 174, no. 9 (26 February 1949), 19. See AC through the 1950s but particu larly: Victor Milner,
‘A.S.C. inaugurates research on photography for television,’ AC, 30, no. 3 (March 1949), 86, 100–2; John De
Mos, ‘The cinematographer’s place in television,’ AC, 30, no. 3 (March 1949), 87, 102, 104–5; Walter Strenge,
‘In the best professional manner,’AC, 32, no. 5 (May 1951), 186, 200–1; Leigh Allen, ‘Television film
production,’ AC, 33, no. 2 (February 1952), 69; Frederick Foster, ‘The big switch is to TV!’ AC, 36, no. 1
(January 1955), 26–7, 38–40; Arthur Miller, ‘Hollywood’s cameramen at work,’ AC, 38, no. 9 (September
1957), 580–1. Estimates for 1955 were that ten times the work for television compared to theatrical exhibition
was being done in Hollywood; Morris Gelman, ‘The Hollywood story,’ Television Magazine, 20 (September
1963). Lincoln, ‘Comeback of the movies,’ p. 130; ‘Outlook for 1956,’ MPHerald, 202, no. 1 (7 January 1956),
8; films listed as in production for January through March 1950, 1955, and 1959, Motion Picture Herald; ‘Top
grossing pictures of 1956,’ MPHerald, 206, no. 1 (5 January 1957), 12–13; ‘Name Adler to Zanuck post,’
MPHerald, 202, no. 6 (11 February 1956), 18; Vincent Canby, ‘Hollywood pushes into TV production arena,’
MPHerald, 198, no. 4 (22 January 1955), 13; Jay Remer, ‘Hollywood eyes TV as new production source,’
MPHerald, 202, no. 2 (14 January 1956), 12; William R.Weaver, ‘Hecht-Hill-Lancaster plan nine features,’
MPHerald, 206, no. 1 (5 January 1957), 20.
11 ‘Gimmicks for a Gidget,’ MPHerald, 214, no. 4 (31 January 1959), 38.
12 Arthur E.Gavin, ‘Location-shooting in Paris for Gigi,’ AC, 39, no. 7 (July 1958), 424–5.
13 Richard Dyer MacCann, ‘The independent producer: independence with a vengeance,’ Film Quarterly, 15
(Summer 1962), 14–21; Robert H. Stanley, The Celluloid Empire: A History of the American Movie Industry
(New York: Hastings House, 1978), pp. 251–2; Vincent Canby, ‘How big is big MCA?’ MPHerald, 214, no. 7
(21 February 1959), 23–6.
14 ‘1953 film year,’ 1954 Film Daily Yearbook (New York: Film Daily, 1954), 48; William R.Weaver, ‘Hollywood
scene,’ MPHerald, 198, no. 2 (8 January 1955), 28.
15 Arthur E.Gavin, ‘Location-shooting in Paris for Gigi,’ AC, 39, no. 7 (July 1958), 424–5; Herb A. Lightman,
‘Shooting black and white in color,’ AC, 40, no. 8 (August 1959), 486–7, 499–500; George J. Mitchell, ‘Multiple
cameras cut shooting time of Hell To Eternity,’ AC, 41, no. 7 (July 1960), 412–14, 434, 436–8; Robert Aldrich,
‘Learning from my mistakes,’ Films and Filming (June 1960), rpt in Hollywood Directors, ed. Koszarski, pp.
298–304.
16 Dore Senary and Charles Palmer, Case History of a Movie (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 68; this is also
Martin Field’s explanation in ‘Hollywood report on a “Trend,” ’Penguin Film Review, no. 9 (1949), 100–2.
17 Herb A.Lightman, ‘The camera and production value,’ AC, 27, no. 9 (September 1946), 312–14, 339; George
Seaton, ‘One track mind on a two way ticket,’ The Screen Writer (September 1947), rpt in Hollywood Directors,
ed. Koszarski, p. 133.
18 ‘More trouble in paradise,’ Fortune, 34, no. 5 (November 1946), 155–6; Nelson, ‘The independent producer,’ p.
49.
19 Donald Knox, The Magic Factory: How MGM Made ‘An American in Paris’ (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1973), pp. 205–6.
20 David Linck, ‘Zoetrope takes cue from studios of ‘30s and ’40s,’ Box Office, 116, no. 18 (5 May 1980), 1.
21 Francesca Riviere, ‘Rebirth next: an exclusive interview with Francis Ford Coppola,’ L.A.Weekly, 28 November
1979, p. 40.
22 Dudley Nichols, ‘The writer and the film,’ (1959), rpt in Film: A Montage of Theories, ed. Richard Dyer
MacCann (New York: E.P.Dutton & Co., 1966), p. 74; V.F.Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging
Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 166.
23 Knox, The Magic Factory, pp. 205–6.
York: Dover Publications, 1978), pp. 97–8, 103.
Chapter 27
Deep-focus cinematography
1 Joseph Dubray, ‘Large aperture lenses in cinematography,’ TSMPE, 12 no. 33 (1928): 206.
2 Patrick Ogle, ‘Technological and aesthetic influences upon the development of deep focus cinematography in the
United States,’ Screen Reader, 1, ed. John Ellis (London: British Film Institute, 1977), pp. 87–8. See also Peter
Mole, ‘Will there always be a need for carbon arcs?’ AC, 31, no. 2 (February 1951): 72–3; Charles W.Handley,
‘History of motion picture studio lighting,’ A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, ed.
Raymond Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 122.
3 Michael Leshing, ‘Time and temperature control,’ IP, 16, no. 4 (May 1944): 22; Mary Eunice McCarthy, ‘Hands
of Hollywood (Hollywood: Photoplay Research Bureau, 1929), p. 60; ‘Projection faults denounced,’ AMPAS
Bulletin, no. 13 (11 August 1928): 4; Frank Woods, The sound motion picture situation in Hollywood; TSMPE,
12, no. 35 (1928); 626; Carl F.Gregory, ‘Limitations of modern lenses,’ Cinematography, 1, no. 2 (May 1930): 9,
29; James Wong Howe, ‘Lighting,’ Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931): 50–1; J.J.Finn, ‘The indictment against
“soft lighting,” ’ IPro, 1, no. 3 (December 1931): 20.
4 ‘Bring them back for more,’ Motion Picture Projection, 2, no. 9 (June 1929): 5.
5 William Stull, ‘Solving the “ice-box” problem,’ AC, 10, no. 6 (September 1929): 7. See also Lewis W. Physioc,
‘Exposure control serious problem,’ IP, 2, no. 4 (May 1931): 6–8; Lewis W.Physioc, ‘Problems of the
cameraman,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 3 (September 1931): 408–9.
6 George H.Scheibe, ‘Filters for special effects,’ AC, 14, no. 12 (April 1934): 486; Lewis W.Physioc, ‘Physioc
writes of camera problems,’ IP, 3, no. 8 (September 1931): 5–6; John Arnold, ‘Shooting the movies,’ in We Make
the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumburg (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 154; Lewis W.Physioc, ‘More about lighting,’
IP, 8, no. 7 (August 1936): 5; George Scheibe, ‘Soft focus,’ IP, 11, no. 3 (April 1939): 6; Charles B.Lang, Jr,
‘The purpose and practice of diffusion,’ AC, 14, no. 5 (September 1933): 171, 193–4; John Arnold,
‘Cinematography—professional,’ The Complete Photographer, vol. 2, ed. Willard D.Morgan (New York: National
Education Alliance, 1943), p. 765. Cf. Vladimir Nilsen, The Cinema as a Graphic Art, tr. Stephen Carry (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1959), pp. 151, 177.
7 Emery Huse and Gordon A.Chambers, ‘Eastman Supersensitive Panchromatic Type Two motion picture film,’
Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931), p. 107.
8 Oliver Marsh, ‘Super-sensitive film in production,’ AC, 12, no. 1 (May 1931): 11; Hal Hall, ‘Improvements in
motion picture film,’ Cinematographic Annual, 2 (1931): 93–102; Charles G.Clarke, ‘Fast improvements of fast
film,’ AC, 12, no. 3 (July 1931): 10, 40; V.B.Sease, ‘Du Font’s new panchromatic film,’ AC, 13, no. 5 (September
1932): 17, 25; P.Arnold, ‘A motion picture negative of wider usefulness,’ JSMPE, 23, no. 3 (September 1934):
160–6; ‘Symposium of new motion picture apparatus,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 3 (September 1931): 387; James Barker.
‘Make-up for fast film,’ AC, 12, no. 7 (November 1931): 11, 24.
9 Clyde DeVinna, ‘New angles on fast film,’ AC, 12, no. 2 (June 1931): 19, 22; Fred Westerberg, ‘New negative to
improve quality,’ IP, 2, no. 4 (May 1931): 29.
10 ‘Quality photography: a measure of superior craftsmanship,’ IPro, 2, no. 3 (May 1932): 12. See also, ‘Report of
the Studio Lighting Committee,’ JSMPE, 17, no. 4 (October 1931): 645–55.
11 ‘ASC recommends fast films,’ AC, 12, no. 3 (July 1931): 19.
12 For summary accounts of 1930s innovations, see Emery Huse and Gordon A.Chambers, ‘New Eastman emulsions,’
IP, 10, no. 11 (December 1938): 23–7; ‘Pan and sound put inkies on top,’ IP, 10, no. 3 (April 1938): 43–8;
Joseph Valentine, ‘Make-up and set painting aid new film,’ AC, 20, no. 2 (February 1939): 54–6, 85; ‘Lighting
the new fast films,’ AC, 18, no. 12 (December 1937): 494; ‘Report of the Studio Lighting Committee,’ JSMPE,
33, no. 1 (July 1939): 97–100.
13 L.W.O’Donnell, quoted in ‘Lighting the new fast films,’ pp. 69–70.
14 ‘Report of the Studio Lighting Committee,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 3 (March 1938): 294–8; G.Gaudio, ‘A new viewpoint
on the lighting of motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 2 (August 1937): 157–68.
15 Hal Mohr, ‘A lens mount for universal focus effects,’ AC, 17, no. 9 (September 1936): 371.
16 John Castle, ‘Bert Glennon introducing new method of interior photography,’ AC, 20, no. 2 (February 1939): 82.
17 James Wong Howe, ‘Upsetting traditions with Viva Villa!’ AC, 15, no. 2 (June 1934): 64, 71–2; ‘Riddle me this,’
AC, 13, no. 6 (October 1932): 16; Castle, ‘Bert Glennon,’ p. 83; Gaudio, ‘New viewpoint,’ pp. 157–68; ‘Lighting
Tobacco Road,’ IP, 13, no. 1 (February 1941): 3, 7.
18 James Wong Howe, in Hollywood Cameramen, ed. Charles Higham (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), p. 88.
See also, ‘The layout for Bulldog Drummond,’ Creative Art (October 1929): 729–34, and William Cameron
Menzies, ‘Pictorial beauty in the photoplay,’ in Introduction to the Photoplay, ed. John C.Tibbetts (Shawnee
Mission, Kansas: National Film Society, 1977), p. 166.
19 Ogle, ‘Technological and aesthetic influences,’ pp. 92–3.
20 John Arnold, ‘Art in cinematography,’ AC, 12, no. 12 (April 1932): 25.
21 Quoted in Leonard Maltin, Behind the Camera: The Cinematographer’s Art (New York: New American Library,
1971), p. 69.
22 Herb A.Lightman, ‘Documentary style,’ AC, 30, no. 5 (May 1949): 176.
23 Harry Burdick, ‘Intense preparation underlies Toland’s achievements,’ AC, 16, no. 6 (June 1935): 240, 247;
Gregg Toland, ‘Using arcs for lighting monochrome,’ AC, 22, no. 12 (December 1941): 559; ‘Adjustment for
dolly head,’ AC, 16, no. 6 (June 1935): 246; Gregg Toland, ‘Practical gadgets expedite camera work,’ AC, 20,
no. 5 (May 1939): 215–8; ‘Toland with Twentieth’s Kidnapped awarded camera honors for July,’ AC, 19, no. 7
(July 1938): 274: Toland’s Dead End selected in caucus one oi three best,’ AC, 19, no. 4 (April 1938): 141–2;
‘Ace cinematographer Gregg Toland passes,’ Los Angeles Times (29 September 1948): n.p.
24 Walter Blanchard, ‘Aces of the camera XIII: Gregg Toland, ‘AC, 23, no. 1 (January 1942): 15.
25 Gregg Toland, ‘Realism for Citizen Kane,’ AC, 22, no. 2 (February 1941): 54, 80.
26 Ibid., Gregg Toland, ‘I broke the rules in Citizen Kane,’ Popular Photography, 8, no. 6 (June 1941): 55; 90–1.
27 Toland, ‘Realism,’ 55.
28* There persists among American cinematographers the belief that Toland also used the ‘Waterhouse stop’ method
to achieve small apertures. Joseph Walker explained:
With the advent of sound we all had difficulty matching the exposure with different lenses, especially
very short focus lenses at small apertures. Some of the diaphragms were so sloppy there could be a half-
stop difference at f:11, depending on whether you stopped the lens down to f:11 or opened it up to f:11.
My own solution was to own four complete sets of lenses and try to match the calibrations.
Gregg Toland used very short focus lenses on Citizen Kane and used them at small apertures. His
solution, and a very practical one, was to use the ‘Waterhouse Stop’ system, whereby a small piece of
metal with an accurately drilled hole in it is inserted in a slot in the lens barrel, in place of the conventional
diaphragm. A different metal strip for every stop is needed but this way the f-stop would match on all
lenses that were prepared in this way.
I think these lenses were shown at a meeting at the ASC.
(Letter from Joe Walker to Charles G.Clarke, 23 May 1972. In ASC files.) In his articles, Toland
makes no mention of using the Waterhouse stop method, but it is possible that he did.
29 Toland, ‘Realism,’ pp. 54–5.
30 Joseph V.Mascelli, ‘What’s happened to photographic style?’ IP, 30, no. 1 (January 1958): 6.
31 Gregg Toland, ‘The motion picture cameraman,’ Theatre Arts, 25, no. 9 (September 1941): 647–54; ‘Orson
Welles: once a child prodigy, he has never quite grown up,’ Life, 10, no. 21 (26 May 1941): 108– 16; John
Mescall, ‘Pan-focus for your home movies,’ AC, 22, no. 12 (December 1941): 576, 593; Blanchard, ‘Aces’, 15,
36. See also Hal McAlpin, ‘Let’s shoot ‘em sharp,’ IP, 15, no. 12 (January 1943): 7–9.
32 Mescall, ‘Pan-focus,’ p. 576; ‘Through the editor’s finder,’ AC, 22, no. 9 (September 1941): 424; ‘“Increased
range” system promises to revolutionize photography,’ IPro, 16, no. 6 (June 1941): 12; ‘Report of the Studio
Lighting Committee,’ JSMPE, 38, no. 3 (March 1942): 282.
33 Charles G.Clarke, ‘How desirable is extreme focal depth?’ AC, 23, no. 1 (January 1942): 14.
34 ‘Photography of the month,’ AC, 23, no. 2 (February 1942): 66.
35 ‘Photography of the month: The Little Foxes,’ AC, 22, no. 9 (September 1941): 425.
36 Linwood Dunn, ‘Optical printer Handy Andy,’ IP, 10, no. 5 (June 1938): 14–16; ‘Special effects at RKO; IP, 12,
no. 11 (December 1940): 4; ‘First rear projection specifications,’ IP, 11, no. 2 (March 1939): 22.
37 Quoted in Walter Blanchard, ‘Unseen camera aces II: Linwood Dunn, ASC,’ AC, 24, no. 7 (July 1943): 268.
38 Interview with Linwood Dunn, conducted by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, July 1980, Hollywood,
California. See also Donald Chase, Filmmaking: The Collaborative Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), pp. 293–7;
Peter Bogdanovich, ‘The Kane mutiny,’ Esquire, 77, no. 4 (October 1972): 100–1.
39 Clarke, ‘How desirable,’ p. 36.
40* Mitchell, for instance, developed a lightweight, single-system 35mm camera for combat photography, while Art
Reeves designed a field camera that used reflex viewing. RCA paralleled the advances in photography with
portable sound-recording equipment. Military demand also elevated 16mm to the status of a semi-professional
gauge. Hollywood studios had used 16mm occasionally for wardrobe, location, and acting tests before the war,
but after 1942, the usage increased, partly because 16mm stock was not rationed as strictly as 35mm. James
Wong Howe enthusiastically predicted that 16mm would soon become the production standard because it was
cheaper and the equipment was more flexible. See E.J.Tiffany, ‘Mitchell 35mm single system sound camera,’ AC,
24, no. 9 (September 1943): 330–43; Art Reeves, ‘The Art Reeves reflex motion picture camera,’ JSMPE, 44,
no. 6 (June 1945): 436–42; Ainslie R. Davis, ‘New light weight recording equipment serves in the war effort,’
JSMPE, 42, no. 6 (June 1944): 327–48; William Stull, ‘16mm gains in studio use,’ AC, 13, no. 10 (October
1942): 442; Ezra Goodman, ‘Post-war motion pictures,’ AC, 26, no. 5 (May 1945): 160.
41 Ralph Lawton, ‘Champion,’ AC, 30, no. 6 (June 1949): 196, 218; Frederick Foster, ‘Economy lighting with
photofloods,’ AC, 31, no. 1 (January 1950): 10–11, 20.
42 Phil Tannura, ‘The practical use of latensification,’ AC, 31, no. 2 (February 1951): 54, 68–70. See also Leigh
Allen, ‘New speed for films,’ AC, 30, no. 12 (December 1949): 440, 456.
43 Emery Huse, ‘Tri-X—new Eastman high-speed negative motion picture film,’ AC, 35, no. 7 (July 1954): 335,
364; Emery Huse, ‘Eastman Plus-X panchromatic negative film (type B),’ AC, 37, no. 9 (September 1956): 542,
546; Frederick Foster, ‘A faster color negative,’ AC, 40, no. 6 (June 1959): 364–5, 368, 370.
44 Jack Taylor, ‘Dynamic Realism,’ IP, 20, no. 9 (September 1948): 6–7.
45 Charles L.Anderson, ‘Filming with perspective control,’ AC, 31, no. 10 (September 1950): 313; ‘Choosing and
using lenses,’ AC, 40, no. 5 (May 1959): 296.
46 R.M.Newbold, ‘The Garuzo lens in motion picture photography,’ AC, 31, no. 7 (September 1949): 320; Leigh
Allen, ‘Deep focus and longer takes,’ AC, 31, no. 7 (July 1950): 234–5, 257; Hal Mohr, ‘Why I used the Garutso
lens in filming The Four Poster,’ AC, 33, no. 11 (November 1952): 482, 500–1.
47 Stanley Cortez, ‘Tri-X in feature film production,’ AC, 35, no. 1 (January 1955): 33, 44–5; Herb Lightman, ‘The
filming of Viva Zapata!’ AC, 33, no. 4 (April 1952): 155; Herb Lightman, ‘Old master, new tricks,’ AC, 31, no. 9
(September 1950): 318; Herb Lightman, ‘Realism with a master’s touch,’ AC, 31, no. 8 (August 1950): 286–8.
48 William Wyler, ‘No magic wand,’ Screen Writer, 2, no. 9 (February 1947): 10.
49 ‘A letter from William Wyler,’ Sequence, no. 8 (Summer 1949): 68.
50 Lester Koenig, ‘Gregg Toland, film-maker,’ Screen Writer, 3, no. 7 (December 1947): 30–1; ‘Gregg Toland, one
of top lensers, dies at 44,’ Daily Variety (29 September 1948): 6; ‘Letter From Wyler,’ pp. 68– 9.
Chapter 28
Technicolor
1 For a history of color systems, see Roderick T. Ryan, A History of Motion Picture Color Technology (New York:
Focal Press, 1977). See also Howard T. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: Van Nostrand, 1933), p.
138.
2* In the two-color subtractive method, a beamsplitter prism exposed two frames at once, one through a red filter
and one through a green filter. A print was made from each set of images and the two prints were cemented
together, yielding a relief image on each side of the film. One side was then dyed red, the other blue-green.
Imbibition processing improved the method by dyeing each negative’s relief-image print (its ‘matrix’) and
immediately stamping it onto another film; the process resembled half-tone lithography.
3 F.J.Taylor, ‘Mr. Technicolor,’ Saturday Evening Post, 222 (22 October 1949): 131–3; ‘Technicolor,’ Fortune, 13
(June 1936): 40, 46, 54; Joseph Mascelli, ‘The million dollar bubble,’ IP, 23, no. 10 (October 1951): 6, 8–10;
William Stull, ‘Technicolor bringing new charm to screen,’ AC, 18, no. 6 (June 1937): 237; Fred Hasten,
Glorious Technicolor (New York: A.S.Barnes, 1980), pp. 23–197; ‘Abstracts,’ JSMPE, 14 no. 1 (January 1930):
139–40; ‘Progress in the motion picture industry,’ JSMPE, 14, no. 2 (February 1930): 245; ‘Technicolor orders
18 new cameras,’ Hollywood Filmograph, 10, no. 16 (3 May 1930): 26; ‘Technicolor expansion program in
operation,’ Technicolor News and Views, 1, no. 1 (April 1929): 1–2; ‘Increase in popularity of Technicolor
productions graphically shown by 35-millimeter positive print footage output, 1932–1947,’ Technicolor News
and Views, 10, no. 2 (August 1948): 2; ‘Technicolor gaining,’ AC, 25, no. 5 (May 1944): 178; J.A. Ball, ‘The
Technicolor process of 3-color cinematography,’ IPro, 8, no. 6 (June 1935): 12; Howard C.Brown, ‘Will color
revolutionize photography?’ AC, 17, no. 7 (July 1936): 284–5.
4 See Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 29–58; ‘Color film increase,’ Business Week (22 May 1937): 47.
5 Jimmie Stone, ‘The assistant cameraman,’ IP, 11, no. 11 (December 1939): 23; ‘Why all this hubbub regarding
color?’ AC, 17, no. 8 (August 1936): 327, 334–5; ‘Ziegfeld Girl,’ AC, 22, no. 4 (May 1941): 223.
6 ‘Eliminating guesswork in cinematography,’ Scientific American, 115 (9 December 1916): 532, 535–6; Taylor,
‘Mr. Technicolor,’ p. 131; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 20–3, 29, 81, 199; ‘What? Color in the movies
again?’ Fortune, 10, no. 4 (October 1934): 93–4, 161.
7 ‘What? Color in the movies again?’ p. 166.
8 Stull, ‘New charm,’ p. 236; ‘A cinema world wonder,’ IP, 2, no. 5 (June 1930): 84–6; Robert L. Greene, ‘The
camera optical engineer,’ IP, 22, no. 5 (May 1950): 8–9; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 84–93.
9 ‘Technicolor system,’ IP, 10, no. 1 (February 1938): 9–10; Ira B. Hoke, ‘Grooming camera battery for 1931,’ IP,
2, no. 11 (December 1930): 15, 40; Stone, ‘Assistant cameraman,’ p. 13; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 66–7.
10 William Stull, ‘Following focus by remote control,’ AC, 17, no. 2 (February 1936): 53, 60; William Stull,
‘Process shots aided by triple projector,’ AC, 20, no. 8 (August 1939): 363–6, 376; Farciot Edouart, ‘The
evolution of transparency process photography,’ AC, 24, no. 10 (October 1943): 380, 382; Elmer C. Richardson,
‘Production use tested the “Ultra H.I. Arc,”’IP, 8, no. 3 (April 1936): 26–7; Peter Mole, ‘Twice the light and
twice the sunlight for color cinematography,’ AC, 16, no. 8 (August 1935): 332– 3; R.E.Farnham, ‘Lighting
requirements of the three-color Technicolor process,’ AC, 17, no. 7 (July 1936): 282–3, 292; E.G. Richardson,
‘Recent developments in high-intensity arc spotlamps for motion picture production,’ JSMPE, 28, no. 2
(February 1938): 206–12; W. Howard Greene, ‘Low-key lighting may be as easy in color as it is in
monochrome,’ AC, 19, no. 4 (April 1938): 146, 151; ‘Pan and sound put inkies on top,’ IP, 10, no. 3 (April
1938): 47; Ray Rennehan, ‘Rennehan talks Technicolor,’ IP, 9, no. 8 (September 1937): 24.
11 See, for example, Lyle Wheeler, ‘Art direction for color by Technicolor,’ Technicolor News and Views, 11, no. 2
(June 1949): 2–3.
12 Walter B.Pitkin and William M.Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures (New York: Appleton, 1930), p. 261.
13 For a good discussion of how color can be seen as lacking realistic motivation, see Ed Buscombe, ‘Sound and
color,’ Jump Cut, no. 17 (1978): 23–5.
14 Lansing C.Holden, ‘Color: the new language of the screen,’ Cinema Arts, 1, no. 2 (July 1937): 64. See also Philip
E.Rosen, ‘Believe color will not aid dramatic cinematography,’ AC, 4, no. 5 (August 1923): 4.
15 Quoted in Basten, Glorious Technicolor, p. 30.
16 Ibid., p. 27.
17 Ibid., p. 57; D.K. Allison, ‘Common sense of color,’ IP, 9, no. 8 (September 1937): 7–9.
18 Taylor, ‘Mr. Technicolor,’ p. 27; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 54, 70; Lansing C.Holden, ‘Designing for
color,’ in We Make the Movies, ed. Nancy Naumburg (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 240; Natalie Kalmus, ‘Color
consciousness,’ IPro, 8, no. 6 (June 1935): 17; Arthur E.Gavin, ‘South Pacific— New concept in color
photography,’ AC, 39, no. 5 (May 1958): 294–6, 318–19.
19 Natalie Kalmus, ‘Colour,’ in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (New York: Dodge,
1938), p. 122.
20 ‘Rennehan talks Technicolor,’ p. 25; Peter Mole, ‘Lighting equipment for natural-color photography,’ IP, 8, no. 5
(June 1936): 17; John Arnold, ‘Cinematography—professional,’ in The Complete Photographer vol. 2, ed.
Willard D.Morgan (New York: National Education Alliance, 1943), p. 767; James Wong Howe, ‘Reaction on
making his first color production,’ AC, 18, no. 10 (October 1937): 409–11; SMPTE, Elements of Color in
Professional Motion Pictures (New York: SMPTE, 1957), pp. 44, 70; E.G. Richardson, ‘Recent developments in
motion picture set lighting,’ JSMPE, 29, no. 2 (August 1937): 183.
21 Ray Rennehan, ‘Natural-color cinematography today,’ AC, 16, no. 7 (July 1935): 288, 294; ‘Faster color film
cuts light a half,’ AC, 20, no. 8 (August 1939): 355–6; C.W.Handley, ‘Advanced technic of Technicolor
lighting,’ IP, 9, no. 5 (June 1937): 10; William Stull, ‘New charm,’ p. 236; W.Howard Green, ‘Creating light-
effects in Technicolor,’ IP, 8, no. 12 (January 1937): 10–11, 25; Winton Hoch, ‘The Technicolor cameraman,’ IPro,
21, no. 10 (October 1946): 20–2, 34; Robert Surtees, ‘Color is different,’ AC, 28, no. 1 (January 1948): 10–11,
31; Joe Valentine, ‘Lighting for Technicolor as compared with black and white photography,’ IP, 20, no. 1
(January 1948): 7–10.
22 Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 137–46; ‘Technicolor to employ standard camera negative in year, Dr. Kalmus
predicts,’ Technicolor News and Views, 1, no. 8 (November 1939): 1–2; ‘Company’s feature volume largest in
history,’ Technicolor News and Views, 3, no. 2 (April 1941): 1–2; Winton Hoch, ‘Technicolor cinematography,’
in The Technique of Motion Picture Production, ed. SMPE (New York: Interscience, 1944): 20–2, 34; Taylor, ‘Mr.
Technicolor,’ pp. 133–4; ‘Technical news,’ JSMPE, 43, no. 1 (July 1944): 68; Charles G.Clarke, ‘Practical
utilization of monopack film,’ IP, 18, no. 1 (February 1946): 11–12, 29; ‘Technicolor establishes new records in
a troubled year,’ Technicolor News and Views, 4, no. 2 (April 1942): 1, 3; ‘The Technicolor monopack process,’
Technicolor News and Views, 7, no. 3 (September 1945): 1–2; Herbert T.Kalmus, ‘Technicolor’s post war plans,’
Technicolor News and Views, 5, no. 4 (December 1943): 1, 4; Herbert T.Kalmus, ‘Future of Technicolor,’ IP, 16,
no. 4 (May 1944): 29; Charles G.Clarke, ‘We filmed Kangaroo entirely in Australia,’ AC, 33, no. 6 (July 1952):
292–3, 315–7; William J.Kenney, ‘Monopack as medium for three-color process,’ IP, 16, no. 12 (January 1945):
12.
23 The most detailed examination of Technicolor’s relation to Eastman Kodak is George E.Frost and S.Chesterfield
Oppenheim, ‘A study of the professional color motion picture antitrust decrees and their effects,’ The Patent,
Trademark and Copyright Journal of Research and Education, 4, no. 1 (Spring 1960): 1–39, and 4, no. 2
(Summer 1960): 108–49. See also Basten, Glorious Technicolor, p. 146; ‘Technicolor,’ Fortune, p. 54; Howard
C.Brown, ‘Movies in color,’ IP, 8, no. 6 (July 1936): 26; Ed Gibbons, ‘Color,’ IP, 9, no. 6 (July 1937): 5–7;
‘Technicolor system,’ IP, 10, no. 1 (February 1938): 10; Ed Gibbons, ‘Color progress dominates 1939 technical
horizon,’ IP, 10, no. 12 (January 1939): 9–10; ‘Technicolor answers anti-trust action,’ Technicolor News and
Views, 10, no. 1 (January 1948): 1; ‘Color film suit settled in US consent decree,’ Los Angeles Times (25
November 1948): sec. 2, p. 2; ‘Eastman gets color patents,’ Hollywood Reporter (10 July 1951): 1, 4;
‘Government case against Technicolor terminated,’ Technicolor News and Views, 12, no. 1 (March 1950): 1–2.
24 ‘Color in the motion picture,’ pp. 164, 166; ‘Six companies now testing Eastman Color,’ Hollywood Citizen-
News (10 November 1949): 19; Earl Theisen, ‘Notes on the history of color in motion pictures,’ IP, 8, no. 5 (June
1936): 8–9, 24; Don Hooper, ‘Negative-positive color,’ IP, 9, no. 8 (September 1937): 27–9; W.T.Hanson,
‘Color negative and color positive film for motion picture use,’ JSMPTE, 58, no. 8 (March 1952): 223–5; W.T.
Hanson and W.I.Kisner, ‘Improved color films for color motion-picture production,’ JSMPTE, 61, no. 6
(December 1953): 670–2; Basten, Glorious Technicolor, pp. 149, 160; Frederick Foster, ‘Eastman negative-
positive color films for motion pictures,’ AC, 34, no. 7 (July 1953): 322–33, 348; Robert A. Mitchell, ‘Color and
its reproduction on film,’ IPro, 31, no. 2 (February 1956): 17; James Morris, 1954 seen as biggest year for color,’
IPro, 29, no. 1 (January 1954): 7–8; Robert A.Mitchell, ‘To which IP replies,’ IPro, 30, no. 8 (August 1955): 16;
1945 to 1955: ten years of progress in projection technology,’ IPro, 30, no. 12 (December 1955): 24, 38;
‘Summary of current widescreen systems of photography,’ AC, 36, no. 11 (November 1955): 676; ‘CinemaScope,’
International Sound Technician, 1, no. 2 (April 1953): 2; Robert A.Mitchell, ‘Anatomy of CinemaScope,’ IPro,
29, no. 6 (June 1954): 10; ‘Warner Brothers debuts “Warnercolor”’AC, 33, no. 3 (March 1952): 122; Edwin A.
DuPar, ‘Warner-Color—newest of color film processes,’ AC, 33, no. 9 (September 1952): 384–5. See also
R.M.Wiener, ‘Color film often doomed at birth—in the lab,’ Box Office (5 May 1980): 1, 5, 30.
25 Jackson J.Rose, American Cinematographer Handbook and Reference Guide, ninth ed. (Hollywood: American
Cinematographer, 1956), p. 59; ‘Closeups,’ AC, 35, no. 3 (March 1954): 122; Herbert T.Kalmus, ‘President’s
message,’ Technicolor News and Views, 15, no. 2 (November 1953): 2; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress Committee
Report for 1959,’ JSMPTE, 69, no. 5 (May 1960): 302; ‘Technicolor improves color printing process,’ IPro, 30,
no. 5 (May 1956): 14; Lowell A.Bodger, ‘Ultra-wide screen systems,’ AC, 43, no. 7 (July 1962): 441; Basten,
Glorious Technicolor, pp. 156–9, 197; Bob Allen, ‘Wide screen production picking up,’ IP, 33, no. 11
(November 1961): 222.
Chapter 29
Widescreen processes and stereophonic sound
1 Ralph G.Fear, ‘Wide image on standard film,’ AC, 10, no. 5 (August 1929): 17, 44; John R.Bishop and Loren
L.Ryder, ‘Paramount’s “Lazy-8” double-frame camera,’ AC, 34, no. 12 (December 1953): 606; John D.Elms,
‘Demonstration and description of the Widescope camera,’ TSMPE, no. 15 (1922): 124– 9; Fred Waller,
‘Cinerama goes to war,’ in New Screen Techniques, ed. Martin Quigley (New York: Quigley, 1953), pp. 119–20;
William Stull, ‘Seventy millimeters,’ AC, 10, no. 11 (February 1930): 9, 42–3; Edmund M.DiGiulion, E.C.
Manderfield, and George A.Mitchell, ‘An historical survey of the professional motion picture camera,’ JSMPTE,
76, no. 7 (July 1967): 668; Paul Allen, ‘Wide film development,’ Cinematographic Annual, 1 (1930), pp. 186–7;
H.H. Dunn, ‘New giant movies,’ Popular Mechanics, 53, no. 5 (May 1930): 709; Fred Westerberg, ‘Is 35mm
passing?’ IP, 1, no. 9 (October 1929): 28–34; George A. Mitchell, ‘70mm film versus other sizes,’ IP, 2, no. 3 (April
1930): 3, 7; ‘Progress in the motion picture industry,’ JSMPE, 15 no. 6 (December 1930): 759, 763; James
R.Cameron, ‘The new wide film arrives,’ Projection Engineering, 1, no. 2 (October 1929): 26, 38.
2 ‘Grandeur film makes debut at Fox Carthay Circle Theatre,’ Hollywood Filmograph, 10, no. 7 (1 March 1930):
9.
3 Henri Dain, ‘Memorandum on widening the field of camera lenses,’ JSMPE, 19, no. 6 (December 1932): 527.
4 J.P.Maxfield, ‘Demonstration of sterophonic recording with motion pictures,’ JSMPE, 30, no. 2 (February 1938):
132. See also ‘Reproducing orchestral music in auditory perspective,’ IPro, 5, no. 3 (May 1933): 14–16; Harvey
Fletcher, ‘Transmission and reproduction of speech and music in auditory perspective,’ JSMPE, 22 no. 5 (May
1934): 314–29; and Franklin L.Hunt, ‘Sound pictures in auditory perspective,’ JSMPE, 31, no. 4 (October 1938):
351–7.
5 W.H.Offenhauser and J.J. Israel, ‘Some production aspects of binaural recording for sound motion pictures,’
JSMPE, 32, no. 2 (February 1939): 139– 55; ‘Warners’ “Vitasound” praised at showing,’ AC, 21, no. 12
(December 1940): 547; ‘RCA’s “Panoramic” sound system ready soon,’ IPro, 16, no. 1 (January 1941): 30;
JSMPE, 37, no. 4 (October 1941): 331–405; ‘Report of the Committee on Sound,’ JSMPE, 41, no. 4 (October
1943): 292–6. See also ‘Movies soon to have three dimensions in both sight and sound,’ Architectural Record,
83, no. 1 (January 1938): 38.
6* Anaglyphic (red/green) stereoscopic processes have been used sporadically since early in the century, but most
stereoscopic cinema of the 1950s employed Edwin Land’s Polaroid process, first patented in 1928. The ‘Natural
Vision’ Corporation applied polarization to cinema with Bwana Devil (1952), an independent production
acquired by United Artists. Some studios, such as Warners and Columbia, obtained licenses to use ‘Natural
Vision,’ while other studios built their own systems.
7 ‘New dimensions perk up Hollywood,’ Business Week (14 March 1953): 122–3; Robert A.Mitchell, ‘Visibility
factors in projection,’ IPro, 28, no. 5 (May 1953): 10.
8 G.H.Cook, ‘Modern cine camera lenses,’ JSMPTE, 65, no. 3 (March 1956): 155; Walter R.Greene, ‘New
CinemaScope “55,” ‘IP, 28, no. 3 (March 1956): 5; Ron Ross, ‘Cameraman’s comments,’ IP, 27, no. 4 (April
1955): 7.
9 ‘Filming The Ten Commandments,’ IP, 28, no. 10 (October 1956): 6; Herb A.Lightman, ‘Why MGM chose
“Camera 65,”’AC, 41, no. 3 (March 1960): 192; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress Committee Report for 1956,’
JSMPTE, 66, no. 5 (May 1957): 242; Arthur Rowan, ‘Todd-A0—newest wide-screen system,’ AC, 35, no. 10
(October 1954): 526; George Howard, ‘Design improvements in high-wattage filament lamps respond to studio
needs,’ AC, 39, no. 4 (April 1958): 228; ‘Industry news,’ AC, 36, no. 5 (May 1955): 254; Lowell A.Bodger,
‘Ultra-wide screen systems,’ AC, 43, no. 7 (July 1962): 426; Petro Vlahos, ‘Motion-Picture Studio Lighting and
Process Photography Committee Report,’ JSMPTE, 64, no. 8 (August 1955): 447; ‘3-D and wide screen news
roundup,’ AC, 34, no. 7 (July 1953): 308; N.H. Groet, T.J.Murray, and C.E.Osborne, ‘Two highspeed color films
and a reversal print film for motion picture use,’ JSMPTE 69, no. 11 (November 1960): 815–16; Merle L.Dundon
and Daan M. Zwick, ‘A high-speed color negative film,’ JSMPTE, 68, no. 11 (November 1959): 735–6;
Norwood L. Simmons, ‘The new Eastman color negative and color print films,’ AC, 43, no. 6 (June 1962): 362–3,
385.
10 DiGuilio et al., ‘Historical survey,’ p. 669; Lightman, ‘Why MGM…,’ pp. 163, 192; Darrin Scot, ‘Panavision’s
progress,’ AC, 41, no. 5 (May 1960): 302–4; Bob Allen, ‘Wide screen production picking up.’IP, 33, no. 11
(November 1961): 215; J.Victor, ‘From any angle,’ IP, 28, no. 5 (May 1956): 6; ‘New products,’ JSMPTE, 66,
no. 12 (December 1957): 800; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress Committee Report for 1958,’ JSMPTE, 68, no. 5
(May 1959): 278; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress Committee Report for 1959,’ JSMPTE, 69, no. 5 (May 1960):
311; Scott Henderson, ‘The Panavision story,’ AC, 58, no. 4 (April 1977): 414–33.
11 Loren L.Ryder, ‘Modernization desires of a major studio,’ JSMPE, 47, no. 3 (September 1946): 226; ‘50-mm film
tests seen as industry effort to neutralize competitive threat,’ IPro, 21, no. 14 (April 1946): 8; Bob Mintz, ‘The
big changeover,’ AC, 34, no. 10 (October 1953): 481, 497–9; Charles R.Daily, ‘Progress Committee Report,’
JSMPTE, 64, no. 5 (May 1955): 226; Robert A.Mitchell,‘“Matching” aperture and lenses,’ IPro, 30, no. 5 (May
1955): 7– 11, 33–4; Charles R.Daily, ‘Progress Committee Report,’ JSMPTE, 62, no. 5 (May 1954): 227; Derik
J.Southall, ‘Twentieth Century-Fox presents a CinemaScope picture,’ Focus on Film, no. 31 (November 1978):
8–26, 47; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress Committee Report for 1958,’ JSMPTE, 68, no. 5 (May 1959): 290; Lloyd
Thompson, ‘Progress Committee Report for 1957,’ JSMPTE, 67, no. 5 (May 1958): 242.
12 ‘C-Scope leads new methods,’ The 1954 Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures, ed. Jack Alicoate (New York:
Film Daily, 1954), p. 59; Martin Quigley, ‘Introduction,’ in Quigley, New Screen Techniques, pp. 10–11.
13 Loren Grignon, ‘Experiment in stereophonic sound,’ JSMPE, 52, no. 3 (March 1949): 280–91.
14 ‘1945 to 1955: ten years of progression in projection technology,’ IPro, 30, no. 12 (December 1955): 39; Loren
D.Grignon, ‘Experiment in stereophonic sound,’ JSMPTE, 61, no. 3 (September 1953): 365; Dolph Thomas,
‘Problems in stereophonic sound,’ International Sound Technician, 1, no. 3 (May 1953): 21; Ralph Lawton,
‘“Penthouse” 4-track sound reproducers,’ AC, 34, no. 10 (March 1954): 502–3; Lloyd Thompson, ‘Progress
Committee Report for 1956,’ JSMPTE, 66, no. 5 (May 1957): 242.
15 ‘Editor’s comment,’ IPro, 30, no. 7 (July 1955): 16; ‘20th-Fox adopts small-sprocket Magoptical,’ IPro, 32, no. 3
(March 1957): 21.
16 Bazin’s comments can be found in ‘Fin du montage,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31 (January 1954): 43; ‘Un peu
tard…,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 48 (June 1955): 45–7; ‘Massacre en cinémascope,’ Arts, no. 525 (20–26 July
1955): 1, 5.
17 André Bazin, ‘Le cinémascope sauvera-t’il le cinéma?’ Esprit, 12, no. 10–11 (October-November 1953): 683.
18 François Truffaut, ‘En avoir plein la vue,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 25 (July 1953): 22–3.
19 Charles Barr, ‘CinemaScope: before and after,’ Film Quarterly, 16, no. 4 (Summer 1963): 11, 18.
20 André Bazin, ‘Beauté d’un Western,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 55 (January 1956): 35.
21 Herb A.Lightman, ‘Shooting Oklahoma! in Todd-AO,’ AC, 36, no. 4 (April 1955): 210; Charles G. Clarke, ‘And
now 55mm,’ AC, 36, no. 12 (December 1955): 707; Walter R.Greene, ‘New CinemaScope, “55,”’IP, 28, no. 3
(March 1956): 6; Gayne Rescher, ‘Wide angle problems in wide screen cinematography,’ AC, 37, no. 5 (May
1956): 300, 310, 322–3; Arthur Gavin, ‘CinemaScope: what it is, how it works,’ IPro, 28, no. 4 (April 1953): 10.
22 Kenneth MacGowan, ‘The wide screen of yesterday and tomorrow,’ Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, 11,
no. 3 (Spring 1957): 238.
23* Cinerama set up many obstacles for the cinematographer. The ‘blend lines’ between the three panels were
visible, so the camera crew had to find vertical objects or shadows to conceal the breaks. If an actor were not
placed wholly within one panel, the blend lines would bisect the body. The camera could not be panned or tilted
because, again, of the distortions caused by the blend lines. And the three cameras required three separate
lighting set-ups, since the diaphragms of all three cameras were interlocked to keep exposure constant. Todd-AO
was no less cumbersome. Since movement perpendicular to the lens tended to blur, action had to be staged along
diagonals. Because Todd-AO had no optical printers, fades and dissolves had to be done in lighting. The Todd-
AO lenses also yielded a very shallow depth of field. Both Cinerama and Todd-AO, after some initial success in
the 1950s, became moribund because their novelty value did not compensate for their expense and lack of
flexibility in production. See William Daniels, ‘Cinerama goes dramatic,’ AC, 43, no. 1 (January 1962): 50–3;
Joseph Brun, ‘The Cinerama technique,’ AC, 35, no. 6 (June 1954): 291, 301–2; Lightman, ‘Shooting
Oklahoma!,’ pp. 243–4; Aaron Nadell, ‘Cinerama— a step in the right direction,’ IPro, 27, no. 10 (October
1952): 11; Herb A.Lightman, ‘Filming the first Cinerama feature,’ AC, 43, no. 9 (September 1962): 537, 560–1.
24 Ron Ross and Vie Heutschy, ‘Cameraman’s comments,’7P, 25, no. 11 (November 1953): 10; Charles G.Clarke,
‘CinemaScope photographic techniques,’ AC, 36, no.6 (June 1955): 11–12.
25 See the several essays grouped as ‘Le CinemaScope,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31 (January 1954): 36–48. See also
Henry Roster, ‘Directing in CinemaScope,’ in Quigley, New Screen Techniques, pp. 171– 3; Clarke,
‘CinemaScope photographic techniques,’ p. 12; Robert Wise, ‘How my editorial background helps me as a
director,’ American Cinema Editors: First Decade Anniversary Book, ed. Frederick Y. Smith (Hollywood: ACE,
1961), pp. 25–9.
26 André Bazin, Orson Welles, tr. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 67–74.
27 Clarke, ‘CinemaScope photographic techniques,’ pp. 11–12; quoted in Kazan on Kazan, ed. Michel Ciment (New
York: Viking, 1974), pp. 122–3.
28 See Gavin, ‘CinemaScope: what it is,’ p. 10.
29 Barbara McLean Webb, ‘Pioneering in CinemaScope,’ Cinemeditor, 3, no. 4 (December 1953): 3.
30 Leon Shamroy, ‘Filming The Robe,’ in Quigley, New Screen Techniques, p. 180.
31 Truffaut, ‘En avoir plein la vue,’ p. 23.
32 Charles Bitsch, ‘Naissance du CinemaScope,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 48 (June 1955): 41–2.
33 V.F.Perkins, ‘River of No Return,’ Movie, no. 2 (September 1962): 18.
34 Barr, ‘CinemaScope—before and after,’ p. 11.
35 Jacques Rivette, ‘L’âge des metteurs en scène,‘ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 31 (January 1954): 48.
Chapter 30
Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice
1 René Wellek, ‘The term and concept of classicism in literary history,’ in Discriminations (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970), p. 68.
2 Osip Brik, ‘The Lef arena,’ Screen Reader, ed. John Ellis (London: SEFT, 1977), p. 316.
3 A relentlessly snappy account of recent developments may be found in James Monaco, American Film Now (New
York: New American Library, 1979), pp. 1–137. Less zoot-suited prose dominates Thomas Guback, ‘Theatrical
film,’ in Who Owns the Media?, ed. Benjamin H.Companie (New York: Harmony, 1979), pp. 179–241.
4 ‘Jaws tries to swallow Coke?’ Time (24 October 1977): 76.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962).
6 For a description of the current system of production, see David Lees and Stan Berkowitz, The Movie Business
(New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
7 Steve Shagan quoted in Andrew Laskos, ‘The greatest movies never made,’ American Film, 4, no. 10 (September
1979): 50.
8 Vincent Canby, ‘Let’s call it “the accountant’s theory” of filmmaking,’ New York Times (10 July 1977): sec. 2, p.
11.
9 Richard Dyer MacCann, ‘The independent producer: independence with a vengeance,’ Film Quarterly, 15, no. 3
(Summer 1962): 14–21; Robert H.Stanley, The Celluloid Empire (New York: Hastings House, 1978), pp. 251–2;
Robert Lindsay, ‘The new tycoons of Hollywood,’ New York Times Magazine (1 August 1977): 20; Karen
Stabiner, ‘Playing hardball with a hot agent,’ American Film, 6, no. 9 (July-August 1981): 40–5, 67.
10 Robert R.Faulkner, Hollywood Studio Musicians: Their Work and Careers in the Recording Industry (Chicago:
Aldine, Atherton, 1971), pp. 46–50.
11 Arthur E.Gavin, ‘Hear Me Good shot in straight continuity,’ AC, 38, no. 9 (September 1957): 572–3, 602–3;
‘Industry news,’ AC, 40, no. 81 (August 1959): 454; Rex McGee, ‘Michael Cimino’s way west,’ American Film,
6, no. 1 (October 1980): 78.
12 McGee, ‘Way west,’ pp. 36–7.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Francesca Riviere, ‘Rebirth next: an exclusive interview with Francis Ford Coppola,’ L.A.Weekly (28 November
1979): 40.
16 Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1980), p. 100.
17 Ben Fong-Torres, ‘The China Syndrome,’ Rolling Stone, no. 288 (5 April 1979): 50–5; Aaron Latham,
‘Hollywood vs. Harrisburg,’ Esquire, 91, no. 10 (22 May 1979): 77–86.
18 On Jane Fonda’s star persona, see Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), pp. 72– 98.
19 For the makers’ attitudes toward the characters’ ambivalence, see Fong-Torres, ‘China Syndrome,’ p. 55.
20 Godard, Introduction, p. 100.
21 Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), p. 58.
22 D.W.Samuelson, ‘A survey of current film production techniques,’ AC, 58, no. 9 (September 1977): 918–19, 922–
3; D.W.Samuelson, ‘Introducing the Louma crane,’ AC, 60, no. 12 (December 1979): 1226–7, 1260–1, 1274.
23 Interview with Robert Altman, Paris Film Festival 1976, transcribed by Geoffrey Miller.
24 Quoted in Lear Levin, ‘Robert Altman’s innovative sound techniques,’ AC, 61, no. 4 (April 1980): 368, 384.
25 Ed DiGiulio, ‘Steadicam-35—a revolutionary new concept in camera stabilization,’ AC, 57, no. 7 (July 1976):
786–7; ‘The first feature use of Steadicam-35 on Bound for Glory,’ AC, 57, no. 7 (July 1976): 778.
26 Ed Digiulion, ‘Two special lenses for Barry Lyndon,’ AC, 57, no. 3 (March 1976): 318.
27 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, tr. Joris De Bres (London: New Left Brooks, 1975), p. 501. For a good instance
of evangelistic enthusiasm for technological innovation, see Charles Schreger, ‘The second coming of sound,’
Film Comment, 14, no. 5 (September-October 1978): 34–7.
28 Peter Lloyd, ‘An outlook,’ Monogram, no. 1 (April 1971): 11–13.
29 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The pathos of failure,’ Monogram, no. 6 (1975): 13–19.
30 See Robin Wood, Personal Visions (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), pp. 20–9; David .Bordwell, ‘The art cinema
as a mode of film practice,’ Film Criticism, 4, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 56–64; Steve Neale, ‘Art cinema as institution,’
Screen, 22, no. 1 (1981): 11–39.
31 Ralph Rosenblum, When the Shooting Stops… The Cutting Begins (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 142– 9.
32 Pascal Kané, ‘Sylvia Scarlett: Hollywood cinema reread,’ Sub-stance, no. 9 (1974): 35.
33 Quoted in Jordan Fox, ‘Walter Murch—making beaches out of grains of sand,’ Cinefex, no. 3 (December 1980):
51.
Chapter 31
Alternative modes of film practice
1 Carlo Lizzani, Storia del cinema italiano 1895–1961 (Firenze: Parenti, 1961), p. 42; René Jeanne and Charles
Ford, Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Laffont, 1947), pp. 121–2; Charles Pathé, ‘Le crise du
cinéma,’ Le film, no. 102 (25 February 1918): 8; Charles Pathé, ‘Etude sur l’évolution de l’industrie
cinématographique française,’ Le film, no. 120 (1 July 1918): 12. For a discussion of the influence of the
American cinema upon French culture at this period, see David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film
Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980), pp. 34–5; for an analysis of European
responses to this domination, see Janet Staiger and Douglas Gomery, ‘The history of world cinema: models for
economic analysis,’ Film Reader, 4 (1979): 35–44.
2 Rudolf Messel, This Film Business (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), p. 259.
3 Hugh Castle, ‘The battle of Wardour Street,’ Close Up, 4, no. 3 (March 1929): 10–11; Urban Gad, Filmen: Dens
Midler og Maal (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1919).
4 ‘The movies most popular in Japan,’ Japan Advertiser (10 March 1919): 2.
5 Akira Iwasaki, ‘An outline history of Japanese cinema,’ in Cinema Yearbook of Japan 1936–37, ed. Tadashi
lizima (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1937), p. 3.
6 Harry A.Mimura, ‘Professionals and amateurs of Japan,’ IP, 5, no. 9 (October 1933): 14.
7 Erik Barnouw and S.Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 41–2,
66.
8 Sergei M.Eisenstein, Montage, tr. Michael Glenny (forthcoming).
9 See, for example, Michèle Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars, and Pierre Sorlin, ‘Analyse d’un ensemble filmique
extensible: Les films français des années 30,’ in Théorie du film, ed. Jacques Aumont and J.L.Leutrat (Paris:
Albatros, 1980), pp. 132–64.
10 Kristin Thompson, work in progress upon the European avant-garde of the 1920s.
11 Television’s use of continuity techniques is discussed in David Antin, ‘Video: distinctive features of the
medium,’ in Esthetics Contemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1978), pp. 393–4.
12 For the application of the Hollywood style to amateur moviemaking, see Your First 50 Pictures (Rochester:
Eastman Kodak, 1930), pp. 3–4; Making the Most of Your Cine-Kodak (Rochester: Eastman Kodak, 1925), pp. 4–
16; A.L. Gaskill and D.A. Englander, Pictorial Continuity (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947); and Emil
C.Brodbeck, Handbook of Basic Motion Picture Techniques (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).
13 Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (Reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 80–2.
14 Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, ‘The perception of motion pictures,’ in Handbook of Perception, vol. 10:
‘Perceptual ecology,’ ed. Edward C.Carterette and Morton P.Friedman (New York: Academic press, 1978), pp.
282–4.
15 John M.Carroll, Toward a Structural Psychology of Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), pp. 54–80.
16 Peter Wollen, ‘Counter-cinema: Vent d’est’ Afterimage, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 6–16; Colin MacCabe, ‘Realism
and the cinema,’ Screen, 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 7–27; Paul Willemen, ‘Notes toward the construction of
readings of Tourneur,’ in Jacques Tourneur, ed. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film
Festival, 1975), pp. 18–19; Noël Burch and Jorge Dana, ‘Propositions,’ Afterimage, no. 5 (Spring 1974): 46–8;
Jean Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Cinema/ ideology/criticism,’ in Screen Reader, ed. John Ellis (London:
SEFT, 1977), pp. 5–8.
17 See Martin Walsh, ‘The frontiers of language: Straub/Huillet’s History Lessons,’ Afterimage, no. 7 (Summer
1978): 21–3.
18 Quoted in Michel Mesnil, Kenji Mizoguchi (Paris: Seghers, 1965), p. 151.
19 A more extensive account of Mizoguchi’s style is offered in David Bordwell, ‘Mizoguchi and the evolution of
film language,’ in Language and Cinema, ed. Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp (Los Angeles: American
Film Institute, 1983), pp. 107–15.
20 For examples of Surrealist criticism of Hollywood cinema, see The Shadow and Its Shadow, ed. Paul Hammond
(London: British Film Institute, 1978).
21 Paul Babisky and John Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry (New York: Praeger, 1955), pp. 29–87.
22 Joseph L.Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (New York: Grove, 1959), pp. 332–
50.
23 André Bazin and François Truffaut, ‘Entretien avec Jacques Tati,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 83 (May 1958): 11;
Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p. 62; Jan Dawson, Wim Wenders
(Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1976), p. 13; Jack Hamilton, ‘Antonioni’s America,’ Look, (18 November 1969):
40.
24 Dziga Vertov, quoted in Film Makers on Film Making, ed. Harry M.Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1969), pp. 103–4; ‘The Vertov Papers,’ tr. Marco Carynyk, Film Comment, 8, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 48;
Zuzana M.Pick, ‘A special section on Chilean cinema,’ Ciné-Tracts, no. 9 (Winter 1980): 38–49; Melton
S.Davis, ‘Boy talks with girl, boy argues with girl, boy says…,’ New York Times Magazine (21 November 1971):
88ff.
25 Yoda Yoshikata, ‘Souvenirs sur Mizoguchi,’ Mizoguchi (Cahiers du cinéma hors série, 1978): 13ff; Davis, ‘Boy
talks…,’ pp. 88ff.
26 Davis, ‘Boy talks…,’ p. 88.
27 Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1975), p. 144; David
O.Selznick, Memo From David O.Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York: Avon Books, 1973), p. 157.
28 Francis Porcile, Présence de la musique à l’écran (Paris: Cerf, 1969), p. 197; ‘Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub
et Danièle Huillet,’ Cahiers du cinéma, no. 223 (August 1970): 53; Roud, Jean-Marie Straub, pp. 9, 62, 118.
29 Bertolt Brecht, et al., ‘Collective présentation (1932),’ Screen, 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 43.
30 Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, ‘Towards a third cinema,’ Afterimage, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 28– 9.
31 Michael Goodwin et al., ‘The Dziga Vertov film group in America,’ Take One, 2, no. 10 (March-April 1971):
10. See also Michael Goodwin and Greil Marcus, Double Feature: Movies and Politics (New York: Outerbridge
& Lazard, 1972), p. 19. And compare Marcel Martin, ‘Le groupe “Dziga-Vertov,”’Cinéma 70, no. 151
(December 1970): 86– 7.
32 Getino and Solanas, ‘Towards a third cinema,’ 32.
33 Quoted in Eric Sherman, Directing the Film (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 294.
Appendix D
Lighting plots and descriptions
1 Diagrams 1 and 2 from H.M.Lomas, Picture Play Photography (London: Ganes, 1914), pp. 82–3.
2 L.G.Harkness Smith, ‘Electric lighting for motion-picture studios,’ Electrical World, 65, no. 17 (24 April 1915):
1040.
3 Diagrams 3 through 7 from Smith, ‘Electric lighting for motion-picture studios,’ pp. 1040–2.
4 William A.D.Evans, ‘The artificial lighting of moving picture studios,’ The Illuminating Engineer, 8 (June
1915): 286–7.
5 William Roy Mott, ‘White light for motion picture photography,’ TSMPE, no. 8 (14–16 April 1919): 32.
6 Ibid.
7 Wiard B.Ihnen and D.W.Atwater, ‘The artistic utilization of light in the photography of motion pictures,’ TSMPE,
no. 21 (18–21 May 1925): 26.
8 Diagrams 10 through 12 from Ihnen and Atwater, ‘The artistic utilization of light in the photography of motion
pictures,’ p. 27.
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American Cinematographer (AC), 1921–80
American Projectionist, 1923–31
Camera!, 1918
Cinema: The Magazine of the Photoplay, 1930
Cinema Arts, 1937
Cinema News, 1916–19
Cinema Progress: The Film and Life, 1936–9
Cinematography, 1930–1
Cinemeditor, 1952–63
The Drama, 1911–18
The Eclair Bulletin, 1912–13
The Edison Kinetogram (EK), 1909–16
Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, 1928
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The Film Spectator, 1926–9
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International Photographer, 1931–62
International Projectionist, 1931–60
International Sound Technician, 1953–4
Journal of the Society of Motion Picture [and Television] Engineers (JSMP[T]E), 1930–80 (Previously titled
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Motion Picture, 1924
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Photograph credits
In the following listing, the numerals in the form 1.1 etc. are figure numbers. Any stills not credited are from
the authors’ private collections. All frame enlargements, script pages, and advertisements were printed by
Kristin Thompson.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: 17.14, 17.17, 17.52, 27.20
Allied Artists: 5.23 (© 1957)
American Cinematographer: 20.6, 20.7, 20.9 (1 December 1921, back cover), 20.12, 20.13, 20.15, 25.3
(February 1929, p. 30), 25.4 (December 1937, p. 497), 25.5 (October 1932, p. 12), 25.6 (November 1939, p.
495), 25.7 (April 1929, pp. 20–1), 25.8 (August 1938, p. 313), 25–9 (April 1939), p. 168, 25.10 (January
1939, pp. 24–5
Bison 101 Archive: 13.1, 17.40, 17.41, 20.2, 20.3, 20.5, 20.8, 20.11, 20.14, 20.17, 21.1, 21.4, 21.9, 22.1,
23.1, 23.2, 23.17, 27.25
Columbia: 3.1 (© 1955)
Eagle-Lion: 7.1, 27.35 (© 1947)
Twentieth-Century Fox: 5.5 (© 1944), 5.8 (© 1954), 5.42 and 5.43 (© 1957), 27.7 and 27.8 (© 1927), 29.
2 (© 1954), 29.5 and 29.11 (© 1954)
Goldwyn: 1.1 (© 1929), 5.6 (© 1946), 5.25 (© 1941), 27.13 (© 1929), 27.22 (© 1931), 27.26 (© 1937),
27.27 and 27.28 (© 1936), 27.29 (© 1937), 27.31 and 27.32 (© 1937), 27.40 (© 1941), 27.41 (© 1941), 27.
43 and 27.46 (© 1946), 28.2 (© 1938)
MGM: 1.2 (© 1927), 3.17 and 3.20 (© 1944), 5.3 (© 1921), 5.26 (© 1921), 5.28 (© 1924), 5.33 (©
1921), 7.2 (© 1933), 17.22 (© 1926), 17.36 (© 1921), 21.8 (© 1921), 23.11 and 23.12 (© 1932), 23.13 and
23.14 (© 1927), 27.3 (© 1924), 27.4 (© 1927), 29.3 (© 1957)
Moving Picture News: 9.1 (18 November 1911, p. 9), 9.2 (27 September 1913, p. 3), 9.4 (27 September
1913, pp. 4–5), 9.5 (1911), 9.6 (6 May 1911, p. 4), 9.7 (12 August 1911, p. 23), 9.8 (23 September 1911,
back cover), 9.9 (7 January 1911, p. 4), 9.10 (28 October 1911, n.p.), 9.11 (5 October 1912, p. 27), 17.29
(20 January 1920, p. 46), 24.1 (23 November 1912, p. 39)
Moving Picture World: 9.3 (4 March 1911, p. 485), 9.12 (10 July 1915, p. 268), 9.13 (10 July 1915, p.
272), 9.14 (21 October 1911, p. 200), 11.1 (11 February 1911, p. 290), 11.2 (8 June 1912, p. 907), 11.5 (18
May 1912, p. 621), 11.6 (10 July 1915, p. 235), 11.7 (10 July 1915, p. 239), 12–1 (27 May 1911, p. 1181),
12.2 (22 April 1911, p. 887), 12.3 (1 April 1911, p. 701), 12.4 (2 October 1915, p. 134), 12.5 (6 November
1915, p. 1185), 12.6 (8 July 1911, pp. 1594–4), 12.7 (24 June 1911, p. 1430), 20.16 (28 February 1920, p.
1435), 21.3 (26 October 1918, p. 526)
Museum of Modern Art: 1.3, 17.51, 23.18, 29.1
New Yorker: 5.44 and 5.45 (© 1964), 29.4 (© 1964)
751
Paramount: 3.2 (© 1924), 3.5 to 3.7 (© 1928), 3.14 to 3.16 (© 1953), 5.1 (© 1953), 5.4 (© 1924), 5.7 (©
1932), 5.15 and 5.16 (© 1924), 5.27 (© 1949), 5.34 (© 1925), 5.35 (© 1949), 18.1 to 18.4 (© 1924), 27.2 (©
1927), 27.14 (© 1932), 27.42 (© 1949)
The Photodramatist: 11.9 (December 1922, p. 11)
Scientific American: 11.3 (21 June 1919, p. 651)
Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers: 17.38 (No. 21, May 1925, p. 31. Copyright ©
1925 by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, New York, New York)
Universal: 2.1 to 2.5 (© 1948), 27.1 (© 1948)
United Artists: 5.22 (© 1921), 27.36 (© 1949)
Walter Wanger: 27.30 (© 1940), 27.33 (© 1940)
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research: 2.6, 3.3, 3.8 to 3.13, 3.22 to 3.25, 3.26 to 3.28, 4.1 and
4.2, 4.3 to 4.5, 5.9 to 5.10, 5.11 to 5.14, 5.18 and 5.19, 5.21, 5.24, 5.29, 5.30, 5.31, 5.36, 5.40 and 5.41, 5.46
and 5.47, 5.48 and 5.49, 5.50 to 5.53, 6.7 to 6.9, 6.10 to 6.40, 12.8 to 12.19 (Aitken Bros, papers), 20.2, 21.
2, 23.3 to 23.10, 23.15 and 23.16, 25.1 and 25.2 (Warner Bros, scripts), 27.5 and 27.6, 27.9, 27.10, 27.11,
27.12, 27.15, 27.16, 27.17, 27.19, 27.21, 27.34, 27.37, 27.38 and 27.39, 28.1
Misc. books and articles: 11.4 (Lescarboura, 1919, p. 399), 11.8 (Lee Royal The Romance of Motion
Picture Production, LA: 1920, p. 67), 13.2 and 13.6 (Croy, pp. 149, 69, 111, 77, 205), 20.1 (Richard
Kosarski, ‘Maurice Tourneur’, Film Comment [March 1973], p. 29), 20.4 (Lescarboura, p. 81), 20.10
(Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, 2nd ed., p. 437), 21.5 (Brown, Adventures withD. W.Griffith), 21.14
and 21.15 (William Innés Homer, Alfred Steiglitz and the American Avant-Garde [Boston: New York
Graphic Society, 1977), pp. 25, 56), 21.18 (Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography [New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1964], p. 103)
Index
A bout de souffle (1959), 373, 374 American Film Manufacturing Co., 122, 397, 402
Academy Awards, 291, 313, 333, 345, 353 American Gigolo (1980), 375
Academy Motion Picture Research Council, 258–9, 300, American Graffiti (1973), 373
306, 339, 359 American in Paris, An (1950), 327
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, see
74, 106, 254, 258–60, 261, 299–310, 307, 313, 322, Biograph Company
354, 358, 386 American Romance, An (1944), 16, 62, 355
Accounting practices, 102, 134–8, 143–5 American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), 106, 254–
Act of Violence (1948), 350 5, 257, 260–1, 268, 285, 293, 294–7, 299–301, 339,
Acting, 118, 149, 174, 179, 189, 192, 380–1; 341, 343, 348, 351, 358, 471
facial expression, 189–92, 201; American Standards Association (ASA), 256, 260, 360
pantomime, 172–4, 189–92 Analytical editing, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 163, 173, 196, 198–
Actinicity, 270–2, 274, 284 203, 216, 239, 278, 362
Actors’ Equity Association, 106 Anchors Aweigh (1945), 71
Adam’s Rib (1949), 52 Anderson, G.M., 117, 122
Adorno, T.W., xiii, 33, 60, 83 Angels Over Broadway (1940), 22
Advanced capitalism, 313–19, 324 Anger, Kenneth, 385
Adventure. Island (1947), 25 Animal Crackers (1930), 21
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (1938), 353 Antheil, George, 34, 72
Advertising: Antitrust suits, 331–2, 398–400
practices, 97–102, 103, 121, 129–32, 313; Antonioni, Michelangelo, 46, 65, 375, 377, 382, 383
sales work, 100, 103, 331–2 Anybody’s War (1930), 145
After One Hundred Years (1911), 181, 200 Apocalypse Now (1979), 375
Agents, 132, 146, 149, 323, 333, 369 Applause (1929), 25, 45, 61, 306, 307, 344
Akeley camera, 73, 268–9, 302 Appointment for Love (1941), 36, 45
Alamo, The (1960), 334 Arc light, 125, 223, 226, 253, 263, 271, 272, 273–5, 281,
Aldrich, Robert, 56 283, 294–6, 299, 300, 304, 342, 343, 348, 354–5, 356,
Alien (1979), 72 404–14
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), 307 Archer, William, 17, 169, 170, 171
‘All Star’ Film Company, 101 Arkansas Traveler, The (1938), 35
All That Money Can Buy (1941), 344 Arnold, John, 299, 345
Allen, Robert, 113–15, 161 Arriflex camera, 349
Allen, Woody, 372 ‘Art cinema,’ 5, 13, 18, 78, 373–4, 381, 384
Alma’s Champion (1912), 205 Art direction, 118, 147–9, 151, 217, 219 , 221, 231, 234,
Altman, Robert, 372, 373, 375 280, 323–4, 326, 355
American Cinematographer, 106, 254, 255, 269, 275, Art titles, 26, 29, 63, 64, 187–8
283, 284, 292–3, 306, 344, 345, 346, 348, 349, 354, 379 Artcraft, 399, 403
752
INDEX 753
Artistic motivation, 19, 21–3, 24, 28, 29, 30, 70 Barthelmess, Richard, 291
Aryan, The (1916), 187 Barthes, Roland, 29, 64
Arzner, Dorothy, 232, 277 Bat Whispers, The (1931), 345
Asphalt Jungle, The (1950), 350 Battle of Chile, The (1973–6), 383
L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908), 130 Battle of the Republic, The (1911), 130
Assistant direction work, 135, 144–5, 148–51 Bausch & Lomb, 114, 252, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 262,
Associated Motion Picture Advertisers, 103 343, 360
Associated Producers, 321 Baxter, John, 77
Association of Motion Picture Producers, 334 Bazin, André, 3, 4, 13, 24, 29, 56, 58, 60, 247, 248, 257,
Astaire, Fred, 21, 70–1 258, 341, 347, 360, 361, 362
At Old Fort Dearborn (1912), 200, 228 Beal, Frank, 121
At Sword’s Point (1952), 18 Beater cameras, 265
Audience Research, Inc. (ARI), 324 Beaton, Welford, 51
August, Joseph, 344 Beau Geste (1926), 355
Australian cinema, 379 ‘Beau’ Revel (1921), 188
Auteur, conceptions of, 77–9, 110, 336, 373–4, 377 Becky Sharp (1935), 353, 354, 355
Auteur criticism, 77–82 Bedroom Window, The (1924), 51
L’Authentique Procès de Carl-EmmanuelJung (1966), 304 Beggars of Life (1928), 38, 39
Avant-garde cinema, 381, 384; Behind the Footlights (1916), 207
influences on classical cinema, 72–4 Belasco, David, 101, 107, 117, 122, 132, 148, 275
L’Avventura (1960), 46, 373 Bell, Donald J., 252, 257, 267
Bell & Howell camera, 267–8, 269, 270, 281
‘B’ product, 144, 325, 331 Bell & Howell company, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259, 260,
Back lot, 220 267, 286, 296, 299, 306, 307, 308, 358–9
Back Street (1932), 380 Bell & Howell perforators, 103
Backlighting, 52, 224, 225, 226, 290, 344, 347 Bellamy, Ralph, 22
Bacon, Lloyd, 62 Bellamy Trial, The (1929), 42
Badger, Clarence C., 232 Bells, The (1913), 218
Baggott, King, 101 Beloved Rogue, The (1927), 221
Bagnall, George, 328 Ben-Hur (1907), 130–2, 146
Balalaika (1939), 13, 25 Ben-Hur (1926), 269, 305, 355
Balboa Amusement Producing Co., 123 Ben-Hur (1960), 359
Ball, J.A., 295, 297, 353, 354 Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef (1953), 357, 361
Ball of Fire (1941), 348, 351 Bergman, Ingmar, 10, 46, 78, 373, 375
Ballard, Lucien, 143, 329 Berkeley, Busby, 20, 71, 81
Ballet Mécanique (1924), 381 Bernhardt, Sarah, 101, 160
Ballin, Hugo, 109, 148, 219 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 373
Band Wagon, The (1953), 20 Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946), 351
Bandit of Tropico, The (1912), 211, 216 Big Clock, The (1948), 45, 76
Bank of America in California, 314 Big Fix, The (1978), 75
Bank of Italy, 314 Big Parade, The (1925), 355
Baran, Paul A., 316 494 Biograph camera, 265
Baring the device, 22, 28, 29, 70–1, 417 Biograph Company, 92, 100, 114–18, 121–3, 137, 274,
Barker, Reginald, 438 397, 401
Barnes, George, 285, 344, 345 Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 13, 80, 134, 171, 192, 212,
Barr, Charles, 360–1, 363 228
Barron, Louis and Bebe, 72 Bison Life Motion Pictures Co., 100, 123, 136, 402
Barry Lyndon (1975), 373 Bitsch, Charles, 362
Barrymore, John, 291 Bitzer, Billy, 116–17, 150, 228, 287, 289, 346
754 INDEX
Black Hand, The (1949), 17–18, 19, 26, 36, 71 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), 374
Black Maria, 114 BwanaDevil (1952), 111, 245
Black Pirate, The (1926), 355
Black Tuesday (1955), 350 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920), 73
Blackboard Jungle, The (1955), 350 Cabiria (1913), 220, 228
Blackton, J.Stuart, 99 Caddy, The (1953), 27, 58–9
Blanke, Henry, 326 Cagney, James, 331
Blind selling, 331 Cahiers du Cinéma, 4, 31, 360
Block booking, 331 Camera accessories, 150, 244, 267–70, 279–80, 289, 290,
Blot, The (1921), 187 291, 300, 397
Blow-Up (1966), 377 Camera movement, 9, 12, 21, 27, 29, 36, 47, 51, 52, 53,
Blue Bird, The (1918), 147, 220 66, 69, 73, 79–80, 81–2, 109, 163, 215, 227–30, 249,
Blue Collar (1978), 375 260, 302, 304–8, 343, 346, 347, 348, 361, 363, 373,
Body, human, 50–4 375, 379, 380–1
Bogdanovich, Peter, 375 Camera position, 7, 24, 54, 58–9, 67, 84, 107, 174, 177,
Boggs, Francis, 121 189, 190, 191, 197–200, 202, 214, 215, 222, 227, 302,
Bohème, La (1926), 290 305–6, 346–8, 362–3, 380–1, 443, 445
Bold Bank Robbery, A (1903), 228 Camera supports, 366, 368, 373
Booth, Margaret, 232, 285, 329 Camera technology, 247, 252, 255, 258–9, 263–70, 306,
Borde, Raymond, 75, 76 349–50, 452, 471
Borzage, Frank, 14, 80, 139 Cameraman system of production, 93, 116–18, 143
Bosworth, Hobart, 117 Cameras, foreign models, 265–6
Bosworth Inc., 124, 398, 403 Canterville Ghost, The (1944), 27, 30, 45
Bowser, Eileen, 175, 443 Captains of the Clouds (1942), 356
Bradley, Will H., 148 Caravan (1934), 61, 62
Brakhage, Stan, 380, 384–5 Carmen (1915), 224
Brand name advertising, 99–100, 332 Casbah (1948), 14, 21, 26
Branigan, Edward, 51, 57 Case of Becky, The (1915), 176, 180, 197, 222
Braverman, Harry, 91, 93, 97, 108 Case of the Lucky Legs, The (1935), 26–7
Brecht, Bertolt, 18, 33, 34, 384 Casting work, 149, 323
Breil, Carl Joseph, 33 Castle, William, 140
Brenon, Herbert, 117 Causality, 6, 12–18, 19, 28, 35, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54,
Bresson, Robert, 13, 18, 58, 63, 65, 79, 81, 375, 382 59, 63–9, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81–3, 160, 162, 169, 174–7,
Brik, Osip, 368 181, 192–3, 236–8, 303, 356, 370, 373–4, 375–6, 381,
Bringing Up Baby (1938), 26 416
Briskin, Irving, 140 Censorship, 102–4
Broadway (1929), 307 Centering, 50–1, 54–5, 228, 255, 345, 362
Broadway-Hollywood connections, 132 Central Casting Corporation, 149
Broken Blossoms (1919), 233, 287 Central producer system of production, 93, 134–43, 152,
Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1913), 186 318, 325
Brother Man (1910), 184 Chabrol, Claude, 62
Brown, Karl, 150, 232, 288–9, 292–3 Chaffin, Ethel, 149
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 16, 171, 180 Chance of a Lifetime, The (1943), 140
Brunton, Robert, 148 Chandler, Alfred D., Jr, 94, 368
Brute Force (1947), 375 Chandler, Harry, 314
Buckland, Wilfred, 142,148, 221, 224, 275 Chaplin, Charles, 3, 78, 139, 317–18, 330, 378
Bulldog Drummond (1929), 7, 344–5 Characterization, 13–18, 29–30, 37–8, 43, 54, 82–3, 160,
Bullets or Ballets (1936), 344 161, 162, 167, 170–3, 177–80, 185, 192–3, 201, 302,
Burch, Noël, 7, 24, 79, 380, 444 355–6, 370–2, 373–4, 376
INDEX 755
Charles Chaplin vs Essanay (1916), 140 Comedy of Errors, A (1913), 209

Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on ‘Carmen’ (1916), 140 Coming of Columbus, The (1912), 180, 220
Charrell, Erik, 62 Communicativeness of narration, 25–37, 40–1, 78–82
Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 75, 76 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 87, 247–50, 358, 380
Chases, 160, 175, 192, 203, 204, 229, 233, 443–4 Composite photography work, 148–9, 324
Chaumeton, Etienne, 75, 76 Composition, spatial, 50–2, 73–4, 174, 214, 279–80, 287–
Cheat, The (1915), 132, 176, 200, 210, 225, 275, 350 8, 290, 292, 304, 341–52, 361–4
‘Cheat cut,’ 58 Compositional motivation, 19–21, 24, 70, 175, 350, 355,
Chicken Casey (1917), 223 372, 374
China Syndrome, The (1979), 370–2 Comstock, Daniel, 353–4, 357
Chinatown (1974), 75, 376 Confidential Agent, The (1945), 76
Chinese Trunk Mystery, The (1911), 104 Consolidated Film Laboratories, 290, 318
Chinoise, La (1967), 65 Continuity, 9, 18, 29, 33, 46, 69, 81–2, 162–4, 167, 169,
Chrétien, Henri, 358, 360 173, 189, 194–213, 214–15, 230–1, 239, 278, 286, 292,
Christie, Al, 117 303, 305–8, 348, 351, 362, 372, 378, 379
Christopher Columbus (c. 1904), 130 Continuity clerk, 152, 205, 206
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, The (1968), 385 Continuity script, see Scriptwriting practices
Cimino, Michael, 369, 372 Conversation, The (1974), 375–7
Cinderella (1911), 131, 180, 182, 200 Cooper-Hewitt Electric Company, 271–3, 296;
Cine Liberacíon, 384 lamps, see Mercuryvapor lamps
Cinema Camera Club, 105–6 Coppola, Francis Ford, 336–7, 370, 372, 373, 375–7
Cinema Finance Corporation, 314 Copyrights, 130–2, 134, 146, 162, 312
Cinema News, 106 Corbett-Fitzsimmons prizefight, 115
CinemaScope, 358–63 Cornell, Joseph, 79
Cinematographer and cinematography work, 116–18, 126, Corner in Wheat, A (1909), 107, 174, 176, 200, 210, 211,
142–3, 148, 150, 152, 206, 246, 265–78, 279–80, 281– 218
5, 287, 291, 292–3, 294–7, 298, 302, 304–8, 323, 333, Corporate-welfare activities, 125
342–52, 356, 359–62, 383, 437 Cortez, Stanley, 50, 111
Cinerama, 251, 358–61, 476 Costuming work, 149, 312
Citizen Kane (1941), 20, 21, 29, 74, 78, 328, 341, 344, Courage of Commonplace, The (1917), 13
347–8, 349, 351, 362, 380 CoverGirl (I944), 71
Civilization (1916), 219 Crane, 229
Clair, René, 49 Credit bureaus, 102–3
Claire’s Knee (1970), 383 Credits sequences, 25–6, 43–4, 69, 303
Clarke, Charles G., 73, 205, 233, 255, 269, 287, 289, 296, Crime Without Passion (1934), 74
348, 349, 361 Criss Cross (1948), 350
‘Classicism’ as a term, 3–4, 367–8 Cromwell, John, 24
Clearance, 98 Crosby, Bing, 22, 316
Clodhopper, The (1917), 224 Crosscutting, 48–9, 56, 66, 126, 159, 173, 175–6, 182,
Cobweb, The (1955), 72 201, 203, 210–12, 213, 239, 263, 303, 371
Code of the Sea (1924), 236–40 Crossfire (1947), 42, 43
Cohn, Harry, 321 Crusaders, The (c. 1911), 131
Colleen Bawn, The (1911), 131 Cry of the Children, The (1912), 181–2, 207
Collusion in industry, 102, 315–17, 331 Cucaracha, La (1934), 353–4
Color processes, 111, 353–7, 358, 472 Cukor, George, 4, 52, 79, 109–10, 362
Columbia Pictures, 140, 312, 321, 325, 328–9, 370, 399– Cumberland Romance, A (1920), 225
400, 403 Cupid in a Hospital (1915), 210
Comedy, 13, 20, 22, 37, 38, 62, 71, 161, 171, 175, 178–9, Custer’s Last Fight (1912), 100
186–7, 375 Cutler, Antony, 93–4
756 INDEX
Cycles, 110–12 Dietrich, Marlene, 19, 20

