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On 3 December 1913, the above advertisement appeared in the New York<\/em> Dramatic Mirror.<\/em> D. W. Griffith had left the American Biograph company and set out on an independent path that would lead to The Birth of a Nation<\/em> and beyond. Because Biograph never credited directors, casts, or crews, he wanted to make sure that the professional community was aware of his contributions. Not only did he point out that he had made several of the most noteworthy Biograph films; he also took credit for new techniques. He introduced, he claims, the close-up, sustained suspense, restrained acting, \u201cdistant views\u201d (presumably picturesque long-shots of the action), and the \u201cswitchback,\u201d his term for crosscutting\u2014that editing tactic that alternates shots of different actions occurring at the same time.<\/p>\n Griffith\u2019s bid for credit was a shrewd move for his career, and it had repercussions after the stunning success of The Birth of a Nation<\/em> two years later. Many historians took Griffith at his word and credited him with the breakthroughs he listed. He became known as the father of \u201cfilm grammar\u201d or \u201cfilm language.\u201d The idea hung on for decades. Here\u2019s the normally perceptive Dwight Macdonald, criticizing Dreyer\u2019s Gertrud<\/em> for being anachronistic:<\/p>\n He just sets up his camera and photographs people talking to each other, usually sitting down, just the way it used to be done before <\/strong>Griffith<\/strong> made a few technical innovations.<\/strong> (1)<\/p>\n Filmmakers believed the Griffith story too. Orson Welles wrote of the \u201cfounding father\u201d in 1960:<\/p>\n Every filmmaker who has followed him has done just that: followed him. He made the first close-up and moved the first camera. <\/strong>(2)<\/p>\n In the late 1970s a new generation of early-cinema scholars gave us a more nuanced account of Griffith\u2019s place in history. They pointed out that most of the innovations he claimed either predated his Biograph work, (3) or appeared simultaneously and independently in Europe and in other American films. Some Griffith partisans had already conceded this, but they maintained that he was the great synthesizer of these devices, and that he used them with a vigor and vividness that surpassed the sources.<\/p>\n That judgment seems right in part, but Eileen Bowser, Tom Gunning, Barry Salt, Kristin Thompson, Joyce Jesniowski, and other early-cinema researchers have drawn a more complicated picture. (4) Griffith did speed up cutting and devote an unusual number of shots to characters entering and leaving locales. But these innovations weren’t usually recognized as original by previous historians. More interestingly, much of what Griffith did was not<\/em> taken up by his successors. His technique was idiosyncratic in many respects. By 1915 younger directors like Walsh, Dwan, and DeMille were forging a smoother style that would be more characteristic of mainstream storytelling cinema than Griffith\u2019s somewhat eccentric scene breakdowns. Instead of creating film language, he spoke a forceful but often unique dialect.<\/p>\n The New York Dramatic Mirror<\/em> ad coaxes me to reflect on how filmmakers have shaped critics\u2019 and historians\u2019 responses to their work. Hawks and Hitchcock developed a repertory of ideas, opinions, and anecdotes to be trotted out on any occasion. Today, directors write books, give interviews, appear on infotainment shows, and provide DVD commentary. We know that many of the talking points are planned as part of the film\u2019s publicity campaign, and journalists dutifully follow the lead. (In Chapter 4 of The Frodo Franchise<\/em>, Kristin discusses how this happened with Lord of the Rings<\/em>.) For many decades, in short, filmmakers have been steering critics and viewers toward certain ways of understanding their films. How much should we be bound by the way the filmmaker positions the film?<\/p>\n Deep focus and deep analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n Citizen Kane<\/em> (1941).<\/p>\n Determining intentions is tricky, of course. Still, I think that in many cases we can reconstruct a plausible sense of an artist\u2019s purposes on the basis of the artwork, the historical context, surviving evidence, and other information. (5) This may or may not correspond to what the artist says on a particular occasion. For now, I want simply to point to one instance in which filmmakers have shaped critical uptake, with results that are both illuminating and limiting.