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• 1 2024-09-17T05:59:09+00:00 Action and Acting at Biograph Studio, 1908–1912 15 image_header 2024-11-16T03:31:01+00:00

  By Daria Khitrova and Yuri Tsivian

  Harvard University (Khitrova) / University of Chicago (Tsivian)
  In memoriam Gunārs Civjans, co-creator of Cinemetrics
  
  Abstract

  Introduction
  Tags and Titles: Two Entrances to an Imaginary Museum
  >Enter the museum
  >Tags
  >Titles
  The Yardstick and the Watch: A Long History of Cine-statistics
  >Tools for space and time
  >Statistics on set
  >The full scene
  >Cinemetrics
  >The Biograph numbers
  >Attention-driven editing
  >Parallel currents
  Walls and Doors: Crosscutting to Crossacting
  >Crosscutting
  >Crossacting
  >Distance and the two-shot
  >Sine waves in narrative
  >Making meaning: Crossacting is emotion
  >A wishful surface: Crosscutting in distance and time
  From Facial Asides to Crossacting sans Crosscutting
  >Profiles over time
  >Cinemetrics and pacing
  >The waltz of love

  Introduction

  Every dramatic actor, whether onstage or in front of a movie camera, does double duty. One job is to propel action: lend their voice and body to this or that story devised by a playwright or a screenwriter. Think of a story as a chess game. The way actors move or are moved across the board depends not on them but on which chess piece they embody—a knight, a pawn, or a queen. The other duty is acting. Dramatic actors ought to be dramatic—or funny, if comedy is the name of the game. During a chess game, no one expects a pawn to exclaim “Woe is me!” when taken or a queen in distress to wring her hands. In a theater or at a picture show, we do. While actors have little say in shaping the story they inhabit, their job is to render action relatable.

  Our plan in this study is to highlight and annotate a set of actorly attitudes to a narrative event. Some of these attitudes are medium dependent, and it is on these that we are going to focus. On a stage, exclaiming “Woe is me!” or wringing one’s hands are roughly equivalent ways of signaling emotional pain; when it comes to acting in silent films, only one of the two signals retains force. 

  Take the 1909 Biograph short titled On the Reef. A proper and dutiful Victorian wife, Grace resists the attentions of a family friend whose company she enjoys. A dreamy poet more than a proper womanizer, the family friend takes her resistance all too literally and, devastated, flees for parts unknown. Stunned by this news, Grace bursts into a remorseful tirade, which even the sharpest of lip readers would find impossible to make out. The only clues to Grace’s silent soliloquy come from the gestures that accompany it: we see Grace wring her hands, spread them toward the heavens, drop them onto the table. The woman must be desperate, indeed.
  

  Tags and Titles: Two Entrances to an Imaginary Museum

  Enter the museum

  Like any story, a scholarly argument is expected to have a beginning, middle, and end. Working in a digital environment grants us—or rather, our readers—extra room to maneuver. We envisage this study working as a space more than a story. Call it a virtual version of a film museum. There is no Start Here sign, nor is there a set itinerary for visitors to follow. You roam our rooms much like a visitor does at an actual museum—along the walls where picture after picture is exhibited.

  We offer two complementary ways of exploring a variety of acting techniques peculiar to the Biograph studio style throughout the Griffith years. Imagine two virtual exhibition spaces: one labeled “Tags,” the other “Titles.” The Tags Room harbors clips arranged, unsurprisingly, by tags. Grouped along one of its virtual walls are telltale clues—eloquent props, expressive nos, hand gestures—used across Biograph films in lieu of explanatory titles. Another wall shows various portrayals of the other; a third (in case our virtual room is triangular and not, for instance, round) exhibits clips in which devices like editing or staging help the viewer construe what a character thinks or feels. 

