Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913

3. “A Story Vital and Unified in Its Action” : The Demands of Narrative

3 "A Story Vital and Unified in Its Action": The Demands of Narrative MAR K ET - BAS E D DE MAN D for films of increased length and narrative complexity created interlocking problems for filmmakers of the transitional period. Scenario writers had to determine what types of stories and narrative structures best suited the one-reel running time. Once directors had these scenarios in hand, they needed to devise appropriate storytelling methods. Increased narrative complexity further challenged filmmakers to develop methods to ensure viewer comprehension. The crafting of coherent and legible narratives introduced problems of characterization , motivation, and causality that had not concerned filmmakers in earlier years. In fact, narrative scarcely figured at the point ofcinema's origins. The protocinematic realms of photography, motion toys, and projection rarely incorporated a storytelling function and as such did not bestow a legacy of narrativity upon the new medium. Dominant figures in cinema's initial development, such as Edison and the Lumieres, demonstrated little regard for cinema's narrative potential.1 Scholars typically refer to the first few years of cinema's existence as the technological or novelty phase, highlighting cinema's early status as a visual phenomenon.2 Producers capitalized on the camera's ability to record diverse views; accordingly, the first films were either records of vaudeville acts or some type of actualite (documents of newsworthy occurrences, everyday events, or visually distinctive locales, the latter occasionally rendered as a "panorama" view with the camera mounted on a moving vehicle).3 One can trace the origins of these representational options back to cinema's predecessors: visually defined replications ofthe outside world derive from photography, the sensation ofmovement from motion toys, and non-narrativized entertainment, such as displays of prowess or exoticism, from vaudeville. In other words, the defining features of film's precursors, none of them narratively oriented , shaped cinema's formal tendencies in the medium's earliest years. 45 46 "A Story Vital and Unified in Its Action" Length imposed another obvious limitation. Given the extremely brief duration of the first films' running times, originally dictated by technological constraints, filmmakers found it difficult to engage in narrative representation .4 However, even as film length increased, the realization of cinema's narrative potential resided more with exhibitors; they could craft a series of single-shot views into an evening's entertainment, held together by music, a lecturer, and stereopticon slides. With the advent ofthe multishot film, responsibility for investing cinema with a narrative dimension shifted back to the producer, and the success of "story films" demonstrated narrative's commercial possibilities.5 From 1900 onward, films cease to be merely fictional and unnarrativized (as in the recordings of vaudeville scenes); instead, filmmakers attempt storytelling in the forms offairy-tale films (also known asfeeries), films of humorous episodes, and, eventually, chase films.6 As Tom Gunning has argued, one can define the earliest "genres" in relation to cinema's developing mastery of "filmic space and time" through editing, apart from the distinct types of subject matter involved (1984, 105). The structural simplicity of the humorous episode and the feerie, then, recommended them as early versions of multishot narratives. Filmmakers gravitated toward the chase format in 1904, and the appeal of the genre resided in how well the medium's formal capabilities fit with the chase's easily reproduced narrative formula (i.e., an agent of disruption being chased and eventually caught and, perhaps, punished). One finds in the chase film an early version offilm narrative that fuses a compelling narrative situation with its ideal (cinematic) articulation: conflict is conveyed through action spread over a variety of locales, linked by editing. This logic of narrative progression would assume considerable influence within filmmaking circles, as evidenced by Eustace Hale Ball's advice to aspiring scenarists a decade later: "The keynote of all dramatic construction (a truth which cannot be too strongly emphasized) is STRUGGLE. Remember this whether you are writing comedy, drama, tragedy or romance " (1913, 45). Building on Tzvetan Todorov's suggestion that narrative patterns emerging out of conflict conform to set patterns, Edward Branigan has sketched out how "narrative in its most basic form is a causal 'transformation ' of a situation through five stages: (1) a state of equilibrium at the outset; (2) a disruption of the equilibrium by some action; (3) a recognition that there has been some disruption; (4) an attempt to repair the disruption ; (5) a reinstatement of the original equilibrium" (1992,4). Insofar [18.217.220.114] Project MUSE (2024...