<\/p>\n In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Andr\u00e9 Bazin, one of the great theorists and critics of cinema, argued that Orson Welles and William Wyler created a sort of revolution in filmmaking. They staged a shot\u2019s action in several planes, some quite close to the camera, and maintained more or less sharp focus in all of them. Bazin claimed that Welles’ Citizen Kane<\/em> and The Magnificent Ambersons<\/em> and Wyler’s The Little Foxes<\/em> and The Best Years of Our Lives<\/em> constituted \u201ca dialectical step forward in film language.\u201d<\/p>\n Their \u201cdeep-focus\u201d style, he claimed, produced a more profound realism than had been seen before because they respected the integrity of physical space and time. According to Bazin, traditional cutting breaks the world into bits, a series of close-ups and long shots. But Welles and Wyler give us the world as a seamless whole. The scene unfolds in all its actual duration and depth. Moreover, their style captured the way we see the world; given deep compositions, we must choose what to look at, foreground or background, just as we must choose in reality. Bazin wrote of Wyler:<\/p>\n Thanks to depth of field, at times augmented by action taking place simultaneously on several plane, the viewer is at least given the opportunity in the end to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend.<\/strong> (6)<\/p>\n While granting differences between the directors, Bazin said much the same about Welles, whose depth of field \u201cforces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations\u201d and creates \u201ca psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception\u201d (7).<\/p>\n In addition, Bazin pointed out, this sort of composition was artistically efficient. The deep shot could supply both a close-up and a long-shot in the same framing\u2014a synthesis of what traditional editing had given in separate shots. Bazin wove all these ideas into a larger theory that cinema was inherently a realistic medium, bound to photographic recording, and Welles and Wyler had discovered one path to artistic expression without violating the medium\u2019s biases.<\/p>\n There are many objections to Bazin\u2019s argument, some of which I\u2019ve rehearsed in On the History of Film Style<\/em><\/a>. My point here is that Bazin was presenting analytical points that stemmed from publicity put out by Welles, Wyler, and especially their talented cinematographer Gregg Toland.<\/p>\n In a 1941 article in American Cinematographer<\/em>, Toland talked freely about how he sought \u201crealism\u201d in Citizen Kane<\/em>. The audience must feel it is \u201clooking at reality, rather than merely a movie.\u201d Key to this was avoiding cuts by means of long takes and great depth of field, combining \u201cwhat would conventionally be made as two separate shots\u2014a close-up and an insert\u2014into a single, non-dollying shot.\u201d(8) Toland defended his sometimes extreme stylistic experimentation on grounds of realism and production efficiency, criteria that carried some weight in his professional community of cinematographers and technicians. (9)<\/p>\n Toland\u2019s campaign for his style addressed the general public too. For Popular Photography<\/em> he wrote an article (10) explaining again that his \u201cpan-focus\u201d technique captured the conditions of real-life vision, in which everything appears in sharp focus. A still broader audience encountered a Life<\/em> feature in the same year (11), explaining Toland\u2019s approach with specially-made illustrations. Two samples show selective focus, one focused on the background, the other on the foreground.<\/p>\n An accompanying photo shows pan-focus at work, with Toland in frame center, an actor in the background, and Toland\u2019s camera assistant in the foreground.<\/p>\n In sum, Toland\u2019s publicity prepared viewers, both professional and nonprofessional, for an odd-looking movie.<\/p>\n Throughout the 1940s, Welles and Wyler wrote and gave more interviews, often insisting that their films invited greater participation on the part of spectators. In a crucial 1947 statement, Wyler noted:<\/p>\n Gregg Toland\u2019s remarkable facility for handling background and foreground action has enabled me over a period of six pictures he has photographed to develop a better technique for staging my scenes. For example, I can have action and reaction in the same shot, without having to cut back and forth from individual cuts of the characters. This makes for smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene, for much more interesting composition in each shot, and lets the spectator look from one to the other character at his own will, do his own cutting.