Great Crusade: V:1 E:1 Silent Era, Cinema begins.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

The first features were not very long. The 90 minute standard of today did not exist, it would have been unthinkable. Even the 90 minute standard of today was once the 120 minute standard of yesterday. Even still try and find a Best Picture Oscar for films under 120 minutes!

Originally, Features ran from 7-30 minutes approximately. These were not known as “Shorts” though today, they would all qualify. There is a sizeable amount of snobbery in the industry about “feature length” vs. “Shorts”. They Are different, but as far as presentation to an audience went, it was a nickel either way.

The cinema was built on Westerns and Comedy. The first actual coherent story is The Great Train Robbery, which is, I think, a darn fine little yarn, with an empowered female heroine smart enough to shoot a bullet through a keyhole with a hammer and nail, and a raucous rascally and deadly posse. This little cinema innovation occurred in 1903 and was created by a man named Edwin S. Porter. It also has a cowboy shoot straight “at the audience” at one point, a surefire effect in those days! In fact, this has forever since been known as “breaking the fourth wall” a borrowed term from the theater for when the actors “speak to the audience directly”.

Screw D.W. Griffith’s bigot ass, THIS is the birth of “Editing”, of telling multiple stories at the same time, of “parallel cutting”, of editing as it’s own art. The Birth of a Nation was just bigger and more popular, so LAZY SCHOLARS talk about how it was Griffith that was all that and a bag of chips, the “father of modern editing”. Horseshit. This is also because LAZY SCHOLARS lean so heavily on their old commie comrades like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin, and “Soviet Montage”, which WAS derived from stolen prints of “Birth of a Nation”, which was too “Politically Incorrect” to ever be shown to a Russian Bolshevik dominated audience! SO, because the commies learned so much from “BOAN”, LAZY SCHOLARS and other half-steppers make “BOAN” the centerpiece of the creation of “Editing”. WRONG. Edwin S. Porter, Represent.

Porter himself worked for Thomas Edison on the East Coast, and Edison, who was a total asshole, at one time even tried to set up patents on “editing” so that noone else could cut film and paste it together! See, Edison had what we would call a “work for hire” arrangement with his peasa- , er, employees, where whatever they did, he owned. Even on their own time. This is also how he screwed Nikolai Tesla out of Alternating Current and a bunch of other things. Edison was a real major shit-heel. No wonder the uber-bosses of today owe him so much!

So, from 1903 on, we have “editing” NOT from 1915 when “BOAN” comes out. Screw you Edison, Screw you Griffith. Rock on Edwin S. Porter!

So, we begin Begin, in 1910. OUR first film is Under the Stars and Bars by Gaston and Georges Melies, a pair of French ex-magicians who previously did A Voyage to the Moon which has great sets and crap direction, but is widely regarded as the first “Special Effects Spectacular” ala Close Encounters of the Third Kind etc. Under the Stars and Bars tells the story of a Confederate Officer “called to join his regiment”. He is wounded and captured in an ambush and spends the remainder of the war in a POW camp, unable to send even a letter to his wife. His wife and child are forced to flee the homestead from Artillery fire, the war ends, and he returns to an empty house, now with only one arm and a cane. As he tries to find his wife and child, he has a nervous collapse and is taken to convalesce at the hospital. While convalescing, his child brings him an apple as he sits in his wheelchair, not knowing this is her long lost father. When she tells her mom about it, she goes to meet him and they are reunited. END. You may remember this as roughly being Cold Mountain.

The camera does not really move much, pretty stationary, no real pans or tilts and zero dolly/crab. There is a Close Up (CU) of a letter the officer writes which does double duty as exposition. There is also the “Walk into lens” cut-to “walk out of lens into picture” technique in evidence, though only once. The acting is total pantomime, which makes for interesting exposition scenes, and necessitates a lot of extra kissing (pecks really) to demonstrate “love”. Perhaps the most important thing about this film is that the hero is played by a Maine-born Irishman named Francis Ford, who is a hot star at the time and for some time to come. His brother will join him on the West Coast soon and take the name “Jack” later “John” Ford.

This movie was filmed in San Antonio, Texas, and released in October of 1910.

1912, and another Western dynamo is released called Blazing the Trail, this time directed by Thomas Ince. Thomas Ince was a very interesting figure in the history of Hollywood. He was the first to build backlots and studios. He created the “star system”, and he personally helped found first Universal and then Paramount studios. He was the first to make pictures along industrial lines, in 1913 alone he made over 150 movies! He was murdered (most likely by accident) by William Randolph Hearst on Hearst’s boat in 1924, in the presence of Louella Parsons (who immediately was given a lifetime job as the Hollywood correspondent of record for the entire Hearst paper empire) and Charlie Chaplin (who had been the real target of the gunfire). Apparently Chaplin was in the sack with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies, Hearst caught him and before he could shoot Chaplin, Chaplin fled on deck. The following gunfire missed Chaplin but killed Ince. The Hearst papers reported the next day that Ince had died of “acute indigestion”, as though such a thing was possible! Funny how this, of all Hearst episodes, didn’t make it into that overrated “Citizen Kane” movie.

This movie is pretty standard, there is one interesting innovation, a flashback, delivered under the intertitle “Jack Cooper tells of the Indian attack”. Between that title and the next, it is all a flashback of the double-cross massacre.

The story is: Boy meets girl (boy played by Francis Ford again) on wagon train heading west. Girl’s family wants to break off from train, boy joins them. Boy goes to get water, Indians arrive, double cross the family who haved served them bread and coffee, kill all but brother jack(wounded, left for dead), and girl who they steal. Boy returns to find carnage. Brother has stumbled off, wounded. Boy goes to search for girl at Indian village, where she is being roughed up and held captive. Wounded brother is found by lead of wagon train, posse forms and rides to the rescue. Meantime, boy has snuck into teepee disguised as Indian to save girl, he disguises her but as they are escaping, a squaw detects them, he is tied to a pole, beaten savagely by squaws and braves, and set to be burned at the stake. At the last minute, the posse stampedes the Indians horses, and as they chase the horses they are ambushed by the posse and the captives are freed.

And then, something special that we will see again and again….. The last shot of the movie, is the brother, boy and girl (now united), standing at the graves of the family, marked with simple stick crosses on a hillside. A row of mounted men wind off along the horizon line, silhouetted, and this horizon line is at about 80% of the way up the frame. The group walks off into the sunset/horizon. END. This last shot has John Ford written ALL OVER IT! So much so that graveside conversations, 80% horizon lines and 20% horizon lines, and horsemen silhouetted on that horizon line, are all accepted as “Fordian” themes and techniques of the master. Perhaps this film has something to do with the establishment of these things? He certainly saw the film.