Between May 2014 and October 2016 I had very gradually been developing a podcast, Breaking Cinema.
The development period had been a combination of brainstorming, recording practice episodes, lateral thinking, working on other projects, investing in sound recording equipment, writing a highly detailed document about the overall focus of the podcast and then another detailed document outlining the first 10 episodes of the podcast.
Make no mistake a lot of work, which I now intend to collect together and present on this blog, went into the development of Breaking Cinema.
My concept for the Breaking Cinema podcast had been to do something highly experimental, educational, that would break new ground, but would also be highly entertaining.
And then, after having already recorded some material for the first batch of episodes, I decided to put the project on the shelf.
And since October, 2016 on that shelf Breaking Cinema has remained.
I have no plans to pull it off the shelf, not because I do not want to produce and present the podcast, it is because I can not justify the investment of time and energy it would demand... and the very small amount of returns it would deliver. At the end of the day, in its drawn out and fully produced form, it actually has very little to contribute to my MTA portfolio and career development.
Developing Breaking Cinema was by no means a waste of my time and energy, as, like its sister project The Miracle of Crowdfunding, its development was very much tied up with the focuses and growth of my MTA portfolio. If anything, the process of developing the podcast helped me figure out the direction of my MTA portfolio and career development. the Breaking Blindness overview document for the podcast reads more like a personal mission statement for myself!
I have now decided to acknowledge that, like The Miracle of Crowdfunding, the Breaking Cinema project will probably never come to full realisation. However, this is not to say that many of its ideas have not been incorporated into my postgraduate studies and career direction endeavours, so the seeds it planted have grown and continue to develop and live on.
But Breaking Cinema the podcast is over.
All of the materials I produced as part of the podcasts development will now be presented on this blog as a chronicle its development and of my continuing growth as a creative strategic thinker and practitioner.
It is very flattering when you receive an email out of the blue inviting you to a screening in which you will see three new adaptations of a script you wrote many years ago.
Busybody is a script I wrote back in 2012 during my BA (Hons) in Creative Writing with Film and Screen Studies at Bath Spa University as part of the Planning and Making a Film module.
I have written about Busybody and my experiences in the Planning and Making a Film module before, but suffice to say that Busybody proved to be a very popular script in that module. It has proven so popular that it has now been adapted by students from three different years resulting in a grand total of 16 different adaptations of my original script.
I have not seen all of the adaptations and I can not showcase them all on this blog because I can not locate them all online, but, by far, the best adaptation to date was one I watched at the end of year showcase in May of 2016.
Re-titled Martymachlia and with a storyline somewhat altered, Martymachlia left a strong impression on me after viewing last year, I was very impressed with the effort that had gone into it.
The overall quality of the production, directing and acting is impeccable and, after speaking to the team of students responsible for making Martymachlia, I know that a great deal of effort went into this adaptation.
Martymachlia is all the more startling because it shares some uncanny similarities to a second draft of the Busybody script I wrote in 2014 - re-titled KEYS - a script I had not shared with the university, because my original intention had been to produce KEYS myself. I have since put that idea to bed, but I was shocked to watch Martymachlia and the changes they had made because they so closely aligned with the changes I had implemented in the second draft.
Obviously, it is not exactly the same and I feel that a lot of character is lost in Martymachlia and the story has been simplified too much because it now completely turns both the Natalie and Geoff characters into purely sexual stereotypes; whereas in Busybody and especially so in KEYS there was great deal more depth and complexity to each character - they both possessed a psychology you could imagine a real person having.
This is my only complaint against the Martymachlia adaptation, I only wished it had maintained the original storyline and character motivations of both Natalie and Geoff. If it had, Martymachlia may have been even more uncannily closer to the version of Busybody which now exists in the KEYS script.
However, Martymachlia certainly has the tone and impact I was going for in the Busybody story, but never felt I adequately conveyed until I finished the 2nd draft in KEYS. I had always complained that I was never happy with the 1st draft of Busybody, it always felt rushed and unfinished!
To this end, I have now let the university have the KEYS script because, when I sent it to them last year, I no longer had any plans of making it myself (the KEYS draft is more like a shooting script), but that may change next year because I have always wanted to see my script done right.
Don't get me wrong Martymachlia comes very close, but it is still not quite the quirky and dark and twisted tale I have story-boarded inside my head.
NeuroPsychoCinematics is a research focus in which I hold a great deal of interest and which deals with the characteristics of film and other audio-visual content and their production in relation to perception, cognition, narrative understanding, emotion and neurobiology.
Neuropsychocinematics is not currently an official field of study in its own right, but the groundwork for it does already exist in two other relatively new fields of study, neurocinematics and psychocinematics, which will undoubtedly combine in the not too far distant future in order to form neuropsychocinematics.
"Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during free viewing of films, and inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC) was used to assess similarities in the spatiotemporal responses across viewers’ brains during movie watching. Our results demonstrate that some films can exert considerable control over brain activity and eye movements. However, this was not the case for all types of motion picture sequences, and the level of control over viewers’ brain activity differed as a function of movie content, editing, and directing style. We propose that ISC may be useful to film studies by providing a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers’ brains, and a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products. Finally, we suggest that this method brings together two separate and largely unrelated disciplines, cognitive neuroscience and film studies, and may open the way for a new interdisciplinary field of “neurocinematic” studies."
- Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film
My engagement with neuropsychocinematics began with the orchestration of my award-winning theoretical dissertation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle.
"the human body as a complex organic whole comprises a major variable that has been missing from all film theories’ understandings of the spectator and spectacle relationship... Perhaps the reason previous film theories have been unable to adequately factor actual audience members into their paradigms is precisely because they have deprived their ideal spectators of a physical presence and a body that can influence the filmic experience! Cognitive theory only incorporates the body as far as being an experience simulator driven by perceptual data sourced via the eyes and ears. However, what if the body was actively influencing the filmic experience as a perceptual membrane on a basis equivalent to the eyes and ears?"
