Why were cinema ellipses considered to present a problem for text reception? In cinema, the ‘exit’ from one shot and ‘entry’ into another are often open to two interpretations: the spaces can be seen either as adjacent or as separated by a distance. This ambiguity is removed if these spaces are marked, either by obvious signs of proximity (no one is surprised if a character opens a front door and the next frame shows him already in a hallway) or by clear signs of mutual distance, temporal and spatial.
What signs were used as indicators of ellipsis and how were they received? The classical time-lapse marks were fades and irises, mainly used to elide erotic scenes. By 1915 this usage became so widespread that the word ‘iris’ [diafragma] became a critical catchword for this kind of moment. ‘Good direction is only needed for psychological dramas’, stated an ironical review of a Russian screen version of Octave Mirbeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid [Dnevnik gornichnoy, 1916], ‘all that the “real story” needs is an iris.’8
The same applies to fade-ins. Here is a sarcastic description another reviewer gave of The Husband [Muzh], a film made in 1915 after a play by Mikhail Artsybashev, the novelist whose literary name was made by the so-called ‘problem of sex’:
Scene one: Duganovich, the hero of the film, sleek and well-fed, embraces a cocotte and kisses her. Then he leads her to the sofa…and darkness falls. Scene two: Duganovich embraces the wife of his assistant. Undressing. Couch. Darkness. Scene three: Duganovich embraces his sister-in-law. Parlour. Kisses. Darkness. Scene four: the same character embraces a chambermaid amidst fur coats. Darkness falls even without as much as a single kiss.9
Another common way to cover up an ellipsis was to insert an intertitle. According to Alfred Hitchcock (who started as title writer for a British studio), the favourite intertitle of silent cinema was ‘Came the dawn’.10
However, as Nikolai Izvolov has pointed out in his recent dissertation, this observation probably applies mainly to films produced in the 1920s.11 In the 1910s, when prints were as a rule released in tinted versions,
the dawn was more likely to be indicated by the change of tint from blue (commonly used for night) to pink. Colour, then, was yet another frequent signal for ellipsis.
It can be argued that some of these signals were historically specific. Today, when we watch narrative films of the 1910s, we are sometimes puzzled by what we tend to misread as the lack of narrative clarity. Here is an example drawn from my own experience of film restoration undertaken with a group of colleagues at the Gosfilmofond archives in Moscow in 1988. In Peter Chardynin’s film Chrysanthemums [Khrizantemy, 1914] the heroine (Vera Coralli) leaves her lover’s room after a final showdown and in the next shot collapses grief-stricken on a chair. The modern viewer reads this cut as continuous: after she has closed the door to his study, she is too distressed to leave his house. It becomes clear only later that Vera had returned to her own house, and that the scene in which she collapses actually belongs to a different place and time in the story. Since the print of Chrysanthemums comes to us from studio negatives (negative prints did not have intertitles and, of course, were not tinted), there is no easy way to establish if this ambiguity is a property of the film itself or of its archival copy.12 Theoretically, the ellipsis could have been
cued by means of an intertitle, by means of tint change (different interiors were as a rule differently tinted) or, perhaps, by the insertion of a so-called ‘passage shot’ (Vera walking, riding or driving home) that has subsequently been lost from the footage. I shall return to the question of ‘passage shots’ when discussing the effect of ‘fermata’ on the reception of film narrative.
