Chapter 2: Narrative

Essay: Evolution of Narrative Form

Brought up in the stage tradition it seemed to me for years that in all general views you must photograph your actors as they appear on the stage, full length from head right down to feet, and only in admitted close-ups could you omit unnecessary limbs. But the American films unblushingly cut them off at the knees or even higher when they could show important details more easily that way. It looked all wrong to me at first but I soon gave way and adopted the new technique.

Cecil M. Hepworth, Memories of a Film Pioneer, 1951, as quoted in Emmanuelle Toulet, Birth of the Motion Picture

By 1908 the cinema had risen from the status of a risky commercial venture to that of a permanent and full-scale, if not yet a major and respectable, industry. In that year, there were ten thousand nickelodeons and one hundred film exchanges operating in the United States, and they were supplied by about twenty "manufacturers" who churned out films at the rate of one to two one-reelers per director per week. A similar situation existed on the Continent and in Britain, and by the time Griffith entered the cinema, the studios or "factories" of the Western world could scarcely keep up with the public demand for new films.

David Cook, A History of Narrative Film

The "old" Hollywood grew up during the 1910s and 1920s, as a group of producer-distributors banded together to form an important new industry with production headquarters in the Los Angeles area. From 1916 on, the United States became the number one supplier of movies in the world market, a position it has held ever since. Hollywood's success was based on telling stories clearly, vividly, and entertainingly. The techniques of continuity editing, set design, and lighting that were developed during this era were designed not only to provide attractive images but also to guide audience attention to salient narrative events from moment to moment.

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique

One-Shot Wonders

The earliest films were single shots of contained action: a sneeze, a kiss, a few minutes from a boxing match. Both the novelty of recording and then projecting objects and people in motion and the limitations of the early motion picture technology prompted early filmmakers to create hundreds of short films that did nothing more than offer up single actions in single takes. Nickelodeons offered individual viewers films as short as a minute or two. Subjects were diverse—anything that could be presented in a single scene was presented. Actualités were shot in the real world, the camera recording a busy intersection in a major city or the waves at a resort beach, while other films offered traditional staples of theater such as comedies, dramas, magic tricks, fantasies, vaudeville skits. Dramatic films tended to include scenes lifted straight from the theatrical or vaudeville traditions: a stationary camera simply recorded the re-creation of a scene. Seen in retrospect, these early films include most of the subjects and genres that would appear in modern feature-length films. Missing in these early years, though, was a system for combining and integrating diverse subjects into longer works that would allow filmmakers to create and control dramatic effects and exploit the full power of storytelling.

WILLIAM K. L. DICKSON'S Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894)

WILLIAM HEISE'S The Kiss (1896)

As narrative film evolved, filmmakers edited together separate elements, explored camera tricks, and developed films that were two to ten minutes long. Among the milestones were Edwin S. Porter's tremendously popular Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first western. Still, although The Great Train Robbery broke new ground in combining separate shots into a narrative structure, it consists of scenes shot in long take, lacks editing within each scene, and uses a static camera placed "front and center" of the action, as in the opening scene:

Train agent alone at station	Outlaws enter
Train arrives	Outlaws check schedule
Outlaws hide	Train agent confirms schedule for train man
Outlaws knock out train agent and tie him up	Outlaws and train leave station

One-Reelers and Beyond

A one-reeler is a movie, typically anywhere from five to ten minutes long, that fits on one reel. The difficulty of changing reels discouraged the earliest filmmakers from going beyond the ten-minute mark. Eventually, a "change-over" system was developed so that projectionists could time the end of one reel with the beginning of the next; small cues in the upper corners of the frame prompted them to carefully switch off one projector's light and turn on the other. When the switchover was done correctly, the audience was unlikely to notice the transition from one reel to the next. Multireel films developed slowly, however, and in the early 1900s most theaters used only a single projector. At most multiplexes today, an entire multireel film will rest on a large platter, but in some older theaters, films are projected one reel at a time, just as they were throughout most of the twentieth century.

According to film historian David Cook, the success of early, multireel silent imports led to the production of similar "features" in the United States. Two Italian films were particularly influential: Enrico Guazzoni's Quo Vadis? (1912) was nine reels long, and Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914) ran for twelve reels. This move to longer films had economic and social effects:

The feature film (arbitrarily defined in this era as any film of four or more reels) made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format analogous to that of the legitimate theater and suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. . . . The advent of the feature . . . opened up the possibility of more complicated narratives and offered filmmakers a form commensurate with serious artistic endeavor. Features also placed a new premium on the quality of production as well as its quantity by demanding higher standards of verisimilitude. Longer films had to be made more slowly, with larger budgets and greater care than one- and two-reelers, and once the feature was popularly accepted, high technical standards and elaborate production values became a new focus of competition within the industry. (Cook 39)

