Justifiably, I should add, having just played his hand in two films that, in their own and different ways, would shape what we’ve come to know as “Expressionist” cinema. First, in 1913, he had played Balduin in Stellan Rye’s darkly fantastical The Student of Prague; later, in 1915—with mud now drowning the battlefields of France—he’d shot The Golem (1915), his solo directorial debut. All of Berlin was agog with talk of them. And of him.

When I look at this photograph (the slouched-unsettling photograph), I wonder why it was that Wegener—with his star in the ascendent—chose to “remake” The Golem five years later in 1920. The Golem: How He Came Into The World was really a prequel, albeit a prequel that didn’t just borrow but totally consumed much of the “original” film. Looking at them side by side, as singular stills—and with all the divorcing-from-context that this implies—it can be quite difficult to know precisely which film is which; and you become certain that you’re eyeballing a doppelgänger—or a pair of them (naturally [unnaturally]). Yet again, not much—only 108 metre-long fragments— of the original Golem survives; as if it really was eaten up by its misfit replacement. We’ll never know for sure.

Remakes were not unusual in the silent era. Remember Cecil B. DeMille’s voracious-obsessive habit for remaking his films—not just once but many times. Gance, Griffith, Hitchcock too and, later—in the era of sound—John Ford and even Yasujiro Ozu. It makes sense; after the passage of a few years, old audiences had drifted away, new audiences emerged, and new technologies (including sound) allowed filmmakers—and their erstwhile backers—to “do it again”, but this time with more excess and rigour and spectacle. There was no meaningful sense of an archive; just the mechanical maw of cinema itself (a kind of bleeding edge). This meant that filmmakers could confidently dip back into the (very recent) past and take an “old” (not old) film out for a second spin; armouring it with new technological advances and padding it with longer run-times and more confident actors. This was the idea, at least. There was a gravitation toward the old in the advancing-bleeding pulse of the new.

So, Wegener wasn’t unusual in this regard. He felt, specifically—here’s that old story again—that new developments in scenography had emerged over the past five years; that a war had been lost, and a new hard-nosed mourning had set in. The times felt darker; less fantastical than funereal. Deutsche Bioscop had also snubbed his demands for a richly-confected historical setting; it was just too expensive. Don’t you know there’s a war on?

What’s more—and this is a really compelling argument for me—Wegener wanted to step once more into the heavy skin of his Golem; and he sought out the darkly cavernous mind of Hans Poelzig—an architect turned designer—to help him realise his vision. It was a physical thing; a “test” of acting and the acting body. Together,—here’s the party line—they would define the look of German Expressionism; giving it flesh and shape and life.

But it’s not really as simple as that.

***

Many years later, film theorist Siegfried Kracauer—trying to draw strict lines of sight between Expressionism and the later acid convulsions of National Socialism—shared the opinion that Wegener’s face betrayed “the strange visions that haunted him”.1 He was a “sinister magician”; a kind of fallen Janus to the kindly, avuncular trickeries of the magister Melies (his natural forebear). This is one take; one opinion.

Lotte Eisner—in her much more nuanced and less deterministic treatment of Expressionism—invoked Wegener’s lecture from 1916, given on an Easter Monday, in which he mused about a future of the cinema in which

“a line appears, then curves and changes [giving] birth to faces, then disappears. [I] can imagine a kind of cinema which would use nothing but moving surfaces, against which there would impinge events that would still participate in the natural world but transcend the lines and volume of the natural”.2

In other words, Wegener had his eye on the soul; if film could obtain a soul. It’s an excitingly abstract vision; this never-really-achieved potentiality for Wegener—with his penchant for wives and wise men and his leery cosiness with the Nazi regime – to become a sort of fifth-column flicker-film abstractionist within the edgy but still crystallising landscapes of big Expressionism. He saw phantoms; imagined proto-chemical ghostly emanations appearing and disappearing on the laminated surface of the film strip.

He was the first; but he was also the first to recognise, within the still forming sump of this “new” German cinema, that the movement contained a kind of quivering mysticism; a space in which “the natural and the artificial” might become impossibly entangled together. Kracauer is perhaps too quick to render this down as a kind of promissory of later violence (insofar as Kracauer’s whole thesis is that Hitler was birthed by Caligari). Eisner met him where he was, before Wegener did the actual bad thing and threw his lot in with the post-33’ German film industry; when he’d work on pointless, pitiful films that he was better than, and which did nothing but diminish him.

***

Fast forward to 1933. There were cattle in the Große Schauspielhaus. The theatre of Max Reinhardt—who’d propped up Wegener’s early acting career—was on its belly, crawling into the darkness. Reinhardt had been forced to sell his shares; now it had been taken over as Der Theater des Volkes—the “theatre of the people”, epicenter of a kind of strength-through-joy joylessness which, in 1938, saw members of the German Labour Front destroy Poelzig’s hanging stalactites and scrub away the exterior features; blanding and flattening the gloopy, sepulchral froth of his and Reinhardt’s Expressionist vision. Fritz Fuß—a lackey and a midwit—redesigned the interiors. By 1941, the theatre was unrecognizable. Expressionism had had its day; and now it was frogmarched out onto the wintry banks of the Spree and unceremoniously shot.3

Today, the empty lot where the Große Schauspielhaus once stood—because of course, it was demolished in 1988—has been turned into some yet blander amalgam of “mixed-use housing”, a hotel, apartments, offices. Somewhere, Poelzig’s stalactites hang still; like dancing shadows on the cave wall.

***

So let’s turn back to 1913, 1916, 1920; as years in which—assuming you weren’t some unlucky conscript in the German Heer—things were looking a little bit healthier. Both The Student of Prague and The Golem came during the Great War; sharp, angular, messy expressions that percolated up from all that mud and blood and toil and sorrow, albeit glazed for the watchful eyes of audiences who might yet survive the morass. Yes, Expressionism would eventually fall by the wayside; cast off as only so much degeneration—though, as far as I’m aware, no films made their way into Hiter and Goebbel’s Die Ausstellung “Entartete” Kunst—the “degenerate” art exhibition of November 1937, featuring such geometric abstractions as Johannes Molzahn, Jean Metzinger and Kurt Schwitters. Keen-eyed readers will notice the parallels and connections between their image-worlds and that of Caligari.

Because Expressionism would become swallowed by its own image, a phantom of its own wildly-running-disordered success, it can be all-too-easy to overlook its first stuttery steps. We tend to scrub the record. Balduin-Wegener sells his reflection to a sorcerer, Scapinelli, which the latter absconds with. Fool me once. In a way— stretching—I’m reminded of Takahiko Iimura’s much, much later essay on his own approach to filmmaking; in which he spoke about the idea of film not as a “movie” but as a “reflected picture” (eiga).4 In this way, I kind of like to think about Balduin – the student—as a “victim” of cinema, kind of like he’s been immured into the silvery blossoming head-cutting-apart images of cinema. His eiga-eiga—his reflected picture within a picture (the film)—has been carried away, shot out of a projection booth, splattered against a wall (the projection screen), and bounced back into the eyes of its spectators.

But I said that Wegener’s phantom-photo-theorie—that film might become half natural, half bionic; a matter of lines bending and convulsing—wasn’t something he ever managed to realistically achieve. But is this right, actually? In 1920’s Golem, mirrors and horizons and the eclipsing-leaning of buildings in the Prague ghetto dissect-bissect the world through which Rabbi Loew and Miriam and Florian must work their way, and Wegener discovered a way to conjour this impasto of ancient, hidden, submerged places—a mux of internalities and externalities—in a way that still feels tethered to the naturalistic, organic, hand-made world of wattle and daub and ashlar stone. It is both things at the same time; real and unreal; made and unmade— and the wheeling stars, picked out above Loew’s head, seem to proffer up their wiggling lines; fomenting toward abstraction, or—at least—the transcendental plane.

In both films, Wegener acts—and doesn’t just direct. With the composite visual world of 1920 (a proto Expressionism), he stepped darkly-defiantly into the weird and the eerie. In 1913, a sorcerer of sorts stole Balduin’s soul; in 1916 and 1920, a soul is placed back within unliving clay that becomes living again. Wegener is re-animating his poor, forlorn student through the wrecking-sacral body of the Golem; and the world also tilts, sagging and needling at its edges. Yes he was setting up the conditions for Fritz Lang and Robert Weine and F. W. Murnau and Pabst to really whip up the edgy, striating violence of what Expressionism would become in the long 1920s, but The Golem remains subtler in its effects; it tangles the natural and the artificial in ways that eclipse neither (unlike Weine’s Caligari, which rejects the “real” representative world entirely).

The dark silhouetting; not just in that astronomical first scene—a blanket of stars and illuminations above a splurge of urban crenelations; Rabbi Loew’s forewarning of coming trouble, and the intimation of hidden knowledge and its occult revelation. Wegener uses his light, his silhouettes, his chiascuro-impasto like a palette knife, and all the light-capturing/blocking apparatus of film to try to squeeze inside of the silvery surface of film where—as he’d hoped and dreamed—the real and the artificial were breeding and knotting and entangling together. The camera cannot help but pulse; but when Wegener revisited The Golem in 1920, five years later, he did so with the newfangled armature of German Expressionism, glooping up his sets and beginning to inhabit what Eisner, later, described as the “shadowy, enigmatic interiors” that would characterise the movement and its aesthetics—as if there’s a kind of stepping from the fantasies of the dark, phantasmic forest into the newly mechanical apparatus of post-war industrialism; even if, ironically, the later film was also a prequel; set many centuries before.

But that’s just the thing: Wegener’s Prague isn’t industrial. Not in 1915 or in 1920. It precedes it. Think of Lang’s gigantic concrete trees in his Die Nibelungen duet of 1924, where he fully displaced the gloop and grottos of the “German soul” with the maschinenfabrik of the industrial age.

I’m being vague, actually; what I’m actually interested in is why Wegener chose to “remake”—but really to refract—The Golem in 1920, five years after first making the film in 1915. I don’t think the go-to arguments are sufficient (i.e., that he wanted to exploit newfangled and more confident technologies).

They are not the “same” film, insofar as the 1920 film is a prequel, is bigger, has a different texture and rhythm. Yet, for all intents and purposes, they are the same film; reflected-refracted through Wegener’s newly expansive thinking about photo-theorie and the coalescing language of German Expressionism; which he wanted to help codify, albeit with a now seemingly unfashionable Romanticism that would be rejected in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, made that same year (1920), and whose scenography and realization are all edges and unreality and nightmarish convulsions. Tristan Ettlemen has nudged these thoughts around; I’m coming to them as leftovers. He said, the film “clearly dovetail its Romantic elements into Expressionism”. It is a melange; a thing in both camps. There is more light, too, than the cavernous chiaroscuro that would eventually darken “pure” Expressionism; let’s not lose sight of that.

In other words—and I’m not really saying anything new here—The Golem of 1920 was only prototypically “Expressionist”. As far as I can see it, this film—or this pair of films—occupied a kind of ersatz space between Romanticism and Expressionism; and while we can chalk this down to Poelzig and Wegener’s getting-a-handle-on the aesthetic image-world of Expressionism (they were learning, figuring things out), I find it more compelling to argue that Wegener didn’t want his film to lapse entirely toward the unreality of Caligari (harsh geometric abstraction; HGA), but to inhabit the real and the unreal in the same cell of film (RAU); because this is precisely what he’d mused about four years earlier, in 1916, when he imagined a film in which “events [would] still participate in the natural world but transcend the lines and volume of the natural”.

That is to say; that the real and the unreal—the natural and its transcendence—must necessarily co-exist, dialectically, in productive tension. The Golem—his film of 1920—seems to meet precisely these conditions: dark and stark and gloopy and fantastical, but not breaking apart into the total twisted abstractionism of Wiene’s Caligari; unlike it, Wegener still had a foot in the “real” world; and there was still a man of flesh and bone wrapped inside that un-living suit of clay.

It’s hot right now in London. It’s hot everywhere. Putting aside—inescapable, correct, suffocating—all these timely-timely gestures toward the climate crisis, I’ve started thinking about the not-so-long history of film and how difficult it is to watch a film when it is very hot; all stuffy and needling and amorphous. The “lost” films of Corra and Ginna—and the lost films of every other “lost” filmmaker—become the perfect antidote to too-much-hotness, if for no other reason than they cannot be seen, that they escape the eye, that they resist the indexical absorption of “Looking” and instead become (or already are) objects of distant rumination, rather like the thought of sky-splitting rain during a summer drought; a rain that will never fall, cannot fall, cannot even be imagined to fall. In the schmerz of the great English heatwave, I close my eyes and think about films I cannot ever see. I can do this outside; cooling myself in the shade of a tree.

They—the films of Corra and Ginna—were bombed out of existence. Let me get that clear. During WW2, what existed of Futurist cinema—because they were Futurist filmmakers, in their way—was almost entirely obliterated by Futurist bombs; or, by the kinds of bombs and bombing the Futurists so gleefully reified.

But let’s describe what we can describe. Detail, allusion, adjacency, context. If the lost films are indeed lost then what remains of them? Surely something, else I wouldn’t have mentioned them in the first place.

Corra and Ginna were probably the first filmmakers to experiment with a kind of pure abstraction; scoring and painting directly on the film strip in a way that would anticipate the work of Stan Brakhage on the far side of the Second World War. It feels fitting that Brakhage’s most extensive exploration of painting-film-abstraction was an “adaptation” of Dante’s Inferno—a perhaps winking but probably unintentional recognition of his Italian progenitors.

The collaborators—both Italian—were at first close to and then functionaries of the Futurist movement; besotted and beholden as they were to a materialist/ic, formal, motional cinema over what Peter Gidal would later call the “narrative (dominant) cinema”; the cinema of illusions. Here we might differentiate what they were doing from the work of Émile Cohl, a Frenchman, their contemporary, whose works—which do survive; at least in part—were concerned with a kind of “representational hallucination”; half akin to a proto-Surrealism, the works of the Incoherents. Fantasmagorie (1908) is the prototypical Cohl. But he was unlike Corra and Ginna; I think you can see how and why.

I will probably say a little more about Futurist cinema in later posts, because this necessitates jumping forward to the 1930s. We’re not “there” yet. So I’ll reconcile myself to talk about Ginna and Corra in a certain amount of depth, even if we don’t have access to what must have been their most original and striking cinematic works. They were also among the very first to experiment with abstraction in (canvas) painting, and you might get an impression of what Ginna was capable of by studying the above painting—a canvas finished some time in the first decade of the 20th century. It is dripping and swirling and “motional”; insofar as it conveys a frozen moment of sultry dynamism. We will have to imagine what a moving film-work, executed in this style, would have looked like; especially given that it would have been painted on the much more confined space of a film cell; and simplified too, given that the artists would have to paint and repaint the image, albeit differently, over and over again—many hundreds or even thousands of times.

The first tranche of their films—hand-painted abstractions—were made between 1911 and 1912. There were six of them; or, at least six of them are absolutely known to have existed at some point or another—bearing with them such titles as A Chord of Colour (1911), Study on the Effects of Four Colours (1911) and The Rainbow (1912).

Ginna would eventually join the Theosophical Society in 1913, drawn to the occult and esoteric themes he was beginning to gravitate toward in his paintings, which we must assume were carried over and replicated, given motion, in the films he later made with Corra; reflecting what for him had been “the true starting point of art”, “the descent of human spirituality towards the sensitive world”. Lucia Collarile suggests that Ginna painted “states of mind, in pure thought and pure colour, that resulted from a profound search for inwardness”.1 It was this search that saw him attempt to produce a “chromatic drama” through “the union of music, painting, literature, theatre and cinema”; which led directly to his efforts, with Bruno Corra, to “[apply] colour directly onto film”. It was only a little later, in 1912, during the busiest days of their collaboration, that Ginna introduced himself to the Futurist general staff in Milan. Much of the work that Ginna would later do was also lost, though we’re indebted to various personal accounts of the processes he worked through in order to “wield” his colours toward a “fantastic expressive synthesis”. In their place, we have fragments and studies and scraps. They point toward the motional, chromatic drama that his and Corra’s films would have embodied had they survived.

Later, in 1916, they produced another grander film called Vita Futurista. Roundly described as the “first Futurist film”—at least officially—it was commissioned by no less than Filippo Marinetti himself. It was an episodic film; a series of anti-narrative vignettes that “illustrated” the aims and ambitions of Futurism. It was destroyed only much later, in 1960; or it was “lost”. Its sequences were descriptive: “How the Futurist sleeps”, “The Sentimental Futurist”, “How the Futurist walks”.

It is also lost, though a handful of scruffy stills survive. Ghostly and fogged and imprecise; it’s difficult to intuit what each of them depicts. In them, there is something akin to the “movement photography” of the Futurist Bragaglia brothers, whose work sought to capture the dynamism and energy of the moving human body; as if we can intuit toward the lost Futurist film-world: an accordioned-electrical-smearing of the body jolting-dancing through its positions.

But Vita Futurista—perhaps because of its lost-ness—has a yet ghostlier affect than the Bragaglia photographs; where its foggy frames can only evoke a sense that they were encoded by another alien mind, strange and distant and unknown; or that they were the work of some secretive outsider artist, scrawling away with dry pen on tatters of paper in their unvisited rooms. Even then, Bragaglia’s thesis evinces perhaps nothing more than a wailing, insufficient desire for photography to be film:

“the resulting [...] photograph, achieved by experimental and other means, would succeed in registering the expression and the vibration of actual life, and in distancing itself from obscene, brutal, and static realism, and it would no longer be the usual photography”

A photograph, expressive and vibrating with “actual life”, that is “no longer [...] photography” feels like a theory for the film, albeit a theory of film without movement. Such were the paradoxes. Bragaglia was kicked out of the Futurist ranks in 1913 for heresies such as these. Corra and Ginna strove toward something much more vitial and moving. Their lot was to have most of their work destroyed by the same inhuman forces that their Futurist masters had so eagerly cheered on.

But these lost digressions and speculations come up against the one surviving Futurist film from this first, early period of Italian filmmaking. Thaïs—made by Bragaglia himself—exists today in a parlous print, scruffy and dim, but through which we can trace the promissory of the now-dissolved Futurist kino; showing that his efforts to create a filmic photography led him precisely and predictably to the doors of cinema itself. No surprises there, I should think.

The film itself is also a rather predictable love story centred on a wilful diva; a beautiful Slavic countess played by Thaïs Galitzy. Her great pleasure or compulsion (or both) is her desire to seduce married men, “dragging them to the brink of ruin”. Eventually, she seduces the lover of Bianca, her best friend, who—distraught on discovering this act of faithlessness—throws herself from her horse and dies. Thaïs, consumed by her own guilt, is subjected to a hypnotically surreal barrage of unreal images before she too takes her own life.

It is with no little irony that the eponymous Thaïs—dressed in an outfit so spectacular and erotic and strange that it will “drive the count crazy”, as the story goes—appears to us, in the blown-out raggedness of the film’s surviving print, as a blossoming smear of vapourous yellow. If this is the Futurist horizon then it’s an unintentional sleight of hand; the inverse entropic trajectory that ultimately afflicts even chemicals and machines. You could say: here’s the poison gas that, even then—in 1917—was groping its way across the battlefields of Flanders and Verdun. If that isn’t the Futurism that Marinetti and his engine-operator-artists ultimately clamoured for then I cannot say what is.

There is (allegedly) a print of the film that hasn’t been muddied and broken, but I’ve been unable to find it anywhere. In its place I’ve managed to find and study stills taken from this better, cleaner, less muddy print, but there are only a handful of them that seem to exist (which, ironically, are also in a muddled state of decay). We can see a film whose set design is very beautiful, sort of Diet Cocteau, sort of geometrically abstruse, the not-yet-modern man’s image of the “modern” (sharp corners, edges, repeating patterns, and – for some reason – squares).

In this light, Ginna and Corra’s lost cinema represents one of many similar narratives from the early years of film: a “lost” pathway that may have shaped film, but no longer forms a part of its record. But the cinema is a land of ghosts. It haunts us from time to time.

There’s a pretty useful article by Massimo Introvigne on this matter, “Around Giacomo Balla: Italian Futurists and Theosophy 2: Futurism and the Theosophical Society”, which can be read here.

It’s a familiar story. Less familiar is how Abel Gance—this is the first time the Frenchman has properly entered this history—approached a kind of auto-cocained stimulation through his very early cinema; entangling the process of image-making, turning it into a kind of recreational derangement.

When you make a very famous and very ponderous film, people—by which I mean critics, or writers; or both—tend to forget your early works; as if “you” (Gance) sprung out of the earth fully formed. So, we think of Gance as the serious-serious maker of J’accuse, La Roue, Napoleon. Big films with weighty subjects.

Before he made these films, however, Gance was jollier and stranger and (eventually) sadder, too. But, for a while, I think he was quite akin to his fellow countryman Jacques Tati (who was born in 1907). He hadn’t experienced much tragedy or suffering. He hadn’t yet been punctured by life. Tragedy would shape his cinema; but this was still to come.

La Folie du docteur Tube (1915) is a strange and largely forgotten film. I don’t know if Gance specifically had Freud in mind when he made it. It means, “the madness of Doctor Tube”; if you hadn’t already figured that out. In the film, Dr Tube—who is all gurning, gangly, gnashing with a fake moulded dome on his head; like a kind of papier-mache mountain—starts snorting a mysterious white powder of his own invention, becoming unhinged. More unhinged.

Now, his servant and his nieces and their boyfriends—I think—start messing around with the powder. Their bodies become increasingly twisted and distorted, bending toward inhuman figurations and muddled perversions of “ordinary” flesh. It’s not scary, though; this isn’t a Murnau or Pabst. We’re in the hands of a (still jolly) Frenchman, it’s basically a funfair film; albeit with a hint of what might later be called “body horror” (a term that gets used far too much, too often, too uncritically).

Gance said of his film, “I got drunk too quickly and said, ‘I’m going to impress them at the cinema because I have a very powerful idea’”. He was already under the influence. In that condition, subject to a lot of alcohol, he thought about how sight and seeing can become disordered.

“It was”, he said, “a story with the decomposition of light rays, which makes things no longer seem at all from the angle from which we see them”.

It’s a difficult account to follow (perhaps he was drunk), but Gance was talking about anamorphic lenses; or, he was talking about the use of bending-distorting mirrors, because anamorphic lenses didn’t exist yet. “I did everything that I technically imagined the audience would appreciate [because] it had never been done”. La Folie was a kind of experiment in how the technical apparatus of film might be bent and twisted away from “ordinary” ends; it was also an essay or a position-statement revealing Gance’s own attitude-philosophy toward the cinema. In this, he would make certain steps toward bridging the pure trickery of Méliès with the narratology of the later impressionists (among them Jean Vigo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein). He was saying: a film isn’t told; a film is seen and seen-through (because we quibble and question how it “departs” from ordinary seeing; how it is both like and unlike reality).

Is La Folie an “avant-garde” film? It is certainly an experimental film, when we think about what Gance set out to do. He said, I’m going to play around with lenses in order to approximate the effect of being drunk or drugged. He conceived of the camera as a kind of eye that could (unlike a human eye) be manipulated with mechanical instruments (rather than chemical-biological ones).

The avant-garde seems to occupy a slightly more intentioned-positional place in film. The avant-garde is the post-war filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, many of whom were structural filmmakers—or later became structural filmmakers.

But, in 1995, Jan-Christopher Horak edited a volume called Lovers of Cinema: the first American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, where they relocated the emergence of (an) avant-garde much earlier than people usually talk about. For the interests of this volume, it really started happening during the 1930s. There was also the European avant-garde of the 1920s, with people like Man Ray and Fernand Léger creating films that looked like moving symbolist and cubist paintings; combining drawing and animation with plastic figuration and all sorts of irregular shapes and rhythms. It was a kind of metricality. These were also avant-garde films and experimental films.

But, Gance—like Lois Weber before him—was an autochthonous entity; coming across these visual streams without the structuring interpretive frame of cinematic modernism. He worked his way there through b-movies and genre and a certain amount of fucking around and finding out. In this he was aided by Léonce-Henri Burel—his long-term cinematographer.

Together, they would “work out” an increasingly grander and more cohesive visual language. Kevin Brownlow makes the obvious-necessary point that Gance “made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before”. He also says “since”. There were interstitial films—between La Folie and J’accuse—where this stance became more apparent. In 1917, Mater Dolorosa was a moody, morbid but still quite sappy-sentimental affair, but it showed how keen an eye Gance had for deep, carving shadows and expressive lighting.

By the by, Albert Dieudonné plays one of the film’s “young men”, one of the boyfriends. Eventually, in 1927, Dieudonné would assume the role of Gance’s Napoleon. When he died in 1976, he was buried in his Napoleon costume. Nobody in the world can see this image; yet, it is an image in the world (which is also a world of images).

The film, La Folie, is a document of irreducible dream-fiction; an orderly disordering of perception. If you read the writings of Edgar Morin (see: fleshy lips, tightly narrowed eyes; the author of La Méthode and The Cinema: or, The Imaginary Man) then you will happen upon his concern with the cinema as an instrument that brings about “huge gaps in the objective image”, that “swells and overflows [objectivity], surges and gushes forth”. It is not literally magic, but it is a kind of “magical vision”; it shares a correspondence with dreaming—how it “disrupts the boundaries of time and space”.1 Early, Gance’s cinema—his cinema before his cinema; before his bigger heavier dinners—was such a surging-gushing. But I can’t say whether Edgar Morin saw La Folie. It feels like he might have seen it. We will never know.

The lens twists and bends; enlarging and exaggerating. It is literally topsy-turvy. It offers a kind of (resolving) entanglement between illusion and “non-illusionist” or materialist film that Peter Gidal would write so standoffishly and critically about in the 1970s.2 Is the film about the good/bad docteur or is it “about” the formal mechanisms of film (a seeing/sensing/optical machinery)?

The doctor’s head—so ridiculous in its Hulotian pomposity—suddenly becomes the least “weird” thing about his addled body. Is this Gance’s big joke? Dog-body gets swirled and scrunched up; it is like a distorting mirror at a country fair, and it could be that Gance was really sending up the kind of Méliès-ian trick-films that he and the French cinema-going public had grown up with.

But the tipsy-tripology comes to an end; a kind of “balance” is restored. Now the girls and their guys toast each other with champagne; seated and lace table-clothed (primly). But Dr. Tube remains in the background, cramming his head and shoulders into a menacing birdcage. His mania isn’t quite spent. He could be a filmmaker; he could be Gance himself. Only time will tell.

There are three taut strings. The camera is angled down at them, only several feet away. Three pale hands hover above the strings; each clasping a sharp and waiting razor. When all three strings are cut the gallows’ trapdoor will slam open, plunging “The Boy” to his death. We are witnessing an execution; or the preamble to one.