  In the Tags Room, we collate similar clips across different films. Watch Grace’s undersexed husband from On the Reef produce his pocket watch to inform her that it’s time for him to get some sleep. Now, compare the old man’s watch to the hourglass the medieval queen from The Sealed Room upends in order to intimate to her troubadour paramour that the king is unlikely to return in less than an hour. Different times, different timepieces, but Griffith’s reasons for using them are much the same. Add here another hourglass from The Call to Arms and a king-size alarm clock that the worried wife from The Drunkard’s Reformation keeps nervously consulting while her husband is having a good time at a bar, and you will get a pretty good idea of Griffith’s reliance on his signature scheme: building a story around a ticking clock.
  

  Tags

  Various methods existed to help actors overcome the silent barrier. In this study, we categorize—or tag—a number of those. We have tagged the climactic scene of Grace’s despair “pictorial acting” because Marion Leonard, a stage actress turned photoplayer, makes ample use of the gestural vocabulary familiar to us from live theater, visual arts, and culture-intrinsic traditions. Lifting one’s hands, for instance, is an ancient form of worship known to us from as far back as the Old Testament via innumerable pictures. Perhaps less iconic, yet as idiomatic, is the gesture of wringing one’s hands. Obviously men do it too, but so firmly has hand-wringing become associated with feminine anxiety that a phrase from a recent article on feminist politics, “Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course,” sounds almost like a stylistic gender bender.¹ In this study, we use the tags “pictorial acting,” “mimed speech,” and “facial asides” to catalog an array of mimic or gestural ploys that early film players used to make up for the absence of spoken lines.

  Other tags point to other things. While the scope of films this study covers—the Biograph studio output from 1908 through 1912—sounds rather narrow, D. W. Griffith’s narrative demographic is diverse: modern to medieval, urban to rural, north versus south, and east to west. Consequently, Biograph players were expected to know how to enact racial, class, and historical otherness—hence such tags as “minstrel mannerisms,” “stoic Indians,” “period etudes,” “rustic simplicity,” or “foreign fops.” Tags like “dorsal angle,” “pause before exit,” “tableaux,” and “mental cuts” are less about acting as such and more about acting-cum-editing and staging. These are Griffith’s ways of making us privy to what a character is pining for or mobilizing a sense of déjà vu in order to plant an idea or a mood.

  Titles

  Using short clips stored in the Tags Room, we can work our way through an array of Griffith’s titles. Conversely, the Titles Room grants us an opportunity to analyze what particular tags define the acting anatomy of a movie. There is a list of titles on a wall, of which we select one. If we want to know more about Mary Pickford’s style of performance at Biograph, it makes sense to scrutinize Awakening or Ramona. If one is curious about Leonard, billed as a “Biograph Girl” before Pickford took over the title, one would study the Victorian melodrama On the Reef, mentioned earlier. 

  In the Titles Room, the modus operandi is stop-and-go. Here, we watch the selected movie end to end, but, at tagged junctions, the film freezes, and an annotation pops up. Take On the Reef. The film’s first tag, “mimed speech,” is found around a minute and twenty-five seconds into the film. A doctor is shown standing behind the head of the bed in which a woman is dying. He raises two fingers in the air. The gesture is mirrored by an elderly gentleman, who rushes hurriedly out of the room. Why? Two what? A modern viewer will likely need to read the annotation to this scene to get a sense of what is going on; it pays to rewatch the scene to appreciate how alert picturegoers must have been to digital numerals of the kind. Click to go on. The next stop (6:46.00–7:22.90) is tagged “tableaux” to indicate that the falling-in-love scene is a screen realization of a love story from a famous narrative poem. This is discussed in the annotation. At 7:53, the next tag, “telltale props/timepieces,” calls for our attention. Grace’s husband looks at his pocket watch, and nickelodeon picturegoers infer that the author is about to park the husband in the bedroom to give the family friend time to open his heart to Grace. Grace’s heart, despite itself, responds—until she remembers she is married. At 9:21, the tag “mimed speech/deictic dialogues” announces a drama of finger-pointing: toward the bedroom, at the door, at the floor. Dramatic exit, followed by Leonard’s trademark pictorial acting: hand-wringing, hand lifting, arm dropping. 
  