Differentiation, 70–83, 97, 99, 108–12, 115, 126, 244–5,
Daisy Kenyan (1947), 79 263–4, 266, 270–1, 273, 291, 293, 298, 339, 343, 345
Daly, Augustin, 117 Diffusion (in cinematography), 54, 272, 287–9, 296, 342–
Damon and Pythias (1914), 180, 222 3, 349, 350–1, 356, 453
Dana, Jorge, 380 Directional continuity in editing, see Screen direction
Dance of Life, The (1929), 74 Director, role of, 117–20, 123, 126, 135–7, 143–4, 147,
Dangerous Female (1931), 61 152
Daniels, Bebe, 277 Director system of production, 93, 117–20, 142–3
Daniels, William, 51, 350 Director-unit system of production, 93, 121–4, 137, 143,
Danish cinema, 378 291, 318, 322, 325
Dante’s Inferno (1911), 100, 131, 133 Disney, Walt, 343, 359, 379
‘Dark’ studios, 125, 142, 271–2, 275 Dissolve, 44, 46–7, 66, 374
Daughter of Dixie, A (1911), 182 Distribution alliances, 98, 121, 143, 317, 398–9
David Copperfield (1911), 131 Distributors:
Davis, H.O., 136 as film financiers, 314;
Day of Wrath (1943), 58 as key to exhibition outlets, 317–19
De Mille, Cecil B., 50, 110, 139–40, 152, 224–5 Dive Bomber (1941), 356
de Mille, William C., 51, 96, 111, 139, 302 Diversification, 92, 316, 424
De Palma, Brian, 372, 375 Division of labor:
Dead End (1937), 345–7 defined, 91;
Deadlines, narrative, 44–6, 48, 64, 66, 68, 182, 183, 192, detailed, 91–2;
371, 376 history of, xiv, 9, 83–4, 91–2, 164–5, 244–7, 308, 354,
Deadlines in production schedules, 123, 139, 334 367, 372, 382, 383–4;
Decentralized management, 316, 322 social, 91–2
Découpage, 60–9, 239, 303–8, 345, 347–9, 351–2, 361–2, Divorcement, 331–2, 400
380–1 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912), 180
Deep-focus cinematography, 221–3, 230, 339, 340–52, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913), 180
361, 471 Documentaries, 159, 161, 162
Defiant Ones, The (1958), 334 Dog Lost, Strayed or Stolen $25.00 Reward Apply Mrs.
Departments, 135–7; Brown, 711
development of, 123–5 Park Ave., A (1905), 183
Depth (of space), 12, 21, 52–3, 54–5, 158, 214–23, 229, Dog Star Man (1965), 382
255, 301, 308, 341–52, 356, 359, 379, 445 Dolce Vita, La (1960), 373
Depth of field, 222, 287, 289, 341–52, 361 Dolly, 229
Deren, Maya, 317, 319 Dolly’s Scoop (1916), 225
Detective Burton’s Triumph (1914), 209–10 Don Juan (1926), 296
Detective fiction, 76–7 Double features, 144, 318, 400
Development phase of a scene, 63–9 Double Indemnity (1944), 75
Devices, stylistic, 6–7, 9, 12, 50, 78, 341, 380–1 Double Life, A (1948), 350
Devil’s Bait, The (1917), 26 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 73, 382
Deep Valley (1947), 34 Downstairs (1932), 305–6
Deserter, The (1912), 182 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, The (1905), 179
Dialogue hook, 33, 376 Dreier, Hans, 148, 324
Diamond from the Sky, The (1915), 195 Drew, Sidney, 131
Diary of a Country Priest, The (1950), 13 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 41, 58, 62, 81, 380, 382, 383
Dick Tracy (comic strip), 77 Drink, The (1909), 130
Dickson, W.K.L., 116, 335 Du Pont, 244, 252, 253, 295, 299, 343, 350
Dieterle, William, 62, 326, 344 Dude and the Burglars, The (1903), 174, 183
INDEX 757
Dumb Girl ofPortici, The (1915), 229 Electrical Research Products Incorporated (ERPI), 252,
Dunn, Linwood, 255, 349 257, 296, 300, 315, 359, 360
Duras, Marguerite, 62, 302, 382 Ellipsis, 44, 48, 74, 181, 211
Duration, 12, 44–8, 63, 64–5, 66, 181, 192 Ellis, John, 87–8, 335
Durbin, Deanna, 327 Ellis, Melville, 149
Dwan, Allan, 17, 50, 53, 271–2, 277–8 Elsaesser, Thomas, 44, 71–2, 373
Dyer, Richard, 14 Emerson, John, 26, 28, 36, 44, 48
Dynamiters, The (1911), 182 Ending, 35–7, 39, 69, 83, 195, 371;
Dziga Vertov Group, 384 happy, 76, 83
Engels, Friedrich, 83
Each Dawn I Die (1939), 344 Enoch Arden (1911), 130
Eagle’s Mate, The (1914), 172–3, 201, 205, 209, 219 Enthusiasm (1930), 63, 302
‘Earline-match’ cut, 57 Epilogue, 36, 238
East of Eden (1955), 72 Epstein, Jean, 42, 302
Eastman Color, 253, 357 Equitable Studio, 151
Eastman Kodak, 114, 249, 251–2, 253, 255, 257, 262, 277, Erlanger, Abraham, 113, 131
283, 283–6, 288, 289, 295, 296, 299, 300, 343, 350, Essanay Film Manufacturing Co., 100, 123, 140, 144,
357, 359, 379 151, 267, 268, 397, 399, 401
Easy Rider (1969), 373 Establishing shot, 56, 58–9, 63, 66, 187, 196–8, 201–2,
Easy to Look At (1945), 26 205, 213, 216, 345, 347, 351, 362, 381, 443
Eclair Films, 132, 402 Exhibition and exhibition practices, 103, 128–34, 176
L’eclisse (1963), 65 Exit Smiling (1926), 183
Economic practices: Exorcist, The (1973), 72
effects on mode of production, 88–9, 123, 134–8, 142, Exposition of a film, 28–9, 30, 32, 37–8, 39, 42
145–6, 153, 335; Expository phase of a scene, 63–9
effects on signifying practices, 126, 314 Exposure, cinematographic, 279, 287
Edeson, Arthur, 344 Eyeline-match cutting, 46, 57, 66, 207–8, 210, 213, 351,
Edgar Allan Poe (1909), 274 379
Edge lighting, 20, 52, 67, 344, 349, 379, 412 Eyemo camera, 270, 349
Edison, Thomas, 113–14, 251, 252, 298, 397
Edison Manufacturing Co., 100–1, 113–14, 116, 126, 130– Factor, Max, 245, 253, 283, 295, 296, 343, 355
2, 137, 143, 153, 312, 397, 399, 401 Fairbanks, Douglas, 16, 61, 62, 180, 186, 378
Editing (phase of production), 152, 246, 383 Faithful (1910), 184, 218
Editing (technique) Fall of Troy, The (1911), 130
(see also Analytical editing), 6, 9, 24, 46, 47–8, 50, Fallen Angel (1945), 61, 79
55–9, 60–9, 73–4, 84, 162, 173, 174, 177, 194, 197, Famous Artists, 333
214, 229, 235, 275–8, 285–7, 292, 302–3, 304–6, 308, Famous Players [-Lasky] Film Co., 132, 137, 142, 148–50,
347, 348, 361, 362–3, 371, 374, 378, 379, 382, 439, 398–9, 403
444; Fan materials, 99
multiple space, 196, 202, 203–12 Fantasia (1940), 359, 360
Editor, 206, 231, 277–8, 285–7 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 54, 83, 384
Edouart, Farciot, 299 Fatal Opal, The (1914), 185–6, 197
Efficiency, 243, 245, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 273, 276, Fate’s Turning (1911), 183
285, 286, 291, 293–5, 354 Faust (1911), 130
812 (1963), 374 Faust (1926), 73, 456
Eisenstein, Sergei, 23, 31, 44, 46, 48, 55, 59, 65, 73, 74, Fazan, Adrienne, 329
358, 368, 369, 380, 382, 386 Fear, The (1912), 205, 208
Eisler, Hanns, 33 Feature films, 130, 163, 164, 167, 171–3, 175, 176, 179,
181, 186, 190, 192, 212, 218, 231, 439;
758 INDEX
see also Multiple-reel films Fellini, Federico, 46, 78, Foy, Bryan, 326
373, 374, 375, 383 Frame cut, 51, 57, 205
Field of Honor (1917), 222 Frampton, Hollis, 62, 79
Film Boards of Trade, 103–4 Francastel, Pierre, 53
Film Booking Company, 399, 403 Free-lance writers, 132, 146, 164–7, 170, 180, 435
Film Box Office Attractions, 398, 403 French cinema, 3, 10, 378, 379
Film d’Art Company, 130 Freshman, The (1925), 22, 37
Film noir, 74–7 Freund, Karl, 74, 111, 249, 255
Film Service Association, 113, 116, 397 Freytag, Gustav, 17, 168–9
Film stock, speed of, 249, 253, 255, 343, 346, 350, 356 Friendly Marriage, A (1911), 176, 207, 215
Film Supply Company of America, 398, 401 Frohman, Daniel, 132
Filmo camera, 270 From Here to Eternity (1953), 15, 31
Financing, 313–19; From the Manger to the Cross (1911), 122
defined, 90 Frontality, 51–2, 55, 239, 347, 351, 362, 380–1
Fire Down Below (1957), 45, 61 Fuller. Sam. 81
Fireman Save My Child (1927), 145 Functions, stylistic, 5, 158, 248, 260–1, 303–4, 339, 341
First National Exhibitors Circuit, 150, 317, 324, 399, 403
Flag, The (1927), 353 Gai savoir, Le (1969), 63, 302
Flaherty, Robert, 284 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 315–16
Flash Gordon (1981), 375 Gambler’s Charm, The (1910), 179, 184, 208
Flashback, 5, 12, 19, 42–3, 66, 76, 77, 177, 179, 181, 182, Gaps in narrative, 38–41, 82, 381
186, 192, 376, 377 Garmes, Lee, 110, 334
Flashforward, 42, 374 Gartenberg, Jon, 227
Floodlights, 273–4 Garutso modified lens, 350
Flowers and Trees (1932), 353 Gaslight (1944), 76
Flying Down to Rio (1933), 74 Gaudio, Tony, 255, 344
Flying Fortress (1942), 46 Gaudreault, André, 157, 158, 163
Focus, 52–3, 266–9, 343–52, 361 Gaumont, Léon, 282
Foolish Wives (1922), 22, 290, 292 Gaumont Film Co. (France), 101, 130
For Heaven’s Sake (1926), 307 Gauntier, Gene, 119
For Husbands Only (1918), 197 Gay Shoe Clerk, The (1903), 199
Forbidden Planet (1956), 72 General Electric, 244, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 294,
Ford, Francis, 136 295, 296, 359
Ford, Henry, 90 General Film Company, 98, 133, 398–9, 401
Ford, John, xiii, 78, 80, 110–11, 308, 321, 326, 329, 372, Generic motivation, 19–21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 38, 40, 70–2,
373, 378, 384 73, 77, 81–2, 83, 350–1, 355, 361, 371, 374
Foreshadowing, 37, 44 Genette, Gérard, 19
Forest Rangers (1942), 356 Genre, 13, 20, 37, 62, 70–2, 100, 110–12, 145, 159, 160,
Fort Apache (1948), 384 175, 177, 186, 373, 375
Foul Play (1911), 131 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), 51
Fountainhead, The (1949), 22 Georges Méliès Films, 397, 401
Four Frightened People (1934), 145 German cinema, 3, 7, 28, 55, 72–3, 229, 270, 345, 378,
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The (1921), 225, 229, 379
233, 237, 289–93 Getino, Octavio, 384
Four Wives (1939), 359 Ghost of Rosie Taylor, The (1918), 43, 186, 226
Fox, William, 103, 129, 398 Giannini, Attilio, 314–15
Fox Film Corporation, 73, 124, 244, 249, 298, 300, 307, Gibbons, Cedric, 109, 145, 148
321, 358, 360, 399, 400, 403 Gibson, George, 337
Foxfire (1954), 356 Gidget (1959), 16, 25, 332
INDEX 759
Gigi (1956), 333 Haas, Robert, 148