Robert Harron played “The Boy”. He had a pencil moustache and a quick frown. Later—apropos of nothing; or everything—Harron fatally shot himself in a New York hotel room. This was 1920, only a few years after his starring role. Bleeding out, he made a call to hotel reception; seeking assistance. “I’m in a devil of a fix”.1

We are very close to the end of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1915). The strings will only not be sliced should “The Dear One”, his lover (played by Mae Marsh)—who is now racing across dale and valley carrying with her the identity of the “true” murderer—arrive at the prison before it’s too late. To render the virtuous truth. To save his life.

D. W. G. plays this tension for all it’s worth. He cuts between them; flashing his two-sided coin—or is it a blade? It is part and parcel of his message of justice and love and virtue and forgiveness. The “intolerance” of his film is bitter; it crushes the innocent.

For D. W. G., these three cords—the executioner’s cords—aren’t just “keys”. They are tuned musical strings. His film might as well be plucking them.

In fact, didn’t Jean Louis Schefer write that the silent cinema “has never been able to be a silent cinema”?2 It whispers. It has a structuring, musical rhythm. If images succeed each other as notes succeed each other then doesn’t this movement represent its own kind of harmony—or at least a sense of counterpoint? D. W. G. thought so.

The careening, blue-lit carriage of a Babylonian chariot. The violent crescendo of a violent pogrom of French Huguenots. Griffith cuts between them, and the sequencing of this cutting—which is at first leisurely, almost incidental—speeds up. It acquires a feverish alliteration. Babylon, Paris, Judea, America. Flames gut the harem of Belshazzar. Knives and wetted blades flash through linen and lace. Much of the time, with Intolerance, death and violence are the wages of injustice; and they are never far away.

For D. W. G. it’s all a matter of speeding the counterpoint up. Faster, quicker, more mobile. Intensifying. His critics called it incoherent (we’ll get to that), un-unified. But isn’t it just so exciting? It’s certainly disjointed. But isn’t that what he wanted?

The walls of Babylon are being sundered; great machines of war are tearing it apart. Griffith cuts back, a visual metronome, to the arc-lit shrouded face of Lilian Gish. Mae Marsh trembles, her thin wrists, her puckered face. Miriam Cooper—“The Friendless One”—fires a pistol through a tenement’s scabby window; fatally striking the body of her bullying lover. He is already assaulting Marsh. The Boy, Harron, will take the fall; he’ll hang for it. These things are connected. Why? Because Griffith is telling us they are; because he is showing us they are.

These tensions flex and strain and snap across the surface of Intolerance; almost as if Griffith is wrestling it to the floor. This is a big film; he must be panting and heaving. The lines of tension bite into its body, yanking it around.

In the space of two years, D. W. G. would refine the still frenetic-diffuse language of cinema. 1915, 1916. From his hands there emerged technical and well-understood phrases that, repeated, almost like a mantra, obtained a kind of unassailable concreteness in how we write and think about film.

1915, 1916. Two years in which the nascent industrial cinema turned itself inside out. The Birth of a Nation threw its lot in with racial panic, a cynical-severe autopsy of Reconstruction told through the leery, forgetful lens of US capital-culture on the cusp of their entry to another pulverising war. It abhors war. He says as much.3 But even more deeply it prickles its nose at the white panic of miscegenation. In this it becomes bilious; daubing black paint on its face and dolling out fantasias of violence against “white innocence”. There’s a wild, preening desperation to it. It is why such furore rose around the film. Mayors were petitioned, letters were written. The NAACP came out to cease its production. D. W. G. had sundered America. His film is giddy and stupid.

He was preening, of course, and hurt; and the big, monolithic tale of Intolerance—which came after Birth of a Nation, remember—wasn’t really that interested in its purported humanism. D. W. G. saw himself as the victim of his critic’s “intolerance”. Paul McEwan has slyly shown how the truculent filmmaker rarely broke cover about this most nefarious production. In 1915, he made the defiant claim that its story was “based upon truth in every detail”. Years later, in 1930, more ruminative, talking to the actor Walter Huston in an awkwardly-staged interview, muses that he “thinks” the film is true; pausing, “Truth? What is the truth?” There is a crumb of doubt.4 He was about to choke on it.

With Intolerance, a “long” year later, he made his plea against injustice. Because he was “treated badly”; because butter wouldn’t-couldn’t melt in his mouth. &Etc. His film was an artistic achievement and a wild popular success; it was also a pernicious artefact of vile racism and ethno-nationalist bombast. D. W. G.’s “truth”—that thing he felt so certain of and then doubted—might be found in the mix and muddle of these things.

For Manny Farber he was “the revolutionary Griffith”. He was “half tory and half culture bug”; possessed of a “practical genius”. Farber was writing two years apart. He came back to D. W. G. many, many times.5

Through these brief pell mell years in the American cinematic experiment, D. W. G. was ironing things out; just as he was boxing and shadow-boxing with his own critics and ideals. Egomaniac or “Master”? Both, probably.

There was parallel editing, which we also call “cross cutting”; continuity editing; masking, close-ups, emotional storyteling. David Wark Griffith—or so it is typically understood—brought these things to the cinema where they hadn’t previously existed; as if he was one of Méliès’ magicians. It is wizardly. There is the intimation of Jacques Rancière’s “problematic alignment” of the many tripped-up functions of the image in modernity. D. W. G. brought this crisis-contradiction machine to a head.

The insert and the close-up. It’s true that they were already present in the grammatology of cinema. They’d been seared into nitrate by industrious Brightonians many years before. Englishmen, in fact. Ok. But D. W. G. refined the instrument; making its intrusion less a condition of its own novelty—done because it could be done—than a necessary narrative instrument. Done because it needed to be done, because it advanced or complicated the story he wanted to tell.

The iris blinks around Cooper’s regretful face. D. W. G’s film is big when it needs to be big—just think of those barnstorming depictions of Babylon; with their teeming ant-colonies of extras—and tight when it presses in. He is singling her out for her guilt. It’ll come to be important. Later. These radical proximities—lens to face—collapsed the gap between spectator and actor; complicating the camera equipment itself as a thrumming mystical-material bridge. It drilled light into the human condition; for the first time, you were really being invited by film to look inside the actor’s invisible psyche.

After all, D. W. G. was a moralist—and film was his illuminating sedge. The Birth of a Nation opens with a “plea for the art of the motion picture”. It speaks of the need to show “the dark side of wrong” so that we may “illuminate the bright side of virtue”. Intolerance—produced after The Birth of a Nation’s troubled, wretched apercu—goes further. In it, D. W. G. makes greater lunging pleas to his audience. With both films, we’re not trusted “simply” to witness (or, better, to be subject to) moving images. First we need to understand why D. W. G. is showing them to us. There is a nervous-thin-skinned trembling behind this. The horror of being misunderstood; the diabolism of being misrepresented.

The gentle, funny dancing of Elsie’s feet behind the garden’s curtain—scooping a white cat into her arms—&Etc how she trips running to her brothers. Intimacies of softness.

How “The Mountain Girl”—Constance Talmadge—“sells” herself on the husband market—the chest-thumping of a naive fool, or a holy fool—and where she strikes her chest an arrow will later pierce it. Foreshadowing.

D. W. was getting-inching-industrializing toward a certain maturity for the “new” cinema. He saw a place for continuity editing—sewing actions together in such a way that they felt less fitful than flowing.

Here, Henry B. Walthall and Elmer Clifton’s characters walk across a cotton field. They are friends; for now. First there are a number of slaves (D. W. G., cynically, never shows them as anything other than smiling and happy; he also never calls them “slaves”). They are kept to the rear of the spatial field. The “masters” arrive, the slave owners. Young dullard pimps (though D. W. doesn’t think of them like this). There’s a close-up of a bushel, one young white man plucks a flower from it, a close-up of the flower in his fingers; and now his body moves from frame to frame—away from his compatriot.

Now, in conversation, Griffith cuts between them; both standing in their own clump of cotton, in their separate frames. This is “shot reverse shot”. Benjamin Cameron (a southerner) looks to the left. Phil Stoneman (a northerner) looks to the right. Their eyes match—drawing an invisible thread between both of these parallel, alternating shots. Cameron walks further away, deeper into the cotton field. D. W. G. “irises” his departure—winking him out. The thread has snapped—and with it the invisible unity of their friendship. Love, and war and racial violence will get between them now.

D. W. G. knew that he didn’t need to spell it out. It was softer than that. He could imply it. In fact, the images of his film—how they contaminate, bleed and separate—could tell the story for him. Both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance practiced this newfound logic; both to lesser and greater success.

But there are darker smudgier things in the weft of his 1915 spleen. We are not going to pass over them. The “irregular” black Union troops who raid the South Carolina town, burning and pillaging; their uniforms torn and hanging off their bodies. D. W. G. is at pains to dehumanize them, to distance them. How maliciously he shoots them—and their “premiere”, the politician Lynch (played by Geroge Siegmann). D. W. G. is telling us that the races have their place.

Years have passed. Decades; a whole century. Griffith remains “the most reviled and detested film director in history, with the possible exception of Leni Riefenstahl”. John Steinle wrote this in 2006. It is a long and propulsive and thorny historiography, printed in the pages of Senses of Cinema. It is hosted under their “great directors” vertical. W. D. G., Steinle argues, abandoned the subtlety of his earlier Biograph productions. It was mugging and overdone and hysterical. Becoming larger, increasingly swollen, more afraid, it also began to unravel. It’s true, so far as it goes; but the scale was delirious. He was swallowed by it willingly.

Tom Gunning knew that D. W. G. had opened a sluice to something new and different; establishing a previously unseen voyeurism between performer and camera. Now there was a “relationship [based on] an understanding of the camera, and therefore the cinema spectator, as a powerful voyeur with the ability to penetrate into the character’s most private reaches”. This realisation—stewed and stewarded during his Biograph years—made hay for the primacy of the insert, the previously “thrown-away” gesture. Lilian Gish frustratedly flicking a switch into a stand of bushes; Mae Marsh pressing her fingers into a doorframe, on the other side of which Robert Harron also presses; the plucking of a flower from a field—and all that this entails and signifies.

Quick aside. You also forget how violently D. W. G. wielded his knife. Lens hoods that, at first, in The Birth of a Nation, “irised” the image were, by the time of Intolerance, used to “carve” the frame into ever more angular and discordant shapes. These “masks” draw our attention, yes; but they do more than this. They intensify and derange our feelings toward what we’re seeing. When Babylon falls, he captured the tumbling of a soldier’s body from the walls with a vertically masked “strip”; drawing strange mental comparisons with Richard Drew’s unforgettable photograph from 9/11, “The Falling Man”. D. W. G. would pass the masked baton to Abel Gance. Eventually, angling for nostalgia, Orson Welles would pluck the device from cinematic forgetting.6

Intolerance was called “fatuous” and “grotesque” just as it was felt to be revolutionary. Eisenstein bulged his eyes, lauded it, critiqued it; how it was missing a “unifying” image—how it so desperately needed a stronger appreciation for the mechanics of editing. Later, Eisenstein would propose his own solution to this problematic.

Mae Marsh lifting her daughter’s fallen hat, her fingers reaching toward it—her daughter has been carted away by the women’s temperance movement, a grave misunderstanding—tucking her body against the night wall of the home where her daughter has been taken to, confronting a tumulus of institutional authority she cannot breach. The softness of the clothing; the hardness of the wall. These scenes draw soft, sensitive lines between themselves. They tug and snag. Isn’t he so good in these quiet somber sensitive moments?

But isn’t he also so good when there is clashing and scale and thrown-open spectacle? That Babylonian dolly shot tunnels its way through heaps and cash and piles of bodies. The set would be gutted with flames. Eventually. There is sufficient detail in the image that you can squint and pick out the smallest instances of bodies, jewellery, swords, fabrics, dishes of rose petals softening in water. It is lurid-gigantism. It is so obviously in love with Pastrone’s Cabiria (1913), a film that gave D. W. G. “permission” to accelerate and accentuate.

But, what exactly happened to the unfamiliar-untutored-inexperienced eye when it was subjected to these helter-skelter images, these propulsive images, these collapsing-boundary images? It must have felt like a kind of violence. They moved so quickly and discordantly. Most people hadn’t experienced something like this before. Not outside of a war, an automobile crash, an industrial accident.

The “obliteration of the boundaries [between] the living and the dead, the animal and the mineral, all alike merged in the density [of] the pictorial paste”. Rancière again. This blurring-billowing-out gigantism of D. W. G.—how he encompasses-swallows everything in his accelerating path—is “one of the central forms in the historical imaginary of horror and monstrosity”. These are the words of Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, writing about architecture. But it so easily applies to the grit-texture-scale of D. W. G., too. Enlarged to the point of incontinence; it spills its parts and sprays effluvia everywhere. It “releases that which should be kept inside”.7

In its fullest obliterations, D. W. G.’s tempera-texture is almost abstract. It falls apart. The burning of Babylon. Look at it! Riot and trauma; but then a piercing image plucks the gloom, singling an instance out—salvaging it with the insert and the close-up. A hand gripping a stone; a defiant weapon. The billowing gunsmoke clouds of an American battlefield; and then the tangled bodies of the fallen. Here are the consequences.

What D. W. G. really did—at his best—was to mediate between the paste and the piercing of it.

• How Francis Doublier brought the kino to Russia 📽️

• The singular talent of Yevgeni Bauer 🪆

• Yakov Protazanov’s bridging of the Imperial and Soviet cinemas 🛠️

What exactly was happening in Russian film—big growling bear; Tsarist empire on the cusp of goodnight obliteration—when the rest of the world was learning their melodramas and turning out trick-films? Pre-Revolutionary film, I mean. What was it?

People don’t often ask this question. They don’t often ask this question because the answer concerns a time before Eisenstein, before Dziga Vertov, before “kinopravda” and Odessa steps and maggoty meat and jocular jabbing Dutch angles. It was a less sexy-erotic-muscular time in (Russian) cinema and we prefer to direct our energies elsewhere. Nobody has much time for the silent cinema; even less for its darkest reaches.

Let us (me) be fair, however: Not much was happening in Russian cinema before the 1920s. Not really. Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Vertov and Eistenstein all properly appeared after 1917. Their forebears (mostly) slunk away; into shadows, yes, but also into graves. You are going to hear some names today that might sort-of sound familiar but probably not. You are going to hear about at least one really good film. That’s a good enough reason for reading on. I hope.

Francis Doublier probably shot the first “Russian” film in 1896. He was an electric emissary of the Lumière brothers; bearing with him his cranks and reels and lenses. The first to be used in Russia. Doublier was there—he was rolling his camera—when the Tsarist tides swelled to greet the crowning of their new holy-emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. He was present when those crowds—beered-up and agitated and sweltering—caused a stampede that might have killed thousands.

He also filmed the actual coronation, which had taken place two days earlier.1 Years later—I’ve written about this—Francis Doublier would meet his end in a New Jersey film fire. The coronation he captured would be Russia’s last.

When we evaluate pre-Revolutionary cinema, you have to remember that a great deal of “bourgeois” art was either destroyed or so badly neglected that it suffered an equivalent fate. Many films don’t survive. There is a big void.

But let’s take quick stock. I think there’s an interesting ethnographic pulse from Alexander Drankov who, encouraged by Leo Tolstoy, filmed the everyday lives of peasants. A Peasant Wedding didn’t make it through the flames. His series about the life of con artist Sofia Blyuvshtein was a roaring contemporary success. He worked for a while producing anti-Bolshevik films for the Provisional Government before fleeing to Kiev, Odessa, Constantinople—and eventually Los Angeles. Let’s also not forget the Polish-Russian stop-motion artist Ladislas Starevich. His The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) is a fun and funny little thing. Insects with briefcases and motorcars and fine-windowed houses. Following the Revolution, he left Russia—ultimately settling in France.

Now, let’s fast forward and backward a little. In 1908, Vladimir Romashkov produced Stenka Razin—a fictional dramatization of the life of the historical Cossack leader. Drankov directed. It’s often cited as being the “first” fiction film in Russia. Romashkov had previously attempted to do the same for Boris Godunov (there being no shortage of local legendary heroes for this continental empire), but the production fell through. Too many disputes; changing light. Drankov screened surviving scraps of the production—like a sort of failed re-enactment. These were Scenes from Boyar Life.

Stenka Razin itself is a wonky, ill-mustered and largely forgettable film about which there’s nothing much positive to say. There are tableaux. The actors stand around, very distant from the camera, blurry and imprecise with their distance, gyrating and waving their arms about. Razin is difficult to discern from the gathered mob. There’s the suggestion of commotion; a woman, his bride; Fin, the end. That’s it. Really. It lopes and slops around.

Literary adaptations were big business for the “Imperial” cinema. Yevgeni Bauer and Vladimir Gardin would both cut their teeth making these things. History films—often inflected-spittle-flecked with prodigiously nation-building intent—also offered a type of reliable business. They had an audience. It suited a certain “idea” of the Russian “soul” (fated, torn-asunder, assimilated, destined, pre-destined, tragic, heroic). Anna Karenina came in 1915. Little or nothing of it survives. Perhaps one alleged reel; a tattered fragment of nitrate. Gardin and Protazanov also laid down a very cumbersome take on War and Peace, its run-time tumbling out to more than two hours. Frowning Napoleon; the hero-enemy of Russia. This is a cinema not only freighted with self-importance but cloyingly close to literature.

For want of a “great” Imperial film, my sporting money is on Yevgeni Bauer’s After Death (1915). It’s easily among the best and most memorable and also the most inventive productions made in Russia before the Revolution brought the houses down. Bauer was a Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture alumnus. Musical parents; a caricaturist. Georges Sadoul said he was “the first true artist in the history of cinema”. Few had as strong a pedigree.

It’s a Turgenev adaptation, actually; a refabulation of Klara Milich (1883). Plot is gothic-melancholic and oh-so sad. Andrei—a fragile recluse—is reluctantly “persuaded” to attend some social events with his stalwart friend Tsenin. Andrei meets Zoia (played by Vera Keralli of course). She wants him; Andrei—with fear and trembling—rejects her. Zoia passes away. In fact she kills herself. Now, Andrei becomes morbidly obsessed with the dead actress. He can’t get enough; he is haunted by her.

Bauer knew that the gothic required less than light. His film—it is barely 46 minutes long—skulks in shadows. Lamps and candles throw out meagre halos of illumination. Andrei’s face is stark. The darkness presses in on him. The secluded Andrei, sprawled on his day bed, eyes bolt open; Zoia’s shivering ghost materialises beside him. The most arresting scenes are repetitious; Andrei—dreaming, he stands in a field of wild wheat—stands with his back to us. Through the ears and foliage, Zoia approaches; dressed in glimmering white to his mourner’s black. Now he faces us; crumpled and terrified on the dusty floor. Zoia—her face pained and harrowed—raises her arm above his head, her pale gown troubled by the wind.

The film doesn’t end well for anyone. We leave Andrei at the height of his delusion-paranoia; rising from bed—he too is now dressed in pale underclothes—pointing in the same off-screen direction as the ghostly Zoia. Their bodies are one. We can guess, but it seems that Andrei isn’t much long for this world either. Throughout, Bauer showed an expressive, sculptural attentiveness to shadow and light. His darknesses were profound and impenetrable; his lights were halated and glowing.

Bauer was prolific. In fact he produced eighty films, of which only a smattering survive. I like the sorrowful-strange The Happiness of Eternal Night (1915), whose plot concerns a blind girl—played again by Vera Keralli—who, upon regaining her sight after an implausible operation, mistakes her lover’s younger brother for her beloved, and who—through a series of strangely zombielike narrative jolts—ends up losing her sight again, upon which time the original lover returns to her. Balance—or something like it—resumes.

It’s not the plot that holds you. Not really. Bauer’s lighting, his framing, his rare but clever inserts, his spectacular exterior shots make it memorable and eerie (a snow-clasped St Moscow, draped in white, the onion domes of Saint Basil’s are bulbous and lovely). You are in the hands of somebody who knows what they’re doing; nothing feels dashed off or loose or just “good enough”. The science, the film’s most unsettling insert, feels apropos of Un Chien Andalou and upstream of La Jetée. I mean, isn’t it so clever that the newly sighted Kerali has her face increasingly bathed in slabs of obliterating shadow.

Taken together, Bauer’s filmmaking has a muscularity that you only rarely encounter around this time. He should be watched more often. I really hope somebody plans a retrospective; that his films are properly restored and made available to non-Russian audiences. You’ll notice from these screengrabs how tattered and smeary the available editions are; crunched by digital compression and desperately in need of restoration.

Despite these limitations, these brief scraps of notes gesture toward Bauer as the possessor of a preternatural talent. But his career was cut tragically short; dying from pneumonia in 1917. He was 52 years old. I can’t say if he was a casualty of the tumult of his era (the disintegration-mania of the Great War; the gyrations of the Bolsheviks; the trembling of Kerensky’s Provisional Government), but it’s tempting to make that speculation. He worked on his final film in a bath chair. It was completed by Olga Rakhmanova.2 In 1928 she was expelled from the Association for Revolutionary Cinema for “having nothing to do with Revolutionary cinema”. I’m minded to disagree.

He made other memorable things. Like the dark twisted lurid fantasia of The Dying Swan—another instance of Bauer’s ghostly apparitions and clasping hands and stabbing chiaroscuro; all foreshadowed by trails of pulled-apart flowers, drooping bushels of flowers, a twisted ankle. It orbits around a fatally morbid artist-aristocrat who, searching for the perfect image of “death”, eventually murders the object of his desire—played by a magnetic-pale-insectoid-trembling Vera Kerali—to “better” capture her likeness; body folded-crumpled onto itself, the camera’s lens hood stuttering into black as Andrej Gromov—the artist; lank hair, pointed-quizically-Leninite beard—lays himself down beside her. End. No salvation-catharsis for this audience. It overlaps with a certain morbidity in the late-Imperial symbolism of Blok and Bely; just as it laps up the morbid fantasias of the the coming apocalypse of the Revolution.

I’ve spent a lot of this post talking about Yevgeni Bauer. It’s not too great a stretch to say that he was his generation’s greatest talent, and his contemporaries—Gardin, Chardynin, Vasili Goncharov—hold only the slightest candle to him. But we probably shouldn’t forget that Yakov Protazanov—that defiant talent; his best work was still ahead of him—was also kicking around. He would build bridges between the Imperial and Soviet cinemas in a manner that Bauer, soon to be dead, could not. Protazanov’s early work was decadent, haut bourgeois, flecked with a certain heavy malodorousness. Big cakes of it survive. He was capturing a society teetering on the edge; all it needed was a gentle push.

In October 1917, barely two weeks after the Bolshevik’s storming of the Winter Palace, Protazanov released his then longest and most tell-tale project: a feature-length story of moral collapse and satanic corruption. Satan Triumphant—starring a leery-eyed Alexsandr Chabrov beside a defiant Ivan Mozzhukin—details the spiritual fall of a country pastor and the birthing of a generation-spanning curse. It starts out rural; it becomes urban, haut bourgeois. The make-up is heavy. You notice it immediately. Thickly painted and smudged and darkened.

Like Bauer, Protazanov favoured shadows and the intensifying slice of contoured light. Equally, layers of fabric and clothing and paper and paint pile up; the mise en scène is purely suffocating. A bust half bathed in stark light. Forlorn mother passing into the shadow of her unlit home. Lightning flashes; the pounding work of stuttering bulbs. Look how it opens: the pressed-together faces of the pastor’s congregation, their faces filling the frame from edge to edge; establishing an immediate sense of spiritual “urging”, a heaviness of expectation. We are in the pastor’s shoes. But “the ascetic sermons of the pastor did not please the folk”. Things are about to go off-kilter. What was Protazanov winking at?

Indulge me. We could claim that it was the last film of the Empire and the “first” of the Revolution; and the world that it depicts—eventually, with its dinner jackets and champagne and falling roses and glittering jewellery—would come undone through its own savage conflagration. Civil War was coming to Russia. Its bourgeoisie would flee. The Devil—features twisted into a made-up scowl—burns his way through a naïve congregation, felling a pious pastor in the process; then he turns his sights on the decadent demimonde. The rest—as they say—is history.

The vignette is an “iris”; is a closing sphere; is a word that attaches to the eye, floats above the eye, describes the technical blinking of a cinema camera (which is also a type of eye). It does all these things.

I like to think of it as a telescope described as a telescope; a delimiting of space—its centre giving way to sharp-suddenly or fading-away black. It is often blurry. It might wobble.

The vignette draws attention to its centre and delimits its edge; quartering space as it does so. It’s an arrangement in which the periphery functions as its own border—losing saturation until it burns into total blackness. Vignettes might seem a little janky; even amateurish. It is a kind of blurring fall-off. Skid, skim, drop. It reminds us that there is a centre—a kind of geometry. Even Sjöström—who so often filled his shots from edge to edge—found cause to use them, eventually; when the mood was right. In The Phantom Carriage (1921)—let’s call it Körkarlen, its Swedish title—buttered its extremities with a wavering crust of black. It better suited the morbid, deathly tone of his New Year’s flash-backed Thanatos. Death was coming. Fate was looming. Life was being hemmed in.

Really, the vignette is a device that we most intimately associate with the early days of cinema. To use it today would feel anachronistic, a wilfully antiquated revival; like wearing a monocle or a bowtie. You might look down on it. Fusty.

But how does it happen? Easy. When the light of the lens doesn’t entirely cover the frame of the film. That’s one method. It’s about proximity. Because the lens is accidentally located too close; or because the filmmaker sought this effect. This is why it’s so ambivalent; because we can’t decide whether the vignette being shown to us was intended by accident or design. It’s not always obvious.

The other technique is that of the iris; where the camera operator closes the camera’s iris—the “lid” of the film’s “eye”—in order to create an inverted halo of bitter darkness around the image. No light gets in; we watch with tunnel vision.

Is it the same as a “circle”? I don’t think so. Not quite.

Some of the earliest film images were circular. You might think of Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s moving photo-images of Trafalgar Square. They were taken in 1890; several years before the Lumière brothers “invented” their cinema (I’ve written about this particular fallacy). David Goodman writes very well on it. He introduces Donisthorpe and W.K.L. Dickson and Charles Francis Jenkins; all of whom worked with intentionally circular projections—aping the format of Kodak’s 1888 circular “snapshot” picture format. They did it because it was popular.

Filmmakers learnt how to bathe the frame in sufficient light so as to fill the image to its edges; where the captured shot “bleeds” to its permitted maximum. It fills up like milk in a bowl. The vignette is destroyed. To bring it back, the filmmaker must manufacture it.