But there is also a possibility that what we today misread as continuity was read as discontinuity in 1914. We may assume that the historical viewer was more sensitive to certain types of discontinuity signals than we are to the same signals nowadays. Since I am not sure that it can be sufficiently documented, I make this assumption on a speculative rather than an empirical basis. As is known from textual studies of early narrative cinema (Barry Salt, Tom Gunning), the initial rules for marking continuity were more rigorous than the ones that came later. For example, exits and entrances, as well as directions of characters entering and leaving the frame, had to be co-ordinated and matched with cuts.13 In some Russian film scripts of the
1910s ‘exits’ and ‘entrances’ meticulously marked for continuity sequences were also accompanied by ‘directions’: if a character was supposed to move in continuous space, he had to exit to the right of a frame and reappear from the left (or vice versa). Hence, one may assume that in cases where such rules were not observed (e.g. cut before exit or left/right confusion) the viewer would automatically read the sequence (or cut) as discontinuous. In Chrysanthemums Vera moves to the right almost as far as the shot will allow, then turns to the door in the back wall and exits through it heading leftwards. In the next shot (already home) she enters from the left side of the frame. In terms of directions this is a mismatch. Could it be that while for us a match on action is enough to validate continuity between shots, the 1914 generation of spectators may have required the match on action to be complemented with a directions match? If this hypothesis is sound, one may say that the narrative competence of the early viewer was more firmly based on the presumption of discontinuity than ours is.
Be that as it may, it is significant that early film scripts, as well as indicating exits and entrances and marking them with ‘left’ or ‘right’, avoided giving these indications at the starting and ending points of a continuity sequence. Here is an example from Czesław Sabinski’s shooting script for See The Post Coach Rushing [Vot mchitsya troika pochtovaya, 1914], in which only the first entry lacks directions and the last cut (which takes us away to another sequence) lacks an ‘exit’:
9 A general view of the fête. Ivan and Masha come out of the crowd at the tent. They look back and both exit right…
10 Ivan and Masha appear on the street from the left with their backs to the camera. They walk past laughing and joking and disappear right…
11 Ivan and Masha are walking from the left towards the house of the village elder, their backs to the camera. They stop… Masha says goodbye. Ivan embraces Masha and kisses her.14
A distinction can be drawn between transition inserts (like intertitles and passages) and in-frame indicators of ellipsis (like directions, change of tint, etc.). Some ways of controlling narrative through manipulation of in-frame diegetic elements were quite specific. If we take, for example, a closer look at shot 11 of the shooting script cited above, we will see that the end of the continuity sequence was signalled by mutual gestures of parting. On the surface, these gestures were simply part of the characters’ story-motivated behaviour. At the same time, they served as diegetic signals of discontinuity. Parting gestures, welcoming gestures, comings, goings, arrivals, departures, and the like, belonged to those few diegetic elements that, apart from their surface role in the story, had a covert function within the narrator system. These agents in the service of syntax could be detected by the suspicious frequency with which they would show up at certain points of the diegesis. This made film stories look really bizarre. ‘Why do people who live in castles do little else but shake hands and smoke cigars?’, queried Georg German, with assumed naivety, in the article describing what we may define as the aggregate diegesis of cinema around 1914. ‘Can every estate owner really be a professional hand-shaker?’15
Some observers pointed to the syntagmatic role of the motor car: ‘The plot of a cinema drama has the right to be as absurd as it likes, as long as the linkage between its component parts is guaranteed by a crazy car ride’, wrote a reviewer for The Theatre Paper in 1914;16 while the paper’s regular film correspondent,
reviewing Bauer’s Silent Witnesses [Nemye svideteli, 1914], pointed out that the device of switching from one scene to another was poorly done, with no clear narrative perspective: ‘there were a number of blank spots and gaps,…the action was monotonous; people arrived, departed, got into a car, got out of a car, and that was that.’17
In this respect, in-frame discontinuity cues (greetings and farewells, arrivals and departures) functioned in a similar way to letters and telephone conversations. ‘Why are cinema’s dramatis personae always writing letters?’, wondered the same Georg German with the same air of innocent surprise.18 Indeed, letters took the
lion’s share of all written texts that figured in early films: to send a letter was the easiest way to ‘communicate’ between distant shots. The same applied to telephone calls, which were particularly useful because, unlike letters, which helped to establish links over time (‘Paul is round in a flash’), they established simultaneous action over physical distance. Therefore, as Eileen Bowser observes, ‘for some film-makers, the literal “link between spaces” of the sounds of a telephone call may have been needed to stimulate… alternative editing.’19 Like letter-writing, telephone conversations were overexploited in early film practice
—a fact that has not passed unrecorded in literature.20 Like letters and telephone conversations, greetings
and farewells signposted the narrative relationship between shots, the only difference being that the letter and the telephone performed a conjunctional role, drawing shots separated in time and space into a single narrative block, while gestures of greeting were more like signs of narrative disjuncture.
