Titles, Subtitles, and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation

Common contemporary usage of the term intertitle reflects a misunderstanding of the function of title cards up to the early 1910s. Unlike the later role of intertitles as captions placed in between shots within scenes, early title cards were headings, either serving as titles of individual films (and initially presented as lantern slides) or as subtitles naming component scenes within longer individual films like Edison's Uncle Tom's Cabin. This use underscored the systematic alternation of scene and title and the autonomy of the scene.