During the silent era, filmmakers used the vignette to draw attention to specific actions within their scenes; whether that was an actor—we might think of Jean Amsler’s distraught expression in Jacques Feyder’s Visages d’Enfants (1925)—or how it can isolate a gesture, an act, an event; as was used so effectively by D. W. Griffith in his gigantic Intolerance (1916): like the poised blades that will cut the rope leading to Robert Harron’s execution blade; when Mae Marsh so forlornly attends to a dead flower’s stem; or the voluptuous pale skin in the Babylonian harem. Here it was used intentionally; it was just one of the tricks of the filmmaker’s trade. Griffith used the vignette to pick out narratively significant actions in the pell-mell marbling of his scenes; there’s so much going on that he needs to nudge us, to draw our attention, to lure our eye: “hey, over here—look”. The vignette cuts away unnecessary “flesh”; it leaves that which is vital.

Robert Harron’s face is vital. He is tormented and wracked and shocked and alone. Griffith shows us his face, centres light on his face, tells him to look at us—and for us to look at him. Other scenes in the film are filled to their edges. In this instance, with Harron—“The Boy”—locked in his cell, standing trial for a crime he didn’t commit, trembling in the littleness of his prison—Griffith wanted us to focus only on the centre; and to feel the whole narrative weight of the film, and the promise of his reprieve, pushing toward this point. The vignette drew attention; it also heightened suspense.

Mirriam Cooper’s face is vital. The “Friendless One”. Her eye trembles on the edge of tears. Here, Griffith wants us to spend a moment with her; to drink in the weight of her terror after shooting down Walter Long, “The Musketeer”. Harron will stand trial—unfairly—in her place. The vignette eradicates the walls, the room, the people around her. Living inside her guilt, with the probability of Harron’s execution; she is entirely alone.1

The winking iris is different. It closes out a scene and transitions us into the next; it says, “this moment is over; but another one is coming”. This was before filmmakers had mastered the dissolve—one scene “melting” into another—and before they’d fully appreciated the cut. This took time; where hard, blunt cutting felt too abrupt, too violent. It was only later that people—mostly Russians—would begin to theorise the cut as a kind of punctum, a piece of grammar, a “part of speech”; and it would be many more years until yet other people—mostly French—would theorise the cut as a kind of “suture”, a psychoanalytic wound stabbed into the eye-genitalia-body of the film.

The vignette was a remnant of film’s attachment to theatre, to the camera lucida, to the pin-hole, to the obscura. In this it retains a kind of tricksy Vaudevillian ambiguity; a ruined part of the “old world” that persists into the terrain of the new.

F. W. Murnau would still be applying the device into 1924. In The Last Laugh, a soft vignetting—the work of cinematographer Karl Freund—draws our eyes and our focus. The heavy suitcase in a room’s corner; Janning’s despair, clasping gloved hand to face; rain slicking down into the Berlin streets; his heavy-but-glad departure from the hotel where he has laboured and struggled and won.

Murnau’s vignette—it’s very soft here, barely a gentle furze of trembling darkness—keeps our focus tightly kept on faces, on the Kammerspielfilm aura of effects, on the inner lives of the people we’re seeing on screen. When he preens his carefully kept head of hair and bushy beard in the mirror, we see his daughter cooking in the reflection. The vignette eclipses his line of sight, connecting Jannings and his Maly—soon to be married. Now he turns, fondly, affectionally; Murnau’s camera not losing focus on Maly’s patient work. The line of sight—though it’s been reversed; pushing back through us—remains fixed on his daughter. Jannings’ soft, out-of-focus head reminds of this; it’s a clever visual metaphor; saying, “you’re seeing what’s inside the old doorman’s head—the person he most cares about”. It’s literal, figurative, quiet; and Murnau does it all—this hazy piece of impressionistic perspectivalism—with a softened edge to the frame. Our eyes don’t flick left or right. We look ahead.

But the same focusing-looking-tightening of the vignette also works against the poor, forlorn, fatuous doorman. The vignette highlights his fall from grace, his demotion, the horrible secret of it that he carries with him. How shattered his pride is. When the rich guest jabs at his now shaggy, mortified body, demanding that Jannings clean his shoes, the camera looms down on him—his clothes scruffy and rumpled, no longer neat and puffed up. The vignette tightens Jannings’ sorrowful face, hides the detail of the rich man’s body—now we see only his hand jabbing and the bright lit tip of his pointed beard; so unlike the unkempt mass of Jannings’ own. Here, the vignette works both ways; building up and throwing down.

The vignette would hang around for a little longer yet, where the “weighty immobility” of the silent film—that’s Lotte Eisner’s figuration—would give way to an increasingly literal and dynamic form of narrative storytelling; and the vignette would seem too poetic, too old-fashioned, too heavy handed. It would fall and fade away; to be picked up only by a few latter-day experimenters nodding and winking their way at their cinematic heritage. Polanski, Kieslowski, in their own way, in their own time. But we still have a long way to go before we get to them.

• The wonky reputation of Cecil B. DeMille 📽️

• The lurid successes and controversies of The Cheat (1915) 🎰

• DeMille as a frustrated landscape painter; his melodramatic “congealments”; his and Wyckoff’s experiments with expressive lighting 💡

Cecil B. DeMille isn’t a “fashionable” filmmaker. Nobody talks about him anymore.

For a time, however, “Mr.” DeMille—that’s how he was known; probably not always “fondly”—was a box office fixture. In 1950 he played himself, “Cecil B. DeMille”, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. It was a sly performance. It carried with it a certain measure of cruelty; where “DeMille” infamously all but ejects the deluded Norma Desmond from his film set. It’s not a flattering look. Was this how Wilder saw DeMille? Was this how DeMille saw himself?1

It would be impossible for DeMille to have precisely no thoughts about his own stature. He was a name. He had a reputation; it was a lauded one, but it became increasingly toxic over the years. He was among the “first”. The first auteur, the first big-wig. In the 1910s, he did much to bring the genteel classes to the cinema; “exploiting” the kinds of discourses and texts and stories that registered with them, that they cared about. That’s Sumiko Higashi’s précis. DeMille was also flagrant; he knew how to raise eyebrows. This also helped.

But you might begin to wonder whether DeMille’s own “reliability” cursed him to a kind of forgetting. Dumpy, not quite exciting enough. Perhaps. Critics didn’t love him; that’s what Sam Goldwyn said. Audiences did, however; and “they have the final word”. Manny Farber juiced the point: how DeMille was the “closest movie equivalent to having a knife slowly turned in a wound for two hours”.2 Yeowch. Later in life, he’d make “heavy dinners”. Those big, bossy, sprawling biblical epics that seemed out of touch with the barbiturate-Tupperware complex of the post-war settlement. Darling give us jokes. He’s remembered for these films. He’s forgotten for these films.

Maybe he’s become the John Updike of pre-code-post-code cinema; once important, now considered old-hat-fusty. Maker of “ho-hum” productions? Let’s give it some thought. Bald pate; kind eyes; slightly unreadable smile. Not an easy figure to push beyond. Like a bank manager or a rural physician. I’m not saying he’s Musil’s Man Without Qualities. He had a lot of qualities; perhaps too many qualities. But his “appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be” (Musil). That’s what I mean.

Does it matter? By the time the USA entered the First World War, DeMille was already a household name. Laughing to the bank; his efforts during the silent era were nothing short of heroic: a Herculean-come-Fordist labour of energy and ideas which gave us films like Carmen (1915), The Captive (1915), The Cheat (1915), Joan the Woman (1916), and The Little American (1917)—which made Mary Pickford a star. Originally I’d written “arguably”, but it’s inarguable. Nobody would doubt it.

In this post, I’m going to look at DeMille before he became the DeMille of Wilder’s imagination; before he became a bossy anticommunist thug. Before he pissed everyone in the Screen Directors’ Guild off. Long before he clobbered us with the hammer blows of his historical epics; before his rip-roaring sound films of the 1930s. Even before his melodramas of the 1920s. Today, we’re going to look at his first few good years in film; when he split the difference of his “theatrical hokum”, “pious sentiments”, and technical electricity. Warning: It wasn’t always good.

I’ve written about The Squaw Man (1914); it’s not a good or memorable film, except for a few salvageable scenes in the snow. It was DeMille’s and Lasky’s first attempt at making a movie; so we should be a little forgiving. In fact, DeMeille would remake the story a further two times—never quite satisfied that he’d got it right. Not sure if it was ever worth it though.

Either way, it wasn’t a monomania. He had other ideas; plenty of them. In 1915, he made what was probably his best early film: The Cheat. It’s a sexually-charged tale of misbegotten haut bourgeois naughtiness-turned-violence. Melodrama. Fannie—miscast, yes, but played innocent-dumbly enough by Edith Hardy—embezzles money from her Red Cross association; then she borrows the lost sum from Hishuru Tori, a wealthy Japanese ivory merchant.3 But he wants something in return; something that isn’t monetary.

Let’s pause here. Tori/Arakau (see Footnote No. 2 please) is played by Sessue Hayakawa—the brilliant Japanese actor who would come to perform some of the silent era’s sexiest villains. In The Cheat, he’s all brooding, glowering intent—a cat’s paw; sharp in ways that will cut Fannie. He’s possessive, demanding, violent; and his prowling approaches are only halted when Fannie shoots him in the shoulder. Bang, bang! But he’s already branded her with a hot stamp bearing his name; another piece of ivory on his shelf. This is all very abject. Richard—Fannie’s husband—discovers them in their bloody act and, like the gallant husband he is, takes the blame. He goes on trial.

The rest of the story can be dispensed with relatively quickly; Fannie—tormented by her guilt; scandalized by Tori’s protestations of innocence—comes clean. She shows the entire courtroom the blistered scar left on her skin, the shape of Tori’s stamp. This sends the courtroom into a violent daze; they all but lynch Tori then and there. DeMille’s film juices this for its racist provocation, the intimation of “white purity” and its violation. Bodies pucker together; there’s a storm of limbs and crushing shoulders.

Racially dubious provocation, yes; the Parisian papers seemed to love it— particularly Hayakawa’s performance. But looked at formally, as a “film”, which The Cheat most certainly is, DeMille was onto something; murky chiaroscuro, fired-up-eroticism, moral mazes. There’s the hint of fallen women, impossible love, seedy violence. He knew that secrets were stashed away behind every bourgeois address; just need to needle it, pick away at it. Those who came to the cinema were getting a kind of catharsis—a sick kick. They were all but confessing their own desires, their guilt. It garnered controversy. Hayakawa was the one who ended up apologising. It’s all a bit murky.

That same sense for tighter casts, delimited scenarios, and less ricocheting between locales would serve him well in The Captive. He was learning. Blanche Sweet falls in love with House Peters—who’s been “assigned” to her farm while serving as a prisoner of war. Nice scenario. The film also has some really saucy shadow-work and chiaroscuro. DeMille knew how to light scenes, but not always for effect; he wasn’t Murnau, or Pabst. Feels more by chance than design.

There’s also that sensitivity to landscape; how confidently he photographs cattle, how vertiginously he plays out the skirmish that leads to Peters’ capture and her brother’s death. Bullets flying upslope, figures against a skyline, swords and gun-smoke flashing down. It’s over quickly; it doesn’t need to go on and on. Here’s DeMille getting to the gist. You can see why people liked him. You’re not getting bored; he’s not overdoing it.

Back-to-the-land pastoral fantasy, nothing pushy or showy; even if it depends on typically DeMille’ian coincidences and meet-cutes that have the quality of “ech the alternative was too much work”. He could go long, but he also had the capacity to whip away the table cloth and wrap things up with alarming rapidity. Not much interested in the ends of things, perhaps. There’s those fantastically well-lit scenes in the basement, all cleaved shadow and darkness; and the moment where Blanche catches herself crying in her mirror. She takes a good long look at herself; who she is, who she loves. It’s very effective, at least in these moments.

Now for something less good. You can mull over more of that murkiness in Joan the Woman—DeMille’s schlocky 1916 retelling of the story of Joan d’Arc. Lot of paper-plastic armour and declamations and cardboard backdrops, stewed together with some wincingly purple prose. It’s a war film for the French market; their national hero served up to them in proto-Hollywood pomp during a national tragedy. Might seem a little exploitative, perhaps. Might have loved Geraldine Farrar too deeply in her martyr’s role. By the by, Leonard Maltin thinks her “miscast”. It’s all quite silly; too am-dram theatrical. Farrar was better as Carmen. We’ll get to that.

It feels heavy, ponderous; too disinterestedly un-cinematic. Not for the first time, it also seems harried and hurried; where some nice chiaroscuro doesn’t really salvage the limpness at its heart. Two hours and 17 minutes, too; chewing a mouthful of the Flanders mud that the film is so awkwardly anchored around. It’s frustrating because we know that DeMille could keep things tight. In fact, it used a then newfangled colour technology to tint the flames; and a print was stolen from a New York film exchange in 1917 in an effort to pirate a new negative. That might be its surest legacy. It has you gasping for relief when you see Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc in 1928. Later.

Now, DeMille’s Carmen—another 1915 production; he was really prolific—proves the rule that stories about the sea, and scenes about the sea, lend themselves so easily to the silent cinema. Its opening shots have the depth of frame, the painterly composition, the natural violence that you just don’t see in his chamber works. They feel big and spectacular in the vein of Sjostrom; whom DeMille was, presumably, photocopying. The story is even about smugglers. Kind of proves my point that DeMille was really a frustrated landscape painter, not a thesp—and not really a filmmaker’s filmmaker. Stark cliffs, billowing capes, tumbling waves, rocky outcrops. It’s all here. Silhouettes look lovely against the ocean. Don Juan in his epaulettes and horsehair helmet; smugglers with their earrings and velvety robes. It’s good photography; but it feels shruggingly mannerist. So-so.

But he does try something different here (cue muted applause); where he has his characters draw close to the camera, muddling right up to it, and so creating a conspiratorial intimacy against a pushed-away background. DeMille saw filmic space as a field of attractions-repulsions; where closer proximity to the lens was equivalent to greater narrative significance. His shots become like outstretched arms; where the fingertips are the furthest part of the body from the life-giving heartbeat, even if they wiggle and move. The lens is nurtured space, congealment; it’s where the important part happens. This is evolution, figured filmic. Farrar is seductive; Wallace Read, playing José, is sufficiently innocent-wide-eyed to fall for her obvious manipulations. Blood spills everywhere, eventually, through coiled-heavy embraces. DeMille understood trios.

In The Little American, we get another rabble-rousing propaganda platform from DeMille. It was 1917. More humour here, at least; leavened by some throat-clogging moments that even the most red-blooded patriot would blush at. Mary Pickford winking-girl-next-door into the camera while an American flag billows behind her; ahw-shucks moment when Jack Holt sees her in his telescope. Fourth of July, genteel drawing rooms, a lot of clattering around. There’s really nothing much to recommend it.

He’d probably done better with The Golden Chance (1915), whose story is tight, its subject everyday and sad and well understood. Poverty, hope, love. Lots of medium shots, quarter-profiles, deep shadows; many of them black-backdropped to pull the faces and expressions out. Chloe Ridgely’s doubt and disbelief feel natural; a rich fellow wants to marry her, to save her from her no-good alcoholic husband.

DeMille clobbers them with light; pushes the shadows into ink-pot pitch. This is the influence of Alvin Wyckoff, his cinematographer. It might even be too much, this divine heavy heavenly slanting. But you can see how DeMille and Wyckoff were trying to itch and inch toward it, this proto-Expressionist-Rembrandtification of the kino frame. Intense darkness, a single source of out-of-frame light puncturing the gloom. When you look at these two films side by side, it’ll come as no surprise that DeMille was working on both productions at the same time. They’re “of a pair”. They’re in conversation.

But DeMille would go on to big, burdensome things. There’d be a space during the 1920s when he’d turn out some influential greats (Forbidden Fruit had its day). I still think he’s at his best when he’s cloistered and not too strenuously moralistic; but it proved a hard habit to kick. He was Hollywood’s “first auteur”, but his skittering-always-roaming-eyeballing of themes and subjects and the inconsistency of his stylistic application makes him feel like a clattering canon, not a singular brain. He was too “in hock” to Victorian theatre, too uneven, too unpredictable. I agree with Kevin Brianton on this. I like him when he’s small and congealed and lurid; weaving his melodramas in a tightly puckered style. The Cheat is the best among these films, even if it relies on some sorrowful orientalism that easily clouds its reception.

But here was a filmmaker whose later life—bullying biblical epics that stick to your ribs, like eating uncooked pancake batter—obscures his early-life experiments. Beneath Golgotha the melodrama, a frame lit by coal-light, a furrowed brow, a dress that slips off a shoulder, a shadow, a contradiction, a quietly suppressed scandal. Here’s Cecil B. DeMille as a very different filmmaker with a very different future. Not the pompous old jackal who attempted to have Mankiewicz removed from the Screen Directors Guild. He became a conservative bully fit for red-under-bed jaw clenching. Maybe these inclinations were always present. In his Hollywood Divided, Kevin Brianton speaks of DeMille’s “disgrace”; how he would end up being accused “of every possible ultraconservative sin”. He didn’t just desire the “blacklist”; he set out to enforce it.

But like I said, nobody talks about Cecil B. DeMille anymore.

• How Urban Gad electrified the bourgeois bedroom ⚡

• The scene-stealing naturalism of Asta Nielsen 🎭

• How landscape poetry found its voice with Victor Sjöström ⛰️

The thing about Scandinavian film is that it’s just as easy to draw lumpen generalisations about it as it is for those generalisations to fall apart. They persist until they don’t; they have coherent borders until they disintegrate. First, the constituent countries that make up “Scandinavia” moved at different and jolting paces: where Denmark and Sweden lurched ahead, Norway straggled—and Iceland never really got underway.1 This might still be the case. Secondly, the often talked-about “Golden Age” (say, 1917 to 1924) isn’t exactly where the region’s film story began.2 It was building on something.

The purpose of this post is to poke around in the foundations of Scandinavian film; and to get a clearer sense for those gestures and moments that preceded its fully-fledged “heroic” era. If we can call it such. Certain tendencies match our expectations: that it was morbid, sober, naturalistic. Yes. But we’ll also see how Scandinavian film wasn’t afraid of melodrama, sexual controversy, and bizzaro dance numbers.

I wonder: How much of our “image” of Scandinavian film is overdetermined by the later influence of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingrid Bergman? The pre-Golden Age films (ugly phrase, but whatever) set these tendencies in motion, but that doesn’t make them primitive “first attempts”; in fact, we’re going to look at a number of (largely forgotten) films whose form and texture feel fully coherent. Today’s post will end abruptly at the “edge” of the Golden Age—and I’ll pick it up again in a later post.

First, Asta Nielsen—“the Asta”, as she’d eventually become known—deserves special attention. Her acting style—famously composed, refreshingly naturalistic—engendered a new sobriety in the cinema; a new “realness”. Less gestural, much less bulging of eyes and pirouetting of body. Her frame is poised; her glances slide and stare and gently furrow. Her approach “drew” the audience in to her character’s psychology, rather than “telegraphing” it directly, obviously. Throughout her career, she escaped ever being “typecast”; playing a grave, gravely Hamlet as confidently as she shimmied around as a seductress.

But the women she portrayed were almost always strong-willed, impulsive, erotic; out of step with their time and place. Maybe a lesser actor would have given it all too much; Nielsen knew to hold something back. Greta Garbo said that Nielsen “taught me everything I know”. You can’t argue with a pedigree like that.

Theatre school, the daughter of a washerwoman; she would go on to command vast sums for her appearances, a legion of adoring fans. Paul Davidson—the German film producer with whom she early allied—realised, upon seeing her first performances, “that the age of the short film was past”; and that Nielsen “[could] carry” the ambitions of a mature European narrative cinema.3 It’s why Germany has always loved her; Davidson’s studio was in Tempelhof, Berlin; and so was her contract. Her alluringly androgynous frame, proud face, large eyes. It made sense.4 For Béla Balázs, her face—and her gestures—registered a “polyphonic play of features”; a kind of layered mutability that could hold a nest of contradictory truths and furrowed meanings at the same time. With Nielsen, we’re invited to read her face as we would in “real” life.5 It is many things at the same time.

For starters, there was The Abyss. Here, Nielsen plays a rural music teacher engaged to a boring, reliable bourgeois. When the circus rolls up in town, Nielsen shirks church—yawn—and steals away to the funfair; where she catches the eye—it’s really a two-way entanglement—of a leery performer, Rudolf. Nielsen sees a way out of her stultified milieux; and is soon making assignations with the cowboy —before promptly running off with him.

But note the film’s title: the “abyss”. Nielsen’s act of defiance comes at a cost. Many pearls were clutched, at the time, about her raunchy grinding dance with Rudolf, a kind of Christiania daggering performed with a riotously sexy confidence. For a moment, she is entirely in command; turning every figure around her into a stew of dumb flesh. Eventually her circus performer grows tired of his new plaything. It ends tragically, mortally. How could it not?

You could say the same for Der Totentanz. Reconstructed from scraps, production notices, censorship documents, and scripts, we have some 429 of the original 905 meters of film (which feels like an unnecessary detail but I liked typing it); feels like a miraculous act of salvage. The film itself is a love triangle centred on a brilliant, alluring musician (Nielsen), the composer for whom she is his muse, and her jealous incapacitated husband. Familiar scenario; familiar names.

But here’s the thing: “naturalistic” doesn’t mean lifeless. That’s the special grain about her performance in this otherwise overwrought melodrama; because her expressions are far from unanimated. If anything, they do overtime. What marks her expressiveness out is how nuanced and “readably real” it is. We sense her pride, her diffidence, her pouting frustration when her husband hums-and-haws about her continued music training (it’s no secret that she gets no little attention from the adoring musicians and composers around her). Her face plays with secrets, fantasies, eroticism, contempt. It offers (Balázs again) a “complete dictionary of the gestures of sensual love”. He called it “micromorpological”. In silent film, fucking is more about the eyes than the crumple of a physical embrace.

The reconstructed copy of Der Totentanz is partially made up of production stills, and these further intensify the power of Nielsen’s physical acting. Really it’s all a matter of drawing rooms, dressing rooms, upended domesticity. Gad makes use of the compressed frame to tell his story through bodies—how they’re angled, how they pull together and apart, where their gazes fall and where they don’t. It’s about Bella’s slowly gyrating hip, her sleeveless dress, its black silk; her body collapsing the space between the far left of the stage and Czernek’s piano.

This is defiantly erotic; slushing about with a “powerful emotion” that—the gloopily purple intertitles explain—is “imprisoned and enslaved”. Gad lets things bubble up, edging desire. Not quite taking it to completion. There’s Bella floating-hovering over Czernek in her crow’s black dress, its deathly feathers falling almost onto his head and neck; how she runs her hand inches from his back. Not touching; almost touching. Gad puts the electric spark between them.

It ends in death. We knew it would. Knife plunges into Czernek’s throat, Bella torn between “passion and horror”. It’s a messy, abject entanglement of sex-death-desire-innocence. Gad resists clarity. Erotics as death drive; violence as a kind of sublimated penetration. Bella is drawn not to Czernek (I guess) but to the impassioned, liberating stirrings of the music they make together. It is her own playing that catches her in its vortex.

In that final scene, Bella’s body is slumped over Czernek’s lifeless corpse, blood and tears, her frantic pacing husband, the horrifying entanglement of limbs and costumery. It is pointedly Gothic in its reification of art’s seduction. Bella is carried away as a murderess, not a victim. This feels like the radical pith of Gad’s film and Nielsen’s performance in it. Her “overwhelming grief” is her own, and her final descent from the hotel lobby, accompanied—but not led—by a policemen has the same delusional imprimatur as the magnetically memorable finale of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, where the quite mad Norma Desmond performs her own arrest.6

But Gad didn’t have Sjöström’s sense of place, nor his attentiveness to the frame. It’s a lot of very static rooms being hung out in, hallways being walked, doors being opened. Maybe there’s something older here—an indebtedness to the spatial congealment of theatre. Even then, Gad knew actors; and he knew how to “use” them. It’s about lavishing the body, its mannerisms, reactions, slopings and mopings, with real attention; playing toward a doomed naughtiness. Really he had a love for beautiful women and an equal disdain for infidelity and those who engineer it. Lots of his films end up with fisticuffs and piles of clobbering bodies. Private moments are pulled to the foreground while indifferent bystanders pour champagne, sink beer, and mess around in the background.

But let’s give Gad his due. There are intimations of a sensitive, compositionally sophisticated mind behind his typically static boudoir dramas. I like that moment in When Passion Blinds Honesty (1911) when young Aage—pursuing the woman who rejected him to Monte Carlo—is darkly framed against the city’s glittering sea. His mind is obviously in the doldrums; he’s just embezzled money from his company so that he could travel from faraway Denmark and strut about like a popinjay. Bella—his love interest; another Bella in Gad’s filmography—brushes past him with her smugly chattering lover. Their faces briefly swell the frame; and then he’s alone again—a silhouette against the sun. Poor Aage. I also really admire the sumptuous boating scenes of The Strange Bird (1911). It’s Nielsen playing another desperate lover, her struggling through woodland and reeds, a galvanic pursuit along the waterways. Desperation. Revenge. Here’s Gad at his agile best; and Nielsen at her most tragically defiant.7

The best instance of Nielsen and Gad’s collaboration—or perhaps my favourite; it’s hard to disentangle the two—came with The Black Dream (1911). This 53-minute story tells of a woman (Nielsen) who sets out to save the honour of her beloved Count Waldberg who has, through that age-old admixture of pride and stupidity, lost an extraordinary amount of money to Hirsch the jeweller.

The plot relies on a clever, interwoven dose of dramatic irony as Nielsen play-acts a seduction of Hirsch in order to steal jewels from him, which Waldberg— unaware that he’s handling stolen goods—will be able to pawn in order to settle his debt. Gad cross-cuts between these parallel strands, ramping up the tension and juicing the dramatic irony to a point of muted exasperation.

Crucially, Hirsch discovers Nielsen’s act of cat burglary by spotting her deception in a mirror—and these mirrors will continue to play a clever role in Gad’s film; scattering the dejected Waldberg’s reflection as he moodily tramps down city streets contemplating murder and suicide. In the outdoor scenes generally, Gad uses depth of focus to chart Waldberg and Nielsen’s lonely course through parks and streets.

In its finale, Waldberg guns down the poor, forlorn Nielsen in the mistaken belief that she’s really two-timing him with Hirsh; rather than attempting desperately to save him from doing something he’ll regret. There are other tremulous, electric moments; like Nielsen and Waldberg sitting side by side in her decorous apartment—both staring fearsomely, and tragically, into the lens. In this moment, we realise that nothing can save them from their sorry fates.

This style of moody melodrama had its twin with the films of August Blom, whose Temptations of a Great City (1911) was unusually similar to Gad’s: a good man gets into debt, steals from his mother. There’s even a mirror scene. Eventually, Blom would go on to bigger and more sensational stories.