Girl at the Cupola, The (1912), 178, 208 Hale’s Tours, 114
Girl in the Arm-Chair, The (1912), 218 Hallelujah! (1929), 307
Girl of the Cabaret, The (1913), 200 Halloween (1978), 72
Girl of the Golden West, The (1915), 173, 225 Hand of Peril, The (1916), 263
Girl Shy (1924), 179, 202 Hangmen Also Die (1943), 384
Gish, Lillian, 291, 456 Hangover Square (1945), 35, 72, 351
Glace à trois faces, La (1927), 42–3 Hanoun, Marcel, 304
Glass shots, 125, 148, 222 Happy Days (1930), 358
Glass studios, 272 Harlow, Jean, 52
Gledhill, Christine, 76 Hart, William S., 16, 26, 137
Glennon, Bert, 140, 229, 284, 344 Harvey (1950), 51
Glorifying the American Girl (1929), 306, 355 Hasty Heart, The (1949), 15
Godard, Jean-Luc, 5, 9, 23, 24, 31, 41, 44, 54, 55, 59, 63, Haunted Rocker, The (1912), 211
65, 81, 302, 362, 363, 370, 372, 375, 380, 382, 383, 384 Hawks, Howard, 64, 78, 79, 81, 327, 372–3
Godfather II (1974), 375 Hawthorne of the USA (1919), 188
Going Highbrow (1935), 15, 25 Hays, Will H., xiii, 254, 386
Goldwyn, Samuel, 100, 140, 317, 345, 346, 348, 351 Headless Horseman, The (1922), 283, 284
Goldwyn Company, 100, 148, 318, 330, 399, 403 Heath, Stephen, 70
Goldwyn Follies (1938), 345, 355 Heaven’s Gate (1980), 369
Gombrich, E.H., 1, 7, 12, 43, 55, 59, 75 Hecht, Ben, 328
Gomery, Douglas, 244, 298, 300 Hell’s Angels (1930), 269
Gone With the Wind (1939), 353, 355 356 Hellzapoppin (1941), 21
Goulding, Edmund, 329 Henabery, Joseph, 147
Grand Central Mystery, The (1942), 32 Hepburn, Katharine, 52
Grandpa’s Reading Glass (1902), 199, 207 Her First Adventure (1908), 204, 211, 228
Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 345 Her Mother’s Fiancé (1911), 175, 183
Graphic aspects of editing, 50, 55–6, 235–6 Herrmann, Bernard, 72, 303
Great K. and A.Train Robbery, The (1926), 269 Hierarchy of workers, 89–90, 92–4, 119, 123, 134, 136–7,
Great Love, The (1918), 212 140–1, 143, 315–17, 336–7
Great Northern Film Company, 133, 402 High and Low (1963), 306, 362
Great Train Robbery, The (1903), 98 130, 177, 203, 210, High Cost of Living, The (1912), 182, 189
228 High Time (1960), 17, 44, 45
Great Ziegfeld, The (1936), 21 Hilferding, Rudolf, 315
Greater New York Film Rental Company, 398 Hindess, Barry, 93–4
Greed (1924), 18, 80, 171 Hired Hand, The (1918), 180–1, 201, 228
Green Pastures (1936), 344 Hiroshima mon amour (1959), 374
Gregory, Carl Louis, 108, 118 Hirst, Paul, 93–4
Gregory, R.L., 7–8 His Double Life (1933), 15
Grierson, John, 284 His Girl Friday (1939), 22, 78, 81
Griffith, D.W., 48, 52, 55, 62, 77, 79, 80, 92, 96, 105, His Mother’s Boy (1917), 182
107, 111, 117–18, 121, 126, 139, 147, 157–9, 162, 174, His People (1925), 192–3
190–1, 211, 212, 228, 234, 335, 346, 378, 438–9, 456 His Phantom Sweetheart (1915), 225
Grit of the Girl Telegrapher, The (1912), 211 History Lessons (1973), 380
Grot, Anton, 147–8, 326 Hitchcock, Alfred, 19–20, 40, 59, 62, 78, 79–80, 81, 372,
Guest in the House (1944), 20 375, 384
Gulf & Western Company, 368 Hochberg, Julian, 59
Gulf Between, The (1917), 353 Hold-up in a Country Grocery Store (1904), 183
Holland, Mildred, 131
760 INDEX
Holliday, Judy, 52 Independence Moving Picture Company of America

