Lista de Comprobación

In the last section of this chapter, I will examine another widely accepted idea about the connection between the visual style of Cabiria and D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance focusing on the role camera movements. I will use the same categories of movement with the character and movement on stationary characters, and movements on spectacular set elements or movements in front of a flat, painted background.

One of the most grandiose American film productions of the 1910s was D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance from 1916. Made two years after Pastrone’s film, Griffith

reportedly was deeply impressed by Cabiria, which made him actually rewrite many of his plans for his own historical epic. According to the introduction to the film on the Kino Video release, Cabiria’s “impact has reverberated throughout the history of cinema. It has been said that when he saw Cabiria, D. W. Griffith was so overwhelmed that he decided to turn The Mother and the Law, then in production into Intolerance.”69

Bowser cites a story that goes back to Lionel Barrymore who went to see Cabiria with Griffith, “who

remarked, ‘I wonder how they do that goddam thing?’”70

The thematic similarities between the two productions hide different stylistic and compositional strategies.

For Intolerance’s Babylonian sequence, Griffith wanted to include camera movements that linger on the dramatic sets and make it clear to the viewer that the backdrop to the sequences was not a flat, 2-dimensional painted scenery. He had to construct a crane with the help of which the camera team can move vertically on the Babylonian walls and track in at the same time. Huck Wortman, in charge of the sets in Intolerance, constructed a 150-feet high crane, which “was mounted on six sets of four- wheeled railroad-car trucks and had an elevator in the center.”71

Director Allan Dwan’s story is slightly different about how the problem of the dolly-crane shots was solved on the set. Dwan recalls that Griffith had him come in to help them to construct a dolly that had an elevator on it.72

Whatever notion Griffith developed after seeing Pastrone’s film, a close look at the camera movements reveals a very important difference between the two historical epics’ mobile framings.

Intolerance’s four different episodes are interwoven in a parallel editing structure. The concept of intolerance is represented in four different historical periods, and “[t]he symbolic bridging device that interconnects and links together the various stories is the recurring cameo shot of Mae Marsh, his greatest star, as Eternal Motherhood.”73

70 _{Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915. New York: Scribner, 1994. p. 251. Citation} from the Lionel Barrymore file, Braverman Papers, in D. W. Griffith Papers, Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center, undated (1940s).

71 _{Bitzer, Billy. His Story Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. p. 135.}

72 _{Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. p. 100-101.} 73 _{http://www.filmsite.org/into.html}

1.12 The poster for Intolerance

The different periods are distinguished by different colored tints, but visually the

Babylonian episode does not stand out merely because of its tint. The camera movements that occur relatively often in the Babylonian sequence are practically nonexistent in any of the three other episodes. Aside from a few pans and tilts, which all serve the purpose of reframing, there is only one instance in the rest of the film where the mobile frame is used for dramatic purposes: this is the chase sequence at the end of the contemporary episode where the Dear One (Lillian Gish) and the Governor are racing with cars and trains to get to the scene of the execution to save Jenkins. Here a very powerful sense of urgency is conveyed by the speeding vehicles and the sustained tracking shots that follow train and the car.

The tracking shots and the crane shots in the Babylonian episode follow a very similar pattern. Out of the twenty-one mobile shots in this episode, there is none where the camera moves on stationary characters. Seven of the camera movements are the crane shots74

that were accomplished using the famous dolly-crane.

1.13 Intolerance: Crane shot moving on the huge sets

Here the descending camera also tracks in. The huge sets reveal themselves as real, multi- part 3-dimensional structures. But the camera movement does not exist at this point of the Griffith film to focus our attention on any of the characters: as soon as the camera

approaches the dancers on the ground (as can be seen in the fourth frame of 1.14), a quick cut takes the viewer to a two-shot of Belshazzar and his lover.

A few seconds later the camera continues the descending movement, but it stops and starts to rise up above the heads of the dancers.