- Ways of Being, 2013:55
My speculations in this area of research have sincecontinued with my Ways 2 Interface blog. When I concluded my BA (Hons) I felt compelled to continue down the path that I had started in Ways of Being, but I instinctually felt that I would need to adopt an innovative transdisciplinary approach in order to actually get anywhere with it, hence my Postgraduate 2.0 Studies.
Whether or not I will go back to a traditional academic path in order to progress this research remains to be seen, but I have a hunch that a real opportunity lies in doing it independent of academia and I suspect that this focus will form a component of my entrepreneurial practice.
At any rate, I am a huge supporter of neuropsychocinematics (or whatever it gets called) and I believe it has it has a bright future.
Between August and October 2016 I undertook the TCM Presents Painfully Funny: Slapstick in the Movies MOOC as part of my postgraduate MTA portfolio and I successfully completed and passed the course.
My Certificate of Completion
In 2015 I had undertaken TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir, a highly thorough and informative online offering which I had immensely enjoyed. The instructor Richard Ls Edwards was even kind enough to message me and thank me about the completion reflection I wrote on my experiences of undertaking the course and the points I had raised regarding where I felt the course was lacking.
However, I found my experience with Painfully Funny to be even more lacking and I believe there are two reasons for this...
Painfully Funny was too brief both in length and in content; it was severely lacking the thorough depth of its film noir counterpart
Being an avid slapstick fan, I already knew a great deal about slapstick cinema; especially early slapstick cinema.
In terms of providing a overview of the development and evolution of slapstick cinema in accordance with the slapstick season film programming TCM broadcast alongside the MOOC's duration, the course did a very good job of acting as a companion piece. However, for someone who, as with Investigating Film Noir, can not access TCM, the experience of taking the course on its own was immensely underwhelming.
At the conclusion of Investigating Film Noir, I felt as though my knowledge of cinema and particularly so of film noir had been greatly nourished and I even went so far as to compare the experience of undertaking Investigating Film Noir to undertaking a full-length learning module as part of my BA (Hons) in Film and Screen Studies.
Ultimately, like this completion reflection, Painfully Funny felt painfully short and agonisingly underwhelming because there is so much more it could have offered. I only hope the next TCM Presents offering about Hitchcock will make up for the deficiencies of Painfully Funny.
366 FRAMES 2012 was a photography project in which I took a photo a day for the whole of 2012 and it was instrumental in sharpening my visual understanding and execution.
Then towards the end of 2014, long after completing the original project, the creative filmmaker in me collected together all of the 366 photos and vlog material about my project I had recorded to produce a video meditation on how the process of undertaking the 366 project benefited me personally...
And then I went one step further and collected together all 6,505 photographs I had produced in 2012 and created a stop motion presentation of my life in 2012...
EYES is a 7-minute short film/pilot episode that I produced in 2013 as part of a larger web series concept proposal package which was undertaken for my final year BA (Hons) practical dissertation. The EYES project ended up being awarded the highest mark of the Creative Enterprise Project module!
EYES represents the culmination of my film education and exploration of my First Class degree in Creative Writing with Film and Screen Studies. The whole EYES concept had a strong subtext and multi-layered story and the pilot was designed to set this complexity up in its aesthetic of being an audio-visual Rubik cube...
Cousins make the worst combinations and this is especially true of Boris and his long-lost cousin Lianne. Lianne has tracked Boris down looking for answers about their family which has long since vanished. Claiming to be someone else, Boris wants nothing to do with his cousin. However, as their streams become entwined, a reflexive connection is formed and a whole other world comes to the surface. EYES is a mystery wrapped in an enigma contained within a Rubik cube...
Presented below is a reflective commentary for the Pilot in which I commentate on the Pilot episode (Part 1) and then go into a bit more depth about various attributes of the Pilot and their place in the overall project (Part 2).
Embedded below is the shooting script for the Pilot. Earlier drafts of the script can be seen here and reading them will reveal how the Pilot's story and overall concept evolved during the scriptwriting phase. There is a significant shift between the 3rd and 4th drafts!
The playlist below provides a
record of the evolution the EYES Pilot experienced during its five month
editing process. These videos are testament to my wish to keep
developing the Pilot's narrative and the overall EYES concept during the
editing process, watching the videos will reveal how the Pilot evolved
from the script.
For more on the development of the Pilot and the overall EYES concept proposal package see the EYES of a Storyteller blog.
I have always held a soft spot for silent cinema and I was foretunate enough to indulge this passion completely in the penultimate year of my BA (Hons) in Creative Writing with Film and Screen Studies. First, by focusing on the silent comics (in particular Harold Lloyd) and, secondly, with the following 5000 word essay I had to undertake for my final submission of the Understanding Hollywood module. The research and writing of this essay took place between February and May of 2012 and it proved to be an especially trying process which required a number of deadline extensions in order to thoroughly finish up to submission standard. Back then I was not as motivated to write as much as I do now.
When I finally and exhaustingly submitted it!
Ultimately, The Birth of an Institution awarded a First and I am still very pleased with its final result. Dealing with the birth of cinema, The Birth of an Instition is very much a companion piece/prelude to my award-winning BA (Hons) theoretical dissertation, which deals with the development of cinema from the close of the silent era, then throughout the rest of the 20th century and finally speculates on the mass innovation of the future orientation of cinema. However, let's return back to the mass innovation of the early days...
This essay will describe and account for the institutionalisation of cinema in the USA during the silent era. Providing an overview of the emergence of American silent cinema, both as a business and as an art form, the essay will assess how the evolution of the silent era film industry, from its beginnings as a peepshow to its eventual form in the picture-palaces, enabled it to become an American institution.
When Thomas Edison supplied the Kinetoscope: “a peepshow machine in which a short piece of moving film (less than thirty seconds) could be viewed by one person at a time” (Chapman, 2003:53), movies took their first step to being a commodity in the USA. The Kinetoscopes were to be found as sideshows in amusement parks and in parlours catering specifically for them:
“The first Kinetoscope parlor was opened with ten machines by the Holland Brothers at 1155 Broadway, in April 1894. For a twenty-five-cent ticket, a customer could watch films in five Kinetoscopes, and for fifty cents, he could watch all ten films (no discounts, apparently)” (Kobel et al., 2007:10).