Hollywood, move to, 122–3 (IMP), 117, 122, 397, 402
Homer’s Odyssey (1912), 100 Independent production, 317–19, 324, 327, 330–2, 334–5,
Hoodoo Ann (1916), 186–7, 192, 213 400
Horizon-line isocephaly, 51 Independent production companies, 101–4, 158, 265–6,
Horkheimer, H.M., 123 397–8, 402
Hornbeck, William, 206, 232, 285, 444 India Song (1975), 43, 302
Horror films, 72, 73, 77, 351 Indian cinema, 378
Hotel Imperial (1926), 229, 284 Indianapolis Speedway (1939), 16, 61
House of Discord, The (1913), 207 Industrial interest groups, 97, 102–6
House of Fear, The (1915), 263 Industry:
Housewife (1934), 26, 31, 61 defined, 89;
Houston Fearless Camera Company, 260 history of, 397–403
How Green Was My Valley (1941), 42, 83, 348 Ingster, Boris, 344
How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), 357 Innovations, 97, 108–12
Howard, Louis J., 121 Innovative worker, 109–10, 312–13, 331
Howe, James Wong, 50, 282, 344 Insert, 188–9
Huettig, Mae D., 316, 325 Institutions and technological change, 250–61, 262, 294–
Hughes, Howard, 328 7, 298–301, 306–8, 339, 341–52
Hugo, lan, 72 Integration in industry, 92, 313–17, 399–400, 424
Huillet, Danièle, 26, 32, 81, 362, 380, 382, 383 Interchangeability, 90, 119, 134–5
Huse, Emery, 255, 257 Interiors (1978), 375
Hussain, Athar, 93–4 Interlude (1957), 30, 39, 45, 61
Hypotheses, 44, 47–8, 54–5, 58, 64, 81, 183; International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees
types, 38–41 (IATSE), 105, 312
International Photographer, 292
I Walked With a Zombie (1943), 42, 43 International Photographers, 106
I Was a Male War Bride (1949), 14 International Pictures, 400
Ideological/signifying practices: Intertextual motivation, 19–21
defined, 87; Intertitles, 126, 138, 146, 152, 162–3; 172–4, 181, 183–4,
affected by economic practices, 126; 186–8, 213, 442;
affected by mode of production, 142, 148; dialogue, 182–5, 188–90, 442;
effects on mode of production, 88–9, 94, 125, 137–8, expository, 27–8, 44, 63, 74, 79, 177, 183–9, 238, 303
142, 151, 153, 335 Intolerance (1916), 48, 147, 177, 186, 212, 219, 228
Ideology, 54, 82, 83, 250 Iris, 9, 269
III Wind, An (1912), 178 Italian, The (1915), 206
Illusionism, 7–8, 24 Ivan the Terrible (1945), 23
Impact (1949), 25, 36
In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1980), 54 Jackman, Fred, 324
In médias res opening, 27, 28–9, 37, 39, 172, 177, 185, Jakobson, Roman, 10, 12, 248
188, 238, 239 Jancsó, Miklós, 18, 62, 362, 363, 380 383, 384
In Old Madrid (1911), 209 Japanese cinema, 378, 379, 382
Incandescent lighting, 249, 253, 273–5, 283, 294–7, 298, Jaws(1974), 74, 368
300, 304, 342–4 Jazz Singer, The (1927), 34, 279, 297
Ince, Thomas, 136–8, 158, 195, 314, 335 Jeffries—Sharkey prizefight, 115
Ince Studios, 148, 151 Jenkins, C.Francis, 104, 256
Independent Film Protective Association, 102 Jerusalem Delivered (c. 1911), 131
Independent Motion Picture Producers Association, 335 Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Company , 132, 398, 403
Johnny Belinda (1948), 350
INDEX 761
Joiners, 276 Kühle Wampe (1931), 384

