Narrative

TOWARD A HISTORY OF FILM NARRATIVE

While the cinema was born out of a collection of scientific, industrial, and aesthetic initiatives, its narrative potential quickly came to drive its commercial viability. Alongside "actuality" ( actualité ) movies, such as most of the Lumières, there quickly grew short chase films and "trick" films, including the many highly influential movies by Georges Méliès (1861–1938). Méliès pioneered an entire subgenre of movies in which camera tricks combine with theatrical settings to allow characters to disappear before our eyes, fly through the air, or even lose their heads. Le Voyage dans la lune ( A Trip to the Moon 1902)proved exemplary in presenting a series of scenes, edited end to end, each filled with a combination of painted stage sets equipped with trap doors and fantastic transformations exploiting in-camera editing tricks. He brought the spectacle of magic acts into the cinema, exploiting film's abilities to exceed the limits of real time and space in the theater. Similarly, chase films quickly became a staple of early filmmaking, in part because they too were well suited to a medium with no sound and only fledgling techniques for characterization or plot development.

Chase films followed the logic of comic strips, with a simple initial situation that leads through a series of accumulating visual gags. A typical scenario might include a dog stealing a string of sausages from a butcher, who gives chase, knocking over pedestrians as he goes, who then pursue him as he pursues the dog, with the number and variety of collisions and participants increasing steadily. One version is Pathé Studios' La Course des sergents de ville ( The Policemen's Little Run , 1907). These films, like more melodramatic variations, such as Rescued by Rover (1905), take full advantage of early cinema's strengths, including its ability to show rapid movement and edit together a string of chronological events. These films were structured much like live-action comic strips, with individual shot sequences replacing the static comic frames. Many early narratives retold formulaic tales or condensed stories that were already well-known to the audience, so that there would be no need to explain character relations or motivations. Simplified reenactments of the crowning of a monarch, scenes from famous plays ( Hamlet , for example) or novels (such as Uncle Tom's Cabin ), or even Bible stories could be just as comprehensible as chase films full of visual gags.

The film historian Tom Gunning has found early cinema's tendency toward spectacle and illusion as evidence that it is more a "cinema of attractions" than a cinema straining to tell stories. Many cinema pioneers shared the same impulse as that of carnival or vaudeville acts. Their task was to present highly exhibitionistic entertainment shows that would grab and hold the spectator's attention. Films would be organized as a series of displays, occasionally linked by some story line that allowed for a logic of scene-to-scene ordering. Characterization, however, was often kept to a minimum, and the films' success was measured more by their effects than their stories or themes. Previously, some film histories had simplistically reduced much of early cinema to a series of baby steps toward an arsenal of effective fictional devices. More recently, however, historians of early cinema have labored productively to clarify the differences between film practice before 1910 and the subsequent, more narratively constructed, and voyeuristic silent cinema. Nöel Burch has labeled the early tendencies toward a unique film practice as a Primitive Mode of Representation, a mode that repeatedly defies and frustrates narrativity.

From the beginning, cinema was exploited for its ability to display processes in real time, which privileged documentation and instructional filmmaking, but most exploration of the medium, including avant-garde investigations of film's more abstract or formal potential, has historically been reworked and adapted for narrative purposes. The 1910s was a transitional decade for motion pictures throughout the world. The exhibition of films became more standardized into programs, typically featuring narratives to anchor the screening, though the bill also included documentaries and eventually animated cartoons. By the middle and late 1910s, it was the feature narrative presentation that lured audiences to the movies, thanks in large part to new theaters, stars, and the establishment of new genres that all attracted more middle-class spectators. With the increased length of films and the rise of specialized motion picture studios, American cinema, in particular, came to be built on corporate models, with division of labor, boards of directors, and prescribed slates of annual production quotas. Along with that, it began to concentrate on predictable, efficient stories and styles. Internationally, specialized film studios were being built that allowed more evocative lighting designs and facilitated increasingly intricate camera movements and set construction. A more conventional, commercial narrative cinema was in place by 1920 that was easily distinguishable on every level from the shorter, now somewhat radically diverse films of 1910. This new norm for narrative filmmaking became known as the classical realist cinema, and its dominant American form was the Classical Hollywood Cinema.