The fact that there were no discounts and that a twenty-five-cent could equally buy you a ticket to a vaudeville house for more than thirty seconds of entertainment goes to show just how popular the Kinetoscope proved to be, because people would pay to view them anyway.
The Kinetoscope.
The proprietors, after purchasing an individual Kinetoscope machine from Edison at the hefty price of $250, wanted to cash in on this new found popularity as much as they could:
“Exhibitors, however, wanted to maximise their profits, which they could do more readily by projecting a handful of films to hundreds of customers at a time…and by charging 25 to 50 cents for admission” (Belton, 2005:8-9).
Thus it was that in 1905 the Nickelodeon was born; these were little more than converted vaudeville theatres and shops; however, these small picture theatres would spread out across the continent to become, essentially, America’s first cinema chain: “By 1907, there were upwards of 3,000 of them. Pittsburgh could boast a hundred, Chicago 300, for all a man needed to break into the picture business was a projector, a vacant store and a few chairs” (Brownlow, 1979:46). The relocation of motion pictures on to the high streets of the towns and cities of the USA was a major push for the integration of movies into the American lifestyle:
“The Nickelodeons, or Nicklettes, were centred in the urban areas. Properties had their eye on the middle class, and from the start, sites were selected close to middle-class shopping centres. Some proprieties were anxious to avoid too shabby a clientele for fear of discouraging their white collar customers.” (Brownlow, 1979:46).
The Nickelodeons provided a cheap form of entertainment and proved incredibly popular with immigrants and the lower class. However, they struggled to gain a footing with the middle class:
“Nickelodeons were not regarded as respectable, any more than the penny arcades. As late as 1913, no motion picture theatre was permitted within 200 feet of a church.” (Brownlow, 1979:46).
A nickleodeon.
The poor conditions of the Nickelodeons were one factor of this: "nickelodeons were disdained by the well-to-do. But the workmen and their families who patronized the movies did not mind the crowded, unsanitary, and hazardous accommodations most of the nickelodeons offered" (Jacobs in Allen, 1979:2). However, in addition to improving the conditions of the Nickelodeons, another step to remedying this class divide would be in the types of films that the Nickelodeons exhibited: “The films themselves, in those early days, were…naïve. They were aimed at unsophisticated people” (Brownlow, 1979:52). Those initial films were little more than extended versions of what had been shown in the Kinetoscopes:
“The kinds of films shown were actualities (documentaries, views of famous distant places), recorded vaudeville acts, excerpts from popular plays, phantom rides (films shot from the front of moving vehicles) and trick films, which used the techniques of slow motion, reverse motion, substitution, and multiple exposure to perform tricks or acts of “magic”” (Belton, 2005:8).
Looking at these films today they seem incredibly crude and it is hard to imagine how audiences maintained engagement with films that lacked stories. However, Cook points out that:
“audiences experienced these films very differently than we do - as a kind of performative spectacle, or “attraction,” whose function was to present rather than to represent, to show rather than to narrate. Tom Gunning has called this phenomenon the “cinema of attractions”” (Cook, 1981:19).
The Lumiere Brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, an actuality about a train arriving at a station. This film supposedly sent patrons running because they believed the train was going to come through the screen and run them down, this is where immersive cinema begins.
However, the cinema of attractions was only a passing fad: “Cinema is about novelty and once you’ve seen somebody put a duvet cover on you have to do something a bit different with it” (Merton, 2010); the only way it would gain a new and, as history has shown, seemingly inexhaustible appeal was by mastering the art of the narrative. At best the films that did boast “strong” narratives were staged and filmed in long shots as if they were theatre plays:
“Early, pre-1906 cinema stressed showing rather than telling. Most films made in this period were actualities, which outnumbered fiction films until roughly 1906” (Belton, 2005:8).
These films had very minimal editing which, when it did occur, was used to cut from one long shot to another long shot:
“Neither Edison nor the Lumières could foresee that the movies would invent flashbacks; there are no flashbacks in Shakespeare.” (Cousins, 2011).
The first screen adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as produced by Thomas Edison; this film is a very clear example of an unsophisticated filmed stage play. This evolution towards more complex presentations was key in order for the movies to be accepted in all the class structures of the USA. The movies needed to stop trying to be part of the theatre and needed to embrace the potential of the cinematic format, in order to tell visually engaging stories.
For the longest time it was agreed by film historians that this began in American cinema with Edwin S. Porter’s innovation with editing in his 1903 film Life of an American Fireman (Dir. Edwin S. Porter, USA, 1903). This is a film in which cross-cutting is employed to cut between the interior of a burning building with two characters in distress and the exterior of the burning building with the fireman going into the building to rescue them. Cutting these separate actions together as one event works to create suspense and, ultimately, to keep the audience engaged. However, as Cousins explains:
“Another print of the film exists in the archives, which shows all the street action in one continuous shot and then the interior action, similarly in one sequence. Film historians used to believe that this version was a “rough cut”, which Porter had yet to fine tune. However, it has recently become clear that this film was closer to the original release print. Only in later years, once intercutting was discovered, did Porter or someone else belatedly “improve” the more theatrical version by editing.” (Cousins, 2004:37-38).
Life of an American Fireman, this is the earlier version without the cross-cutting.
Therefore, Life of an American Fireman can not be considered American cinema’s first instance of employing editing to create an effect; rather this is evidenced in a later Porter film: The Great Train Robbery (Dir. Edwin S. Porter, USA, 1908).
The Great Train Robbery
The Reception of this film was very enthusiastic: “The rise of the American film industry was largely due to this one twelve-minute film.” (Brownlow, 1979:35). The Great Train Robbery was instrumental in the creation of the linear storytelling technique that would soon be imitated by all the other filmmakers:
“the most significant accomplishment for Porter was his conveying the story without overlapping action – repeating actions when moving from interiors to exteriors, as he’d done in Life of an American Fireman – allowing him to build narrative momentum.” (Kobel et al. 2007:20).