<\/strong> (12)<\/p>\n Some of this publicity material made its way into French translation after the liberation of Paris, just as Kane<\/em>, The Little Foxes<\/em>, and other films were arriving too. Bazin and his contemporaries picked up the claims that these films broke the rules. Deep-focus cinematography became, in the hands of critics, a revolutionary new technique. They presented it as their discovery, not something laid out in the films’ publicity.<\/p>\n But the case involved, as Huck Finn might say, some stretchers. Watching the baroque and expressionist Kane<\/em>, it\u2019s hard to square it with normal notions of realism, and we may suspect Toland of special pleading. Some of Toland\u2019s purported innovations, such as low-angle shots showing ceilings, had been seen before. Even the signature Toland look, with cramped, deep compositions shot from below, can be found across the history of cinema before Kane<\/em>. Here is a shot from the 1939 Russian film, The Great Citizen, Part 2<\/em> by Friedrich Ermler.<\/p>\n More seriously, some of Toland’s accounts of Kane<\/em> swerve close to deception. For decades people presupposed that dazzling shots like these were made with wide-angle lenses.<\/p>\n Yet the deep focus in the first image was accomplished by means of a back-projected film showing the boy Kane in the window, while the second image is a multiple exposure. The glass and medicine bottle were shot separately against a black background, then the film was wound back and the action in the middle ground and background were shot. (And even the middle-ground material, Susan in bed, is notably out of focus.) I suspect that the flashy deep-focus illustration in Life<\/em>, shot with a still camera, is a multiple exposure too. In any event, much of the depth of field on display in Kane<\/em> couldn’t have been achieved by straight photography. (13)<\/p>\n RKO’s special-effects department had years of experience with back projection and optical printing, notably in the handling of the leopard in Bringing Up Baby<\/em>, so many of Kane<\/em>‘s boldest depth shots were assigned to them. But here is all that Toland has to say on the subject:<\/p>\n RKO special-effects expert <\/strong>Vernon<\/strong> Walker, ASC, and his staff handled their part of the production\u2014a by no means inconsiderable assignment\u2014with ability and fine understanding.<\/strong> (14)<\/p>\n Kane<\/em>\u2019s reliance on rephotography deals a blow to Bazin\u2019s commitment to film as a medium committed to recording an event in front the camera. Instead, the film becomes an ancestor of the sort of extreme artificiality we now associate with computer-generated imagery.<\/p>\n Despite these difficulties, Toland\u2019s ideas sensitized filmmakers and critics to deep space as an expressive cinematic device. Modified forms of the deep-focus style became a major creative tradition in black-and-white cinema, lasting well into the 1960s. Bazin\u2019s analysis certainly developed Toland\u2019s ideas in original directions, and he creatively assimilated what Toland and his directors said into an illuminating general account of the history of film style. None of these creators and critics were probably aware of the remarkable depth apparent in pre-1920 cinema, or in Japanese and Soviet film of the 1930s. Their claims taught us to notice depth, even though we could then go on to discover examples that undercut Toland’s claims to originality.<\/p>\n Some little things to grasp at<\/strong><\/p>\n I assume that Toland and his directors were sincerely trying to experiment, however much they may have packaged their efforts to appeal to viewers’ and critics’ tastes. But sometimes artists aren\u2019t so sincere. By the 1950s, we have directors who started out as film critics, and they realized that they could guide the agenda. Here is Claude Chabrol:<\/p>\n I need a degree of critical support for my films to succeed: without that they can fall flat on their faces. So, what do you have to do? You have to help the critics over their notices, right? So, I give them a hand. \u201cTry with Eliot and see if you find me there.\u201d Or \u201cHow do you fancy <\/strong>Racine<\/strong>?