Sjöström was cut from a different cloth. This theatrical Stockholmite found his lyricism not in bourgeois bedrooms but in the rasping gasp of the wilderness; where his first love—apropos of Jean Vigo, eventually—was the sea.

In Havsgamar (1915), the rocky outcrops of the coast cut across the frame like glaciers; breaking the composition into snarls of black-grey and blinding white. Sjöström angles his camera up, pans across it, uses stark silhouetting to punch bodies out of the sky. You need only think of the custom officer’s motorboat puttering its way toward the smuggler’s ship, diminishing to a fingernail’s breadth; the rocking close-up in the smuggler’s launch as they sail against the wind; Sjöström’s parallel cutting between the two boats as their chase across the fjord closes in. Sjöström was a landscape poet; his Asta Nielsen was the ocean and its waves.

Landscape was his constraint; it meant that Sjöström had to think carefully about the placement of his camera, to use cutaways and close-ups to bring attention to actions that were otherwise “hidden” by folds of sail, outcrops of rock, narrow decks. For Sjöström, nature dictated the terms.

The film is fat with moments that surprise; hinting at the imagistic innovator that Sjöström would become. I think about that scene where “mad” Anton—he lost his mind as a child when he saw his smuggler father murder the upstanding local customs officer—overhears his now elderly father plotting the downfall of the new officer (the son of the murdered officer, of course). Sjöström pans between two adjacent spaces, revealing the plot and Anton’s discovery of it. He’ll notify the local sheriff; the ill-doing will be brought to mortal justice. Not without no small amount of smoky violence and gloomy caves. Sjöström wraps the action up quickly; he hadn’t quite got a handle on how to “resolve” a picture. Yet.

If Nielsen was a heroine for the electrically libidinal bourgeois imaginary, then Ingeborg Holm—performed with sober naturalism by Hilda Borgström—was her antithesis: a putatively “ordinary” woman subjected to the mundane abjections of poverty. Here’s where Sjöström and Gad really pull apart.

This 1913 story is simple, sober; but it also carries a quiet indignation. Ingeborg Holm is the wife of a grocer who, after a brief illness and death, leaves his family with towering debts and hungry mouths to feed. Quickly overcome, Ingeborg is swallowed by poverty; and when she throws herself onto the charity of the local state she’s met with cruel indifference. The only thing they can do for her—aside from a pitifully insufficient allowance—is to condemn her to a “poor house” and take away her children. This comes to pass.

Really, Ingeborg Holm is a social study; bristling with a quiet rage against the cruel and immovable indifference of the government. No, it’s not exactly dynamic; and it doesn’t fizz with the angular brio of those “wilderness” films that would eventually make his name, but Borgström’s performance seethes with coiled nobility and trembling brittleness. Perhaps Sjöström just wasn’t as comfortable shooting indoors (which is what one reviewer suggests); but I’m inclined to look on the subtler side. When Ingeborg sneaks out of the poor house to find her sickly, now-adopted daughter, Sjöström feeds great slants of light that illuminate her body as she passes between the beds of other destitute women. In his exteriors, he uses a great, breathing width to underline Ingeborg’s littleness against the unfeeling suburban landscapes she picks her way across. The wilderness is here; it’s just packed behind a deceptively misleading exterior.

Elsewhere, Sjöström used the tight, square frame to communicate power and influence. Pleading with the poor house big-wigs in their cozy office, Ingeborg moves to the left of the frame; pressed against the limit of the visible while the centre is occupied by the heavyset figures of the administrator and doctor—and it is toward the lens that she advances as her desperation ramps up; almost like she’s trying to bridge the impossible gap between her sorrow and the sympathetic audience. When she’s finally reunited with the son who was taken away from her, their embrace is located in the centre of the frame. Balance has been restored.

In 1917, Sjöström would shoot A Man There Was—the film that would catapult him into proper stardom and herald the arrival of Scandinavia’s “Golden Age”. As ever with this history, we’ll be getting to it. Later. I just want to make the case that Havsgamar and Ingeborg Holm laid the first bricks. The defence rests.

Lots of burrowings and digressions in this post. We’ve covered a lot of ground; so let’s put it this way: of the pair, Sjöström had the stronger sense of place—a mythopoetic understanding of landscape, a Romantic pitting of man against nature and woman against misfortune; surfing the fuzzy, long-tailed wake of a specifically German romanticism. One must imagine Caspar David Friedrich as a fisherman.

Gad was more urbane, more melodramatic; with Nielsen leavening his often sensationally purple scenarios with a newfound naturalism. Eventually, Sjöström’s visual language and preference for less “genteel” scenarios would come to define Scandinavian cinema, but not without the morbid sobriety that “the Asta” carved out for them. Elementary particles of all that absurdist boozing, sexual dysmorphia, and melodrama would carry through to Bergman and, later, Thomas Vinterberg. This is Gad’s legacy, too.

That’s the too-tidy explanation for how the “dark age” of the Golden Era laid the foundations for what came next. The reality is trickier, more nuanced; especially when you’re approaching such a mass of films.8 We’ve not given much time to August Blom, Kay Kühle, or Holger Madsen, nor to the comprehensively detailed imagination of Benjamin Christensen. But we’ll definitely be talking about him in a future post (hint: he shot Häxan).

The early 1910s were the “age of melodrama”, which is how Peter Schepelem wraps it up. But this is prim; Laura Horak underlines the salaciously erotic appeal of Scandinavian cinema; where it became sufficiently popular (who’d have thought) that its films were quickly packaged and distributed across Europe and America; causing tongues to wag and other involuntary physical reactions in cinemas across the world. The undercurrent to this story is how national cinemas became increasingly entangled with global markets; sometimes to their benefit, often to their detriment. Like Germany, Denmark and Sweden would eventually leak a shocking amount of talent to the growing uber-industry of Hollywood. Lubitsch and Lang were not the only voluntary exiles who fell into its mouth.

• Lois Weber and her bananas formal inventiveness ⚙️

• How she turned film into a politically-attuned pulpit ⛪

• The falling-out-of-favour of cinematic moralism 🤏

In November 1939, Lois Weber—tall and dark-haired with a famously uplifted eyebrow—was admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles in critical condition. Destitute and forgotten, she died two weeks later. Variety allowed two brief paragraphs for her obituary, and swiftly moved on.

It was a sad and lonesome end for one of film’s earliest and most ferocious agitators; a woman filmmaker whose career had surged and faltered through contracts with Universal and United Artists; her filmography numbering at least 78 productions (a number of which are lost).1

She was an actor-filmmaker who commanded millions in financing just as she “reject[ed] the values of capitalist America”. Her films were quasi-libertarian, papally-provoking morality plays softly brimming with what Kevin Brownlow calls a “quietness”, a “use of detail”, a “naturalism”. Not only were her stories real—morally inflected, finger-pointing, declamatory; they also sought to “charm the eye” and “leave a pleasant fragrance behind”. This would become an increasingly wonky tightrope for Weber to walk.

In the last estimation, Weber was a “picture missionary” who used film as a vehicle—often a sly and formally inventive one—to unpick and unstitch the moribund hypocrisies of her era and who saw silent film as a “voiceless language” that might give voice to real problems in America.

Three early films mark Weber out as a visionary apostle, and I want to spend today’s entry looking at this trio in depth. There are other films—the kind of movies she called “heavy dinners”—that demand attention, but I want to keep us locked in to the details. You might want to read Brownlow’s Behind the Mask of Innocence for a fuller estimation, a wider treatment.2

From the 1910s, Lois Weber—Pennsylvania born, middle class, devout—would carve a strange and ecstatic and palpably controversial path through early film. In her own words, “a real director should be absolute”—and her total filmmaking lives up to this claim.3 Maybe you’d call it auteurism, if that word had existed in the 1910s. You’d certainly call her agitational. It makes sense that she worked for Alice Guy in Gaumont’s outfit in New Jersey. She knew the movie business; inside and out.

In 1913, Suspense landed like a bomb. It is a kinetic and formally dizzying production that had an intuitive and vivid understanding of how to figure and disfigure such things as space and time—those oh-so uniquely cinematic fundamentals.

It is a “simple” film on its surface—a thriller which hinges on the proximate possibility of sexual violence. In it, a “wife”—played by Lois Weber – tends to her child at home while her husband—Valentine Paul—busies himself at his unspecified bourgeois office across town. Meanwhile, a third figure—Sam Kaufman—starts sniffing around the house. Here is the foundational triangulation of Weber’s film: an exposed wife, an absent husband, and a dangerous vagrant who is hellbent on getting inside and dot-dot-dot—who can say.

The wife gets wise to the vagrant’s desires. Here’s the tension: she calls her husband and communicates her angst and worry. Now he must make his way home—interceding in the transgression before it happens—while the vagrant tries to steal his way inside.

When I said “triangulation”, I meant it. Weber uses a triangular splitscreen to establish the parallel continuity of wife, husband, and vagrant. We see each of them in their cropped slice of frame: an invention you’d sooner expect to see in Leger and Man Ray. Now how she revs up the vagrant’s approaches to the building. First she frames down, over the rafters of the porch—a strange and uncanny angle. Later the camera is positioned—bird’s-eye—directly above the man’s head: he looks up, shunting his heavy skull back on his spine; locking eyes with the camera suspended over him. In later film parlance this might be used to suggest that the figure is somehow at risk, diminutive, puny; here it makes him feel alien and dangerous.

The husband’s chase is bottled lightning. Rushing, he hijacks an idling car outside his office which—oh la la—triggers a secondary chase made by clueless cops who don’t know why the husband performed this desperate act. The chase is dangerous: Weber’s camera is in the car with him, and the pursuing cop car is captured—convex and bulbous—in the husband’s wing-mirror. Parallel editing now: Weber switches back and forth between car-car-chase and vagrant approaching wife. He spies her through a keyhole—cue some very inventive keyhole-shaped masking.

Naturally, we know that the husband will get back in time; we know everything will “be alright”. Weber’s “suspense” isn’t about gratifying the audience with bloodshed, but establishing an alarmist bell-ringing anxiety centred on the flimsy protections offered by the home. It’s not the first time that the image of the “hobo” or vagrant was singled out with a sense of moral alarm in early film, and I’ve always been surprised how early these narratives kick in—having assumed that they would have been more common during the Depression.

But Weber wouldn’t eddy around her real moral concerns for too long. Now that films had begun to detach themselves from single reels, longer and more nuanced stories could be told. In Hypocrites (1915), Weber created a modern allegory for all the wanton doubletalk of the church and those putative people who call themselves its believers.

In format it is two things: a mediaeval parable that follows the martyrdom of Gabriel the ascetic—and a modern-day story in which a priest, played also by Courtenay Foote, likewise attempts to teach his flock about the purity of “truth”. Weber is taking a shot at clerics and the sluggish indifference of the church. Not enough piety, too much lip-service.

In effect, Hypocrites feels patient and holy; perhaps a little sluggish. Weber uses trembling, haliated lighting and black backdrops to pick out the face and body of the saint. Faces are framed in heads-and-shoulders; bodies are cast despairingly on the ground. What I really love about the medieval scenes is how Weber captures her crowds. Tracking shots on dollies patiently explore their faces and attire; slightly low-angled lenses fill the screen with cobbled-together mugs. The frame fills up; and Weber knew exactly how to exploit the frame—how to tilt the camera, which angles to set up—in order to lend her film a visual energy that, in 1915, was still really quite rare.

In the modern day story, Weber exploits a gigantically steep hill to effect the arduous course of the people’s bodies as they follow the priest up his dreamstate mountain. Many of them give up and wander away, while the priest experiences a dream in which he and the naked Truth go about revealing acts of hypocrisy in the world. Gamblers, cheats, sex-addicts; Truth holds her mirror up to them and sighs at their sinful audacity.

The film was censored, of course; thought too agitational against the church. It also featured a then salacious scene of full-frontal nudity—the first example of such in a film that wasn’t a porno. Margaret Edwards fulfilled this role. Weber shot these scenes on a closed set. There were riots in New York; it was banned in Ohio. The British Board of Film Censors, however, passed it without note. I don’t know what to take from that.

In Shoes (1916), Weber took aim at poverty and desperation. Eva—played stoically-despairingly by Mary MacLaren—is employed at a five-and-dime store on a tiny salary; and lives in a crowded home with her hard-working mother, gaggle of sisters, and layabout father. It was MacLaren’s first appearance; she’d go on to act for Douglas Fairbanks and Tod Browning, and would eventually appear alongside a young John Wayne.

The drama in Shoes revolves around Eva’s desire—as the title implies—for a solid and respectable pair of shoes; where her own cheap things are constantly falling apart in rain and sludge. Weber spends a lot of time showing Eva labouriously cutting out new cardboard soles for her shoes while fantasising about a lovely, proper pair in an upmarket shop window. We see these shoes through the window, spattered with rain and steamy with desire. These are Checkhov’s pumps.

The film itself goes like this: Eva is being courted by a caddish cabaret singer called Charlie. He wants her; she’s not really interested (or she’s too good and respectable to admit such feelings). But Charlie is willing to pay for Eva’s body – and this is precisely what comes to pass. With her money, Eva buys the shoes; only to discover—the next day—that her father has finally secured a job. If only she’d waited, &Etc.

Weber doesn’t blame Eva; she blames the iniquity of her situation—and she blames the men who leech off women; exploiting them passively and actively. That’s the moral “web” of Weber’s film, but what is so singularly powerful about this production is how Weber brought it to life through her dazzlingly coherent visual language.

Closeups are frequent; they jab into the film like hot knives through butter. Weber loves to show us Eva’s shoes—her toes pirouetting, the soles falling apart. In one memorable scene, it begins to rain; and we follow Eva’s footsteps with a ground-level pursuit shot as Eva’s weary, worn shoes splash through the water like a miserable metronome. This pair will be ruined; it is beautiful and devastating in a way that feels both obvious and audacious. Just like that moment when Eva prepares herself to sleep with the caddish Charlie; how she glances at the mirror, a crack across its face—splitting her skull in two. Weber says: Eva is broken, her innocence is shattered.

Domestic details were important to Webe; and she paid a care and attentiveness to even the smallest parts of everyday life. When Eva’s mother boils cabbage for the family supper, it is treated with a weighty gravity. Eva’s father—the out-of-work layabout—isn’t really bothered about the woes of his family. At the dinner table, he “props his book against the sugar-bowl”—indifferent and blind to Eva’s ragged feet.

In many of her films, Weber preferred the use of real domestic spaces; and what we’re seeing is an actual working-class home rather than an imagined “set”. Everything feels more real, more lived-in, more used. Everything is askance; of bodies, tables, counters, furniture.

In Weber’s universe, nothing is glamorized. This is real life. When Eva makes her heavy, steady, tired way up the stairs of her building, Weber’s camera meets her body and pans to the right—thickly. It feels weighted down. Her body, sick with influenza, slumped in her rocking chair; her feet in a bowl of warm water. The way her body crumples into itself when Charlie takes her hand at the nightclub table. These moments congeal the frame. We also get attentive and detailed cutaways that shift the angle, draw attention, underline; right out of the rulebook that Kuleshov hadn’t even written yet.

Lois Weber was an ideologue, an agitator; I half think that she was closer to Shumyatsky—the head of the Soviet Union’s Soyuzkino film organisation in the 1930s—than she was to a totally freeform filmmaker. This isn’t a dig; Weber looked at the conditions of real working people—and she looked at the spiritual malaise that she saw affecting the US— and she launched an electric broadside against it. It gets heavy, sure; sometimes too on-the-nose. The double-exposure of Shoes when Eva—tossing and turning in bed, wracked with worries about her family’s dire situation—sees a gigantic grasping hand with the works “POVERTY” marked on it reaching over her head. I had already been telegraphed this point; it wasn’t necessary to literally spell it out.

In many ways, Weber was a difficult reformer; and it’s not easy to understand the subtle and often contradictory currents that pass through her films. Indeed, the “problem picture” had become an (un)popular bête noire by the 1920s; insufficiently entertaining, too dogmatic. Who’d want to go to the cinema just to be lectured? Kevin Brownlow puts it this way: “Countless social or message pictures had played on people’s sense of outrage, and they had grown tired of feeling ashamed or indignant when they went to the movies.”

Even then, Weber was among the best of the moralists and problematisers; she had an intuitive and inventive understanding of the cinema and had the sensibility to fold her morals into an appetizing bite. Weber herself said that she didn’t want to crowd the box office with the “promises [of] red lights”. But this statement feels somewhat disingenuous; the full-frontal nudity in Hypocrites certainly did pack the houses, just as her bruising reputation ensured no small amount of controversy. Intended or not, she got people talking about her films and—for some years in the 1910s and early 1920s—coming through to sit down and watch them. The Blot (1921)—through its depiction of “genteel poverty”—is perhaps her masterwork; Where are my children? (1916) addressed the sensitive subject of abortion. She was unrelenting; she saw her films as an “editorial page”.

Eventually, however, her career began to falter; after her divorce from Phillips Smalley in 1922, with whom she’d collaborated on so many films, she became an alcoholic. Her audience faded away, her company failed. During the cynical 1920s, there was too little oxygen for films that bore their finger-wagging moralism too heavily. Lois Weber faded from memory.

• Fitzhammon’s English seascapes and Italy’s L’inferno (1911) 👹

• The stoic realism of Victor Sjöström and Urban Gad 🧲

• American “firsts” care of Chaplin and Cecil B. DeMille 🃏

• The monolith that was Cabiria (1914) 📜

I know; there’s no D. W. Griffith here; but his time will come in a slightly later post, just as we’ll be giving our Scandinavian sad boys proper attention in due course.

In 1910, one-reel films were still the norm across much of the world; but their time was fast running out. In England, the Cinematograph Act—of 1909—prompted the building of the country’s first purpose-built film theatres. It’s a long way from sticky-carpet “Vue” kinoboxes, of course, but you get the idea.

Things were jilting and juddering. Electricity was in search of its ground. The “capacity”—as lanyards like to say—was making itself felt; with seats and screens now being designed for nothing but projection. In the USA, films were getting longer, bolder, more daring. Italy had caught the itch; Japan too. It wouldn't be too long before certain puritanical freaks would start declaring that there was too much film and it was showing all the “wrong” things. But that was still to come.

In Denmark and Sweden, however—a jolt in the mechanical tapestry of film—the one-reeler was about to go completely kaput; marking a sinuous sea-change in the tastes and appetites of Edwardian cinemagoers. It happened in fits and starts, with Victor Sjöström—patrician, eyes straining up, mouth pressed into unsmiling moon—going for longer and more harrowing tales of misbegotten heroines and tragic affairs of the heart. Urban Gad joined him for the ride; two quiet giants with sobering melancholia.

By the by, I’m waving my hand dismissively at the idea of defining a too-absolute criterion of the “feature” film. Sjöström’s The Gardener was 34 minutes; Gad’s The Abyss was a slightly plumper 38 minutes. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!

England wasn’t ignorant to these efforts, of course. Lewin Fitzhammon’s The Heart of a Fishergirl (1910) was “just” 8 minutes and 46 seconds long, but it pulsed with a bigger, hungrier appetite. Lulworth, roiling seas, the fragile masts of wind-whipped boats. Bodies dragged from the sea; arms flung, grasping. It’s probably not very well done, and—for much of the film—its characters sort of stand around and spam a given set of reactions like video game characters who’re stuck in a loop.1 But the ocean is beautiful; I mean this. It is savage and dangerous and the seaweed slicks and oils itself onto the cliffs like alien sputum. It was also a real film; it had a story. We are really getting somewhere; landscape was dictating the terms. But it was hardly long and very far from a “feature”.

Bigger films needed bigger budgets. They needed bums on seats. It was becoming a matter of energy and invention and—sometimes—many hundreds of extras.

So let’s look at L’inferno—an Italian retelling of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Made in 1911, this film—a buxom 68 minutes-long—was helmed confusingly by a trio of directors: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe de Liguoro. It took them three years to make. These are the nuts and bolts.

Naturally, L’inferno isn’t the whole of Dante’s heaven-hell digression; where its producers knew—perhaps cynically—that their Italian audience would find more meat than gristle in a salacious story of hell than in a parable of paradise. For inspiration, they drew from Gustave Doré’s engravings; much as Méliès had done with his own early tricks and fantasies in France.

Like Dante, we “descend” through crepuscular layers of doomed afterlife; with each fresh scenario providing a sinister faberge’d backdrop against which Dante and Virgil pick their worried way. It is messy, mucky, crawling. It writhes like maggots in a bin.

The shots themselves—like engravings—remain largely static, but the film makes artful use of both fore- and back-ground; piling up thick strata of corporeal horrors to convey the eternal monstrousness of this hellish domain. Like Méliès—from whom the filmmakers must surely have been indebted—there are moments of double-exposure and masking used to pad out the field and introduce different scales of movement into the frame. For example, Satan’s great, final reveal; his horrible jaws chewing away on sinners like strips of beef while Dante and Virgil tremble their tiny way beneath his maw. We also get torments. Bodies scurrying across treacherous rocks; heads stuck-fast in blocks of ice; limbs sodden with flame.

L’inferno is a faithful “adaptation”. In this, it feels more like a sequence of stately and sinister dioramas than a narratively taut “story”. We’re offered precious little insight into Dante’s mood or motivation beyond snippets of cantos ripped from the literary original. Later, in 1924, Henry Otto—prodigious, prolific, forgotten—would take a more nuanced and “psychological” stab at the story; fabricating a contemporary framing narrative to connect Renaissance Italy with evil in the modern day. I don’t really prefer it.

So, while this Doré-inspired kino-diorama dangled one idea of the cinema before audiences, other filmmakers sought to shake something more “cinematic” loose. Here, we can spend a moment thinking about the sober, sorrowful realism of Victor Sjöström and Urban Gad; both of whom worked and greased and sombrely eyed-up the psychological and sociological angles of their Nordic homeland. Liberated-yet-doomed heroines, careless cads, bitter love triangles ending in desperation and death. Asta Nielsen—we’ll get to her in a later post—worked these emotions with a newfound subtleness that would prove enormously influential.

Despite their high-strung storylines, these films—the first cinematic “dark wave”—give off a more sober naturalism than was then popular in the rest of Europe and the USA. They were patient, doom-laden affairs slaked with Lo-Fi torments and existential pity. Their heroes were ordinary and struggling and real—their plots end often tragically. The Gardener, The Abyss, and The Black Dream all seeped out a sombre maturity that proves that film had grown up. Expressive light, downcast gazes. Here were the primeval precursors that Bergman—many years later—would heat into his own erotic-myopic miasma. Sjöström would even act for him.2 Film has always returned to itself.

Elsewhere. “Firsts” were cropping up all over the shop. We get the first feature-length comedic outing with Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), while Cecil B. DeMille sprung into 1914 all-guns-blazing; pummelling out six features in the space of a year.

First, Tillie’s Punctured Romance—a Mack Sennett production; care of the Keystone Company—saw Chaplin briefly ditch the “Tramp” character he’d bow-leggedly debuted in short-film-form in favour of playing an unscrupulous playboy and bounder. In fact, the entire cast was a scrabbly, sensational hoot; and the film has the added allure of being wildly successful as well as featuring one of the very first “films within a film”.

There are things to expect here; formally. Characters “step out”—are introduced—during the pre-film credit sequence; effectively bowing to the unseen “audience”. You can read Marie Dressler’s lips; she clasps her hands together and, looking slightly beyond and above the top left of the camera, says “thank you”. Costume change—cross-fade—and we get another cross-fade from a curtained hall into a garden. The film has “begun”; Dressler’s eyes bulge open—what the hell am I doing here? It’s funny-silly already; the film has barely begun.

It’s not quite slapstick; more like a comedy of manners and circumstance with a lot of kicks and punches thrown in. Most notable—perhaps—is Sennett’s approach to landscape photography; and the scene where uncle Banks falls from the mountainside is delivered with positively Nordic sobriety. Look how beautifully composed this sequence is!

For DeMille, meanwhile, The Squaw Man (1914) had the auratic novelty of being Hollywood’s first feature production; a continent-sprawling tale of deception, attraction, murder, retribution. Here, we get a first taste of the role that the frontier would play in the American cinematic imagination; where much of the film’s action takes place in Wyoming. It was also a Western—chaps, six-shooters, bar-brawls, &Etc. DeMille—who’d remake this film three times in his life—gave early shape in The Squaw Man to the gunslingers, gangsters, and fallen women—all those heavy-shouldered “types”—who would define the cinema of the 1920s. This was still to come.

The film itself. Busy medium shots in packed parlours and race-track stands livened-up with the odd insert and thrown-open landscape; lending it a kind of melange-like quality. The story itself is hysterical and slippery; little helped by its slew of baffling intertitles and jump-jolts in the narrative that are so harebrained it’s basically impossible to follow.

For example, the honestly baffling scene-change to the Alps; whereupon Henry, after slipping off a small rock the size of a large rock, has enough wherewithal to make a death-bed confession that old Jim is innocent; cue everyone reappearing in Wyoming again and sort of wrapping things up, even if Nat-u-Ritch (Lilian St. Cyr) dies in the process. The burning ship, the steam boat, the bar brawl, the pickpocketing, the Derby day, the local sheriff’s re-election bid. It has a too-muchness that stews into a kind of bananas-everything.

That being said, the snowy mountain scenes are lovely to behold (like Tillie’s Punctured Romance imo)—just as the inserts are deftly handled and really do nudge the narrative forward; filling in the (many) blanks that otherwise pepper the film.

It’s easy to forget that this was DeMille’s first film, Lasky’s first production; that they were running on a shoe-string budget in an undeveloped part of the San Fernando valley—and that DeMille’s movie orientation to date had involved an afternoon spent at the Edison lot. Later, in The Cheat (1915), DeMille would take this plot—embezzlement and the social and emotional torrents that fall out from it—and render it down into a more chewable and satisfying form; as well giving us a brilliantly malevolent turn from Sessue Hayakawa. You deserve to hear about this in more detail; and you will.

In Italy, meanwhile, a new largeness heaved into view. In 1913 and 1914 respectively, two massively influential films—Quo Vadis and Cabiria—would express that uniquely Italian obsession with monumentalism, history, spectacle. Both films strip-mined the ancient Roman past for their narrative meat, but it was Cabiria—filmed by Giovani Pastrone, with his comically alert moustache and piercing eyes—that would send the deepest reverberations through cinema. D. W. Griffith learnt much from it that he would judiciously apply to his own gigantic experiments in the USA; as did DeMille. Here was film as a powerful instrument for narrative storytelling. Roger Ebert was fulsome with his praise: “Pastrone helped free movies from a static gaze”. Martin Scorsese, another fan. It was the first “epic”; a paving stone on the road to Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959) and a distant relative of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Everyone owes it something.