It was through the building of this “narrative momentum” that Porter was able to install the film with a sense of jeopardy which the audience greatly engaged with:
“They ran it to get the reaction of a better class of audience… I was a little dubious about how it was going to go with that audience, which was a sophisticated, show-me type of audience. When the picture started they all started to get up as usual and walk out, but then turned back to look at it, and they all, slowly, as the picture went on, went back to their seats. And they sat there, stupefied. They didn’t yell, but they were mystified at it. And when it was all over, with one accord they gave it a rousing reception.” (Anderson in Brownlow, 1979: 35).
Thus it was the middle class began to accept this new type of sophisticated narrative film: “the middle class managed to appropriate and "uplift" the cinema to suit its own tastes and objectives as soon as it realized how big the cinema actually was” (Singer, 1995:6).
What remains of a picture palace from long ago.
Certainly, the motion picture business, from the consumer’s side, seemed to be moving up a gear; in addition to having new: “grandiose, purpose-built theatres to accommodate the demands of middle-class audiences” (Maltby, 1995:118), the films that were shown in these theatres were vastly more sophisticated than they had ever been: “Cinema had learned to follow the flow of action from one space to another. This made chase sequences possible, liberated movies and emphasized movement” (Cousins, 2004:38). In short, these new innovations made movies more exciting and something that Americans were becoming more and more happier to integrate into their lives.
However, for the figures behind the motion pictures the evolution from a cinema of attractions to a cinema of narratives; together with the growing numbers of exhibition theatres brought with it new financial considerations: “In the mid 1900s American cinema was approaching a state of chaos with proliferation of production companies and film exchanges” (Chapman, 2003:73). In 1908 Edison set actions in motion that lead to the formation of the Motion Pictures Patent Company. The MPPC, or “the Trust,” was the first attempt to gain control over the filmmaking industry by Edison and eight other filmmaking companies: “It set out to control every aspect of the nascent film industry” (Kobel et al., 2007:40). It allowed them to have exclusive rights over the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures: “The trust was a blatant monopoly: trust films could be sold only to licensed distributors, which in turn could lease them only to licensed exhibitors. Only licensed exhibitors could use Trust projectors.” (Kobel et al. 2007:40).
The Trust, however, was still unyielding and resorted to hiring thugs to put the independents out of business: “either by destroying the camera, if they could get hold of it, or by burning down our studios, if we happened to have one.” (Dwan in Brownlow, 1979:55). As the majority of American motion picture production was based in New York the independents reasoned that if they were to continue making movies then they would need to do it elsewhere. Therefore, the majority of the independents ended up In California and, slowly but surely, the film colonisation of Hollywood took place: “the town became a metaphor for the industry if not always a studio’s exact location” (Kobel et al. 2007:43).
Aside from being far from Trust members, California had many practical advantages in terms of filmmaking. It had Sun all year round and, with electric film set lighting still a few years away, this proved to be a major advantage: ““The first film studios un America had been built in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but weather conditions in those cities were soon realised to be too unpredictable” (Chapman, 2003:73). However, this was not the only advantage: “beside sunny climates there was a range of different landscapes, including ocean, desert, forests and mountains” (Chapman, 2003:73), they had a variety of naturally built film sets for any type of film. Hollywood it seemed had been built for film production and the film producers were quick to capitalise on this: “In a way, the Trust members became the dinosaurs of their era, and the independent film producers were the quick, small mammals that would eventually take over the industry and establish the big studios.” (Kobel et al. 2007:44).
A largely untouched Hollywoodland
The irony is, unlike the Trust as run by Edison, Hollywood became a oligopoly run by a group of studios and it was through this oligopoly that the competing studios gained control of the American film industry. The MPPC: “failed because it tried to dominate the industry by controlling production of movies but, as was already clear by 1915, the other branches of the industry, distribution and exhibition provided more effective ways of dominating the industry as a whole.” (Maltby, 1995:117). Thus it was that the studios and their attitudes as viewing: “the movie industry as a sort of retail business.” (Kobel et al. 2007:46), enabled them to gain full control by providing distribution and exhibition in addition to actually producing the films: “the resulting system was, as in other industries, called “vertical integration” and guaranteed a continuous production line.” (Cousins, 2004:63).
However, the studios would also go on to impose their products on the consumer through the exploitation of another system; namely the star system: “most studios at the time did not publicize their players, they were flooded with questions about actors. Fans wanted to know the name of the fat comedian, the dark-haired hero, and the “girl with the curls.”” (Barbas, 2001:10). The truth of the matter was the spectator had fallen in love with the figures they were seeing on screen and if the audience cared about particular performers (the first of these was Florence Lawrence) then they would keep coming back to see them In the movies: “stars had only a limited amount of power, in no way commensurate with their power to attract audiences at the box-office” (Maltby, 1995:141-42). The star system also provided a further means to integrate the movies into American life because it provided a means of familiarity through the performers who the public had come to love: “As well as being the most visible part of the industry, the star system was central to the standardization of the movie product, and to its interrelations with other consumer industries and advertising” (Maltby, 1995:141).
However, the quality of the products that Hollywood was selling, in terms of film form, still needed to be perfected: “Film had already come far. It was born as a sideshow, a novelty; quick fun, like fast food. But almost at once it became clear that it was also a language: a new language; a language of ideas” (Cousins, 2011); the filmmakers needed to learn how to use that language properly. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery had provided audiences with a few discernible sentences but films needed to be able to tell grand narratives in order for the motion picture to become its own highbrow visual literature and secure the viewership of the full spectrum of the class structure. The man who would ultimately do this was David Wark Griffith: “his sensibility was steeped in a literary tradition that of Dickens and Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Walt Whitman. Yet, while borrowing from nineteenth century literature Griffith was forging the new art of the Twentieth century.” (Scorsese et al., 1995).
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) - an early example of Griffith's experimentation with film form.