D. W. Griffith was the most important filmmaker to emerge during the transition between one-reelers and features. No filmmaker did more to develop and establish the tools and techniques filmmakers use to tell a story. Compare his fifteen-minute-long An Unseen Enemy (1912) with Porter's The Great Train Robbery and note the greater attention to continuity in Griffith's film. Continuity is the sense of unity and coherence within a well-integrated whole, and early filmmakers needed to develop a system for achieving this sense when connecting disparate shots into a narrative beyond one reel. Griffith's characters fluidly move from one space to another, for example, entering and leaving scenes frame left and right at the appropriate places and at the appropriate tempos. In what we now call match-on-action, Griffith cuts exactly in the middle of the character's movement from one space to another. The film also highlights Griffith's masterful work with cross-cutting, or parallel editing, in which action occurs simultaneously in two or more separate locations:

Fluid continuity and match-on-action cut: sisters leave one room and enter another, leaving frame left, entering frame right

In the four frames above, two sisters (Lillian Gish as the older one, her sister Dorothy as the younger) move left to right from one room to the next. Griffith cuts carefully on the action of opening the door of the adjoining room, a fluid treatment of continuity characteristic of The Unseen Enemy.

Eyeline match: younger sister and beau watched by older sister

In the shots above, Griffith carefully maintains what is called the eyeline match, as the older sister watches the younger sister chastely refuse a kiss from her boyfriend.

Close-ups

Griffith also uses dramatic and sophisticated close-ups in The Unseen Enemy. In the shots above, the sisters phone for help as a grate is removed and robbers stick a pistol through the opening. Griffith intercuts compelling medium shots as well:

Medium shots

Crosscutting between the sisters in peril and their brother on the phone, listening to the mayhem

At the end of The Unseen Enemy, Griffith cross-cuts between the sisters in peril, their brother listening in on the telephone and then racing home with the police, and the young boyfriend arriving on the scene to help with the rescue. While the black-and-white footage, period costumes, and silent-era acting styles seem dated today, Griffith's innovative film techniques are still used in thrillers and action films. As film historian Tom Gunning notes:

Before Griffith, temporal relations between shots were often extremely ambiguous. During the period of Griffith's filmmaking at Biograph this temporal ambiguity nearly disappeared, and the rules of temporal continuity over shots were established. Griffith's parallel editing also marked temporal and spatial relations quite specifically in contrast to the ambiguous temporality of earlier cinema. (26)

To learn more about close-ups, medium shots, and other types of shots, see the detailed discussions in chapter 4, "Cinematography." For detailed discussions of cross-cutting, match-on-action cutting, and other techniques for maintaining or avoiding continuity, see chapter 6, "Editing."

Hollywood Narrative Structure and Beyond

Even before the first talkie, Hollywood had established the basic feature-length narrative structure and film techniques that would dominate the industry for the next century. Feature-length films typically include characters who overcome obstacles and conflict in pursuit of goals, and they follow the pattern of a three-act structure, with rising action in the latter third of the story and strong closure at the end. Film historian Kristin Thompson notes that Hollywood filmmakers seek to avoid obvious plot "holes," or unexplained or motivated elements, and that "the most basic principle of the Hollywood cinema is that a narrative should consist of a chain of causes and effects that is easy for the spectator to follow. This clarity of comprehension is basic to all our other responses to films, particularly emotional ones" (10). Thompson argues that though these films may be easy to follow, their narratives are not necessarily simplistic. While the conventional notion is that narrative and experimental styles are at odds with one another, many Hollywood films include elements of experimental and avant-garde film styles—think of Alfred Hitchcock's employing then-cutting-edge technology to convey a near-psychotic nightmare in Vertigo (1958). Likewise, experimental filmmakers frequently introduce narrative components into their films, while not all difficult-to-follow foreign or art films offer greater complexity, more sophisticated narratives, or deeper understanding of human character than do Hollywood films.

In recent years, Thompson and many others who study the film industry have debated whether the century-old system of narration and continuity is undergoing some profound change. While Thompson maintains that classical Hollywood's narrative fundamentals still dominate the industry, some argue that there is now a "new Hollywood" or "post-modern Hollywood" cinema, a cinema being engulfed by the new-media influences of video gaming, the Internet, and digital production.

Films that embrace new media are perhaps the most significant challenge to the classical Hollywood narrative tradition. In the last two decades, many films have been influenced by computers, video games, the Internet, and other new media. Some of these films have enjoyed popular success, such as the all-digital animated films Toy Story (1995; director: John Lasseter), Shrek (2001; directors: Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson), and Finding Nemo (2003; directors: Andrew Stanton and Lee Kunkrich); other "new media" films have enjoyed critical and artistic success, such as the French production Amelie (2001; director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet); Groundhog Day (1993; director: Harold Ramis); Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998; director: Tom Tykwer); and Moulin Rouge (2001; director: Baz Luhrmann). Each of these films expands and elaborates on classical narrative structure, even while maintaining some continuity with it. In Groundhog Day, the video-game inspired repetition of events is grafted onto a classic three-act structure. The other films are more pronounced in their use of digital effects, but all ultimately add a new-media superstructure onto the classical narrative foundation.

Run Lola Run (1998)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Moulin Rouge (2001)

FOR FURTHER READING

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. Third Ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

"Edison Motion Pictures." American Memory. Library of Congress.

Gunning, Tom. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Toulet, Emmanuelle. Birth of the Motion Picture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.