Really, Cabiria is two stories—one large and historic, the other intimate and relatable. The eponymous “Cabiria” is the daughter of a wealthy Roman who, through a series of largely inexplicable events and accidents, gets sold into slavery; the “best” part of which is the spectacular eruption of Etna; providing the narrative device which sets Cabiria’s story in motion. Masonry tumbles, steam hisses, sparks fly. There are many waving, gesturing, freaking-out bodies whose sole intent is to provide a sense of scale and largeness. Meanwhile, Fulvio and Maciste—two Roman spies who’ve gone to ground in Carthage—variously attempt to upset the proceedings while searching vainly for the long-forgotten Cabiria. It’s probably accurate to say that their antics provide one of the earliest examples of the “buddy movie”. Fulvio is sly and small, Maciste large and loyal. Pastrone cross-cuts his narrative; he builds these pieces—often confusingly—side by side.

Much happens in Pastrone’s mad masterwork, including a handful of dazzling set-pieces whose scale and inventiveness would only be bested by D. W. Griffith. But I’m also minded to celebrate Cabiria’s subtler arts, like how he used rails to dolly his camera around the set; pushing toward and away from the action like a gently floating feather. This device heralded a new ubiquity of image in the cinema; demonstrating that the camera needn’t remain fixed on its pedestal but could play a shapely role in unfolding the film through its pirouetting movements. In Bodastoret’s tavern, Pastrone dollies his camera across the span of the room; slowly “revealing” and then tracking the action as it unfolds. He does this through lover’s trysts, chases in gardens, scenes of war, acts of celebration. When we first meet Cabiria in her father’s sprawling villa, the camera dollies toward the action; picking out Batto—her gregarious father—and pushing away those details that are not relevant. It draws us toward these characters, telling us who we should give our attention to. This man matters; this character is important. Pay attention. In this figuration, the camera is a glacial and flowing “eye”. It reinforces the idea that what we are watching isn’t a “film set” but the living texture of history. It feels obvious and natural. Pastrone got there first.

In the film, he also made use of close-ups and depth of field; using space and “volume” to lug his story along. I love the scene where Fulvio steals back into the city of Carthage; climbing up a pyramid of bodies. It is shot mostly in silhouette, the wall and the “stack” of bodies filling up the left hand-side of the frame; Fulvio must make his way to the right—up and over the wall. This thing is tense. Later, how the two Romans hide from their pursuers in a culvert of hidden foreground while their enemies charge and stomp across the upper ceiling of the frame. There’s a moment where one of Etna’s survivors briefly contemplates Cabiria’s family ring; Pastrone shows it to us in a rich, soft close-up. Taken together, it is like a fresco—part Fra Urbino, another Raphael; tiny figures measuring only as grains of wobbling dust become an integral part of the action. They are its emotional sedimentation.

But for all its massiveness, Cabiria’s “heart” is the affable, affective relationship between Fulvio and Maciste; making it a much fresher and gladder film than other more sober works that would be inspired by it.3 Really, Pastrone understood that epic stories—at least in popular entertainment—ask for a more humanising edge. Ebert again is so moving and good on this film: “These people are all dead, but here they are as they were on that day in 1914, boldly telling a story in a new medium”. It is a living, palpable, corporeal thing. The “new bigness” was coming; and it would shake almost everything up.

Film’s first forays beyond the one-reeler set a lot of things in motion. Everything was happening very, very quickly. The old-hat and hackneyed way of doing things—painted backdrops, immobile cameras, OTT “expressive” acting—began to lose out to vertiginous and increasingly durational experiments.

There’s much I’ve had to skirt or avoid: like Stellan Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913) and Louis Feuillade’s archly decadent, conspiratorially thrilling Fantômas serialization (1913), whose top hats, tailcoats, cat burglars, and calling cards gave audiences an “immense” and “explosive genius” whose English-language ads—sold to international film exhibitors—promised that there would “always have a full house” when its reels were set flying. I would have been there.

For old-heads like Edwin S. Porter, however, the adjustment was almost too much to bear. His Tess of the Storm Country—a five-reel drama from 1914—left Mary Pickford picking the bones out of Porter’s soup; criticizing his stuck-in-the-mud filmmaking that hadn’t much evolved since 1903. In fact, she claimed that he “knew nothing about directing. Nothing”. Maybe that’s unfair; maybe not. But it just goes to show how fastly faceted film was becoming on the cusp of the Great War.4

Adieu, one-reel cinema! But it wasn’t really “gone”. Shorter films would muscle their way back through the cinematic froth. There would be tiny experimental musings and primeval avant-gardes and any number of crankily cool things that started shooting back into the rump of film once the Big Boys—the studios, the producers—had exhausted themselves with going large.

This period—our loose-edged early 1910s—was one where film was putting its armour on and riding out to battle. It was engorging itself; and the films were only going to get bigger and more spectacular. But as film established a “convention”—not just a “language”—it would fall prey to increasingly weird experimenters who’d pull the stuffing out of its sofa and push the proverbial cups off its tables. Man Ray, Buñuel, Léger, Duchamp, René Clair would all—in a long decade’s time—reinvent film all over again. The 1920s were a long way away yet; but not too far.

But in order for the un-making reverse-rewinding of film to happen, it needed to get increasingly bigger. Make yourself—and then pull yourself apart. The death of the one-reeler was a necessary violence.

In this post, I’ll be covering:

• Fructuós Gelabert and Spain’s first narrative 🇪🇸

• How Enoch J. Rector shot a prizefight — and caused a sensation 🥊

• Foreshadowing how film would become wrapped up with morality 👮‍♂️

What was brand-spanking-new for Spain had already been around the block in France and the USA, where the first Iberian film came in 1897; taking its slow-damned time to cross the French-Spanish border. That’s how the oft-repeated story goes, at least; and it’s entirely possible—probably probable, in fact—that other contenders came earlier. We know that the Lumière brothers brought their travelling film programme to Barcelona—trains arriving, workers leaving—in May 1895. Must have felt good to be somewhere warm, for a change.

But it fell to Fructuós Gelabert—a native son of Barcelona, prodigiously round of frame and spectacles alike—to produce Spain’s first proper narrative. In boisterous fashion, he chose to depict a fight. The resulting film, Rina en un café, is thirty seconds long. It is a fight, which is a fact that is not obvious from its title.

That same year, America was also thinking boisterously; albeit on a much grander scale.

Enoch J. Rector has the kind of biography that feels so very typical of the late 19th American century. Boxing promoter, inventor, partner in the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company. He was a narrow, willowy man with a crisp moustache and parted hair—and he had an easy flair for spotting opportunities.

In 1897, the opportunity that came to him was the Corbett-Fitzsimmons bout; a much-anticipated fight that took place in Carson City, Nevada on March 17. It was a prizefight, a lot of money and prestige was riding on it. The hype is typically American, and the resulting film—which was subsequently toured around the country, from Boston to Tucson—has attracted such high-flung claims as, “it was boxing that created the cinema” (so says Luke McKernan).

Perhaps. The fight film—100-minutes long, screened nationwide, a kind of early sport-media-film sensation that wasn’t just widely seen, but alluringly profitable—might be considered closer to a pay-per-view TV broadcast than a film-film. In this light, boxing didn’t create the cinema; it created the box office.

But, in 1897, 100-minutes was a damned long time. Rector had to overcome some needling hurdles to make it work in its wide-screen format—and at such great length; making use of a technology called the Latham Loop. Three cameras placed alongside each other, each running 63mm nitrate film; aspect ratio of 1.65:1. It was as wide as it was long. Figuratively speaking. It meant that Rector and his crew could also load and expose the film in a basically continuous fashion. It was less an act of delicate artistry than a three gun salute fired into the aether of the American imagination.

Not all of the film survives today; just nineteen minutes or so, transferred from a print owned by New Yorker Jean A. LeRoy that had been dug up in the 1980s.

It had an introduction, it had the fight—the meat of the film—and it even had a kind of postscript; where we see the empty ring and the audience members who eventually scramble into it. It lollops and swims; this very wide frame with two pale bodies in short shorts making feints and jabs and leaning away from each other. Less concussive than liquid. Bowler-hatted gentlemen, seen from behind, arms folded gazing into the ring (promoters, coaches, gamblers—who can say). I even think there’s some kind of advert facing us along the lip of the ring.

It might have made $750,000. It very easily could have made less; but that’s for the proper historians to figure out. Might be worth noting that the film courted some controversy too; at the time, women were barred from attending fights—but they weren’t banned from watching one on film. Here was a loophole; a first or early instance of film slipping the bounds of the “real” and ruffling feathers as it did so. Frames within frames, Corbett had earlier acted on the stage in a fictionalized version of himself; the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were aghast; an editorial in The New York Times cocked a snook at it (because this great new technology had been bent to such ‘ordinary’ and violent ends).

In short, the 1897 fight—or its filming—signalled some of the perturbances that would later clatter and crash down on American movie morality through the auspices of Will H. Hayes. This was the edge of a moral minefield. But 1934 was a long way off yet.1

It was also the cause of some litigation, when Siegmund Lubin—film’s first great “pirate”, who deserves his own entry in this history and will probably get one— restaged a dramatisation of the fight on a Pennsylvania rooftop and shot the whole thing on film. I’ve seen it said that the fight film dragged the movies into the “low brow” (Terry Ramsaye). It was a filmed fight that was most capable of starting fights.

If Rector’s fight was proto-Blockbuster TV entertainment, then Gelabert’s film was conceived as something more akin to the early Lumière narratives; where a group of men hanging around a cafe end up brawling over a woman. It’s also wide; giving us the cafe tables—it’s outside, Spain in the summer—and a patch of public square, a flight of stairs, trees; everyone decked out in suits, though it becomes quite hard to distinguish their faces.

The version I’ve seen opens with a medium shot of Gelabert—who smiles, cane in hand, sitting down; I suppose this was by way of an introduction, almost like a theatre director taking a bow before their audience. There’s something charming about it; still sort of sense-struck by the idea of what film is and what it can “do” —a kind of quizzical sensation that everyone is just glad to be enjoying, like a magic trick when the illusionist winkingly lets the audience in on their gambit.2

In its tiny totality, Rina en un café has—as Zuriñe Piña Landaburu observes—everything that the cinema would ultimately contain: love, jealousy, violence, as if it was a teeny-tiny shot-glass-sized reduction of the currents that were about to pulse through the narrative cinema. It even has a happy ending.

Two films, two fights, two continents. In 1897, we can see different imaginaries of the cinema raising their heads: one that had its eyeballs on dramatic fictions, the other on the long-played possibilities of time and duration. It also becomes abundantly clear how quickly film was shaking itself loose; with any number of inventors rushing to lever and crowbar the “cinema” into as many shapes as they could come up with. Even in its relatively simple form, Gelabert’s work knew that film turned on the fulcrum of a story—just as Rector knew that audiences would become increasingly hungry for longer flicks, and that both were capable of causing their own kind of sensation.

Gelabert would eventually go on to experiment with documentaries and historical dramas, the latter—like Guzmán el Bueno (1910)—made use of three-dimensional sets. Later, seemingly in the 1940s and ‘50s, he created early concepts for 3D filmmaking. Rector, meanwhile, would seem to disappear from film; at least according to those records that I was able to find. His obituary has him working in Bolivia, Buenos Aires, Texas—an oilman. Perhaps he had already made his fortune. Gelabert struggled financially for much of his life.

If there was a great deal of money to be made in cinema, it was not distributed evenly. Many people seemed to drift away, fall away, dissolve—the “contrary” and “shifting imperatives” of the early cinema (Stephen Barber), being so malleable and prone to dissolution; even if its story is one of ratcheting and intensification. History is written by the victors, &Etc.

Both Spain and America would come to play increasingly large roles in film—but the types of stories they’d tell would continue to bifurcate down very different trajectories. Hollywood would give us Billy Wilder and Cecil B. DeMille; Spain, Victor Erice and Luis Buñuel. I might be comparing apples and quinces, but isn’t that the point of a global history?

• Introducing the “Brighton School” and its major players ⛱️

• Showing how they pioneered not just the close-up, but some of the first colour films 🎬

• Weighing up their influence and contribution to film language 📣

Bit of a lag with this post because I needed to chase down some archival materials; not least Sadoul’s book about the Brighton School (which I found in the British Library). I also had to go cap in hand to the Huntley Film Archives and the BFI Archive. More about that below.

If you’ve been following this history then you’ll already be familiar with the Brighton School. Both G. A. Smith and James Williamson were “part” of it, though this loose affiliation of Brighton-based filmmakers never saw themselves as a coherent group.

Looking back, Williamson was quite casual about its formation; describing it as a “coincidence” of their mutual residence in the town. It was natural to suppose that filmmakers—of whom there were so few in the 1890s—would congregate and share ideas. It was a very small world.

In this post, I want to revisit Brighton—and, sorry, Hove; its towny neighbour—in order to lay the foundations for discourses and dialogues that will become important in future entries of this history. Bear with me; I have not forgotten every other country in the world.

The “Brighton School” was first described by French film theorist Georges Sadoul, whose British Creators of Film Technique—translated and published by the BFI in 1948—gave theoretical bones to works made by the likes of G. A. Smith, James Williamson, Esmé Collings, and the engineer Alfred Darling; though this shouldn’t be construed as some kind of weird Franco-Brighton love affair but as part of Sadoul’s wider engagement with the history of film style.1 He found out about them by accident, though; some aside or half-mumbled mention that snagged on Sadoul’s mind. It was a hunch that took the Frenchman on a seaside day-trip to visit Smith and his contemporaries. Fun little scenario.

David Bordwell—bearded and chummy and very, very smart—provided the bigger picture when he glossed Sadoul’s thinking about these early film experiments; writing that “cinema developed artistic ambitions in the 1910s because it addressed itself to the bourgeoisie”. Sadoul was a Marxist, and he wanted to show how economic and class factors had a structuring influence on film’s evolution. It didn’t come out of “nowhere”. The same can be said of the Brighton Schoolers.

In searching for the roots of “film language”, Sadoul “[brought] forward the earliest British filmmakers as important contributors”; calling out their sleeves-up tinkering with close-ups, cut-ins, tracking shots and “camera ubiquity”.2 Here was the origin of a mature “film style”, and it would allow Sadoul to argue that films like Citizen Kane weren’t explosive aberrations but rather a bootstrapping of earlier innovations that were already half a century old by the time Welles and Toland got their hands on them. He would do the same for D. W. Griffith, hoisting him up as a great synthesiser of techniques rather than a lone, experimental genius.

So who were the Brighton School, and what did they actually do?

Let’s start with Alfred Darling, who Williamson, in his unpublished memoir, credits as being the major influence in drawing these characters together.3 He was a Brighton native, square of head and thick of moustache. Engineer by trade and early education. John Huntley—smilingly, with his film-scuffed voice and seat in the back row of a cinema during a very useful but almost impossible-to-track-down BBC documentary from 1966—tells us that G. A. Smith hit up Darling on a Monday morning in 1896 after seeing the Lumière films at a city screening. Darling sorted him out with a camera; a studio wouldn’t come until 1898. His garden provided his “stage” in the meantime. Painted backdrop type stuff; scrappily Victorian (willowy half imperial baroque).

Smith—who I introduced in my last post—had that Robert Frost look. When filmmakers sought him out in the 1950s, recording a brief interview with him, Smith had his hands planted on his fence posts—chin lifted up, eyeballing around, furze of white blossoming hair. Explains how he started with “natural subjects [actualities] . . . and then I went on to comedies”. Thick, tumbling voice; falling out in plummy droplets, a chortling laugh.

Elsewhere, it was Friese-Greene who allegedly got Williamson into the film racket; or so explains Williamson’s son in that 1966 BBC interview. Plummy, clipped, matter-of-fact. His father’s efforts came out of “bits and pieces”; it was all “odd shots” made out of 50ft lengths of film. Glass-roofed studios (but he dismisses the term), tracks for cameras, laboratory gear. It was a “one-man band”, but it grew in stature as time went on. They screened their stuff on Saturdays in a DIY-assembled “cinema” (really a kind of wooden affair with ornate painted backdrops); 6 shillings or whatever to get 15-minutes of film (“if you were lucky”, recalls one contemporary).

So we’ve got Smith and Williamson, but there’s also Esmé Collings to contend with. He was a partner of Friese-Greene in London, opened a photographic studio in Hove in 1888. In 1896 he began putting together a catalogue of films that were more-or-less facsimiles of what the Lumières were doing in France (crowd scenes, trains arriving at stations, beach bathers, etc), but people always like to talk about A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896); it was an erotic film. By 1898 or so he’d given up on film and moved back to painting; one of his earliest passions. Like many early filmmakers, he made a short and energetic contribution. But it was also a very important one.

Things were happening in the rest of the UK, of course. I’ll probably talk about this in a later post, but we can barrel along by mentioning the already-mentioned Friese-Greene as well as Robert W. Paul, Walter R. Booth, Will Barker, &Etc—all of whom benefited from manufacturers who were already apprenticing camera-builders in the late 1890s and early 1900s, or were manufacturers themselves.4 Devices got shared around, built on spec, commissioned, adapted. This was happening in Clerkenwell, mostly; where canny artisanal manufacturers were already fitting out shops and selling their home-brew wares to prospective filmmakers.

Together, Smith, Williamson, and Collings were among the first to systematically apply some of the devices and techniques that we now consider part of the furniture; including narrative, reverse shots, continuity editing, close-ups; and while Hove was a small place, film travelled easily. Edwin S. Porter was certainly aware of what they were up to; he paid attention and put their ideas to work. Everyone’s favourite Life of an American Fireman—a Porter-Edison film from 1903 —apes Williamson’s Fire! (1901). It might be “better”, but it wasn’t the “first” of its ilk. If that matters. I don’t know if it does.

I wrote about Williamson’s The Big Swallow in an earlier post, but his An Interesting Story (1904) offers an equal dose of corporeal silliness; featuring a man so absorbed in his book that he is run over by a steam roller; only to be inflated again by a pair of passing cyclists. Not too dissimilar from the antics that would make fellow Englishman Charles Spencer Chaplin famous in just a handful of years.

But there was one more trick that the Brighton School had up their sleeve, and it remains one of the most surprising culverts—because it has largely been forgotten—of early British film.

Enter Charles Urban. Here was a thick-jawed, slick-haired American—by way of Bavaria—who, arriving in the UK in 1897, set up the Warwick Trading Company; a purveyor of news-reels and actualities. He actually did a lot for British film; pioneering scientific movie programs at London’s Alhambra, filming a 2,500 ft film of “living London”, and being one of the first residents in what would become the heart of the British film industry on Wardour Street.

His relationship with G. A. Smith—hello again—was instrumental. Together, they’d pioneer one of the first colour film systems; perhaps even the first. Luke McKernan’s long and detailed piece about “Kinemacolor” is probably the thing you want to read if you’re really interested in this, but I can gloss the particulars for you here.

In 1903, Urban tasked Smith with trying to make the earlier Lee-Turner colour process actually work; it was notoriously “stubborn”, nobody could make heads-or-tails of it. Smith saw that a two- rather than three-colour approach had the best potential (red and green), and had sufficient chemical know-how to think about how to overcome the limitations of the colour-insensitive film stocks that dominated at the time.

Long story short, this meant creating his own panchromatic film stock; being one that was fully sensitive to the colour spectrum. It worked; and was patented in November 1896. The special camera that this stock required involved some kind of rotating red-green disc, but that’s as much technical bluff as I can give here. The best and most fun surviving example is G. A. Smith’s Two Clowns from 1906. You can watch it here; ciggies, conspiratorial whispers, glasses of booze. Clowns too, of course.

There was some further patent wrangling, and—despite Urban’s founding of the Natural Color Kinematograph Company—the system fell out of favour or was just sidelined and forgotten. Kinemacolor was groundbreaking, but it wasn’t easily scalable and uptake was resultantly limited. It made brief appearances in France, Austria, Germany, but quickly petered out. It wouldn’t be until the mid-1960s that colour film would become at all common; more than half a century after it was first invented.

The early cinema was bright; much brighter than the blackest-ever-black that defined the monochrome era that would eventually take flight. Tints were common; we’ll talk more about those in due course. Fire was red; daylight golden; the night a kind of primeval Klein-blue. Brighton was brightest of all; for a little while. Through colour and monochrome, they showed it all: granny threading her needle, the dramatized story of a fire brigade, seaside bathers, a kiss in a tunnel, a tale of Father Christmas, and even an imagined “attack” on a British embassy in “China” that was sufficiently realistic that its spectators believed it was a news reel.

In summing up the Brighton School, Bordwell again has the coup-de-grace; explaining how they “sought a total illusion incorporating movement, depth, colour, sound, and the sense of human presence”. This is really “it”, in a nutshell. They were early, they worked relatively independently, they were “small”, even if we can’t accurately say who was really “first”. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is their coherence and scrambling-tumbling inventiveness; meeting that perfectly imperfect tendency of Manny Farber’s “termite art” that I mentioned, off-cuffishly, in the introduction to this history.

They toyed around, got help where they needed it, made as much of a living as was possible. They were also mostly bourgeois, but that wasn’t the case for the technicians and apprentices who manufactured the camera devices the “school” relied on.

It wasn’t also the case for large numbers of their audience, who gathered together and watched The Kiss in the Tunnel—one of the first instances of continuity editing. Point-of-view shot from moving train about to enter a tunnel; cut to scene inside carriage where man and woman have an awkward kissy fumble; cut to point-of-view shot from moving train as it exits tunnel. Michael Brooke—a great source for commentary on these early British films—pads it down to Smith’s desire for “some extra spice” in the story. It wasn’t the “obvious” thing to do; but Smith made it obvious.

Williamson’s Attack on a China Mission (1900), meanwhile, introduced those same audiences to reverse shots; showing us the exterior of the under-attack “mission” (smoke, gunshots, panic) and then cutting to a scene of rifle-bearing sailors approaching the building. They fire their rifles right down the lens. We cut back to the front of the mission; the soldiers heroically save the day.

There’s a quote laying around by film theorist Alexandre Astruc, who argued that:

“The cinema is not an eternal art. Each of the aspects that it reveals is linked inevitably to the psychology of a period. Its successive faces vanish into the shadows when other ways of thinking rise up, when new techniques make earlier ones marginal”

The “psychology” of the early British film industry was its preference for running gags and sort-of slapstick tricks, where Smith, Williamson, and Collings all showed their best work when they weren’t just parroting films that were popular in France but were having fun with uniquely “English” amusements.

Unlike Méliès, these weren’t fantastical flicks in the magical sense. They mined the practical trickery of swallowings, deflations, and optical zoomings; creating a kind of everyday aesthetics of tomfoolery in which bodies were both troublesome and troubling. For Collings, that was a taboo strip act; for Smith, cannibalism; for Williamson, a physical deflation and the subject’s improbably-probable resurrection.

But this doesn’t mean that these films were “superficial”—a simple matter of surfaces. By colourising, distorting, reversing, looking close, the Brighton School played a role in the reassembling of truth that film lays its claim upon. Film truth; or kino pravda, for the “a little later” Russians. It has an “uncanny” truth claim (so Ute Holl says); where, even in its actualities, it was drawing attention to the already-seen, nudging it around. Remember: people paid good money to go and see themselves doing things that they might have done earlier that day in the “real” world. The cinema was different; and even the most indifferent of cinemagoers had glommed on to this. It was a “real” that wasn’t quite real, you might say.

The Brighton School were deflated too; in time. The cinema moved on without them. Sadoul tried to revive them first; and then Tristram Powell and his producer—a young Melvyn Bragg—had their opportunity. The thing about the history of film, as Astruc pointed out, is that its faces have a way of vanishing—just as others “rise up”. Not everyone makes it to the credits sequence.

• G. A. Smith’s first experiments with telescopic shots 🔭

• How James Williamson ate his way into film history 👄

• D. W. Griffiths’ uncanny attention to detail 🔧

The first month of writing this history has me feeling a deep well of respect for actual historians, and there is always the gnawing doubt that I might have missed something or somebody really important. But I can’t watch and read everything; even if I feel like I should. By the way, is there something I’ve overlooked—or a fact I’ve disfigured? Drop me a DM or a comment. I will read it.

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G. A. Smith—a bushy-haired raconteur hailing from London’s Cripplegate—made a name for himself as a stage hypnotist before he turned his attention to the world of film.

But magic’s loss was cinema’s gain, because George Albert Smith would play no small part in helping film unbutton itself from the stagey-fixedness of the theatre and become something that we now recognise as big-F film.

There’s a pattern here, I think, in how closely magic and the cinema were interwoven through the 1890s and early 1900s, when so many conjurers and illusionists—some of whom were certainly shysters and opportunists—threw their lot in with film. In fact, it’s something you might recognise from earlier entries in this history. How’s that for a clever backlink?

For G. A. Smith, however, his act—performed at the Brighton Aquarium (which is either the worst or best possible place to practice illusions)—involved a blindfolded performer identifying unseen objects selected by the audience, as well as the psychic “transference” of unseen numbers. It was a matter of some contemporary speculation as to whether Smith’s act was “genuine”, and to what extent he was hoodwinking his audience. Take your pick.

Ever the man about town, Smith supplemented his income by cultivating a pleasure garden in his adoptive home of Hove; where he staged public exhibitions that ran the gamut from hot air balloons to lantern shows. Later, he would construct a film studio in its grounds. In this way, you might think of him as the English Méliès.1

In 1889, Smith co-authored Experiments in Thought Transference with Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, about whom I know nothing beyond their names. The paper—which is dense and cautious, and I don’t really know why I read it—reports an experiment convened between Smith and a “Mr. W”; a “clerk in a shop, aged probably about twenty-one or twenty-two”. Having hypnotised his subject, Smith believed that he could “transfer” the image of a randomly selected number between his mind and “W”s. Their dialogue is reported, in part, as follows:

Smith: Do you see this?

W.: Where? [pause] I see him now — a “3”.

Smith: Yes. Do you see any more?”

W.: No.

Then, after a lot of ambivalent back and forth—during which time Mr. W fell into a deeper and perhaps predictable state of sleep—the subject “suddenly awoke himself”. There was no further opportunity, on that day, to pursue the experiment.

Eleanor Sidgwick observed, dryly, that “Mr Smith believes himself to have the power of vivid visualisation”.

It would turn out to be a strangely prescient remark.

There was nothing particularly spectacular about film’s first close-up. It took the shape of a game old lark that camouflaged a great deal of its revolutionary potential—as would be the case for so many early films at a time when stories were kept light and bright for their half-distracted spectators. Filmmakers were trying things out; their audiences were sufficiently entertained to indulge them. It was an arrangement that seemed to work both ways.