Journal of the Society of Motion Picture [and Television] Kuhn, Loeb and Company, 99, 314
Engineers (JSMP[T]E), 105, 256–7, 275, 306, 344 Kuleshov, Lev, 207, 378
Journalism, 165 Kuntzel, Thierry, 26, 44, 63
Journey into Fear (1942), 76 Kurosawa, Akira, 10, 36, 362, 363
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1957), 61, 361
Juarez (1937), 326 La Rocque, Rod, 236–7
Jump cut, 184 Labor associations, 102, 105–6
Labor force, 311–13;
Kahane, B.B., 312 denned, 89–90
Kalem Film Manufacturing Co., 100–1, 117–19, 122–3, Laboratory work, 150, 152, 247, 253, 275–6, 278–80, 285–
130–1, 397, 401 7, 288–9, 291–3, 304, 342–3, 455
Kalmus, Herbert, 353–7 Lady from Shanghai (1948), 350
Kalmus, Natalie, 356 Lady in the Lake (1947), 31
Kané, Pascal, 375 Lane, A.Lindsley, 30
Kast, Pierre, 4 Lang, Fritz, 49, 78, 79, 81–2, 384
Kazan, Elia, 362 Lasky, Jesse L., 137, 179, 225, 275, 326, 328, 350
Keaton, Buster, 21, 62, 80, 81 Lass of the Lumberlands, A (1917), 224
Keith-Albee Theaters, 399, 403 Lassie Come Home (1943), 356
Keith’s Union Square Theater, 128 Last Laugh, The (1924), 73, 249
Kelly, Gene, 71 Last-minute rescue, 45, 48
Kent, Sidney, 318 Last Year at Marienbad (1961), 36, 41, 43
Kese, 399, 401 Latensification, 350
Keystone Film Co., 125, 285, 402 Latham loop, 264, 265, 266, 397
Kid Brother, The (1927), 342 Laura (1944), 72, 75, 76
Kidnapped (1938), 345 Lawrence, Florence, 101
Killing, The (1956), 43 Le Baron, William, 328
Kinemacolor, 282 Lectures, as exhibition practice, 133
King, Henry, 283, 284 Legg, Stuart, 315–16
King and the Chorus Girl, The (1837), 25, 45, 65 Leitmotifs, musical, 33–4, 107–8, 303
King Kong (1933), 35, 39 Lenses, 219, 221–3, 289, 293, 301, 305, 307–8, 373, 456;
King of the Rodeo (1928), 25 anamorphic, 359, 361;
Kings of the Road (1976), 383 anastigmat, 288;
Kings Row (1942), 21, 344 coated, 344, 346, 348, 349;
Kiss of Death (1947), 77 soft-focus, 288–9, 290, 291
Klaw, Mark, 113, 131 Leonard, Marion, 101
Kleine-Edison Feature Film Service, 399, 401 LeRoy, Mervyn, 62, 326
Kleine Optical Company, 129, 397, 399, 401 Letter, The (1940), 362
Kleptomaniac, The (1905), 176, 210 Letter to Three Wives, A (1948), 42
Kliegl Co., 274, 275 Lewis, Howard, 320, 322
Klingender, F.D., 315–16 Lewis, Jerry, 27, 78
Kluge, Alexander, 383 Licensed manufacturers, see Motion Picture Patents
Klute (1971), 375 Company
Knowledgeability of narration, 25–37, 40–1, 48, 78–82 Life of an American Fireman, The (1903), 98, 100, 160,
Koerner, Charles, 328 162, 179, 181
Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 33–4, 303 Light Cavalry Overture, The (c. 1927), 305
Koster, Henry, 361 Lighting, 7, 12, 20, 52, 54, 72, 77, 125, 148, 173, 214,
Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, 113 221, 223–7, 230, 231, 270–5, 288, 290, 294–7, 300,
Kramer, Stanley, 334 301, 304–5, 342–51, 356, 380–1, 382, 404–14;
762 INDEX
effects, 223–5, 231, 271; MacCabe, Colin, 380