1.14 Intolerance: In the crane shots, the viewer cannot see facial expressions

Again, the tracking in is combined with a descending crane movement. The interaction between the structures of the set and the slow movements of the dancers makes the shot spectacular, which works best from the long shot distance framing the groups of

characters within the same space. The figures are moving, and the proximity between camera and actors and actresses does not allow for the viewer to observe the psychology of the characters.

The remaining camera movements of the film usually follow moving characters in between the sets at the gates of the Babylonian wall75

, go after Belshazzar who is proceeding between the priests during the ceremonies,76

travel parallel with the dancers77

75 _{[1], [2].} 76 _{[3], [4], [6].}

or follow racing chariots78

. The crane shots or the tracking shots on the moving characters do not exist to allow the spectator to observe the motivations or emotions of the

characters of the film. Griffith’s use of the mobile frame utilizes the technique, it seems, solely to show off the huge and spectacular 3-dimensional sets that were built for the film. As this chapter showed, Pastrone’s camera movements also expose the depth of the compositions. But more importantly, they reveal mental states, motivations or attitudes of the characters by taking the camera close to the scenes, usually to a full shot proximity and by remaining with the figures and allowing them some time to express themselves by typical silent-era gestures.

Although Griffith’s film came two-and-a-half years after Cabiria, in terms of the economy of its storytelling, the traveling shot’s use of functional equivalents does not exploit the possibilities that Pastrone recognized. The huge sets of Babylon signal a return to the usage of the camera movement as spectacular. The 3-dimensionality thesis about the Italian epic interprets Pastrone’s mobile visual style from the grounds of the much more widely seen Intolerance. This tweaks the viewer’s understanding of the traveling shot’s function in Cabiria toward an option that Griffith embraced. In terms of narrative motivation, however, the traveling shots in the Italian film today seems more progressive since on top the aspect of the spectacular, it assigns a dramatic function to camera movements that communicate important story information to the viewer. Thus camera movement becomes a proairetic element in syuzhet alteration.

This project focuses on the relation between normative and figurative uses of the same stylistic elements. A central term in this framework is the notion of innovation,

77 _{[10], [11], [12], [20].}

which this chapter traced from the cinema of attraction toward the years of transition. According to the hypothesis of the project, figurative codes occur in a context where the basis of normative codes allows the new function of the stylistic element become visible. This chapter showed how the initial normative usage of the tracking camera was

developed by Pastrone, which set him apart from typical practice during the cinema of attractions.

Cinema, as many other art forms, has multiple means to express the same

information. As Erwin Panofski puts it, the principle of co-expressibility guarantees that a piece of information can be articulated on many different levels79

. Accordingly, the advent of sound did not revolutionize cinematic storytelling, but rather gave filmmakers another channel to convey story material. Co-expressibility provides a basis on which stylistic development can occur: the moving camera can carry new functions since its traditional function (revealing the spectacular) is expressed by other techniques

(costumes, sets, etc.). This chapter showed how the traveling shot in Cabiria repeats what the cinema of attraction has achieved in terms of mobility (reveal the spectacular) but also revolutionizes the function of the tracking movement by connecting it with

revelations of character psychology: the approaching and retreating camera frames units of the story at the center of which stands the expression of crucial narrative information. Following the logic of easy readability of psychological traits, Pastrone moves the camera in his film on stationary characters instead of following moving characters. This forces the viewer’s attention toward the drama by eliminating the distracting aspect of character movement.

79 _{Panoski, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” Bulletin of the Department of Art and} Archeology. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University, 1934.

By the time Pastrone re-contextualizes camera movement in 1913, it already has several assigned functions. In the process of the innovation, these previous norms play an important part as contrasting elements: they render the new norms more visible and emphasize their new role. Pastrone’s new norm for camera movement thus becomes more intelligible, but it also underlines that the mobile shots are motivated compositionally. The traveling shot in Cabiria becomes a proairetic code, a causally functioning

Chapter Two