Some contemporary remarks make one think that by the second half of the 1910s in-frame transition markers were regarded as somewhat obsolete. In 1916 a reviewer for the journal Pegasus praised Nikander Turkin’s film Tanya Skvortsova—Student [Kursistka Tanya Skvortsova, 1916] for a successful ellipsis: ‘It cleverly avoided yet another train departure with much waving and saluting from passengers and people seeing them off. The square in front of the station was shown, and then just the train itself, pulling out of the station.’21 In-frame transition markers (hand-shakes, goodbye gestures, etc.) were gradually replaced by
transition inserts (a shot of a train, for example). A skilfully done transition insert was well received, since it was not only a fresh device of cinema narrative but a device that also brought the narrative technique of cinema closer to the demands of the narrative norm. The playwright Ilya Surguchov, who regularly reviewed films for the journal The Wings [Kulisy], praised one such carry-over from one scene to another in Bauer’s The Lie [Lozh’, 1917]:
The departure for the holidays is very cleverly done…particularly the scene where the train suddenly appears, rushing through a small wood. This really injects life into the stereotyped ‘train departure’ sequence and highlights the truthfulness of the events that follow.22
This last remark is particularly interesting, since the ‘truthfulness of events’ is seen to be dependent on their position in the narrative perspective of the text.
Towards the 1920s transition inserts became the normal way of coping with story ellipses. A straight cut from a ‘goodbye’ pantomime to greetings in the next shot looked old-fashioned. The point was that while in- frame cues warned the viewer that a discontinuous cut was approaching, transition inserts created a semblance of continuity. Therefore the shift can be explained by the general tendency to smooth the course of film narrative, to turn the ‘mountain creek’ into the ‘wide river’. In film literature of the 1920s transition inserts were to be recognised as revealing the ‘innate nature’ of cinema narration, something that Béla Balázs called ‘visual continuity’.23 Boris Eichenbaum also agreed:
The movement of a film is built on the principle of temporal and spatial linkage… If a character walks out of a house, then in the next shot he cannot be shown entering another house; this contradicts both time and space. Hence the need for so-called ‘link-shots’, which in the hands of inexperienced directors tend to weigh down the film by introducing irrelevant, and therefore meaningless, details.24
He continues: ‘In other words, the significance of space in cinema lies more in its contribution to style (syntax) than in its role in the plot.’25
FERMATA
Let us now pause to consider those ‘irrelevant and meaningless details’ that Eichenbaum warned inexperienced directors against, and attempt to define this aspect of cinema narrative against the background of the narrative norm.
Like any kind of narrative, cinema narrative presupposes the existence of a pre-textual reality, which it is claiming to represent. What does this axiom entail from the point of view of the narrative norm? The ‘correct’ narrative had to observe narrative economy. Every detail of pre-textual reality did not have to be delineated with equal meticulousness. The narrative was felt to be flexible and economical when it was able to dwell longer on the more important details, while only mentioning the trivial in passing. In other words, a narration was recognised as economic if the degree of realism with which this or that detail was represented varied according to its centrality within the story. Too much realism in details created the effect of trompel‘oeil which impaired the realism of the entire text.