Many of Griffith’s early films demonstrate his mastering and refining of film form: “Despite the claims of earlier film historians and his own publicist, D.W. Griffith did not invent any of the key elements of the language of cinema. He did, however, more than any other filmmaker, give films an interior human life. (Cousins, 2004:52). An example of this interior human life is in The Girl and Her Trust (Dir. D.W. Griffith, USA, 1912). The film concerns two thieves who steal some money from a telegraph office and then kidnap the telegraph girl as well. The film itself holds many parallels to Porter’s earlier The Great Train Robbery – both films concern the theft of money, both use trains to further the plot, both are very violent, both have a very significant chase sequences and both films put their characters in situations of jeopardy. However, to further the jeopardy in The Girl, Griffith has the two thieves kidnap the protagonist Grace; this adds the damsel in distress element to the film which makes the eventual race-to-the-rescue, a Griffith speciality, all the more powerful.
The Girl demonstrates that Griffith had a better grasp of the type of engaging narrative to tell in a film; as well as how to make that narrative more human and more real to the audience: “He applied greater emotional finesse to extant film techniques, collaborating brilliantly with actresses, minimizing their gestures and contrasting gentleness and ferocity” (Cousins, 2004:52). The Girl also demonstrates how Griffith tells its narrative in the best filmic form. Unlike The Great Train Robbery where each scene is told in a single uncut long shot, here Griffith presents the audience with a whole range of shot variations: “Perhaps Griffith’s single most important insight was that the shot rather than the scene should be the basic unit of film language. With this discovery came the possibility of varying the standard, stationary, head-on long shot” (Ellis, 1995:17). The use of medium shots and close-ups allows the audience to connect to the characters much more easily than they would through a long shot, where characters seem distant and indistinct. The interior human life of The Girl comes from Griffith’s ability to portray strong characterisations on the screen.
Likewise, he would also use the design of a shot to emphasise what was happening in that shot, such as the tracking shot that follows the speeding train as it chases the villains. The motion of the tracking shot is in sync with that of the train and therefore the feeling of hectic movement is emphasised tenfold: “These varied shots were then edited together to create the appearance of a continuous scene selectively viewed. Once understood, these options gave the film maker immeasurably greater control over the audiences emotional response, adding powerful connotations to the action itself” (Ellis, 1995:18). As such, this is exactly what Griffith does with the final chase sequences: he cuts back and forth between the thieves and the train; this hectic cutting style installs in the viewer a franticness of unease. It is not just the variety of shots but also the way in which the film was directed, performed and edited that makes The Girl into a much more engaging film than The Great Train Robbery. When Griffith had first started using these techniques he had: “had to fight his distributors who feared that audiences would be confused by this innovation” (Scorsese et al., 1995). While the distributors may have been worried, the success the films gained in the cinema proved that this new type of filmmaking was the new way forward.
The Girl and Her Trust (1912)
These innovations which enabled the audience to engage with the films they were watching, unquestionably, insured the audience’s presence in the cinemas of American: “Film directors like D.W. Griffith, who carefully crafted narrative personae for themselves, provided these new audiences with the kinds of narratives with which they were familiar in the theatre or in literature” (Belton, 2005: 13). Familiarity, in the sense of films having a standard style of presentation, was the key to keep the spectator coming back for more and familiarity, in the sense that the spectator could relate to the characters in the films, was key for the audience to enjoy the films.
All the elements that Griffin had experimented with and perfected in his earlier films came together in his seminal three hour film The Birth of a Nation (Dir. D.W. Griffith, USA, 1915). Up until this point feature films had seemed like a risky financial venture in Hollywood but The Birth proved that, ultimately, the way forward for Hollywood’s dominance of the American market was with the feature film: “The members of the MPPC lacked a weatherman to tell them which way the wind was blowing and resisted the concept of longer features – which would become the dominant movie format – while the independents embraced them.” (Kobel et al., 2007:44). The Birth showed that it was possible to make a feature length film that drew audiences in and did not bore them with its excessive length: “It was a history film, a state of the nation work designed to appeal not only to middle-class audiences in the tradition of Film d’Art, but to those who flocked to epic, exciting films too.” (Cousins, 2004: 52). The Birth was the blueprint the film industry needed to create a successful feature film: both for presenting a structured, coherent story and for drawing the crowds in.
“To have made a film hailed as the world’s greatest masterpiece must have been exhilarating; but then to see a film like Cabiria must have been immeasurably depressing. Not that it exceeded the standard of The Birth in terms of story, but in terms of physical production and technical dexterity, it made The Birth look primitive.” (Brownlow, 1979:71).
Therefore, Griffith’s aim for Intolerance was to present both a riveting story and a lavish spectacle. However, when it came to presenting a cinematic narrative, Griffith went one step further and presented four separate, but parallel narratives in the film. In this respect Griffith moved slightly too far forward in terms of developing film form; cutting back and forth he would tell four different stories, from four different periods of history, about four different instances of human intolerance and cut these parallel stories together as one mammoth three hour plea for human tolerance: “This confused many of the audiences and the film did less well commercially than The Birth of a Nation for which, to some critics of the time, it seemed like an apology.” (Cousins, 2004:55). While the audience may not have understood what Griffith was trying to do with the structural editing in Intolerance they did, none the less, buy into the epic spectacle element of the film, which created a thirst for more American super-productions.
After The Birth of a Nation and then Intolerance, films had gained a new expectation: in addition to telling a fully rounded narrative they also needed to be spectacles. This was an expectation that was taken to heart in how the films were exhibited. Initially, what had just been an occasional luxury over the more dominant nickelodeons now became the standard: “the uncomfortable, small, makeshift nickelodeons gave way to luxurious movie palaces and other large theatres especially built for the showing of motion pictures” (Belton, 2005:16). The emergence of the picture palace as the dominant form of exhibiting films in the USA signified the point when cinema became fully accepted by the public: “By 1929 and the end of the silent era Hollywood films had become the most powerful medium of mass entertainment the world has ever known” (Brownlow, 1980), the institution had been established!
