We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
198
lines in their efforts to master storytelling, the duality between a pre-1918 cinema of tableaux and a subsequent cinema of classical découpage no longer looks so sharp.
Clarity, emphasis, and moment-by-moment switches of attention were not the only aims of the new staging in depth. Several commentators applauded the depth uniquely available in films of the 1910s, with one claiming that characters coming forward “showed that the set had depth, the illusion being so perfect that many of the audience believed that they were watching a person in a real room.”75 Nevertheless, the idea that depth staging is wholly propelled by a principle of realism—Comolli’s “impression of reality,” Burch’s “haptic space’—seems inadequate to explain the particular changes we have plotted. Realism, of whatever sorts, had to be reconciled with increasing pressures to steer spectators to salient story material within the optical constraints afforded by cinema’s visual pyramid and front line. Depth staging of the 1910s answered to the need, common among artists of all places and traditions, to shape the material for specific effects on the perceiver. In the absence of cutting-based stylistic norms, imaginative filmmakers took rough schemas from early film and developed them into a mise en scéne displaying a range of emphasis, dynamism, and refinement suitable to the new complexities of longer films. Scarcely acknowledged at the time or since, these nuanced tactics of directing the audience’s attention became permanent additions to the filmmaker’s repertoire.
DEPTH, DECOUPAGE, AND CAMERA MOVEMENT
If the long-take, “scenic” method of the early to mid-1910s was so elegant, why did it give way to editing-based norms in only a few years? One reason was probably the success of American films with international audiences, Continuity-based storytelling seemed to be the wave of the future, and a younger generation of directors took it up eagerly, perhaps partly as the sort of rebellion against the elders which Kuleshov records in his attacks on tsarist cinema’s one-shot scenes.76
Another reason why Hollywood’s editing conventions swept the world so quickly reminds us that even successful solutions can produce new problems. With the rise of feature-length films, production became more routinized. Sustained takes required lengthy rehearsal, and if someone made a mistake during filming, the entire cast and crew would have to start all over again. From the standpoint of industrial organization, it is reasonable to break the scene into shorter, simpler shots that can be taken separately, many of which need occupy only a single player and a few staff. The American studios showed
EXCEPTIONALLY EXACT PERCEPTIONS