This film—Grandma’s Reading Glass—was produced by G. A. Smith in 1900. It features a not-so-old “grandma” and her (presumed) grandson who idle away the time by using the eponymous reading glass to inspect a Bovril advert, a pocket watch mechanism, a canary in a cage, the old lady’s beady eye, and—eventually—a purring kitten. The camera become a surrogate for the subject and viewer’s eye—a circle of film masked off against black.

For Grandma’, there’s no narrative structure to speak of; making it “little” more than a technical demonstration (albeit a kindly and heart-warming one). It’s a “trick” film. It cuts between a pair of medium shots and a point-of-view. But, in these seemingly unremarkable movements, “he helped to teach his contemporaries how to create a filmed sequence”. The cinema started small.

Later that year, Smith repeated the trick with a bit more thought put into its structure. As Seen Through a Telescope is a three-act flick whose story goes something like this: frock-coated professorial type pulls a telescope from his pocket, extends the mechanism, and takes a look around. He’s all attentiveness and curiosity. Now the inventive bit: we see what the rheumy old man is actually looking at through his lens; namely, a woman’s exposed calf and shoe, which a pair of hands—not her own—are fussily lacing up. G. A. Smith lets us have a good ogle before cutting back to the wide-angled street scene, whereupon our professor congratulates himself, takes a seat, and is subsequently knocked over by the irate lace-tying husband.

It’s all over in about 59 seconds.

Harmless eye-lolling kiss-me-quick seaside stuff, for sure; but Smith’s circular close-up was a big day for the fledgling cinema.

Like its sister film, Telescope is an instance where the subject—a reading glass, a telescope—is a device that is already understood as a collapser-of-distances. You can follow Smith’s thinking; how film isn’t just an even-keeled documentation of “something-happening”, but a slithering of tendrils that attach parts of bodies, parts of speech, parts of parts. We can “ride” the lens with our own eye. We can rattle around inside an actor’s head and see what they see—and look at the things they’re looking at.

In these two films, Smith was building out the rudiments of a “grammar” of film; adding flesh to its bones and flaying off the parts that belonged to stages and paperbacks. It was heady and intoxicating stuff; so much so that Smith’s industrious confabulations would have Charles Urban “yelling like a cowboy”. He also did some really puffy, pretty things with soft focus and narrative editing.

This is presumably why the BFI included Telescope in their “primitives and pioneers” collection. I mention this mostly because the title alliterates nicely, but also because it lands on a smudgy truth about Smith; that his scrappy-curiosity-craftiness would turn out to be foundational to the cinema. He really was breaking new ground; one act of public perversion at a time.

It would fall to James Williamson, a Fife-born chemist and seller of photographic chemicals and equipment, to pick things up where Smith left off. If Smith was Méliès, Williamson was his Lumière—even if both of their names are often excluded from those grandiose, sweeping-style accounts of early film; though Mark Cousins at least gives Smith passing dues in his The Story of Film. Williamson gets a glance, too; but it isn’t held for long.

In 1901, Williamson directed The Big Swallow—a short trick film which is defiantly simple in its execution but fashions and configures the close-up into something much more radical.2 He built on Smith’s work; taking the idea further.

Here, we see a man—played by Sam Dalton, a professional comedian—in medium shot; his eyes flashing and winking down the lens, gazing directly at us. “I won’t, I won’t!”, the intertitles declare; “I’ll eat the camera first”, before proceeding to approach the camera—and us—until his mouth opens and appears the swallow the camera, cutting to a shot in which the filmmaker and his equipment tumble into the hungry maw. Having gorged on his peculiar meal, he retreats.

For Michael Brooke, Williamson was probably having a bit of a fun with his own experience of dealing with “unwanted attention from increasingly savvy passers-by while filming his actuality shorts”. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those early actuality street scenes; people can’t help but stop and gawp and gather around the camera. I guess Williamson wanted them to act more naturally, or feared that they might eat him.

Unlike Smith’s experiments, The Big Swallow has a peculiarly destabilising effect; messing around with the audience’s sense of perception in such a way that it would become of great interest to the Surrealists. Perhaps a little Un Chien Andalou, avant la lettre.

Fred Talbot, in his Moving Pictures: how they are made and worked (1912), goes into some detail about how Williamson pulled the shot off; having attached the racking bellows of an “ordinary” camera to his cinematograph and using this instrument to refocus the shot as Dalton approached the device; where Williamson had chalked out his points of focus on the ground, adjusting as the “swallower” approached:

“Presently only his head was recorded; then nothing but the open mouth and teeth; and at last, when he almost touched the lens, nothing but a black cavity was revealed upon the film.”

The whole thing was assembled through a careful kind of stop-motion; interlinking Dalton’s walking approach, the “swallow”, and his now satisfied retreat. It is wily and strange and funny in the manner of G. A. Smith’s own Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer from 1897, where Smith had first kidded around with the idea that the camera didn’t need to be yards and yards away from the performer. Instead, we’re close; we see the bottle, the old man’s upper half, his increasingly lively hands, his gurning face.

Really, it took an amateur—or a pair of them—without any kind of stage background to realise that film didn’t have to involve just “plunk[ing] down their camera at a likely distance and let[ting] it grind”, as Fritzi Kramer puts it. Smith and Williamson showed us what film—as its own very new and different media—could become. Not “filmed theatre”, but something to do with perspective, time, vision, composition—and the derangement of all these things. Even then, these close-ups promised the suturing-together of a language that would, for Serge Daney, become “the same language”; shared by acolytes who might otherwise not share the same mother tongue.

They were the first collective utterances whose syllables started with a reading glass, a telescope, a watch. These are mechanical intimations of proximity, collapsed distances, the folding of time; all of which would eventually become Daney’s language. In fact, all of our language. We speak it so fluently that skips our mouths and plants itself directly in our eyes.

If these English films hinged on the close-up—they were demonstrations as much as entertainments—then what of those films in which the close-up played a part, but wasn’t the “whole” affair?

By 1911, D. W. Griffith—who we all know for being as difficult and controversial as he was creatively brilliant—had already spent some time larking around as a stage extra in a handful of American Mutoscope and Biograph Company films before going on to direct a not insignificant number of productions for them; including the first ever film shot in Hollywood, California. He had a habit of being ahead of things.

Before falling out with Biograph—he would go on to found his own Mutual Film Corporation, where he’d be free to overrun and lose as much money as he wanted—Griffith shot a curious 17-minute film that demonstrated his canny familiarity with Smith and Williamson’s experiments across the pond.

The Lonedale Operator stars a moon-faced Blanche Sweet playing a telegraph operator for a remote mining concern who, taking delivery of the company’s payroll, finds herself in a pickle when a pair of ne’er-do-wells attempt to jack the bag of money from her.

What ensues are three intercutting strands of story: Blanche barricaded in her office, the criminals attempting to break inside, and a rescue train whose driver is the gruff, heavy-jawed love interest played by Frank Grandon.

Griffith used bloody red tints for the train shots to better convey the ferocious heat of its engine, and the whole affair clips along with some nicely naturalistic exterior shots shot aboard the carriage. We get a feel for the momentum.

But when the train eventually arrives (how long it takes!), Sweet has already bested the burglars by jabbing a wrench in their faces, which they mistakenly confuse for a pistol. When big lunk Grandon rocks up, all gnashing jaw and rotating shoulders, Sweet reveals her deception—and Griffith rewards us with a close-up of the wrench. It’s a real “ta da!” moment. Even the burglars bow.

Elsewhere, this writer is right to celebrate The Lonedale Operator’s subtly emotive composition, where Griffith frequently places his characters “at the left of right edge of the frame, which creates a sense of imbalance and tension”. He also pushes his camera forward while Blanche Sweet taps furiously at her telegraph machine—better accentuating her mortal terror. We’re in the room with her.

The close-up was novel, but Griffith’s film also shows off his deft technical grasp and cinematic maturity; even when he was dealing with the most schlocky of scenarios. In time, he’d be telling very different stories.

In these early years, the close-up could be many “things”. For some, it offered a means to draw attention to important narrative details that might otherwise get lost. Think about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a Thanhouser Coy. flick from 1912. In the film’s last gasp, Mr. Hyde’s curling, seemingly-but-perhaps-not prosthetic hand grips the poison he’ll use to end his life. In this instance, the close-up solved a narrative “problem” for Lucius J. Henderson, the film’s director; helping to keep the momentum going without relying on a disruptive intertitle (e.g., “Hyde drinks a deadly poison!”) It’s also quite fun, even if it’s the only image you’d probably want to save from this otherwise pedestrian adaptation.

Formal innovations are like sea foam; they spume out at the tops of waves and then get lost just as easily as they came. It’s hard to say whether G. A. Smith’s audience saw his telescope and thought, “the cinema is changed”. This is the backwards-cycling perspective of film histories, which all but feed on observations like these.

It might feel more like a kind of advancing-accumulating-sedimenting thing, where filmmakers were toying around with new tricks and devices that entered their collective lexicon but weren’t always picked up or sustained. Just because G. A. Smith gave it a spin in 1900, it doesn’t mean that every other filmmaker started using them with headless abandon.

Given another decade and loose change, however, close-ups had become part of the filmic furniture. Just think of Louis Feuillade’s obsession with them in his episodic Les Vampires (1915-16)—or Giovanni Pastrone’s up-close adoration of rings and treasures in his sprawling Cabiria (1914). The close-up untethered filmmakers from the disruptive fussiness of intertitles, just as it drew attention to things that the audience needed to take note of: bottle of poison, wrench, exposed calf. Etc.

In other words, film was already beginning to look a lot more film-y as the years wore on; which you might indulge in me as a kind of rotten English version of the French “photogénie”.3

It also makes me wonder what we mean when we say that a film “looks like” a film; implying some kind of teleological process by which cinema arrived logically and coherently toward its “final form”; which can’t be true, and isn’t true. But more about that later.

• How Georges Méliès magicked narrative into existence 🪄

• How Edwin S. Porter learned to tell a good yarn 🎥

• How the first, longest film “ever” made was lost and found again 🎞️

I’m still figuring out how this history will work—the formats, the frequency, all of it; meaning I’m very open to suggestions, recommendations, and ideas. Thanks for reading.

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With his bulbous head, pointed moustache, and silken tie, Georges Méliès cut the quintessential figure of a Parisien bourgeois; revealing only the slightest winking hint of his magical inclinations.

But this man—who looked so much like a well-meaning physician; or a sprightly bank manager—would go on to become one of the greatest (and probably oddest) pioneers of early cinema. Even if you haven’t seen his films, you will be ambiently aware of them. Just think of the face of the moon, whose blinking eyes and smiling mouth—Méliès’ own—emerged from whipped smears of plaster and makeup. I think it must have been really fun to do this; not just artistic—whatever that’s worth—but quite jolly. Méliès was a silly goose!

Later in life, on invitation from an Italian journalist, Méliès described himself—strangely, in the third person—as “an engineer of great precision, experienced in the manufacture of mechanical and automated devices” who, nonetheless, had “experienced great difficulty” in making his first strides into the world of cinema.

To what extent the elder Méliès, acting with the air of a raconteur, was winking at his readers is difficult to determine; but we can appreciate that his path to becoming one of silent cinema’s greatest “auteurs” was not particularly straightforward, especially when he emerged on the “scene” at a time—as he later put it—“when no such material yet existed and when each innovator kept their work and research a closely guarded secret”. He saw himself as being part of a closeted, mystical society.

It was an image that suited him perfectly.

Yet, Méliès wasn’t like the technocratic Edison or the industrially established Lumières; having spent the first part of his artistic life ping-ponging between a passion for stage magic—after seeing a memorable show by John Nevil Maskelyne—and painting; having studied, for a time, at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was not—at least by training or early inclination—particularly interested in the world of cameras and chemicals. Indeed, by 1895 he had cemented his reputation as a known and notable purveyor of spectacles and sensations. He ran a theatre, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, that became a testing ground in which he lathed his illusions into existence.1

But, for Georges Méliès, things wouldn’t stay this way for very long.

December 27, 1895. Stepping through the evening’s blustery chill, Méliès, his tall hat tipped back on his head, made his way to a private demonstration of the Lumière’s Cinématographe; right on the eve of its unveiling to the wider French public. Transfixed, Georges sat in the screening room of Le Salon Indien, watching as the light of the projector pierced the darkness above his head. When the lights came up, he enthusiastically offered the brothers 10,000 francs in exchange for one of their machines.

His offer was declined.

Denied access to the Lumière’s device, Méliès set about labouring to bring his own camera-projector into operation; adapting, borrowing, and intuiting pieces and parts from other parallel inventions. “Rolling his sleeves up”, he set about resolving the considerable technical hurdles; and spent the first nine months of 1896 filming “open air scenes or inconsequential short comic sequences” while refining the technical apparatus that—in his own words—would allow him “to give free rein to his vivid imagination”.

Later, in 1899, after constructing a dedicated film studio on his property in Montreuil, and after creating many zany and amusing scenes and experiments, he shot Cinderella—an ambitious six-minute film featuring multiple scenes, dissolves, and as many as 35 actors. Here was Méliès’ “vivid imagination” on full and electric display.

While we could split hairs all day about which of Méliès’ films represents his first “proper” narrative (could it be his episodic series The Dreyfus Affair [1899]?), Cinderella became his most popular and successful film to date. Only three short years after the Lumière’s Paris screening introduced the mass public to “moving pictures”, film already looked remarkably different and more advanced than the 10-second actualities that had first transfixed cinemagoers.

Narrative cinema had arrived.

For Méliès, however, it was A Trip to the Moon—from 1902—that became the first really lampoonable fixture in the canon of early film; not least for its cream-faced satellite, outrageous scenography, and fantastical happenings.

This was a film that moved beyond boxy stage rooms and implied a greater “beyond”; a phantasmagoric and implied territory brought to life through detailed, brilliant backdrops, raised stages, and artfully confected scenography. It also made early use of masking and , making it a step up from the more stagey presentation of his earlier Cinderella. Its action was less “symbolic”, giving the impression of meaningful cause and effect (rocket is launched, rocket lands on moon, people walk around the moon, people depart the moon). It’s a quirky and chaotic picture, but still very fun to watch today.

Now that filmmakers could manage more than a few feet of film, they could start exploring longer and more nuanced stories—which also invited the idea that the camera itself was not only partial (that there were things it could not see), but also constructive (in that it might be able to “tell” the story of the events that play out before us).

Here’s an example. In A Trip to the Moon, our astronauts—having landed on the moon—move from the right of the screen to the left, whereupon the next scene shows them arriving from the right (i.e., these are contiguous spaces). Moments later, having boarded and launched their craft, their bulky shuttle tumbles from the moon’s surface (dropping off the bottom of the screen) and transitions to a new scene where we see a waving blanket of very real ocean into which the rocket—arriving from the top of the frame this time—plunges. Right to left, top to bottom. It sketches a dog’s leg.

In other words, the idea had now been established that the camera is roving around between contiguous spaces, even while it remains in a fixed position viz-a-viz the centre of the frame. These might seem like little and tiny innovations, but they helped to build the idea that the camera might play an increasingly instrumental role in “telling stories with images”.

In the space of a few years, audiences were already growing accustomed to the emerging grammar and conventions of film. They knew broadly what to expect when they took their seats; following characters from living rooms and parlours to streets and club houses. They appreciated how the camera’s closing iris signalled the end of a scene, or how one space might fade and blossom into another.2

Through the magic of editing, filmmakers could link “scenes” into chapters; telling increasingly longer and more complicated stories. Soon enough, we’d begin to see intertitles shuffling and framing the story along. But not quite yet.

In a later post, I’ll be looking more closely at how this protean cinematic grammar gained coherence under the direction of England’s “Brighton School”, who pioneered so many of the conventions that seem obvious today. For now, it’s enough to remark how figures like G.A Smith, James Williamson, and Esmé Collings were doing a lot of really clever things that don’t “seem” that clever today but, for their time, were unbelievably innovative and bold; fulfilling that ever-prescient quality of art-making that Manny Farber described as going forward, “eating its own boundaries” in an “eager, industrious, unkempt activity”.

We’ll return to this.

Having put a placeholder on England, it’s time to take a look at what was happening in America; which has been—in this history, at least—little more than a footnote so far, despite the industrious beaverings-away of Edison and Eastman, to whom we should definitely be paying some dues.

But let’s start with a splash.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery introduced a newly mature horizon of film editing to American audiences; not least with its dramatic opening shot, featuring a rare medium of actor Justus D. Barnes who, glaring sternly into the camera’s lens—his body framed against a stark background of black—raises his pistol and points it directly at the viewer.

He fires.

The first “metafiction”? Probably; probably not. I half wonder if it feels more akin to a kind of parlour trick. Either way, the act feels quite shocking; it’s really the last thing you expect.

Born to a large Pennsylvania family, Porter had spent much of his early life around machinery and electronics; inventing an unknown number of gadgets and devices while employed by a busy Philadelphia shipbuilder. When films were first screened in the United States in 1896 (care of the Lumières and their flickering international empire), he gained quick and enthusiastic work with Raff & Gammon—early film agents, who managed to hurry themselves into existence in the blink of an iris—before striking off to tour the country as a projectionist. Eventually, he’d make his way to the West Indies and South America; bringing the moving pictures to hotter and clamier climes than his native East Coast.

Returning to New York in 1898, Porter assembled programs of Edison films at the squat, gothic amusement hall of Eden Musée—a former wax museum turned projection hall. Here, he showed what he was made of; drumming himself up as a master of ceremonies for movie-addled audiences. His proximity to Edison eventually led him to work directly for the great man; taking over production at his New York studios. Edwin—plump, unassuming, and thickly moustachioed— got the movies, and Edison gave him the opportunity he needed.

The Great Train Robbery showed just how intuitively Porter understood the protean movie business; pairing his technical flair—he was a master of fades and dissolves—with his appreciation for how to work and entertain a crowd. It was something he’d learned during those long, hot summers touring his projection equipment around fairs and fields in the American hinterland.

There is much in The Great Train Robbery that wasn’t really surprising, where many of its pieces and parts prioritised action over storytelling. But Porter’s ingenuity was in bringing everything he’d learned about the film business together; creating a rough-eyed film that told a mostly coherent narrative; cutting between multiple temporalities and locations in a way that required the audience to follow parallel strands in the story.

He also made clever use of matte effects and projection to expand the expressive possibilities of the frame. In the second scene, the gang of robbers break violently into a telegraph office and tie up its operator; outside, through a wide open window, a projected train arrives at the station. It might look wobbly and ill-formatted today, but—for its time—this was a remarkably novel innovation that Méliès himself would surely have tipped his hat to.

In other of his works, Porter would begin to anchor his tricks and visuals to the bedrock of narrative. There was his Life of an American Fireman (also 1903), The European Rest Cure (1904), and The Kleptomaniac (a 1905 melodrama and social critique). Looking back on his work in 1940, The New York Times found in Porter a man of “mechanical ingenuity and artistic instinct”; the first, homegrown hero of the American motion pictures.

With people like Porter at the helm, films were beginning to cross-cut and operate in different times and spaces; all without sound and almost always without intertitles. It was about intuition and implication, yes; but these films also invited their audiences to “read” the action that played out before their eyes. In this, Porter had been directly influenced by films he’d seen or acquired from Méliès and the Brighton School; speaking of how he “came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story might draw the customers back to the theatres, and set to work in this direction” at a time when they were becoming “tired of the short, single-scene type of newsreel films that predominated then”.

He was exactly right.

In 1906, cinemagoers would be treated to what has roundly been called the first proper or full-length “feature”: Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang. Running to 70 minutes, this was a mammoth duration at a time when most films rarely breached the 15-minute mark. But it wasn’t just long; it was politically divisive. Six years later, as Luke Buckmaster tells it, “politicians [introduced] a ban on the production of bushranger films in New South Wales”. It was a ban that would last until the 1940s.

Even then, only 17 minutes of the film survive today—forming a wrapper of fragments that capture slight touches of the film as it once played. In a lucky twist of fate, some of the film’s most enduring images are among the survivors; including the legendary shootout that led to Ned Kelly’s capture. It had originally been believed lost, but various reels and strips of film kept turning up in people’s cupboards and cobwebby archives. It was restored—well, glossed up and reassembled—by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in 2006. The Tait brothers—it’s funny how much of early film was the work of fraternities and brotherhoods—weren’t neophytes; having exhibited film across Australia, paid visits to the UK, and operated a string of their own theatres. They had that unflappable appetite for film that so characterises the early years of cinema; and audiences were equally impressed, where the first Melbourne screenings—costing £1 a ticket—were standing room only.

But what about the film itself? It was long, yes; but we have to ask what is so novel about it—at least, of those fragments that survive.

For the most part, it’s pretty “standard” fayre for 1906; featuring a handful of tricks and a little visual playfulness. For me, one of its most unique adaptations is its use of gentle camera pans, where Tait’s camera (care of cinematography by Millard Johnson, Orrie Perry, and Reg Perry) moves gently around the scene in order to better capture the depth of field he was working with. Left to right; right to left.

When Ned Kelly and his gang hold up Younghusband’s Station, a lot of the tension comes with the arrival of yet more visitors—soon to be victims—who appear through the building’s gate. The camera’s pan helps to shift our attention between Kelly and these new arrivals; introducing a lick of anticipatory comedy, and dramatic irony, as we realise that they’re about to be robbed.

These pans demonstrate how filmmakers were beginning to see the camera as a floating “eye” that could traverse space and tell a story through its own movement; and that it wasn’t just the actors who could move about the screen. Yes, it’s a little thing; but the early 1900s were the age of little things that were doing a lot. Tait’s film was the first very long film, and that is probably enough to cement its importance—even if its story might not wholly justify this gargantuan duration. There’s a lot of milling and dashing around; a lot of repetition; and a lot of dead space that later filmmakers would approach with more zap and fizz.

But it had broken the barrier of attention; and Ned Kelly’s downfall—in the film’s final scene—is really a thing to behold.

I’m stopping today’s post in 1906. Why? In part, I want to give proper space, in later posts, to talk about the confabulations of the Brighton School; who Porter was so in hock to—and to allow space to show what happened between 1906 and 1914, when the cinema would lurch ever harder and faster toward a more recognisable shape and form.

In my next post, however, I’m going to look in a lot of specific detail at the first usages of closeup shots—a technique that first made an appearance in 1900 and gained proper formal flight in 1911, in the deftly experimental hands of D.W. Griffiths (a filmmaker we’ll be returning to time and again).

“The cinema is an invention without any future”

Louis Lumière

We all know the things we know about the invention of cinema. The tidy Hallmark story tells how Auguste and Louis Lumière—two French brothers and businessmen living on the banks of the Rhône—came up with the “idea” and made it a sensation.

It’s a plumply whiggish story; satisfying our desire to trace the roots of film to a single, coherent point. But the reality—as is so often and excitingly the case—has all kinds of lumps and bumps and dog-legged angles that don’t fit this too-tidy narrative.

In this spirit—and in the interests of what actually went down—I want to use the first entry of my history to tell a muckier story. It’s one, care of industrial secrecies, financial mishaps, disappointments, and acrimony, that—in 1897—blew up in a tragic fire that nobody could have foreseen.

But—to put a lighter and smiling face on these affairs—these same years began without the cinema. By 1900, as Henri Langlois put it—France’s beloved film preservationist, famed for his floppy hair, wonky tie, and bulbous eyes—“cinema sprang from the trees, gushed from the sea, [and] every screen opened a window onto infinity”.

Things were about to get reel.

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First things first, it was another Frenchman—Louis Le Prince—who beat the Lumières’ to what is commonly thought of as “their” invention. His Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) is a 2 second “shot” (lest we think of it as a film in the fullest sense of the term) that documents ‘little’ more than a group of smartly-dressed bourgeois standing and strolling around an English garden. This took place in Leeds, England, making the UK—and a notably rural corner of it, at that—the unlikely place for the film revolution to take off.

Despite its brevity, Roundhay Garden Scene was the first “film”—that we know of1—in the proper sense of the word; and we might compare it to that first photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827. “View from the window at Le Gras” depicts a smudge of densely dark shapes and twisted forms that, squinting and blinking, we have to believe are a horizon of rooftops. It is not too dissimilar from the murky, imprecise forms and hollows that dominate Le Prince’s film—gaunt blocks of body and dress tangling their way through the cinematic darkness.

But how did le Prince do it—and in what ways was his approach both similar to and different from that taken by the Lumière brothers? His machine (the “receiver or photo-camera”), patented in the US and UK in 1888, was a combination of both camera and projector (which he called the “deliverer or stereopticon”). Like his contemporaries, he had to devise a device that could smoothly pass photosensitive film through its aperture; capturing not just a “single” image but a series of consequential “frames”. By divine conception or a canny reading of patents and photographic journals, Le Prince understood—like the Lumières, Edison, and myriad others—that sprocket holes punched in the film strip would ease its passage through the machine. The same technique would subsequently pass exposed film through the projector, creating the illusion of perpetual motion—turning discrete, frozen images into movement and motion. Film’s first “problem” was a matter of movement.

But Le Prince was able to “solve” this problem—thanks to various American patents and innovations, mostly shoved and hurried along by George Eastman of Kodak2—and it was with his sprocket-holed, hand-cranked device, on a mild October day, that he shot his first—in fact, the first—film. We’re led to believe that his equipment was also capable of projection (his assistant, James Longley, noted that Le Prince projected his films in his private workshop, though no public screening ever took place). We have to believe him; and why shouldn’t we?

Contemporaneously, figures like Willian Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe—both Englishmen—were pursuing their own parallel experiments, which the former patented in June 1889 and the latter as early as 1876—though Donisthorpe wouldn’t present anything like a “moving picture” until 1890, when he documented passing traffic in London’s Trafalgar Square. Meanwhile, Birt Acres conducted his own experiments; using his portable (and funnily named) 35mm Birtac machine, alongside Robert W. Paul—who we’ll be hearing a lot more from in future entries—to capture such films as Incident at Clovelly Cottage in 1895, though he wouldn’t publicly screen his films until 1896.

The case of the German Skladanowsky brothers, meanwhile, is more interesting; nudging at the idea that the Lumières really “came first” (so far as public projection goes). Using their Bioscop machine, they hosted a public screening in Berlin’s Wintergarten theatre—in Berlin-Mitte—on November 1st 1895, two months before the Lumières held their own public screening at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris.

The Skladanowsky’s event featured eight films, mostly between 6 and 11 seconds in length, looping continuously while a specially composed score drowned out the sound of the whirring, clacking machinery. The show would travel on to Berlin and Paris, around the same time that the Lumières were promoting their own demonstrations. The programme itself (which you can view online) features dancers, acrobats, boxers, jugglers, and wrestlers—all of it shot outdoors, in full sunlight, against a white or black backdrop. In other words, it was a typically vaudevillian display that might otherwise appear—“in the flesh”—on stages across the city where the programme was screened.