However, to fully understand the institutionalisation of silent cinema we must first ascertain to what extend it is an institution. The Oxford Dictionary defines an institution as: “an organization founded for a religious, educational, professional, or social purpose.” (Oxford Dictionaries). Certainly, if we are to follow Belton’s view of the institution of cinema as being: “an integral feature of the experience of being an American in the twentieth century” (Belton, 2005:4), then surely cinema is a fusion of a religious, educational, professional and social institution: “Going to the movies became as common place as going to school, to work, or to church. For earlier generations, it was familiar an activity as watching television has become today” (Belton, 2005:4).
Cousins claims that what drives films “isn’t box office or showbiz – it’s passion; innovation.” (Mark Cousins, 2011), however, this is an incredibly naïve view that only accounts for half of cinemas success as an institution. If cinema had never gained an audience and become an economically viable option, on the part of its producers, the institution would never have been established: “The cinema is an institution in a number of senses of the term. It is an economic institution, designed to make money. In order to do this, it established itself as an industry” (Belton, 2005:4). “Box office and showbiz” is as much the progenitors of the institution of cinema as “passion and innovation.” Therefore, cinema is a professional money making institution:
“It is a complex organization of producers, distributors, and exhibitors whose job it is to make and market motion pictures. To accomplish its goals, the industry developed a basic technology that facilitates the production and exhibition of movies. It also established various systems such as the star system… and the genre system-which are designed to ensure that individual films return a profit to the industry that produces, distributes, and exhibits them.” (Belton, 2005:4).
Cinema became a social institution when the projector was introduced because it allowed more than one person to concurrently view and indulge in the same film. Going to the cinema became a social event; the cinema became a place: “for people to come together to share a common experience” (Scorsese et al., 1995). It became even more of a social event with the introduction of the picture palaces and all their lavish accompaniments: “By this time, the entertainment program of the movie palace had expanded to include (in addition to the theatre orchestra’s overture and musical accompaniment of the silent feature) dancers, opera singers, and other performers in live skits” (Belton, 2005:17). Therefore, silent cinema can also be considered a social institution.
Cinema is an educational institution in the same sense that it is a religious one; figures like Griffith made cinema into: “a serious chronicler of the human soul.” (Cousins, 2004:61). In the opening to The Birth of a Nation Griffith put an intertitle with a response to the idea of censoring film: “we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue” (Griffith, 1915). Griffin believed that film needed to remain uncensored in order to educate the viewer. Also Griffin’s mastering of film form enabled filmmakers to make films that could be understood by the audience and, therefore, audiences could be informed by the film. The Birth of a Nation claims a great many things about the reformation of America after Civil War, such as how the Ku Klux Klan were the “White Knights” who saved American from the degenerate African Americans. It’s not true, but an uneducated audience member in 1915 would have believed it. Therefore, films have the ability to educate even if it provides a false education and silent cinema can also be considered an educational institution because of this.
In regards to cinema being a religious institution in the sense that the viewer worships what’s on the screen – then it is very much a “religious” institution. As has already been shown silent cinema managed to gain a faithful audience who would consistently come back to worship their favourite stars, or idols, or ideologies (as with The Birth of a Nation), etc. The survival of American silent cinemas, like any religion, was reliant on people actually going to worship it:
“I believe there is a spirituality in films even it’s one that can’t supplant faith. I find that over the years there are many films that address themselves to the spiritual side of Man’s nature… It is as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious; they fulfil a spiritual need that people have to share a common memory.” (Scorsese et al., 1995).
A common memory or a common experience is a very adequate way to describe what an institution is and what it provides. Therefore, silent cinema was very much its own institution and what made it such a powerful institution was its ability to be a fusion of so many different things; not only of other institutions - professional, social, educational, religious - but also of other art forms: literature, theatre, music (orchestra in the picture palaces), etc. The institution of silent cinema was also a necessary component of the twentieth century because it allowed the consumerist world of the twentieth century a means to showcase and worship its opulence – opulence that needed to become a common memory.
Therefore, in conclusion, not only can silent cinema be considered a very intricate institution, but the process towards creating this institution can be accounted for as a result of two occurrences happening side by side and as a result of each other. The first: cinema discovering itself by refining film form and receiving ample investment from its producers. The second: the audience learning to understand film form and then buying fully into the spectacle of entertainment it provided. From peepshow to pictureshow, the institutionalisation of silent cinema in the USA came about through the dual processes of films establishing self-respect and gaining the respect of the class structures; only when both of these had transpired was the institution of silent cinema born.
Bibliography
Barbas, S. ‘From Reel to Real: The First Movie Stars’ in Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Cult of the Celebrity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp.9-33.
Belton, J. ‘The Emergence of Cinema as an Institution’ in American Cinema: American Culture. Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bergan, R. Film: Eyewitness Companion. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2006.
Brownlow, K. Hollywood: The Pioneers. London: William Collins Sons & Co LTD, 1979.
Chapman, J. ‘Early Cinema’ in Cinemas of the World. London: Reaktion Books, 2003, pp.51-75.
Cook, D.A. A History of Narrative Film. WW Norton & Co, 1981.
Cousins, M. The Story of Film. London: Pavilion Books, 2004.
Ellis, J.C. ‘Birth and Childhood of a New Art’ in A History of Film. Fourth Edition. Allyn and Bacon, 1995, pp.1-25.
Kobel, P. and The Library of Congress Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and The Triumph of Movie Culture. New York: Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group USA, 2007.
Maltby, R. Hollywood Cinema. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Oxford Dictionaries [Online]. Available from: https://oxforddictionaries.com/ [Accessed: 14/05/2012].
Singer, B. ‘Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors’. In Cinema Journal, Vol.34, No.3. 1995. Pp.5-35.
Filmography
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies – Television Documentary; Dir. Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson. 225 minutes. United Kingdom: British Film Institute, Miramax Films. 1995.
A Trip to Mars – Film; Dir. Ashley Miller. 5 minutes. United States of America: Edison Manufactoring Company. 1910.
Cabiria – Film; Dir. Giovanni Paastrone. 148 minutes. Italy: Itala Film. 1914.