As contemporary reports suggest, it was exactly the principle of narrative economy that was denied to early cinema narrative by the pre-set and unvarying way in which it represented reality. Let us imagine an automatic narrating machine that reproduces every detail, both important and trivial, with equal meticulousness. From the first days of its existence, the image of cinematic text was close to that of such a narrative automaton. We have seen this image emerge in O.Winter’s essay of 1896 which condemned film images for their lack of focus and inability to select. Of course, Winter’s ‘case’ against the Lumières had to be confined to the discussion of individual images. However, the impression that cinematic images were too faithful to be true was so strong that the term ‘cinematograph’ was instantly turned into a metaphor employed by literary critics to describe what they earlier used to call the ‘photographism’ of realistic prose. One can provide a number of examples from literary criticism of the 1910s; but it would perhaps be better
to quote a review that dates back to 1897 and which gives the following description of Anton Chekhov’s plays:
There is something quite particular in this writer’s manner: he seems to make myriads of snapshots and then display them with astonishing life-likeness… But there exist complex cases that the cinematograph fails to register. What we need is more than exactitude and fidelity of images: [to tell a story] you have to select moments that are typical and characteristic for each dramatic character.26
As soon as cinema transformed itself into a narrative vehicle, it was accused of doing exactly the same to the accepted norms of storytelling: the general opinion was that cinema failed to distinguish the important from the trivial.
Let us look at the way in which this presumption inflected the reception of transition inserts. Joyce E.Jesionowski claims that the British film-maker Cecil Hepworth was the first to use the accumulation of spaces to indicate ‘how long’ it takes the character to get where he is going.27 According to Barry Salt’s
chronology, it was around 1907 that Pathé’s directors began to use corridors and staircases in their ‘comings’ and ‘goings’ scenes.28 Although these transition inserts helped to establish continuity, they were
also felt to burden the narrative with ‘unnecessary and meaningless’ footage. In other words, in their attempts to ‘normalise’ film narrative, the Pathé filmmakers were caught between two norms: any step towards conforming to the norm of narrative coherence was also a step away from the norm of narrative economy.
Salt quotes the following extract from the autobiography of Albert Smith, one of the founders of the American Vitagraph company:
No one complained about this until it became evident that Pathé was using its goings and comings over and over again. The stories varied, but sandwiched in between would be the same goings and comings. This aroused a two-horned complaint: the audiences were getting tired of the same goings and comings, often having little relation to the story, and secondly the buyers weren’t going to pay fifteen cents a foot for this surplusage. They said the story was better without the goings and comings, and so they began to scissor them out of the picture, paying Pathé only for what was left.29
The problem with transition inserts was that, in order to serve their purpose as linkages, they had to be somehow ‘downgraded’ to the level of auxiliary elements—and there was no easy way to signal to the viewer that ‘passages’ recorded with the same impartial precision as ‘main scenes’ were less important. This is, essentially, what Boris Eichenbaum meant when pointing out (twenty years later) that in the hands of inexperienced directors ‘link-shots’ weigh down the film by introducing irrelevant and meaningless details.
However, as we know from some sources quoted earlier, resistance to transition inserts went hand in hand with fascination. One has to bear in mind that reception is always ambivalent in its assessments. Like any cultural anomaly, deviations from the narrative norm were not necessarily seen as a defect. By some observers passages were recognised as an aesthetic resource for developing something like cinema’s own unique manner of storytelling.
In his recent paper on cinema’s temporality, Tom Gunning points to a dual nature of plot unfolding in the cinema of the 1910s. There was always some tension between the viewer’s involvement in the story line (what will happen next?) and the satiation of visual pleasure through the excess of spectacle. Gunning links the latter level of enjoyment to the vestiges of ‘the cinema of attractions’, the period when the whole raison d’être of cinema lay in its spectacularity and ability to astonish:
In spite of (indeed because of) the structural differences between the temporality and visual pleasure offered by attractions and those structured by narrative, the two ways of addressing the spectator can frequently interrelate within the same text. Rather than a developing configuration of narrative, the attraction offers a jolt of pure presence, soliciting surprise, astonishment, or pure curiosity instead of following the enigmas on which narrative depends.30
Gunning’s observation can not only be confirmed by what we find in Russian film literature of the 1910s, it can also be extended to cover filmic elements not necessarily connected with the world of the cinema of attractions. By strange coincidence, transition inserts, initially born out of necessity in order to linearise narrative, turned out to be a powerful source of visual pleasure. Surplus footage, unnecessary details, ‘flattening out’ of the difference between the key story line and auxiliary sections (a kind of cinematic