What should become clear—through all of this—is that there is a great deal of temporal ambiguity, industrial suspicion, and wrangling of patents surrounding the proper “invention” of film; and different histories and historians use different yardsticks to measure that much-desired holy grail of being the “first”. It’s easy to get lost.

In his writing on the early cinema, Stephen Barber talks of the “shattered and gutted projection boxes”, the “dust-encrusted cans”, and “now-decrepit auditoria” of the first cinemas and cinema palaces. He is right to underline how the very earliest days of film were beetled by an obscurity from which a coterie of long-forgotten “also rans” come down to us in fragile whispers, their hands clasping at mouldy fragments. There was money here, but for every successful Lumière—and even the Skladanowsky brothers charged as much as 2,400 marks for their early showings—there were those whose fate was to try, and fail, or to succeed in the wrong way—or too late. The history of cinema is a kind of excavation; and it is throttled by all manner of cobwebs and delusions.

Regardless, it was the Lumières—with their established photography business, workers, and factory—who had the necessary capacity to start making films and film cameras on a more industrial scale. They were keen-eyed businessmen who were well positioned to beat out the German Skladanowsky brothers through a sustained and clever PR war, while certainly benefitting from later (primarily French) accountings that gladly pushed their native-born sons to the front of the proverbial picture. In the early years, the story of cinema was French; but Germany would most certainly make its comeback. Given time.

The brothers’ equipment—or, more properly, their system—was called the Cinématographe; using a name which originated with fellow countryman Léon Bouly who, for want of financing, had to drop his own efforts. What was bad for Bouly was great for the brothers. He is “just” another figure who fell by the wayside.

Wim Wenders’ A Trick of the Light—made in 1995—honours and adores the “successful failure” of the brothers, centring on a charmingly interpolated interview with their now 91 year old daughter. In her light-filled Berlin home, she—with brisk familiarity—handles the artefacts and fragments of her father’s cinematic machinations: photographic “flick books”, hand-punched film reels, plate-glass negatives. It’s a keen reminder that the Berlin brothers were not industrialists, like the Lumières, and had to muddle their “hand-constructed” Bioscop together in their tiny Pankow apartment.

The Bioscop was good; it worked. But it couldn’t achieve the crispness of images, the flowing of motion, nor the durations of time that the Lumière’s technologically superior device could obtain. The brothers—playful and serious and artful and larking—had to make do with being the “forgotten first”, just as Bouly had to concede the race.

Things were moving fast.

Like the Skladanowsky brothers’ device, Lumières’s camera-projector was a relatively lightweight, hand-cranked machine that was capable of producing sharper images and better illumination than Thomas Edison’s “kinetograph” across the pond. It also featured a projector; allowing it to cast its image onto a screen for public viewing. Edison’s Kinetoscope could not do this, requiring a special “peep show” projection box; meaning that only one person could view the films at any one time. This would turn out to be very important, and would hold back the American film industry while their European counterparts were figuring out how to turn film into a collective spectacle rather than a private “trick”.

When you look at it today, the Cinématographe doesn’t look all that dissimilar from a modern camera body; and you’ll quickly recognise the familiar relationship between lens, body, and viewfinder. Even perforations in the film allowed for it to be passed through and projected in a way that would provide a stable and continuous image. This was enough to ensure that their device would gain popular and rapid appreciation. When the Skladanowsky brothers saw the Cinématographe in action, they saw the future; just as they saw the limitations of their own (sadly inferior) invention.

But they had all benefitted from parallel efforts in cinematic invention, and figures like Le Prince should be thought of not as loners beavering away in their ivory towers—but there is a grain of truth to this—than technicians and businessmen who worked along parallel albeit not always overlapping trajectories like a ragtag and dispersed collective who were tumbling toward the “finish line” in a whirlwind of jolts and jumps. In some senses, the arrival of film wasn’t an “accident”—and it may even seem inevitable from a later remove. If Le Prince hadn’t got there first, it’s probable that other inventors would have eventually figured it out. Similarly, film didn’t depend on the industrial capacity offered by the Lumière brothers—but it certainly benefited from it. Bouly’s only impediment was that he ran out of cash; if he hadn’t, the history of film might look (at least slightly) different.

Either way, having cracked the problem of projected motion, this “invention” would—in its first few years—give rise to what film historians call the “cinema of attractions”; where films were really a kind of fairground diversion featuring an “actuality”—a real thing in the world—that had been inscribed through the magic of photographic movement. In just a small amount of time, these silent films—though “silent” doesn’t quite capture the sonic texture of the contexts in which they were projected and watched—acquired their own “language”; and they were inventing it in real time.3

Early attractions (or “actualities”) were short affairs, and they would often be strung together in programmes that audiences might wander into and out of. For the Lumières themselves, that very first work was Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895, 46 seconds long): a film that everybody knows and which has gained such a place in the zeitgeist that it has been memed, ripped, copied, and even sent up by The Simpsons. Elsewhere, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896, 50 seconds long) is another early and notorious film, not least for the (alleged) panic that its first screening induced—though there’s no hard-and-fast evidence that such a freak out took place. For Ray Zone, “a panic legend became the founding myth of the medium”. Remember that.

Hito Steyerl, writing in her typically allusive manner, suggests that when the Lumières’ workers were filmed leaving the factory (chatting, shoulder to shoulder, seeming to glide rather than tread), they carried not only the industry but the idea of film along with them, “dispers[ing] it into every sector of life”. They were now not only workers but subjects of film; and, soon enough, they would become spectators of film, too—forming a newly industrial ouroboros of worker-watcher-worker. But we can only speculate what they felt when they saw themselves projected on the first cinema screens. I like to think that they found it all very fun, despite Steyerl’s cautioning against how this heralded a new era of surveillance and imagistic exploitation.

The actuality film, however—of which these workers were now a part—was not yet a singular thing; and cinematic “genre” was still so slippery and diffused an idea that surviving works come down to us as a kind of kleptomaniac fever dream; begging and borrowing from the expansive costume cupboard of theatre, pantomime, photography, sculpture, and painting. It might have seemed a novelty to some; especially those who’d seen any number of recent inventions arrive just as quickly as they disappeared.

For their own part, the Lumières were sceptical about the long-term relevance of the cinema; infamously declaring that it was an invention “without any future”. It’s for this reason that they would eventually cease production of actualities and drive their business toward the manufacturing of cameras and equipment; though they snubbed Georges Méliès—again, we’ll be hearing a lot about him—when he offered to purchase one of their machines. Intellectual property was everything.

In fact, this is a good opportunity to digress about Méliès—that illusory and unbelievably influential alchemist who cut such an interesting figure in the early cinema of France.

Let’s call him a kind of grandfather-come-wizard of silent film who surfaced from the throng of early actuality-hawkers to cement his place as cinema’s first great illusionist; using tricks, trompe l’oeils, and slights of hand to create phantasmagoric spectacles that ran the gamut of magical conjurings, cave-dwelling demons, and the illusion that Méliès’ own head had been cut off.

They are magical, decadent, and delicately Belle Époque in their realisation; showing the influence that the popular illustrations of Gustave Doré had on the prolific Méliès. He also made more “conventional” actualities; filming festivities and fêtes and life on the streets. With his tricks, exposures, maskings, and illusions, Méliès demonstrated that film was a device that doesn’t just show us the world, but constructs it; preparing the ground for such revolutionary advances as montage, even if these developments would only come “much” later.

Brief digression over.

In these first years of film, it wasn’t yet obvious that the cinema would become a “narrative” vehicle; as one that might involve different perspectives, locations, temporalities, and characters. The first studios and filmmakers were held back by costs, technical faff, and questions about audience reception (who would want to see this), even if they were already clueing up to the idea that films might make excellent vessels for longer and more complicated stories. For now, however, most producers were limited to making short, single-shot films from fixed camera positions; with most being little longer than 10 or 12 seconds. These were hardly the conditions in which to adapt Moby Dick. For now, at least.

Broadly, however, it’s argued that the first proper “story”—and we will get to this in my next entry—was La Fée aux Choux (1896): a now lost film directed by Alice Guy-Blaché (later Alice Guy), who we should rightly think of as one of film’s earliest and most important innovators. She experimented artfully with such devices as colour-tinting, special effects, and sync-sound, and would later go on to found Solax Studios in New York—one of the many businesses that bolstered the early New Jersey film industry, before it upped sticks and headed west for California and the coming stars of Hollywood.

Guy remade her film several times, but only the two later versions now survive. The surviving 1900 version—which is 70 seconds long—features a single static shot depicting a fairy who appears to pull babies from cabbages. The earlier film of 1896 seemed to have a more complex scenario and three additional characters, but we have nothing to go on aside from Guy’s retrospective accounting. It has been argued that this earlier version was likely shot on a wider format, seeing as Guy describes characters “jumping into the field of focus” and mentions people approaching from a distance. Even then, the later films—from 1900 and 1902 respectively—retain a single-shot structure that reveals how film was still broadly “borrowing” from the conventions of the stage; and we do not yet have the closeups, cutaways, or reverse shots that would become increasingly dominant through the pre-war period. This is certainly a story that we’ll get into in a later post.

Elsewhere, a coterie of mostly French, German, American, and English filmmakers got busy with producing their own actualities—a great many of which have been destroyed or lost. Taken together, we can glean a pretty nuanced picture of the kinds of subjects that interested these Edwardian and Belle Époque audiences; ranging from views of Niagara Falls and panoramic scenes of the Champs-Élysées to subway rides and steeple chases. We also get films documenting tragedies and natural disasters, including the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake. There were episodic tales of Rip van Winkle, an observational film of a man drinking a glass of beer (whom we don’t need to “imagine happy”), and the earliest known adaption of Shakespeare. Whatever might “fit” into a short canister of film; whatever the filmmaker felt moved or tickled by; and whatever the early studios thought would go down well with their audiences. It was a lot.

Remember, this was all happening between 1896 and 1900. The cinema made a heady and immediate splash, even if it wasn’t yet certain how it would evolve and develop. The names of influential early producers probably won’t ring a bell, either; including Cecil Hepworth, G.A. Smith, James Williamson, Robert W. Paul, some of whom—by 1899—were making as many as 100 actualities a year. Now the technology existed, audiences came forward; hurrying and curious and eager to see what all the fuss was about. They were hooked.

In today’s entry, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself; and we’ve already covered a feverish and fertile flurry of early filmmaking that I’ll need to eventually retread. There’s the story of the Lumières’ disciples and trainees—people like Francis Doublier—who would bring the movies to Russia, Hungary, and many other countries. There’s the parallel arc of how the earliest films took off in England, Sweden, America, and Italy—but, again, these are tales for another day; even if I won’t be able to tell them all.

We’ll close out this first entry with an event that foreshadows some of the detail I’ll be getting into later around projection and chemicals—and this is the tragic 1897 fire that gutted the Bazar de la Charité: an annual charity event organized by the French aristocracy. For its 1897 edition, the Bazar was located inside a large wooden warehouse at 17 Rue Jean-Goujon, Paris, and had been worked up to look like a medieval street. Its primary attraction was a Cinématographe installation that would screen any number of actualities to fee-paying audiences. I’ve been unable to find a detailed listing of the films that were shown but, given that they were using a Lumière Cinématographe, we can only assume that the programme was made up of Lumière actualities. Let’s picture workers, trains, and walls being knocked down.

On the afternoon of May 4th, however, the projectionist’s equipment caught fire; causing a raging conflagration that killed 126 people. The story attracted fervid speculation and press coverage both in France and internationally—and its cause can most likely be chalked down to the highly flammable materials that early film stocks were made out of, though other reports cite the accidental ignition of flammable ether. While it might not have been the first film fire, it was the most widely reported—and certainly the most sensational.

There is some suggestion, as a result of the fire, that it became “unfashionable” to attend the pictures. Yet, Ian Christie—in Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema—remarks that there’s no meaningful evidence to back this claim up, and—as we’ll see in later posts—film “palaces” and cinemas were about to become a huge, popular business not only in France but around the world. Even then, the Bazar would not be the last fire to terrorise film audiences, nor to obliterate its archives. But people weren’t “put off”. Not by a long way.

This is all to underline what film had become by 1897, all within a year of its first public “revelation”. It was popular, it attracted massive audiences from across the social classes, and it was still tremblingly new. Many died on that bitter afternoon, and the cinema—in that moment, the embers still hot to the touch—might be imagined as having tripped fatally up.

But this wasn’t to be its fate.

There would be other fires; more fires. Film would come to document life as it was lived and dreams as they are fantasised. Given time, it would record such horrors and catastrophes that Louis Le Prince, nor any of his fellow inventors, could have imagined or realised.

Later, in the faraway year of 1980, Jean-Louis Schefer—occupying the once unimaginable position of a theoretician of the moving image—would suggest that we do not watch film, but that film watches us; peeping inside the “invisible chamber” of our “interior history”. Its light burns through us; swallowing and gulping the air that hangs above the heads of us of those who spectate it. It renders us almost passive; a subject of flickering light.

In Leeds, in the autumn of 1888, Le Prince had stirred something unbelievable up—and it was now much too late to put the genie back in its bottle.

This is where I’m going to stop for this first part of my lopsided history. I’ve probably covered too much ground too quickly, but I’d like to think that we’ve at least laid the foundations for future entries. We know “when” film happened; we know who some of the principal players were; and we appreciate how popular and well reported its activities became. We also “get” what kinds of films were being made, and how they were patronized by aristocrats and workers alike.

To modern eyes, these films still feel very shaky and primitive; and there’s no indication—not yet, at least—of what was to come, nor of how rapidly that change would come about. In my next entry, however, I’m going to look at how film first embraced stories and narratives; moving from shuddering fairground attractions to heart-stirring melodramas, science fiction fantasies, and epic dramatizations of violence and tragedy. This part of the story will take us from 1900 to 1906.

See you next time.

“Unlike dogs, images don’t have name tags”

—Dziga Vertov

I’m Owen. While you may already subscribe to my Substack, you probably don’t know much about me; who I am, why I’m doing this. Etc. I live in London; I was born in the smothering embrace of the M25; I have a cat (Rhubarb); I make films, some of which I occasionally screen at events and festivals. I’ve written about film for quite a few years, covering Soviet-era Armenian cinemas, Polish film poster design, the New Wave, the silents, Godard, Land, John Smith, Jean-Daniel Pollet. In fact, I wrote a book about Jean-Daniel Pollet—and you can read it (for free) here.

Having properly introduced myself, I’d like to make an announcement about the Substack that you’re reading. This year, I’ll be foregoing my typically chaotic coverage of individual films and filmmakers in favour of writing an episodic history of film.

That’s right; an ongoing, frame-by-frame “story” of how cinema came to be, where it went, and who made it happen—from 1888 to 1968. That’s the idea, at least.

By the by, this is an opportune moment to subscribe—in case you haven’t done so already.

Subscribe now

Question. Am I uniquely positioned to write this new history of cinema? No. But it will be my intention to give you, and anyone else who chooses to subscribe, my take on the moments and contexts and moods and modalities that turned film from a skittering fairground attraction into one of humanity’s most bizarre and moving expressions. I want to make sure that this “history” doesn’t get too bogged down in the details, but I also want to ensure that we spend enough time digging around in the guts of the moments that matter. It’ll be a balance; and I’m going to have to learn how to strike it.

It’s also an opportunity for me to learn a little more about film (for myself), to focus my watching in a broadly linear fashion, and to take a load of digressions that have been fizzling around my brain for years. I also want to trip up the tendency to tell film’s “story” in an entirely straightforward and Whiggish way; paying proper attention to the waves of experiment that have periodically shaken things loose. Like Manny Farber, I’m interested not just in the lumbering “white elephants” of art—those films that “know” they are films—, but the “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art” that chews the terrain in front of it, nibbling and biting and swallowing and chowing down on the spontaneous and ragged and processual materials that fall into its mouth. My history will move ahead and it’ll dart back; it’ll make broad, sweeping gestures and then it’ll get lost in the sauce. This is the plan.

So, I’ll write about technical innovations, types of film stock, and experiments at the editing table, just as I’ll spotlight filmmakers, forms, and actors who, I think at least, were instrumental in and representative of the evolution of cinema; people who broke it apart and remade it. You’ll know a lot of them already, but you won’t necessarily know them all—at least not in great detail. I’ll pay my dues to well-known and chewed-over movements (German Expressionism, silent actualities, the Hollywood studio system), just as I’ll take a seat on strange-looking chairs and spend a while thinking about Yugoslav “Black Wave”, amateur ACL filmmaking in the 1930s, and the rise of the Sony Portapak.

I have a rough idea of what each post will be about, but I’m not going to lash myself too tightly to this mast. It’s also my plan to write two posts each month; and I have told numerous people that this is my New Year’s resolution—and I can’t exactly go back on my word. It’s too late. This is largely why I’m introducing this as a “lopsided” history of film; because I will miss things, it’ll be biased toward my tastes and moods, and I’ll pursue digressions that might seem trivial or irrelevant to the overarching story. Like before, I’ll have to watch, write, and research at speed, because this isn’t my full time “job”; it’ll have to squeeze through the cracks between.

Thanks for reading; thanks for subscribing; and thanks for being here for the start of this story.

Owen.

Memories of Hiroshima, or an uncomfortable embrace with commerce and capital—or why not both; as Japan grappled with its past and set its eyes on its future (there’s a neat, handheld bit of blurbing for you), the country convulsed with images, and realities, of criminal desperation, loosening morals, and an unkickable dope habit—all of it, as Akira Lippit argues, tangling together into a new cinema that was at once national (Japan as it saw itself) and international (Japan as it was perceived by a global community of film festivals and their audiences). Sweat seeps through as the unctuous cinematic symbol of a society that trembled with all manner of “beasts” and “bastards” (or so the long-haired mouth of Seijun Suzuki put it). Nobody—in this clammy climate—was spared the inclemency of this weather.

The big sweat—let’s call it that—is a heat we can see; one that reaches out and sticks to us. It is a heat that characters slither and struggle through; mopping their heads with grey kerchiefs, blinking intrusive beads of sweat from their eyes, fanning themselves dully and compulsively as if the heat—this heat—was not only the greatest calamity to befall them, but as if they are powerless to put it to an end. The big sweat leaves its thickening mark; staining shirts, oiling brows, and pressing down upon characters—who are almost always town-dwellers and urbanites—with its inarticulate and inescapable schmalz. Yes, the big sweat cannot be sweated out; nor can any amount of fans, cold cloths, or glasses of water dispel it. The heat is simply too much.

First, I thought the “big sweat” was simply a condition of cinematic production in postwar Japan—the necessity of bright available light and summer-long shooting; but the more time you spend with the big sweat, and notice it pooling toward you, the more it comes to feel like a necessary instrument—a forward and highly signifying device that is doing no small amount of fanning and waving of its own.

In Kaneto Shindō’s Heat Wave Island (1959)—a rare emanation of the “big sweat” for the film’s quite literal invocation of it—this heat makes itself immediately known; bright beads of dew clinging to the naked arms of policemen as they go about solving the death of Otoya, played cunningly by Nabuko Otowa (who has just been disinterred from the sun-baked earth). Beads of sweat on exposed shoulders, sunglasses glinting with the ceaseless sun; the uniform of the big sweat is its pervasiveness, its glomming over everything. Shindō offers the rare and languishing respite of wind-whipped flags and water—the passing sight of ferries and boats crossing the island’s water. But it’s never quite enough.

For Oishi, the lead detective, the beauty of the island’s pale granite “is a symbol of poverty”; where the fields regularly wash into the sea, giving up their meagre crop of wheat and potatoes. Shindō is telling us, cynically, that purity cannot survive—and that beauty is always and already compromised. It is here that a Japan Democratic Party boat cruises past (wide shot, a lot of sea to eat up) its agitators appealing over loudspeaker—without a lick of irony—to these “islands bathed in abundant sunlight”. But the waters are already poisoned (no thanks to the factories and industry that replaced the fishing that once thrived here)—and its citizens have been pushed to the limits of toleration.

Otowa—in flashback, we see her before her death; pieces of the whole shattering toward us—leans down, smirking in her sweaty silks. The camera angles down over the nape of her neck, a great glistening on the surface of her body. The heat—and its unavoidable sweat; the body’s merest defence mechanism—is the pallour of every dirty bit of business that this paradisiacally poor island in the Seto Sea has become “infested” with: prostitution, fraud, corruption, pollution. The heat presses down; it renders everything sluggish. Michiko—the film’s “not-quite-innocent” innocent—looks up toward us, low-angled; remarkably, there’s not a drop of sweat on her body. Shindō is telling us something. Later, one of Michiko’s friends describes Otoya as a “horrible and filthy person”—as if too much sweat is the external emanation of a person’s uneasy virtue; or a lack of it. The guilty Mr Nakanishi—dark-suited in the stuffy police interview room—pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and agitatedly dabs his neck. Guilt is a sweaty business. Later, he’ll be writhing from dope withdrawal, eyes dark and caved-in, on the island’s dead and dusty hillsides.

Elsewhere, Nagisa Ōshima’s The Catch instrumentalizes sweating as a kind of terror and fearfulness—and we watch how it streams over the anxious body of an unnamed, captured US airman (this is 1945, remember; the dog days of the Pacific war), who, played with intensity by Hugh Hurd (who’d go on to feature in Cassavetes’ Shadows in 1959), spends much of the film hobbled and chained in a musty outhouse, his wounds festering and his skin needled with moisture; even if Ōshima’s film lurches from dry heat to pouring summertime rain. Not too far away, on the horizon, Tokyo descends into chaos; eviscerated by firestorms and American bombs. Heat is calamity; it will swallow everything.

Kurosawa’s greatest radiator moment came with I Live in Fear (1955)—a tale of nuclear panic and family obligation. Kiichi Nakajima—played bug-eyed by an artificially-aged Toshiro Mifune—is the scion of a successful foundry business whose growing paranoia—he is suffocated by not unreasonable visions of the atom bomb—leads his coolly indifferent family to the brink of ruin. Nakajima begs them to leave Japan for the putative safety of Brazil—which he believes to be less threatened by the fallout that haunts his waking dreams. The family court deliberates over their misfortune; hearing both sides of the argument as they bathe in cloying heat and torrents of damp sweat. Fans are nervously handled, wet towels straddle shoulders, water is desperately downed. Here, Kurosawa’s sweat is the outpouring of sublimated terror—a kind of inescapable pressure that boxes them in from every side. When Kurosawa reached back into history, he became a winter poet; and it is lashing rain (Rashomon, 1950) and curling fog (Throne of Blood, 1957) that single out his histories. For Kurosawa, heat—and sweat—is a condition of a cruel and unkind modernity.

But let’s not also forget Kurosawa’s earlier Stray Dog (1949)—where a cop’s hunt for his stolen gun leads our protagonist, played upright and earnest by a young Toshiro Mifune, on a long, dark journey into the pulsating night of Tokyo’s underground. Through a series of sweaty, too-hot rooms, Murakami—Mifune’s cop—gets the measure of brothel madames, nightclub proprietors, amoral gangsters, and dope fiends—and their fixers. The effect is dizzying; of moist, heavy hands pressing through bodies—with sweat pouring liberally from every available orifice. Jazz—so “American”, so angsty and easy—is the soundtrack; offering a buzzing, discordant cool that nips and bites at Mifune’s scurrying heels.

For Kurosawa, it’s a matter of tightly-cropped faces—hair mussed up and messy—where beads and slithers of sweat are picked out by hot tungsten bulbs. He also packs bodies tightly when he wants to juice up the flossy intensity; in clammy bars, sardine-packed trams, and sticky police offices. Fans whirr, shoulders slump. The world is pressing heavily together.

Elsewhere, in another of Japan’s great “golden age” heaters, we have Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds (1955). Yukiko and Kengo—doomed lovers who first hooked up in the dying days of Japan’s fated war in French Indochina—try to make things work in the ruins of postwar Tokyo. The city is cold; and the heat of their affair, which took place in the tropics, represents a kind of throttling death that cannot but catch up with them—even if Kengo remarks on the comparative coolness of their native city. In flashback, things are torrid; in shirtsleeves, these wartime foresters idle around in high-ceilinged, palatial rooms and dark hotel bedrooms; with the heat intensifying their steamy attractions and their bodies cut apart by shadows from slatted window shutters.

Naruse is explicit about the sordid intensities of this creeping heat. Yukiko’s death—like so many of these films, death is a “known unknown”—comes once they’ve beaten a retreat to the tropics of Yakushima island, where the humid climate decimates her already shaky health. In this instance, sweat isn’t only an intimation of guilt or shame, but a thing that will, quite literally, end your life. There is no escape; no easy way out; except through death, and the film’s postscript—a lick of vertical poetry—tells us that blossoms only bloom for a little while, and we must appreciate their beauty before it fades. Here, he’s admonishing the womanizing, doom-pilled ways of Kengo; but he’s also addressing us. History jogs, catching up with us; by the time it passes, we are already feeding the flowers.

Here, it’s hard not to think of W.G. Sebald’s invocation of the sublimated cultural amnesia that clogged up postwar Germany; where the “regulation of intimate feelings” that any propagandized epoch heralds crashes down into the “deficiency” of the public record along with the regime that authored it. The horrors are repressed; the destruction is absorbed. This isn’t to say that these things can be suppressed indefinitely; and, in the Japanese context, we can see the reckoning bubbling back—lives lost, cities ruined, acts that were done that now cannot be undone—through a “golden age” of cinema in which the past makes itself known not as fact (for nobody says it “outright”), but as a nervous, sickly sweating. Truth, and history, are rendered as moisture. It is rot; and it seeps into everything.

I’m trying to avoid the inertia of listicles, but “sweat” is so pervasive a symbol that it comes up thick and fast. There’s Yoshitarō Nomura’s Stakeout (1958), where —again—we spend time pressed up against roomfuls of perspiring cops, or Kon Ichikawa’s Heat and Mud (1950), which pulses with the anxiety and desperation that this era’s cinema so greedily fed on, or his later Conflagration (1958)—where an act of arson becomes a defiant symbol of postwar rebellion. Burning things, burning up, burning out; it’s all up for (sweaty) grabs.

For Japan’s listless postwar youth, meanwhile—those who didn’t fight, and had perhaps only the haziest memories of the war—steam, sun, and sweat acquired a palpable significance of their own. The epoch of taiyozoku—the so-called “sun tribe” subculture (affluent, hedonistic, lost)—typified a generation who rebelled against the stiff expectations of their parents and embraced the kinds of pouting promiscuity that would re-arrange Japanese cinema and society through the 1950s. Takumi Furukawa’s Season of the Sun—released in 1956—was the first, and schlockiest, of these stories, raising eyebrows and disavowals when it landed on Japanese screens just a decade and pocket change after the end of WWII.