Electrocuting an Elephant – Film; Dir. (unknown). 1 min. United States of America: Edison Manufacturing Company. 1903.
Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, Episode 1: The Pioneers – Documentary Television Series; Dir. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. 60 minutes. United Kingdom: Thames Television. 1980.
Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, Episode 2: In The Beginning – Documentary Television Series; Dir. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. 60 minutes. United Kingdom: Thames Television. 1980.
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages – Film; Dir. D.W. Griffith. 163 minutes. United States of America: Triangle Film Producing, Wark Producing. 1916.
Life of an American Fireman – Film; Dir. Edwin S. Porter. 6 minutes. United States of America: Edison Manufacturing Company. 1903.
Paul Merton’s Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema – Television Documentary; Dir. Paul Merton. 59 minutes. United Kingdom: BBC Bristol. 2010.
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Episode 1: 1895-1918: The World Discovers - A New Artform – Documentary Television Series; Dir. Mark Cousins. 60 minutes. United Kingdom: Hopscotch Films. 2011.
The Birth of a Nation – Film; Dir. D.W. Griffith. 190 minutes. United States of America: David W. Griffith Corp., Epoch Producing Corporation. 1915.
The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots – Film; Dir. Alfred Clark. 1 min. United States of America: Edison Manufacturing Company. 1895.
The Girl and Her Trust – Film; Dir. D.W. Griffith. 17 minutes. United States of America: Biograph Company. 1912.
The Great Train Robbery – Film; Dir. Edwin S. Porter. 11 minutes. United States of America: Edison Manufacturing Company. 1903.
The Better Villain is a 16-minute silent film I made when I was 17-years old back in 2007 for an A-Level Film Studies assignment. Clunky and very rough around the edges, this short film is my first major piece of filmmaking.
The Film Studies assignment it was produced for only called for a 2-minute sequence, but I decided to use the opportunity to make a full short film... which called for me to invest nearly £400 in a standard definition 30GB harddisk drive camcorder, a cutting edge piece of technology at the time.
The 2-minutes I submitted for my Film Studies assignment
At the time, I was attending college full-time in addition to working a part-time job and I would only get two days of a month. As such, I did not have a great deal of time to plan out the film; I did not even have time to write a script for it.
However, while thinking up the visual joke of a short 2-minute sequence about two burglars who break into the same house without realising the other one is there, I conceived of a larger storyline which explained how they found themselves in this situation, what they were there for and how it was all resolved.
Therefore, in my head, I had a rough plot outline of a beginning, a middle and a twist ending.
The original ending... until I thought up a better one while filming the short
Me and my outrageous sense of humour had always been a fan of slapstick comedy and, about two years previously, I had discovered my fascination with silent cinema and how it was possible to tell a story completely visually if needs be. I liked the idea of challenging myself to see if I could make a silent short film which told its story completely visually.
Right from the beginning, I knew that I was going to make a purely visual silent comedy in the style of the silent and not-silent slapstick comedy films I love so much. Key influences for The Better Villain were Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and The Pink Panther films. Regardless of the style of the subject matter, I always intended for there to be a clear linear logic to the actions of the film's storyline. This deleted scene was just a piece of action which was not needed, it was repeated a joke which had already been told and it was hard not to imagine that the Villain 3 character had not seen Villian's 1 and 2 before closing the kitchen door. So I got rid of it.
Another key influence on The Better Villain was the films of Sergio Leone and the music of Ennio Morricone, both of which I had discovered about a year before making The Better Villain. Certainly, you can hear the influence of Ennio Morricone because I used his music for the soundtrack of the film. I did not know of copyright restrictions at the time, forgive me, Ennio! Leone's visuals and Morricone's music masterfully wedded together into one of my all time favourite film sequences from For A Few Dollars More. As a result of hearing his music briliantly utilised in the films of Leone and a few other filmmakers, I developed a taste for his music and would often listen to huge chunks of his library on my iPod Touch.
As of result of listening to his music while thinking up the plot of The Better Villian, Morricone's music became an integral part of the film's composition. While I was listening to the music, I was seeing the visual design of the film and the rhythms of the actions and characters in the film play out. The Morricone music tracks I used in the film... The infernal trio - The Better Villain theme Marche en la - Villain #1 theme Come maddalena - Villain #2 theme Marcia degli accattoni - Villain #3 theme Investigation of a citizen abo - Breaking into the house 1900's Madness #1 - Fight sequence music 1900's Madness #2 - Fight sequence music The music of Morricone became so tied up with my vision for the film that I decided that when I edited the film, I would edit it in the same way which Leone edited his films (Leone always got Morricone to compose the music first) - cutting the images to match the design of the music, which is very apparent when watching the film.
To me, the Morricone music I used perfectly conveyed the overall mood and rhythm of each of the characters I was looking to convey in the visual storytelling of the film. However, Leone's use of the Morricone's music was not the only influence I drew from Leone's films.
There is great aesthetic design to the cinematography and framing of Leone's films that fully take advantage of the widescreen format he was working with when making his films.
I too had the luxury of working with widescreen when filming The Better Villain, the cutting edge harddisk drive camera I was using to film the short was one of the first camcorders on the market to film in widescreen.
You have to remember that this was in 2007, the iPhone had only just come out and it would take a little longer for the smartphone market to fully take off. The Better Villain was a visual experiment and, as such, I used it as an opportunity to play around with the framing and composition of the visuals to see what effects could be created.
Leone's influence is definitely in The Better Villain.
As are the dutch angles of The Third Man, a film which I had not seen at this point, but I had certainly been fascinated by what tilted still images I had seen from the film.
I also wanted visual humour to be a key component of the visual design of the film. We never planned out this shot, me and James (Villain #2) discovered this amusing shot while filming his exterior shots.
The theme of 'black and white' is present throughout the film, not just in the sense that it is a black and white film, but also in the simplistic moralistic and dualistic sense - Villains #1 and #2 are visual opposites of each other and represent the simplistic black and white thinking of slapstick comedy (and most, but not all of early cinema), it's either this way or that way, good and bad, right and wrong.