\u201d I give them some little things to grasp at. In Le Boucher<\/em> I stuck Balzac there in the middle, and they threw themselves on it like poverty upon the world. It\u2019s not good to leave them staring at a blank sheet of paper, no knowing how to begin. . . . \u201cThis film is definitely Balzacian,\u201d and there you are; after that they can go on to say whatever they want.<\/strong> (15)<\/p>\n Chabrol is unusually cynical, but surely some filmmakers are strategic in this way. I\u2019d guess that a good number of independent directors pick up on currents in the culture and more or less self-consciously link those to their film.<\/p>\n Today, in press junkets directors can feed the same talking points to reporters over and over again. An example I discuss in the forthcoming Poetics of Cinema<\/em> is the way that Chaos theory has been invoked to give weight to films centering on networks and fortuitous connections. As I read interview after interview, I thought I\u2019d scream if I encountered one more reference to a butterfly flapping its wings.<\/p>\n More recently, Paul Greengrass gave critics some help when he suggested<\/a> that the jumpy cutting and spasmodic handheld camera of The Bourne Ultimatum<\/em> suggested the protagonist’s subjective point of view–presumably, Jason’s psychological disorientation and frantic scanning of his surroundings. I expressed skepticism about this on an earlier blog entry<\/a>, Anne Thompson replied on her blog<\/a>, and I returned to the subject again<\/a>. Any director’s statement of purpose is interesting in itself, but it should be assessed in relation to the evidence we detect onscreen.<\/p>\n Another recent instance: the new Taschen book on Michael Mann. The luscious pictures, mainly from Mann\u2019s archive, are the volume\u2019s raison d\u2019etre<\/em>, but the filmmaker seems to have placed unusual demands on the text. F. X. Feeney writes:<\/p>\n An earlier version of this book completed by another writer attempted (in a spirit of sincere praise) to treat Mann\u2019s films as reactions against film traditions, as subversions of genre. This fetched a rebuke from Mann: \u201cIt\u2019s irrelevant and neither accurate nor authentic to compare my films to other films because they don\u2019t proceed from genre conventions and then deviate from those conventions. They proceed from life<\/em>. For better or worse, what I\u2019ve seen and heard and learned on my own is the origin of this material. Maybe the film medium by nature spawns conventions, because we all built on what\u2019s gone before, but the content and themes of my films are not facile and derivative. They are drawn from life experience.\u201d<\/strong> (16)<\/p>\n We have to wonder if Mann\u2019s objection played a role in eliminating the earlier writer\u2019s version. If that happened, it\u2019s an unusually strong instance of a director\u2019s holding sway over critical commentary. (17)<\/p>\n In the text we have, Feeney provides a chronological account of Mann\u2019s career: plot synopses, thematic commentary, production background. There\u2019s no discussion of broader historical trends, such as the migration of TV directors into film, the creative options available in 1980s-1990s Hollywood, the development of self-conscious pictorialism in modern film, the possibility of genre films becoming art-films or prestige pictures, or the changes in media culture or American society. All of these lines of inquiry would require comparing Mann with other filmmakers. It remains for other writers, perhaps without the director\u2019s cooperation, to put Mann\u2019s achievement into such contexts.<\/p>\n It\u2019s always vital to listen to filmmakers, but we shouldn\u2019t limit our analysis to what they highlight. We can detect things that they didn\u2019t deliberately put into their films, and we can sometimes find traces of things they don\u2019t know they know. For example, virtually no director has explained in detail his or her preferred mechanics for staging a scene, indicating choices about blocking, entrances and exits, actors\u2019 business, and the like. Such craft skills are presumably so intuitive that they aren\u2019t easy to spell out. Often we must reconstruct the director\u2019s intuitive purposes from the regularities of what we find onscreen. (For examples, see this site here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.) And it doesn\u2019t hurt, especially in this age of hype, to be a little skeptical and pursue what we<\/em> think is interesting, whether or not a director has flagged it as worth noticing.<\/p>\n![\"kane-400.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/kane-400.jpg\")
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