selective, 107, 125, 224–6, 280 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), 375
Lighting instruments, 263, 270–6; Maccabees, The (1911), 130
see also Arc Light; Floodlights; McCardell, Roy L., 118
Incandescent lighting; McCarey, Leo, 31
Mercury vapor lamps; MacDonald, Joe, 350
Spotlights Machine industry, 276
Lights of New York, The (1928), 296, 304, 305–6 Machine processing, 276, 279, 285–7, 304, 342
Linearity of cause and effect, 20, 22, 64–5 Machine-tool industry, 92
Little Doctor, The (1901), 198 Mad Martindales, The (1942), 28–9
Little Foxes, The (1941), 52, 348, 349, 351 MadameX (1929), 42
Lloyd, Harold, 22, 37, 62, 81, 234 Magician, The (1926), 222
Lloyd, Peter, 373 Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942), 52, 362
Loafer, The (1911), 176, 209, 215, 224 Magnificent Obsession (1935), 380
Lobby display cards, 101 Majestic Film Company, 398, 402
Local color, 122 Make-up, 53, 253, 284, 354;
Location shooting, 77, 121–5, 148, 151, 263, 275, 332–3, production work, 149–50, 312, 323;
349 see also Factor, Max;
Locket, The (1946), 20, 21–2, 42, 61 Max Factor Co.
Lodger, The (1944), 20 Maltese Falcon, The (1941), 40, 75, 81, 344, 377
Loew’s theaters, 399–400, 403 Mamoulian, Rouben, 71, 109
Lone Highwayman, The (1906), 204 Man Who Laughs, The (1928), 24
Lonely Villa, The (1909), 175 Man With a Movie Camera (1928), 381
Long Goodbye, The (1973), 375 Management hierarchy, 9, 83–4
Long Voyage Home, The (1940), 345–7 Managers, 132, 135–7, 143–5, 316–17, 325, 334–5;
Loos, Anita, 26, 28, 36, 44, 48, 186 function of, 93–4
Lorentz, Pare, 317, 319 Mandel, Ernest, 315
LornaDoone (1923), 14 Manhandled (1949), 32, 40, 351
Lost Child, The (1904), 199 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 327
Lost Lady, A (1934), 15 Mann, Anthony, 4
Lost Weekend, The (1945), 75 Mantrap (1926), 198, 210
Louis B.Mayer Pictures, 399, 403 Manufacturing:
Love Affair; denned, 92;
or, the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator heterogeneous, 92;
(1967), 374 serial, 83, 92, 143, 329, 336–7
Love and the Law (1919), 32, 36, 64, 208, 216, 222 Marion, Frances, 19, 36, 119
Love in the Afternoon (1957), 20, 110 Marketing research, 144, 323–4
Love Light, The (1921), 269 Markopoulos, Gregory, 385
Low-key lighting, 52, 73, 77, 275, 301, 347, 356 Marriage Circle, The (1924), 303–4, 308
Lubin, Sigmund, 125 Marriage of Molly O, The (1916), 288
Lubin camera, 265 Marx, Karl, 83, 89, 92, 143, 276, 368, 369–70
Lubin Manufacturing Co., 100, 106, 122, 125, 132, 137, Mask, in cinematography, 207–8, 216
146, 272, 397, 399, 401 Mask ofDimitrios, The (1944), 76
Lubitsch, Ernst, 3, 63, 78–80, 149, 303, 328 Mass production:
Lucas, George, 243, 373, 375 denned, 90;
Lumière, Louis, 341 history of, 90–2;
Lust for Life (1956), 34 in the film industry, 115–16, 123, 134–41
Luxury Liner (1933), 145 Master shot (‘master scene’), 308
Match-on-action cutting, 46, 69, 231, 278, 305
INDEX 763
Matrimaniac, The (1916), 180 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 62, 79, 81, 362, 380–1, 383
Mattes, 148 Moana (1925), 284
Matthews, Brander, 17, 164, 167–8, 170 MobyDick (1930), 306
Max Factor Co., 122, 150 Mode of film practice, xiii–xv, 83–4, 367, 378–85
May Irwin-John C. Rice Kiss, The (1896), 198 Mode of film production, xiv, 9, 83–4, 173, 367, 382–5;
Mayer, Louis B., 111, 327 alternatives, 139–40;
May time (1937), 74 defined, 89–95
Mazda lighting, see Incandescent lighting Modernist cinema, 381–2, 384
Mazda tests, 284, 294–7, 298 Mohr, Hal, 117, 150, 152, 279, 290, 344
Mazursky, Paul, 375 Mole, Peter, 253–4, 272, 274–5
Means of production: Mole-Richardson Company, 253, 260, 294, 295, 296, 299,
defined, 90; 302, 306, 307, 343, 354–5, 356
ownership of, 316 Monogram, 317–18, 335
Mees, C.E.K., 251, 258, 296 Monopol Film Company, 133
Meet John Doe (1941), 14, 74, 83, 344 Monopolistic practices, 331, 397
Melodrama, 13, 20, 22, 50, 71–2, 75, 160, 171, 172, 384 Monsieur Beaucaire (1946), 34, 39
Melody Cruise (1333), 74 Montage, 60, 73
Mental set, 8, 12, 55, 57–9 Montage sequence, 29, 44, 63, 73–4, 84, 303, 307, 371,
Menzies, William Cameron, 147, 221, 307, 324, 344–5, 376
349 Morasco Films, 398–9
Mercury-vapor lamps, 226, 270–3, 274, 283, 294, 404–14 Morgan ‘sphere of influence,’ 315–16
Merry-Go-Round, The (1923), 26 Morocco (1930), 145
Merry Widow, The (1925), 355 Most Dangerous Game, The (1932), 44
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 26, 62, 92, 145–6, 153, Mothering Heart, The (1913), 191, 218
244, 245, 287, 298, 299, 302, 307, 320–4, 325, 327, Mothlight (1963), 381
332–5, 337, 358, 359, 360, 399, 403 Motifs, 15–16, 26, 31, 34, 36, 37, 43–4, 237, 346
Metro Pictures, 399, 403 Motion Picture Classic, 99
Metropolis (1926), 73 Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Co., 398, 402
Metz, Christian, 48, 63 Motion Picture League of America, 103
Meyer, Leonard, 78, 247–8, 351 Motion Picture News, 99, 106
Michigan Kid, The (1928), 16, 26, 32 Motion Picture Patents Company of America (MPPC),
Mickey (1918), 25 98, 101–4, 121–2, 131–2, 158, 217, 264, 265, 277, 397–
Microphones, 53, 252, 299, 301–2, 305 8, 401
Milestone, Lewis, 321 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association
Militant filmmaking, 384 (MPPDA), 103–4, 149, 254, 298
Miller, Arthur C., 105, 147, 233, 275, 329, 344–5, 349 Motion Picture Producers Association, 103
Miniatures, 125, 148 Motion Picture Research Bureau, 258, 259, 297, 324
Ministry of Fear, The (1944), 76 Motion Picture Story Magazine, 99
Minnelli, Vincente, 62, 81, 329, 333 Motivation:
Miracle Woman, The (1931), 22 types, 19–23, 24, 178;
Misérables, Les (1909), 130 in general, 43, 45, 169, 170, 237;
Misérables, Les (1935), 345 see also Artistic motivation;
Miss Lulu Bett (1921), 28, 45 Compositional motivation;
Mr. Billings Spends His Dime (1923), 226 Generic motivation;
Mr. Skeffington (1944), 15, 20 Realistic motivation Movietone, 298, 300, 303
Mitchell camera, 252, 269–70, 300, 345 Moving Picture Tales, 99
Mitchell Camera Company, 252, 257, 260, 266, 269, 299, Moving Picture World, 104, 106, 191
345, 354, 358 Moviola, 253, 285–6, 298, 303, 455–6
Mitry, Jean, 57 Mukařovský, Jan, 4, 12
764 INDEX
Multiple-camera shooting, 51, 139, 151–2, 246, 304–8, Nestor Films Co., 117, 122, 132, 397, 402
342, 369, 375, 379 New York Clipper, 106
Multiple-reel films, 100, 143, 314, 317, 398; New York Dramatic Mirror, 101, 106
diffusion of, 128–34; New York Motion Picture Company, 123, 125, 136, 397,
structure of, 133; 402
see also Feature films New York, New York (1977), 368–9, 374
Mulvey, Laura, 383 Newman, Ernest, 33
Muni, Paul, 326 Newsreels, 114–16, 144;
Münsterberg, Hugo, 379 see also Topicals Nichols, Dudley, 336
Murch, Walter, 377 Nickelodeon, The, 106
Murder My Sweet (1944), 34, 75 Nickelodeons, 115–16, 128–9, 160–1, 163, 217
Murnau, F.W., 80, 249 Night at the Opera, A (1935), 323
Music, 4, 72; Night Holds Terror, The (1955), 25
in film production, 107–8, 133, 151, 153 Night Life of New York (1925), 226
Music, film, 29, 33–5, 46, 66–9, 72, 246, 302–3, 369, 382 Night Moves (1975), 376
Music Corporation of America (MCA), 333 Nilsen, Vladimir, 60
Musical cue sheets, 153 No Leave, No Love (1946), 45
Musicals, 20, 21, 22, 62, 71–2, 302, 355, 361, 375 Noble, David F., 134
Musketeers of Pig Alley, The (1912), 174 Norms:
Musser, Charles, 439 in Hollywood style, xiv, xv, 6–7, 8, 10, 70–84, 245,
Mutual Film Co., 140, 152, 398–9, 402 248, 257–8, 301–8, 355, 367, 378–82, 384–5;
My Favorite Brunette (1947), 16, 21 in primitive cinema, 159;
My Night at Maud’s (1969), 383 types of, 4–5
Mystery film, 29, 32, 40, 73 Not Reconciled (1964), 26, 32, 43
Novels, 14, 161, 163–6, 168–70, 172–4, 178
Naked City (1948), 77, 350 Novelty, see Differentiation Now and Forever (1934), 145
Naniwa Elegy (1936), 380–1 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 88
Narboni, Jean, 380 Numéro Deux (1975), 372
Narration, 24–41, 42–9, 58, 63–9, 71–2, 78–82, 83, 84, Nut Stuff (1918), 213
158, 161–3, 171–5, 177, 181, 183–9, 213–15, 229–30,
238, 263, 303, 305, 370–1, 373–4, 375–7, 380–2, 417, October (1928), 31, 65, 381
421 Offscreen space, 59
Narrative: Ogle, Patrick, 342–5, 446, 454
as a system, 6, 8, 12, 157, 174, 380; Olcott, Sidney, 117, 119
industry’s shift to, 115; Old Ironsides (1926), 284
patterning, 12–23, 71–2, 160, 165, 167, 175, 176, 370– Old Maid in a Drawing Room, The (1900), 159, 198
2, 373–4, 375–7, 439; Old Swimmin’ Hole, The (1921), 187
specifications of, 107 Omnipresence, 30–2, 48, 59, 69, 305, 308
Narrow Trail, The (1917), 26 Omniscience in narration, 25, 29, 30, 32, 34, 48, 69, 78,
Nashville (1975), 375 83
National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, 103 On With the Show! (1929), 306, 353
National Board of Censorship, 104 One Frightened Night (1935), 44, 61–2
National Carbon Company, 252, 253, 260, 262, 300, 342 One Hour With You (1932), 303–4, 308
National Independent Motion Picture Board of Trade, One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), 302, 327
Inc., 103 100-to-One Shot, The (1906), 160, 199, 207, 211
National Independent Moving Picture Alliance, 102 One is Business, the Other Crime (1912), 176
National Motion Picture Board of Trade, 103–4 One-reel films, 126
Naturalism, 18, 80, 170–1 One Touch of Nature (1917), 22
Negative cost, 278 Ophuls, Max, 14
INDEX 765
Order, temporal, 42–4, 65–6 Perkins, V.F., 80, 247, 248, 249, 258, 336, 363
Orpheum Theaters, 399, 403 Perry, John, 90, 110
Orry-Kelly, 326 Persona (1967), 65, 374, 375
Orthochromatic film stock, 223, 273, 279, 281–5, 455; Personal (1904), 192, 204
effects on production practices, 147, 149–50 Perspective, 37, 53, 58, 215, 250, 305, 351
Oshima, Nagisa, 55, 363, 382 Photoflood lighting, 349–50
Othon (1971), 384 Photography, 221, 287–93, 342, 357
Our Town (1940), 344–5 Photometers, 91
Ownership of firms, 90, 143, 311–17 Photoplay, 99
Ozu, Yasujiro, 13, 15, 18, 23, 53, 55, 79, 81, 380, 382 Photoplay Authors’ League (PAL), 105
Pickford, Mary, 16, 101, 149, 201, 290–1, 378
Package-unit system of production, 93, 330–7, 339, 367, Pickpocket, The (1903), 174, 203, 204
368–9, 370 Pictorialism, 291–2
Painted Lady, The (1912), 190–1 Picture palaces, precedents for, 128–9
Painting, 221, 225, 292 Pierrot le fou (1965), 65, 81, 383
Pakula, Alan, 375 Planet of the Apes (1968), 72
Pallas Films, 398–9 Play Girl (1941), 26, 35–6, 39
Palmer, Frederick, 15 Playlet, 160, 217
Panavision, 358, 359, 361 Plot (syuzhet), 12, 24
Panchromatic film stock, 249, 251, 253, 255, 259, 273, Poe, Edgar Allan, 167–9, 172
281–5, 293, 294–7, 300, 454 Point of view, 12, 31–3, 34–5, 43, 48, 57, 59, 79, 81, 82,
Paper records, 135–8, 144–5. 147, 149, 150, 152, 323, 198, 199, 204, 207–8, 210, 229, 290, 308
326; Poland, Jack, 105
significance of, 134, 138 Poli theaters, 399, 403
Parachute Jumper (1933), 13 Policeman’s Love Affair, A (1904), 162, 177, 183
Paradigm, stylistic, 5, 7, 54, 58, 60–2, 81, 84, 248, 254, Popeye (1980), 375
260, 303–4, 339, 341, 350, 363–4, 378–82 Porter, Edwin S., 116–17, 157, 162
Parallel editing, 210–11 Posto, Il (1961), 374
Parallelism, 176–7 Potemkin (1925), 73, 381
Paramount Pictures Company, 26, 62, 127, 139–40, 143– Powell, Frank, 121
4, 150, 298, 299, 303, 314, 316, 321, 323–5, 328, 350, Power Behind the Throne, The (1911), 131
358, 360, 368, 398–400, 403, 445 Powers Company, 122, 131, 397, 402
Parole Fixer (1940), 13 Pratt, James, 327
Parrish, Robert, 48 Pre-credits sequence, 27
Parsifal (1904), 183, 216 Preminger, Otto, 62, 78, 79–80, 81, 362
Partners in Crime (1928), 26 Presnell, Robert, 327
Passage to Marseille (1944), 42 Previews, 152–3, 323
Passenger, The (1975), 381 Price of Fame, The (1910), 221
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La (1928), 341, 380 Price, Waterhouse, 145, 317
Passion Play, 130 Primacy effect, 37–8, 63–5, 81–2
Patents, 102, 264, 265, 397 ‘Priming’, 58–9
Pathé Frères Film Co., 100, 122, 130, 146, 153, 300, 397, Primitive cinema, 157–73, 174, 214, 218, 223, 227, 230
401 Prince and the Pauper, The (1911), 131
Pathé Professional camera, 266–8, 270 Prince of Players (1954), 15
Pawnbroker, The (1965), 374 Princess Nicotine (1909), 199
Penthouse (1933), 16, 26, 33, 61 Producer-unit system of production, 93, 318, 320–2, 325,
People’s Institute, 103–4 336, 339, 367, 368
Pépé le moko (1937), 75 Producers Releasing Corporation, 318, 335
Periodization, 9–10, 159, 367 Production designer, 324
766 INDEX
Production management, 118, 135–8, 143–5, 324 Record of a Living Being (1955), 306
Production value, 100 Redundancy, 5, 31, 32, 43, 80–1, 192, 237, 238
Professional organizations: Reel Club, 105
in general, 250, 254–61; Reflectors, 226
see also specific organizations by name Refraining, 51, 67, 68, 214, 228, 229, 304
Profit-sharing, 123, 320, 334 Regeneration, The (1915), 60, 175
Progress, ideology of, 244, 257–8 Région centrale, La (1967), 23, 381
Props, in production, 118, 136–7, 147–9 Rehearsals, 118, 126, 139–40, 145, 151
Protagonist, 16, 82, 373–4; Reign of Terror (1949), 75
goal oriented, 180–1, 370–1, 379 Reinhardt, Max, 117
Providence (1977), 32, 41 Reliance Company, 132, 402
Prunella (1918), 220 Rembrandt lighting, see Lighting, selective
Psycho (1960), 79, 81 Renoir, Jean, 3, 341
Psychoanalysis, films treating, 20–1, 32, 34, 43, 72, 73 Republic Pictures, 318
Publicity, 87, 95, 99–100 Research, technological, 100, 147, 149, 244, 251–61, 263,
Publix Theaters, 399, 403 265, 296, 299, 323, 354–5, 357
Pudovkin, V.I., 73, 378 Resnais, Alain, 32, 41, 81
Punctuation, cinematic, 44, 61 Revue du cinéma, La, 75
Revue Productions, 333
Quai des brumes (1938), 75 Rex Company, 136, 397, 402
Quality, standards of, 244, 263–6, 273, 276, 278, 280, 291, Reynolds, Ben, 290
293, 339 Rhythm, 47–8, 62, 201, 286
400 coups, Les (1959), 374 Richardson, Elmer, 253
Queen of Sheba, The (1921), 220 Richardson, F.H., 104–5, 107
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), 383
Race With Time, A (1913), 180, 182, 222 River of No Return (1954), 363
Rack-and-tank developing, 276, 278–9, 286, 304 Rivette, Jacques, 363, 382, 384
Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 252, 253, 299, Road o’ Strife (1915), 188
300, 302, 315, 359 Road to Utopia, The (1945), 22
Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), 246, 321, 323–5, 328, Road-showing, 133, 144, 317, 398
399–400, 403 Roaring Timber (1937), 38, 39, 45
Raff and Gam n, 113–14 Roaring Twenties, The (1939), 48
Rainer, Yvonne, 382 Robe, The (1953), 357, 361
Raksin, David, 72 Rockefeller ‘sphere of influence,’ 315–16
Rapf, Harry, 327 Rohmer, Eric, 383
Rathvon, N.Peter, 333 Romance, 5, 16–17, 44–5, 76
Raven, The (1915), 151 Romola (1925), 283–4
RawDeal (l948), 45 Rope (1948), 21, 62
Ray, Charles, 180 Rory O’More (1911), 219
Razor’s Edge, The (1937), 329 Rose Hobart (1938), 79
Reaching for the Moon (1917), 186 Roseanna McCoy (1949), 351
Realism, 19–21, 37, 70–1, 77, 175, 257–8, 347–8, 349, Rosenmann, Leonard, 72
351, 355–6, 373, 383; Rosher, Charles, 50, 73, 229, 269, 277, 290, 291, 292, 342,
as advertising appeal, 100–1 456
Realistic motivation, 19–21, 24, 30, 70–1, 77, 178, 371–2, Ross, Murray, 311
373–4 Rossen, Hal, 337
Rear projection processes, 251, 259–60, 303, 349, 354, Rothapfel, S.L., 133
385 Roxy Circuit, 399, 403
Rear Window (1954), 19 Royal Pauper, The (1917), 26
INDEX 767
Rózsa, Miklós, 34, 72 master-scene script, 139, 204, 322;