Whereas Villain #3 represent the real shades of grey you get when you combine the opposites of black and white. The visual representation of Villain #3 represents this, he appears more vague because he knows there are more than just two options, this is why he is the better villain, he represents big picture thinking.
Certainly, this theme of the simplicity of black and white versus the cunning thinking of shades of grey is something which the narrative of the whole film is designed to convey and especially so with the reveal of the twist ending.
I made the film with my two friends Matt and James, both of who had an interest in film, both of who were also studying Film Studies and both of who had very similar senses of humour to myself, so we mostly had great fun making this short. I would be lying if I said that Villains #1 and #2 were not based on their respective actors. Certainly, Matt could be very hilariously dim at times and James was always more sharper, but also had his moments as well.
Villain #3 is definitely based on me, which makes sense becuase he is played by me, I the slightly manipulative one who was always trying to outsmart the other two... just my onscreen had more luck. Like Matt and James, I am also a bit of an idiot in real life. I was a bit of a tyrant on set mainly due to the stress of getting everything I knew I needed to get shot in a very short space of time; while also trying to figure out solutions for some of the plot holes in the story outline. However, one of the time-saving advantages of filming a silent film is that you do not have to worry about what the microphone picks up while filming, meaning you can direct your actors while you are filming. Ultimately, because I had lacked the time to thoroughly plan out the shoot, I ended up over shooting on material with multiple takes of most of the sequences.
And then after we had finished the two-day shoot, I discovered that there were still some shots I was missing in order to make the full plot make sense, so we went back for another half day's pick-up shoot.
Joey "Deadwood" Waller - the original character name of Villain #1
The editing of The Better Villain took a while mainly due to a continuing lack of time (due to my work and college commitments) and because I had to work with the world's slowest PC! However, immediately after filming, I did begin to edit the footage together and I was assembling it in chronological order according to the film's plot.
Florence "Flerr" Mingo - the original character name of Villain #2
Watching the early versions I edited you can see that I am discovering the editing process and I remember hugely enjoying this process.
I edited this first version of "The Third Man" a.k.a. the introduction of Villain #3 after we had concluded filming on the second day, hence why they are caption shots describing the pick-up shots I needed to complete the sequence. By this point, I knew what the film looked and sounded like in my head and this is why I was able to assemble this rough sequence and the other two in a relatively short space of time. We filmed the The Better Villain in the February 2007 using the half-term week we had off college and I had also booked the week off from work, so this gave me time to devote to three days of filming and the rest to editing. However, one week was not enough!
I was running out of time, so I finished the 2-minute sequence for my Film Studies assignment and what else I could of the film.
Then I did not do much work on the film after that... for a good two-years it sat lifeless on my harddrive. This neglect was down to lack of time, but also because I had lost interest in editing a film which I came to believe I could never make work... so I procrastinated.
In the hiatus I managed to shoot and edit the first two films of The Not Even Gay Trilogy and I also managed to experiment with the editing of two trailers for The Better Villain...
Both trailers are heavily stylised.
And both trailers play with genre conventions.
I did not have to make trailers for the film, but it was another way for me to practice my editing and to explore what you could do with establishing a mood in the visual form. The trailers were produced as a result of creative procrastination. They stand as examples of some of my earliest editing work.
It was in 2009, about March if I remember correctly, that I finally found my way back to editing The Better Villain.
Thanks to the 2008 financial crisis making me jobless from the beginning of 2009 to when I started university in September of 2009, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, so I set about completing that crazy little film I had made back in 2007.
By this point, I had become a much more confident editor and my understanding of film form had greatly improved since filming The Better Villain/
The first thing I did was start over from scratch.
I scraped all the sequences I had already edited for The Better Villain. I did this because, at this point, I was using different editing software. I also wanted to have a stab at editing it properly this time over.
I had received a new laptop for Christmas 2008 and, as such, was now able to edit on a reliable computer that did not keep crashing and disrupting the flow of the editing process.
If I remember correctly, I produced a rough cut in about a week, which I showed to Matt (Villain #1) and James (Villain #2) not long after.
Then it was left to gather dust for another year, until I came back to it in 2010 to give it another polish and then I finally got round to adding the final coat of gloss in 2015, after I had finished my time-consuming BA (Hons).
The 2009 and 2010 versions are basically identical to the 2015 version featured at the top of this post, the only differences can be found in how I have reframed, straightened and tightened a few of the shots to make it look visually better all round.
I also shot and added in a new shot of the can of air freshener Villain #1 sprays in the toilet, because it was never clear what he was doing.
And now, in May of 2017, ten years after it was originally shot, I am finally posting it on my film blog.
I've also produced a reflective commentary on the film, which I recorded in 2020...
They say that a film is never really finished, it is only abandoned and I have now abandoned The Better Villain to live out the rest of its life on this blog.
However, I may yet use the hours of footage which were produced from the original shoot and feature the audio of my directing behind camera to edit together a short documentary about the mistakes to avoid... or definitely not to avoid if you want a thorough learning experience when making your first film.
If I ever do get round to cutting together this monstrosity, then it will be called Don't Look Into Camera, a phrase I used at several points during the shoot.
No film is ever perfect and especially so for a first effort.
The Better Villain is my rough diamond, if I were to do it all over again, of course I would do it differently, but for the effort I produced from only a very vague visual joke and in an incredibly short and stressed space of time, I am actually very pleased and impressed by my first filmmaking effort.
I think that it demonstrates a confident understanding of narrative structure, film form, subtext and how to bring them all together into a humourous whole.
The Better Villain - my rough diamond
Ultimately, for making The Better Villain, I am now the better filmmaker!
And there is moralistic lesson to be learned from my first film too... thieves may prosper and fools may pay, but it is the one dressed in sheep's clothing, the better villain, who shall govern the way. Or so says an old Arabian proverb... otherwise known as my reference to the 1933 King Kong.
If there is one message I want the experience of my first film to convey, it is to have fun making films.