That’s the history, at least; the actual film, lopsided as it is, turned heat and sweat into a nihilistic totem; opening with an upclose shot of bubbling, steaming foam that, within moments, ricochets through cards, jibes, and the boxing ring—with all the busted eyes, swollen lips, and sweat-rimmed faces you’d expect. Probably ham-fisted how Furukawa makes every effort to establish the kids’ rebelliousness; dropping references to whisky tabs, gambling debts, and how small of a fig they give for their mandated studies (English just isn’t their “thing”). Either way, “they do what they like”; even while admitting that they couldn’t conjure up a tear if they tried. But they can sweat.

It would fall to Kō Nakahira, and his Crazed Fruit, to properly splay out the aesthetic credentials of the taiyozoku. His 1956 program film (care of Japan’s long-in-the-tooth Nikkatsu studio) has all the roughly-hewn and scandalously too-cool energy of Japan’s newly doomed youth. Its story is one of frustration, liberation, narcissism, and nihilism—and the American-style bars and bourgeois villas that these seemingly unparented kids spend the movie haunting. Nagisa Ōshima saw it as epochal, how “in the sound of the girl’s skirt being ripped [...] sensitive people could hear the wails of a new age in Japanese cinema”. But here’s the (interpretive) rub: the scene in question (it’s a pivotal moment; one that seals two deaths) doesn’t feature the sound of a ripped skirt, but only the image of it—and Nakahira’s camera is already panning away. Ōshima had heard the tear, but he hadn’t listened to it.

Yet again, it’s all sweat, spray, and libidinal energy; and, like Furokawa’s film, we’re invited to ogle, to raise our eyebrows, but also to enjoy the vicarious pleasures. This isn’t quite a disavowal. Even then, the film was sufficiently scandalising to give the Japan Film Censor board a headache—and no small amount of clamour from housewives and conservative politicians. The youth are running wild!

Crazed Fruit—like Season of the Sun—opens with the ocean and the misty spray of a motorboat’s engine, pompy jazz, and a slow zoom on Haruji’s staring face; revealing thick beads of sweat limning his forehead. From here, everything moves thick and fast; with boys shoving-racing their way through a commuter station in sunglasses and loose summer shirts. “Man, it’s hot”—the first words of the film, spoken by Haruji while mopping the sweat from his neck with a de rigeur white handkerchief. Listless teens, roving eyes, card games, and boozing glide along with Shigeyoshi Mine’s luminous, light-as-a-feather cinematography; all without a murk of the chiaroscuro you’d get from the latter New Wave or Kurosawa’s moodier, muddier samurai tales. The sun is shining; the days are long; but—as one of Haru’s listless friends observes—“it’s a wasteland for the young”.

For the parents, all they can do is frown and sigh; declaiming against the “rude and raucous” lads to whom their children are in thrall. But something much more powerful than parental disapproval is at work here; not least a lot of ungrounded libidinal energy. In one memorable scene, we see Haru and Eri splayed out in their bathing costumes on the cliffs of the ocean; the scene intercuts between clenched hands, curling feet, bitten lips, and the sea’s rhythmic swelling. Nakahira doesn’t need to say what’s passing electrically between them. Later, drying her hair, Eri remarks—noncommittally—how she’s “worked up a sweat”. No kidding.

Later, when Natsuhisa—the duplicitous brother—grapples with his own conscience about two-timing with Haruji’s love interest (Eri, of course), his shirt is open, holding an electric fan to his face, his brow beading with sweat. The guilt bears down on him; but it isn’t enough to make him relent—despite lugging his heat-heavy body from sofa to fishtank to table. Their narcissism, boredom, and seemingly endless free time make work for some very devilish hands. They just can’t help themselves.

Even then, and as Chuck Stephens is quick to point out in his Criterion piece, the easygoing narcissism of the taiyozoku films was “outrageously oversize” and “scarcely the sort of lifestyle and luxury available to Japanese teenagers at large”. The cars, the cash, the lack of parental oversight or rules were a bourgeois phantom that didn’t really exist outside of the experience of a handful of properly haute kids. The grittier, more trembling genre movies of the 1950s came closer to the struggling reality of everyday life. It’s Michiko and Otoya who feel more alive than the bar-hopping, girl-swapping shenanigans of Haru and Tatsuya but, taken together, they signal the secrets, crises, and social anxieties that were pulling Japan in any number of dizzying directions.

Through this, it should come as no surprise that the film studios—diversifying from the mergers and extremities of wartime—sought to anatomize the changes that were perforating Japan during the 1950s; even if their political motivations remained obstinately cloudy—unless it was just about making a quick, controversial buck. Toho, Daiei, Shochiku, Nikkatsu, and Toei would compete to tell the story of postwar Japan; released, in 1952, from the confines and restrictions imposed by the occupying American forces. The centre—of course—could not hold, and many of the protean and sort-of New Wave’s most agitational directors would split off from the often rigid, industrially prolific studio system. Seijun Suzuki was ousted from Nikkatsu in 1968—and Shindō, much earlier—in 1950—had struck off to found Kindai Eiga Kyōkai. For these filmmakers, it wasn’t enough to eyeball sociological decadence and decay from the commanding heights of the big film industry, but to muck around with motor oil, hair cream, bodies, and—yes—sweat for themselves. The cinema would also undergo its own hot-under-the-collar rebellion.

For filmmakers like Masumura Yasuzō, this new age needed a new cinema that would “blast spectators out of their comfortable orbit” (in Michael Raine’s words); foregoing the naturalist “passivity” of the old masters. Sweat, in their hands, and through to the increasingly daring films of the 1960s, would lubricate a more sensationalist cinema that was just making itself felt. Yasuzo’s own films threw caution to the wind and went instead for much more muchness—namely, a kind of speed that would do away with the “pre-modern” tendencies, and sensibilities, of the old world. He meant this literally; because his cinema was faster, more propulsive—and it began to shake things loose. Kisses (1957) came first; Giants and Toys (1958), with its satirical send-up of an increasingly consumerist, individuated society, would properly blow away the cobwebs—and this time in colour.

I’ve said a lot, but this might be the “big sweat” in brief: in the cinema of 1950s Japan, sweat—and heat—symbolized a new decadence and uneasiness in a society that was struggling to assert itself in the now (mostly) smoothed-over ruins of a devastating defeat. There is a sensuousness to all this sweating; a veritable pathetic fallacy that pushes youth, salarymen, cops, and housewives into “rumpled” outfits “drenched with sweat” (Catherine Russell’s treatment of classical Japanese cinema is quick to pick up the allegorical quality of all this inclement weather).

Even then, sweat is also a kind of humanist invitation to show a little sympathy for the “too hot to handle” conditions that all these ordinary people are muddling through. We need only think of the beatifically sweating faces of the aging parents in Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953)—or the sleepless, guilty, heat-wracked bodies of Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960); whose corrupt pawns, Wada and Nishi, are driven to madness and suicide in a web of unbridled corporate corruption in which they themselves played a pathetic part. When Season of the Sun’s Tatsuya hurls a candle at Eiko’s memorial (she has died while aborting their baby), smashing the frame, the family look up not so much in anger as incomprehension. “None of you understand” Tatsuya wails in the oft-repeated mantra of teenage anxiety. The social fabric was tearing apart.

By way of an historic counterpoint—an earlier and different treatment of heat—I’m minded to think of Tomu Uchida’s Sweat (1929), in which a wealthy lord, Kitayama Heizaemon, escapes the listless boredom of his estate and his toadying retainers only to find meaning among a group of labourers who are engaged in building his own mausoleum. Here, the “sweat” is that which he wipes from his working brow—a return to honest work and existential purpose. By the 1950s, sweat had become less of an honourable outpouring than a spiritual malaise; greasing the wheels of the newly emergent New Wave. It wouldn’t be too long before we hit the fantasies and phantasms of Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1965) or Shindō’s Onibaba (1964); when, heat or no heat, a properly modernist torture would make itself felt.

This film—funded by the BFI at a time when BFI-funding wasn’t a shortcut to a bit of wet nostalgist folk horror revivalism (WNFHR)—is a radical yet balanced account of the “Diggers”: that group of dissident, non-conformist Protestants who, in the late 1640s, set out to “dig” their way to utopia—marshalled under the prophetic leadership of Gerrard Winstanley, from whom the film takes its name.

Necessary context: what the Diggers were up to—trying to achieve self-reliance and autonomy by ploughing, planting, and growing food for themselves and sharing the bounties in nonhierarchical communes—was perceived by the authorities as a dangerously rebellious act, for the Diggers chose to found their communes not on parcels of their own land—which they did not own—but on on the “Commons”. These commons of land were—technically, judicially—the property of landowners who, in the melange of early modern English law, were obligated to allow the people who lived in their domain to graze cattle on these pastures so long as they didn’t do anything so seditious as felling trees, hunting, building houses, or sewing crops. The Diggers—under Winstanley—claimed that no limits should be placed on the Commons, and that the common man had the right to share the bounties and fruits of any patch of earth they so pleased to farm. It’s also worth noting that the Diggers were just one loosely affiliated group among many dissenting sects that rose up during this period, and the authorities’ violent reaction to them must be seen through the lens of the political tumult that was then shaking the country—not so long after Cromwell had quite fatally chopped off the King’s head.

Brownlow and Mollo’s film is at pains to surface the polyvocal and ever-shifting radicalism that underpinned—and often slipped the bounds of—Winstanley’s project. He—played with gentle defiance by Miles Halliwell—is seen as the moral “leader” of his flock, but that same flock is made up of a nebulous crowd of individuals all of whom bring their own needs and ideas to the collective table. In other words, Winstanley isn’t a secular hagiography so much as an attempt to nail the proverbial jelly of a movement that was both internally heterogenous and continually negotiating itself into existence. Tom Haydon is desperate and comradely, but also a realist; Will Everard is a truculent ideologue; Mrs. Platt is a bourgeois fellow-traveler who struggles to overcome her discomfort with the lives of the “common” people she briefly lives among; while Winstanley himself is an honest and articulate idealist who struggles to contain the diverse personalities who look up to and occasionally bristle against him. There are also nudist, bug-eyed ranters to be factored in. Winstanley wants to convene a “broad” church, but his idealism is continually tried and tested by the harsh political and economic realities that his Diggers have to face. It is not as simple as digging; they must also survive.

Brownlow and Mollo’s film is expressionistic and non-linear; folding different temporalities and rhythms into its fabric. We cut between the forest, George’s Hill, pastures, manor houses, barns, and courts—and each of these spaces make a little bit of period detail go a very long way. Breezy intertitles and clashes of arms set up the foundations, and acts of heroic pastoral labour are depicted with the Dutch-angled lenses of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, while moments of violence tumble unpredictably out of the foliage as the seasons jolt this way and that. Brownlow and Mollo’s achievement is to create a kind of impressionistic collage that encompasses a “structure of feeling” (to use Raymond Williams’ term) rather than a blow-for-blow re-enactment of the formation and disintegration of the Diggers, and they choose to abstract and streamline the reality (what really happened) in such a way that we can conceive of this fellowship as existing as part in the wider warp and weft of history without having to show it to us. In one very effective scene, Everard—who, earlier, left the commune in dismay—returns to the flock with a bundle of letters and greetings from other likeminded Digger sects spread across the country; from Bedfordshire to Yorkshire. “The fire is spreading”. Later,—and all too soon—, their houses will be burned, their crops pulled up, and their number chased from the forests.

The filmmakers were also sensitive to the complexity of contemporary attitudes to the Diggers. While the local lord—a harsh, puritanical pastor—has no patience with Winstanley and his group, Lord General Fairfax—a military commander under whom many of the Diggers served in the recent war—is more sensitive to their demands and does what little he can to protect them. This has a fair amount of historical grounding: while Cromwell’s parliamentarians had come out on top, they angered much of their base in their refusal to enact really strenuous reform. The Diggers themselves were properly known as the “True Levellers”—a radical, breakaway sect stemming from the already rebellious Levellers. The new administration—still wiping the blood from their regicidal axe—had little patience with the forces they had set loose. Pastor Platt is the embodiment of the Cromwellian extreme, while Fairfax reflects the (slightly) more radical, albeit paternalistic, undertow that was trying and failing to make itself felt. Brownlow and Mollo don’t need to say it, but the Diggers’ gentle revolt is doomed to fail.

It’s hard to escape parallels between Winstanley and Watkin’s Culloden, not least because both projects centre the lived experiences of ordinary people during times that were dominated by Big Men. Unlike Watkins’ film, however, Brownlow’s is more academic—and doesn’t share the former’s pseudo-documentarian breakages of form (such as characters directly addressing the camera). Winstanley—and this is testament to Brownlow as a student of the early silent cinema—makes lavish use of stark black-and-white photography; framing characters against the expansive sky and allowing the woodland and forests to fringe and intersect the frame—accentuating all the ways in which this land of “bounty” is really a hard-scrabble existence, both shadowed by danger and impossibly fragile. The land beyond the forest, meanwhile, is vast and open—and the use of eye-bogglingly wide shots of the landscape, within the boxy 4:3 frame, nudges us to see what Winstanley is seeing: that the land of England has room enough for all. This makes the resentment arrayed against the Diggers, in their tiny copse of trees, seem even more petty and resentful.

Winstanley is a psychological study as much as an historical one, and Brownlow and Mollo shift their tonal approach—as the film goes on—to better convey the interior life of Gerrard Winstanley whose voice, otherwise, is almost singularly taken from his written works (with the formality and elevation you would expect). When the George Hill commune is violently, and finally, dispersed, the camera softens, smears, and drops focus—as Winstanley, sodden with rain, takes comfort against a bough. Elsewhere, the directors centre him as the moral heart of the film—a kindly and convincing man, even if his defiance can also feel hopelessly unrealistic. He is a quiet ideologue.

By the by, the psycho-hallucinatory gyrations of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) might suggest themselves as a latter-day descendent of Winstanley, but Wheatley’s film has never seemed to me to be particularly interested in the period it depicts; shoe-horning its radicalism through groovy yeah-baby psilocybin rather than paying attention to what was already there. Winstanley reminds us that the 1640s and those years around it were already deeply weird and wacky, and demonstrates how the doors of perception had been flung widely open through such hot-potato ideas as egalitarianism, regicide, and protean acts of eco-communism. The Diggers didn’t need tabs and shrooms to change the contours of their perceptive reality; they picked up a shovel and got down to work, instead.

But, so much as trains are cinematically ubiquitous (rails equal power and modernity, or something), they have mostly been imagined as a conveyance; to get from here to there, to cover ground, to stir up the contorsions that happen to images when they flick by very quickly. But how do we actually feel about trains, as their own “thing”—putting aside the fact that they carry you from place to place? This is another question.

With Tube Film, Kimia Ipakchi and Orla Smith set out to answer this question; alighting on the “personal film”, as distinct from the more outbound apparatus of the “essay film”, as their vehicle of choice. Here, Smith—who hasn’t been on a train for two years after suffering a claustrophobia-induced panic attack—set out to overcome their fear of going underground, and to shoot quickly, and to edit at speed; and thereby to match the propulsiveness of rail itself. A train can be a film; but a film can be a train, too. But the train isn’t really the “thing” here either.

Video is handy. Literally, hand-held; unbelievably mobile. Camcorders weigh less than a bag of sugar (depending on the size of the bag of sugar). They are more like CCTV (brittle, frayed at the edges, un-soft or, at least, differently soft), and CCTV is de rigeur on all modern trains. Here again, Ipakchi and Smith found a thing that is like the thing; bootstrapping the subject with the film’s form. Curiously, however, Tube Film doesn’t itself ever indulge in surveillance; and we very rarely glimpse other passengers (except as fuzzy, passing orbs). This film isn’t really about them.

Train journeys take you around, but they can also be an object in themselves. Something here about the flaneur, Belmondo and Seyrig, noodling around, going nowhere specifically. Modernity freed us—and this is a very conditional “us”—from the little world of neighbourhood, factory, field, and church, even if it disciplined our labour, and our leisure time, around the dictates of the clock. Being a “few minutes late” is a very modern problem—and a very modern guilt. Why do we attach so much shame to late arrivals, and so much hangwringing to being too early? It says something about encroaching; that you have “stolen” somebody else’s time. But it was never really our time to begin with (Eric Hobsbawm lecture over).

So, Ipakchi and Smith “went around”—mannequinning speed but having nowhere, at least nowhere specific, to “go”. The subject (Smith) was also the object (Smith)—and, besides, this is a journey anchored around the self. The camera is looking in. The personal film goes hand in hand with the hand-held mobility of the lightweight camera; I’m thinking of Mekas (first), but really George Kuchar, or Carole Schneemann, and—now—the likes of Lynne Sachs and Sarah Polley (Mekas was mostly concerned with other people, not himself), which have all offered a counterpoint to the nebulous, quasi-Jungian self that sits at the heart of the structural film. But this is derailing my point.

Tube Film. We see them—Smith and Ipakchi—move between Dalston and New Cross, Lewisham and Bank, Moorgate and Liverpool Street. Here is the Overground; beginning in semi-cavernous darkness. Light seen through an aperture (the tunnel’s end), which is an approximation of both the “afterlife” and of cinema, which might be the same thing. The windows of the train afford not a few moments of reflections inside of reflections (as if to say, “we are here right now—and this is a film”). We’ve become used to seeing people on trains with cameras; typically phone cameras. They are either documenting something “not-normal”, or they are documenting themselves doing something “not-normal”. Trains – which are more or less inescapable once they’re in transit—have become a kind of theatre stage for capitalism’s captive audiences, but most people just want to be left alone. Smith just wants to be able to go.

The journey in Tube Film isn’t entirely purposeless (that is to say, directionless), and Smith gamely lets on that we’re visiting sites—and stations, and stretches of rail —that have some kind of half-glimpsed relevance to their own personal history. An ex, a route to work, places they’ve lived, the route back home. It feels like using transport against itself, and suggests that, when we use transport without a particular destination in mind, that we necessarily find ourselves travelling recursively back to our own past.

Smith is very honest in this film. They use the opportunity of the camera to talk about their feelings and perspectives about such things as (mostly) mental illness, responsibility, moral failure, irresponsibility, claustrophobia, and film itself (as a system for working on, or through, yourself). There’s a rich avant-garde tradition to radical honesty. Thinking of George Kuchar who, in his Weather Diaries, made the mundane auratic—and wanted us to see him through his iniquities, his failures, his unflinching corporeality. Smith lets us see her through their panic, and Ipakchi’s camera remains steadfastly stuck in Smith’s face. At one point, Smith asks Ipakchi whether they’d be able to tell if they were having a panic attack, confessing that it would look a lot like what they’ve just seen—and, therefore, what we’ve just seen. The camera remains very close, only occasionally seeking other subjects—or a wider view. I got the feeling that Ipakchi couldn’t bring themselves to pull the camera away from Smith, so what you’re left with is something that is actually quite claustrophobic: 50-or-so minutes of being in really close proximity to somebody who is going through some degree of emotional turmoil that might, at any moment, break out in panic. I also felt a little uncomfortable in the screening; twisted up on a hard chair in a coldish room, realizing I needed to eat and regretting drinking a quite strong beer about fifteen minutes before. The metal machine music of the train, and the underground, began to work away in my mind. The alarms, bells, closing doors, metallic screeching felt somehow more ghastly than when you actually experience them in “real life” (which film isn’t). I don’t know if these reactions were unique to me, or had in any way been “planned” for, but I was feeling them all the same.

Last question. Is Smith’s fear—and what they do with it—the explosive fear of the Lumiere’s audience in 1895? I literally do not know. But there’s a messy neatness to the idea, after 130 years, that trains can still be so effective as a cinematic device.

Yet, Owen Land can be forgotten in roundups of the ‘movement’. In part, we might attribute this to his oddness; because he was sort of reclusive, certainly abrasive, and would disappear for long stretches of time. He also enjoyed sending up and satirising his fellow structuralists, even if they were in on the joke. But I don’t know if they were.

Today’s essay isn’t about Land in the round, but Land at the end; by which I mean Dialogues (2007-09)—his last and perhaps most peculiar and most tormented film. It is a film that has sufficient notoriety that it has spawned a ‘making of’ documentary (In the Land of Owen [2010]) that was produced, on the seeming fly, by Dialogues’ boom operator (Ben Lazarus) who, chasing payment from Land, met a brick wall; which led to the film, and which casts Land in a somewhat negative light. But not really.

Dialogues is 120 minutes long. It is formed of a series of discontinuous scenes that seem to map certain events in the life of Owen Land after 1985, when he returned from Okinawa, Japan—as part of a residency or art project. Thematically, the film is about mythology, mysticism, and religion; superficially, it is about sex, art, nudity, and misunderstandings.

You might think of the film as an ironic autofictional project, an unravelling of the ‘structural film’ movement, a joke at the expense of his avant-garde compatriots, or even a sincere honest-to-goodness act of autobiography. It might be all these things.

Land shot Dialogues on video; by which I mean Mini DV cassette tape. Most of the scenes were shot in a studio, or in rooms; all of it flatly lit. In this way, it reminds me of Hong Sang-soo: a mise-en-scene, and a cinematography, of reduction. No accented lighting, no expressive contouring. Land wanted everything to be stripped back—often literally (because, as I mentioned earlier, this film contains a lot of nudity). Unlike his contemporaries—thinking of Kenneth Anger, &Etc— Land, here, was not trying to whip sex up into a frothy psycho-sexual torment, and if there’s a door of perception then Land isn’t inviting us to step through it. He keeps us on the threshold; and the lights stay on. In many places, Land spoke about the absurdity of human socialisation; and it’s this element that makes Dialogues seem less lecherous than sardonic. ‘This is sex’, he says; pointing at a woman with her breasts exposed, looking blankly at us. ‘This is the erotic’ he says; showing a man, kneeling on the floor, blandly looking between the legs of a woman—whose face we can’t see—spread out on a table. Expectedly, there is a lot of dialogue in Dialogues; most of it corny, eye-rolling-witty, and delivered with a kind of awkward woodenness.

There are jokes in Dialogues; a lot of them. There are puns, too—many of them delivered through the inter-titles that set up each ‘scene’. We also get visual puns and japes about other more academic films from within the structural movement. My favourite of these is a shot-for-shot recreation of Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (where the camera looks down on an oven’s electric hot-plate onto which Frampton burned a series of photographs). Land pours red paint all over it instead, and the paint begins to bubble—noxious smoke rising from it. There’s also a joke about filming flowers, which might be a pot-shot at Jonas Mekas—or Brakhage. But it could be aimed at anyone. Maya Deren also gets a sort-of homage.

Land was an absurdist; and he invites us to find him absurd—and to find his films absurd, too. That’s why he’s so happy to make jabs at his colleagues; not to bring them down, but to leaven the work of film itself. He asks us to take ourselves less seriously, just as he invites us—like a good structuralist—to think about the things that make a film “a film”. His method of communication is the pun; his weapon of choice is the jester’s stick. The less like a structural film Dialogues becomes, the more Land draws “structuralism”—and experimentalism—into focus. For Sitney, “his cinema bears witness to ‘the arbitrariness of all information’”. Land was open to mistakes and slippages—which was a necessary condition for cash-strapped experimentalists through the 60s and 70s. They had to make do with very little. Video—the video of Dialogues—allowed him to go long, but he couldn’t quite shake the habit of working in small bites. We are addressed by the muses (some with their clothes on; some with their clothes off); a nerdy, schlubby tax official sleeps with a women in exchange for reducing her taxes. Land is thinking about money.

Land isn’t willing to take “it is what it is” at face value; and his scenes—no matter how routine they feel—are always nudging at their own edges. A man and woman begin screwing at a bus stop while listening to a corny song about two people who fall in love while waiting for a bus; a woman travels back in time to the late 1960s and discovers that she doesn’t like it (here’s a little stab at dewey-eyed nostalgia); a “famous” Owen Land visits a regional art museum for a screening of his work, and sleeps with the host’s wife—while the host knowingly lets on that he expected this, and welcomes it. See: Dialogues is autobiographical, in a way—and in the sense that autobiography, here, is refracted through the becoming-history of the avant-garde movement. By 2007-09, when Land was making the film, the halcyon days of the 60s and 70s had become part of the romanticized canon; in large part thanks to the proselytizing work of P. Adams Sitney (his Visionary Film came out in 1974, and has gone through many, many subsequent editions) as well as any number of retrospectives, screenings, and adulatory essays. Land was looking back, taking stock, and raising an eyebrow; and he invites us to do the same.

Talking to Mark Toscano in 2009, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Land spoke openly about his film; drawing attention to the parallels with James Joyce—particularly in terms of how he framed his mythological characters (like Cerce). So far as the Realism of the events in film goes, he says:

“They all happened. None of them happened. Both statements are true. All of the episodes are based on actual experiences of mine.”

He claimed that some of the film’s dialogue is “verbatim”, and that “I like absurdity”. He also draws attention to quotes from Paul Arthur that he incorporated into the film, cribbed from the pages of Artforum. He mentions how, in the scene where a woman—in lingerie—cleans an SUV, he was poking fun at Kenneth Anger, albeit updating the culture of the time between 1963 and “the late 1970s” and the “1980s, ‘90s, maybe now”. He looked back, looked at his own feet (in the “now”), and scrambled it together. In this way, Dialogues isn’t just ‘about’ the mutations of avant-garde film, but the transformations of America and American culture. But he also said that he’s a follower “on the path of tantra”, and that we shouldn’t forget this when watching Dialogues.

In this way, the “dialogues” of Dialogues are held between Land and himself, Land and his former self (George Landow, or the early “Owen Land”), Land and film, Land and other people that Land knows, knew, or at least respects or thinks are interesting. He is also in dialogue with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), art museums, biographers, film spectators, and the “average” guy (or girl) on the street. He’s also in dialogue with the mythology that primed so much of the experimental art movement. He smokes a joint with a woman who we must assume was an ex or a colleague or a fan. There’s no diegetic dialogue; instead, it’s delivered to us through inter-titles. “You’re one of those spiritual types, aren’t you?” she observes. “I’m interested in the things of the spirit, aren’t you?” he (Land) replies. A man photographs his girlfriend in their bed, and gets confused about how to pronounce “synecdochical”. We meet a punk whom Land was in some way affiliated with, and Land drops a reference to the New Testament and film noir (“the plot thickened like coffee”). “WARNING”, one frame announces: “the following scene contains semi-nudity”. The scene in question is a still frame depicting Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 painting “The Death of Socrates”. Owen Land participates in a university sex experiment that is actually an experiment to gauge the participant’s interest in radio. Here are things deferred, things that are not what they are, things that are not what they seem.

Throughout, Land is smiling. And then he winks.