Rule of three, 31, 40 outline script, 118–19, 125;
Runaway Match, The (1903), 160, 207 scenario script, 126, 173, 278;
Runs, length of, 132, 314, 318, 331, 398 script as blueprint, 94, 126, 135–7, 146, 335;
Rushes, 152 script timing, 323;
Russian Formalism, 12 story conferences, 322;
Ruttenberg, Joseph, 333 synopsis, 138, 165;
treatment, 146
Salaries, wages, and employment contracts, 134, 139–40, Scriptwriting work, 100–1, 118–19, 125–6, 136–8, 145–6,
144–5, 311–13, 317, 461 152, 382–3
Salt, Barry, 46, 60, 274, 438, 442, 443 Sculptor’s Nightmare, The (1908), 199
Sample, Extended (ES), 10–11, 36, 42, 51, 60–3 Search for Evidence, A (1903), 203, 207
Sample, Unbiased (UnS), 10–11, 36, 42, 49, 57, 60–3, Secret Beyond the Door (1948), 76
361–2, 388–96 Seitz, John, 286–7, 289, 290, 291, 293
San Francisco (1936), 74 Self-consciousness of narration, 25–37, 40–1, 47, 59, 69,
Santa Fe Trail (1940), 359 78–82, 83
Saratoga (1937), 14, 16–17, 52 Selig camera, 265
Sargent, Epes Winthrop, 104, 106–7, 118, 185, 189, 191, Selig Polyscope Company, 100, 117–18, 121–2, 131–3,
197, 202 145, 397, 399, 401
Sartov, Henrik, 287, 289, 290, 292 Selznick, David O., 317, 320, 327
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 250 Selznick, Myron, 323
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), 23, 41 Selznick Productions, 318, 330
Saxe-Meiningen, Georg II, Duke of, 117 Semi-documentary films, 76–7
Say It With Songs (1929), 74 Sennett, Mack, 121, 234
Scarlet Road, The (1916), 172 Sequence, 61–9
Scenario, see Scriptwriting practices Scene plot, 125, 138, Serials, 99, 133, 144
144, 147, 173, 204 Serrurier, Iwan, 285, 455
Scenics, 159, 161, 162, 227 Sets:
Schaefer, George, 328 construction, 145, 147, 324, 327;
Senary, Dore, 92, 320, 327–9, 334 design, 52–3, 73, 214, 216–21, 223, 230, 301, 347–8;
Schemata, 8, 55, 57, 58–9, 84, 245 models, 147–8;
Schrader, Paul, 76, 372 use in films, 173, 187, 202, 205, 215, 229, 263, 351,
Schulberg, B.P., 321, 328 380–1, 445–6
Science fiction films, 72 Seven Ages, The (1905), 274
Scientific management, 134–9 Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), 44
Scorpio Rising (1964), 381 Seventh Heaven (1927), 179, 229, 291, 342
Scorsese, Martin, 368, 372, 375 Sh! the Octopus (1937), 16, 44
Screen club, 105 Shadow of a Doubt (1943), 20
Screen credits, 312–13 Shamroy, Leon, 50, 362
Screen direction, 57–8, 202, 204–5, 207–9, 212–13 Shamus O’Brien (1912), 200, 223
Screen Writers Guild, 106, 334 Shane (1953), 62
Script, The, 105 She Would Be an Actress (1909), 218
‘Script girl,’ see Continuity clerk Shearer, Douglas, 299
Scriptwriting practices: Sheehan, Winfield, 321, 326
continuity script, 9, 84, 136–8, 144, 173, 196, 205, Sherman, Vincent, 110, 329
233, 278; Shock Punch, The (1925), 36, 45
continuity synopsis script, 139; Shooting order, 125, 139–40, 151
editors and staff, 165–6, 195; Short story, 14, 161, 163–70, 172, 174, 178
general, 164–6, 170, 176, 233; Shot, 60–3, 84, 441
768 INDEX
Shot/reverse shot, 7, 8, 52, 56–7, 58, 59, 66–9, 79, 80, Spectator, 7–9, 12, 22, 37–41, 47, 54–5, 56, 65, 69, 81–2,
202, 205, 208–10, 213–14, 239, 304, 305, 306, 345, 83, 214–30, 346–9, 351, 374, 381, 382
346, 347, 351, 362, 371, 379, 381, 421, 444 Speed Spook, The (1924), 26
Show, The (1927), 7, 306 Speedy (1928), 37
Show People (1928), 15 Spellbound (1945), 20, 34, 72
Show World, 106 Spirit, The (comic strip), 77
Showmanship, 100, 110 Splicing equipment, 276–8, 285–6, 453–4
Sick Kitten, The (c. 1903), 198–9 Spotlights, 224–6, 273–5, 343, 404–14
Siegel, Donald, 84 Stage Fright (1950), 40
Sin of Harold Diddlebock, The (1947), 22–3 Stagecoach (1939), 344, 346
Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 22 Staging, 177, 200, 202, 215–16, 223, 230
Sirk, Douglas, 20, 78, 80, 81 Stahl, John, 62, 232, 380–1
Sisters of Gion (1936), 380 Stand-ins, 151
Sklar, Robert, 315 Standardization:
Skyscrapers, The (1905), 227, 228 defined, 91, 96;
Sleep My Love (1948), 76 history of, 91, 134;
Smith, Albert, 116 mechanisms of, 96–108;
Snow, Michael, 23, 62, 79, 381 stylistic, 6, 70–83, 233–6, 308, 383;
So This Is Paris (1926), 73, 79, 342 technological, 245, 255–6, 262–80, 343–4, 358
Social Secretary, The (1916), 180 Stanley Theaters, 399, 403
Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers, 335 Star Is Born, A (1954), 22, 353
Society of Motion Picture [and Television] Engineers Star Wars (1977), 368
(SMP[T]E), 104–5, 254, 255–8, 259, 260–1, 262, 277, Stars, 14, 37, 101, 131, 160, 164, 173, 179–81, 201, 236,
283, 294–7, 299–301, 353, 354, 356, 358, 359, 360 237, 311, 317, 334, 368–9, 370–1, 437–8
Soft style in cinematography, 255, 279, 287–93, 296, 304, States’-rights exchanges, 317–18, 398
341–3, 456 Static Club, 105–6
Solanas, Fernando, 384 Static Flashes, 105
Solax Company, 124, 402 Stavisky (1974), 374
Somnambulist, The (1903), 179, 203 Steadicam, 373
Sorlin, Pierre, 13 Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), 17, 38
Sound: Steiner, Max, 33, 34, 303
analogy with image, 301–4; Stella Dallas (1926), 189
editing, 46–7, 67, 302–3, 306–7, 383; Stereophonic sound, 53, 244, 339, 358–64
offscreen, 12; Sternberg, Meir, 8, 25, 81
perspective, 53–4, 301–2, 376; Stevens, George, 62, 111
recording, 53, 244, 246, 260, 301–2, 360, 383; Stewart, James, 323
technology, 252, 298–308 Story (fabula), 12, 373
Sound, introduction of, 61, 62, 188, 244, 245–7, 248, 286– Story department, see Scriptwriting practices
7, 293, 294–7, 298–308, 342–3 Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, The (1939), 380
South Pacific (1958), 356 Story sources and acquisition, 130–2 146, 160, 164–7,
Soviet cinema, 3, 13, 18, 54, 62, 72, 73–4, 373, 378, 380, 173, 322
382 Stout, George B., 136
Space, cinematic, 6, 12, 46, 50–9, 63–9, 78–9, 162–3, 214– Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), 344
30, 236, 255, 303, 304–8, 340–52, 374, 376, 377, 381 Strategic decision-making, 316;
Sparrows (1926), 290–1 defined, 94
Special Delivery (1927), 145 Straub, Jean-Marie, 26, 32, 81, 362, 380, 382, 383, 384,
Special effects, 73, 78, 125, 148–50, 243, 324, 349, 373 385
Spectacle, 21, 244, 307–8, 355, 361, 373; Stravinsky, Igor, 33, 72
as advertising appeal, 100 Street Angel (1928), 291
INDEX 769
Street Car Chivalry (1903), 196 factors, 247–51, 262–3, 264, 266, 361;
Street Scene (1931), 307 institutional aspects, 251–61, 262, 339, 353, 358–9
Strike (1925), 381 Technology, xv, 190, 243, 339–64, 373
Strohm, Walter, 329 Television, 27, 255, 371–2, 379, 381
Stromberg, Hunt, 110, 327 Temperamental Wife, A (1919), 216
Struss, Karl, 50, 229, 279, 285, 288, 290–2, 342, 456 Tempest, The (1928), 291, 342, 344
Studio Basic Agreement (1926), 312 Temporal integration, 43–4
Studio Murder Mystery, The (1929), 21 Temptations of a Great City, The (1911), 191
Studios: Ten Commandments, The (1923), 237, 355
as central facility, 119–20, 330; Ten North Frederick (1958), 43
location of, 122–3; Terry, Alice, 291
physical arrangement, 124–5, 218, 221 Tess of the Storm Country (1932), 344
Sturges, Preston, 22 Thalberg, Irving, 136, 153, 299, 320, 327
Style, group, 3, 6–11, 78, 367, 380–1 Thanhouser Company, 118, 122, 131, 397, 402
Subjectivity, 12, 31–3, 43, 57, 66, 73 76, 77, 179, 180, Theater, legitimate, 4, 16, 29, 33, 48, 50–1, 56, 63, 71,
182, 192, 199, 373–4, 376–7 101, 113, 117, 128, 130–2, 143, 147, 157, 158, 160–1,
Suds (1920), 187 163–6, 168–74, 178, 202, 204, 214, 216–17, 220, 228,
Sugarland Express (1974), 373 246, 273, 275, 312, 440, 445
Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944), 35, 36 Theodora (1921), 148
Sun-light Arc Co., 275 These Three (1936), 345, 346
Sunlight, as lighting source, 271–2 Thieves Like Us (1974), 373
Sunny Side Up (1929), 307 Third Generation, The (1980), 54
Sunrise (1927), 73, 229, 285, 291, 342 Three-dimensional films, 245, 251, 259, 331, 359, 360,
Sunrise at Campobello (1960), 22 474–5
Sunset Boulevard (1950), 42–3, 334, 350 Three-point lighting, 7, 52, 239, 273, 350
Superman (1979), 375 Three Women (1977), 375
Support firms, 103, 332 Through Different Eves (1929), 32, 42, 43
Surtees, Robert, 50 Thunderhead—Son ofFlicka (1944), 356
Suspicion (1941), 70, 72, 83 Tie-ins, 99, 134
Swedish cinema, 28 Tiger’s Coat, The (1920), 15
Sweepstakes Winner (1939), 16, 26 Time, cinematic, 6, 12, 33, 42 –9, 63–9, 74, 78–9, 83,
Sweezy, Paul M., 315–16 162, 163, 171, 181, 184, 211, 236, 238, 306–7, 374,
Systems, stylistic, 6–7, 9, 12, 78–9, 303–4, 367, 373, 375, 376, 381
380–1 Tired Tailor’s Dream, The (1907), 199
Tobacco Road (1940), 344
T-Men (1948), 19 Todd-AO, 358, 359, 360, 361, 476
Tableau, 160, 175, 196, 198, 202 Tol’able David (1921), 374
Tactical decision-making, 140, 143, 316; Toland, Gregg, 110–11, 222, 341, 344, 345–51, 361, 471
denned, 94, 123 Toll of the Sea (1922), 353
Taking of Pelham 123, The (1973), 74 Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son (1905), 174
Tale of Two Cities, A (1911), 130, 189, 200, 207 Topicals, 159, 161, 227
Tangled Lives (1911), 190 Touch of Evil (1957), 31, 75
Tati, Jacques, 46, 79, 382, 383 Tourneur, Maurice, 61, 62, 147, 158, 220
Taxi Driver (1976), 375 Tout va bien (1972), 24, 372
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 134–5 Townsend, Edward W., 101, 118–19, 126
Technicolor Corporation, 245, 247, 253, 256, 257, 260, Trade associations, 102–4
297, 299, 300, 323, 339, 353–7, 361 Trade journals, 165–6, 180, 194, 195, 263
Technirama, 357, 360 Trademarks, 100
Technological change: Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1935), 353
770 INDEX
Traits, of character, 14–16, 179, 180 Vernet, Marc, 20

Transatlantic (1933), 344 Vertov, Dziga, 62, 63, 302, 380, 383
Trial of Mary Dugan, The (1929), 42 Victory (1919), 61, 210
Triangle Co., 124, 137, 143, 187, 399, 402 Vidor, King, 57, 232
Trick films, 159, 233 Viking, The (1928), 353
Troland, Leonard, 354, 357 Virtuosity, 21–2, 78, 307–8, 345
Trouble in Paradise (1932), 81 Visconti, Luchino, 373
Trovatore, Il (191l), 153 VistaVision, 358, 359
Truffaut, François, 4, 360, 362, 373, 374, 375 Vitagraph camera, 265
Trying to Get Arrested (1909), 55, 204 Vitagraph Company of America, 99–101, 107, 114, 117,
Tunnel Workers, The (1906), 162 125, 130, 132, 137, 146, 190, 274, 397, 399, 401
Turner, Otis, 121 Vitaphone, 296, 298, 305, 308
Turpin, Ben, 101 Vitascope, 113
Twentieth Century-Fox, 287, 318, 325–6, 329, 362, 368, Viva Villa! (1933), 344
400 VivaZapata! (1950), 350
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), 54 Voice, human, 54, 302, 381
2001 (1968), 72 Voice-over commentary, 36, 76, 77
Tyler, Parker, 21, 34, 70 Volume (of space), 12, 53, 348–9, 356
Tynianov, Yuri, 248 Von Sternberg, Josef, 47, 62, 78, 329 382
von Stroheim, Erich, 18, 22, 61, 62, 77, 80, 290
Uncensored Movies (1923), 213 Vorkapich, Slavko, 74
Uncertain Glory (1944), 35, 36, 45
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), 98, 100, 130, 160, 183, 196 Wagner, Richard, 33, 34, 35, 107–8
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1910), 130 Waldman, Diane, 70
Under Capricorn (1949), 62 Walker, Vernon, 78, 324, 349
Unexpected Guest, The (1909), 184, 199–200, 218 Wallis, Hal B., 326, 331
Union Carbide. 251. 252. 256 Walsh, Raoul, 30, 60
Unions, 105, 311–13, 318, 331–2, 334–5 Wanger, Walter, 327
Unit production, 321–2, 434 Warner, Jack, 326
United Artists, 317–18, 325, 399–400, 403 Warner Bros, 61, 62, 84, 111, 140, 143, 244, 245–7, 249,
United States Bureau of Standards, 91, 105 287, 294, 295, 296, 298, 300, 303, 323–7, 329, 353,
United Studios, 318 359, 375, 399–400, 403
Universal Film Manufacturing Co., 62, 111, 124, 136, 144, Warners’ Features Company, 398, 403
152, 298, 307, 318, 323, 325, 327, 333, 368, 375, 398– Warning, The (1914), 178, 189–91
400, 402 Warrens of Virginia, The (1915), 224
Universum Film AG (UFA), 72–3 Watt, lan, 14
Urban, Charles, 282 Wavelength (1968), 381
Unwritten Law, The (c. 1907), 160, 177, 179, 181 Way Down East (1920), 233, 289, 291, 292
Wayne, John, 334, 386–7
V-L-S-E Company, 140, 143, 399, 401 Wedding March, The (1928), 34, 61, 355
Valentino, Rudolph, 291 Weekend (1967), 31
Van Buren, Ned, 284–5 Weights and Measures (1914), 208, 216
Van Dyke, W.S., 62 Well-made play, 13, 17, 18, 65, 168–9
Vardac, Nicholas, 48 Welles, Orson, 52, 77, 79, 341, 361, 362, 372
Variety (newspaper), 106 Well-made play, 13, 17, 18, 65, 168–9
Variety (1925), 73, 229 Wenders, Wim, 382, 383
Vaudeville, 71, 101, 113–14, 128–9, 147, 157, 159, 160, West Coast theaters, 399, 403
161, 163–5, 177 216, 217, 440 Western Electric, 251, 252, 253, 298, 300, 360
Vent d’est (1969), 9, 13 Westerner, The (1940), 345
INDEX 771
Westmore, Perc, 150, 323 Young Lions, The (1958), 333

Westmore, Wally, 150 Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), 31
Wexler, Haskell, 373
When the Clouds Roll By (1919), 187–8 Zabriskie Point (1970), 383
When Two Hearts are Won (1911), 131 Zanuck, Darryl F., 111, 326, 329, 334
Whispering Chorus, The (1918), 212 Zoning, 98
White, Pearl, 101 Zorns Lemma (1970), 381
White Cloud’s Secret (1912), 122 Zukor, Adolph, 132, 186, 328
White Flame, The (1929), 111
Whitney, Eli, 90
Whole Town’s Talking, The (1935), 31, 49
Wide-angle lenses, 222, 344, 346–9, 350, 358–64
Wide film systems, 244, 251, 259, 260, 358, 359
Widescreen cinema, 244, 249, 331, 339
Widow and the Only Man, The (1904), 180
Wild and Woolly (1917), 179, 180, 186, 197, 228
Wild River (1960), 361
Wild Strawberries (1957), 373
Wilder, Billy, 20, 334
Willeman, Paul, 380
William Morris Agency, 323, 333
Williams, Alan, 54, 71
Williams, Raymond, xiv, 87, 108, 250
Wine of Youth (1924), 39–40
Wings (1927), 269
Winning of Barbara Worth, The (1926) , 285
Wishing Ring, The (1914), 172, 178, 208–9
Wizard of Oz, The (1939), 355
Wohl broadside lamp, 274
Wollen. Peter, 80, 380, 383
Woman, The (1915), 197
Woman in the Window, The (1944), 75, 83
Woman of the World, A (1925), 15, 22, 26, 179
Women in industry, 430
Woods, Frank, 105–7, 298, 299
Workprints, 277–8
World-Pictures Company, 137, 398, 403
Wrong Man, The (1957), 83
Wrong Move, The (1975), 382
Wurlitzer organ, 103
Wurtzel, Sol, 321, 326
Wuthering Heights (1939), 14, 25, 140, 345, 346
Wyler, William, 52, 62, 78, 140, 327, 333, 341, 346, 351,
361, 372
Ye Gods! What a Cast! (1915), 212

You for Me (1952), 36
You Only Live Once (1937), 81
Young and Dangerous (1957), 61

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The Classical Hollywood Cinema

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson

Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Booth, Anita Loos,

ISBN 0-203-35881-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37137-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

Part One The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60 1

Part Two The Hollywood mode of production to 1930 88

Part Three The formulation of the classical style, 1909–28 245

16 The continuity system 287

Part Four Film style and technology to 1930 473

Part Five The Hollywood mode of production, 1930–60 548

Part Six Film style and technology, 1930–60 580

Part Seven Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema 606

Appendix A The unbiased sample 629

Between pages 112 and 113

5.26 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

16.2516.28 The Hired Hand (1918)

17.22 The Magician (1926)

27.16 All That Money Can Buy (1941)

We thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison

The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60

Norms, paradigms, and standards

Viewers, schemata, and mental sets

The ordinary film

Causes and effects

The modest narration

Causality, character, and point-of-view

Such repetition is not extensive—that would be as transgressive as no repetition at all. Optimally, a

The reappearing narration

The winding corridor

Temporal order: the search for meaning

Duration, deadlines, and dissolves

The image: composition

From montage to découpage

O Minotaur, here is your Ariadne’s thread: decoupage.1

Anatomy of the scene

PLAY GIRL (1941) Commentary

Ellen rises and walks around the edge of the sofa

She smiles and walks left (figs 6.24 and 6.25).

Benson’s cubist picture

The assimilation of the European avant-garde

The case of film noir

The reappearing author

Norms, subversion, conditions of production

The Hollywood mode of production to 1930

A mode of production: initial definitions

The historical context

Detailed division of labor and commercial filmmaking

1) the ‘director’ system, the dominant system from 1907 to 1909;

All five systems display a detailed division of labor.

‘Absolutely the superior of any moving picture film ever made’

Life of an American Fireman (1903)

Coalescence of industrial interest groups

A professional engineers’ association

‘The balance between formula and showmanship’

The innovative worker

In an analysis of the pan-focus style, a trade writer noted:68

1.1 (above left) Bulldog Drummond (1929)

1.2 (above right) *The Show (1927)