  The Yardstick and the Watch: A Long History of Cine-statistics

  The Titles Room is anecdotal by design; the Tags Room is potentially analytical. The entire output of Biograph films directed by Griffith from 1908 through 1912 exceeds 450 pictures; the number presently available on Scalar is 73—hardly a statistically representative sample. Yet, as the database grows, we may start examining the flow and ebb of tags across time. As some contemporary critics and many a Griffith scholar have observed, acting style at Biograph evolved. Pickford acts differently than her predecessor Leonard. Blanche Sweet’s acting is different from Pickford’s. Pantomimes and pictorials give way to what has become known as restraint: frontal and profile to three-quarter or dorsal angles, acting as staging to acting as editing. Could tag statistics help us date, detail, and—when needed—delinearize these convincing but, by necessity, sweeping claims? 

  Using statistical data to support, question, or fine-tune empirical observations on film is less far-fetched a prospect than it may at first appear. True, the idea sounds more intuitive with regard to staging and editing than acting. In the early days of filmmaking—more so than nowadays—to stage a scene or edit a sequence involved solving a bunch of engineering problems alongside creative ones. “Photoplays are put on . . . with a stop-watch in one hand and a yardstick in the other,” literary theorist Joseph Berg Esenwein and practicing scenarist Arthur Leeds warned wannabe screenwriters in the manual Writing the Photoplay, which the two cowrote in 1913.²

  Tools for space and time

  Berg Esenwein and Leeds’s two-gun figure is emblematic of the ideal film director—a demiurge in command of the space and time of their film. The stopwatch stands for knowing when to cut—at the time we are looking at, most of the cutting was done on set and in the head. The yardstick, or ruler, was for chalking distances on the ground: how close to the camera to stand (different studios had different standards for that), where an actor is in or out of the frame. Directors, like tailors, measure and chalk before they cut. 

  When it came to timing your movie, many a how-to manual—the likes of Writing the Photoplay mushroomed across the US in the early teens—suggested a learning procedure we might call reverse engineering. Make sure you watch as many movies as you have time for, and when coming to see a picture show, never arrive empty-handed. Bring with you a counting tool, a timepiece, and something to make notes on. “The inexperienced writer labors under a handicap, and one that he could overcome in a measure,” writes Catherine Carr in The Art of Photoplay Writing, “if he would take the trouble to count the scenes and note the length of them by consulting his watch as the story is unfolded.”³

  A watch and a counting tool were the bare necessities. In Berg Esenwein and Leeds’s manual, this minimal self-teaching tool kit is complemented by a makeshift tabulator intended to distinguish between film shots proper (then called “scenes”) and verbal matter, explanatory intertitles (then called “leaders”), and close views of letters, newspaper clippings, bills, etc. (called “inserts”). “Make a practice of carrying a few small cards, with a line drawn down the middle of each,” Berg Esenwein and Leeds instruct. “As the card is held in the hand, mark with a pencil a short stroke on one side for every change of scene, and on the other side a stroke for each leader, letter or other insert—this will serve as a convenient record device.”⁴ The distinction was worth making: if the length of a habitual shot was, as a rule, dictated by action or acting-related factors, how long a written text stayed on the screen hinged on an estimated reading speed (say, three words per second) multiplied by the number of words. 

  Statistics on set

  Admittedly, there are aspects of filmmaking—and, therefore, of filmmaking history—that can and ought to be quantified and tabulated, for the sole reason that feet and seconds are the nature of the beast. But how on Earth can one tabulate Pickford? Sounds impossible, like knowing the dancer from the dance. An actress like Pickford is hard to pin down to a “line of business,” or acting style. We have seen her go through conventional pictorial routines in a period melodrama like Ramona, do well in a slapstick comedy like Wilful Peggy, stereotype rustic simplicity in An Arcadian Maid or a child of the wild in the pictures of the noble native genre. Statistics is about putting data into tables in order to contrast and compare. A critic’s—and arguably an actor’s—favorite compliment is “incomparable.” Can the incomparable be convincingly tabulated, let alone compared? 

  We think we cannot pigeonhole a Pickford into a numbered grid, but only if we consider her in isolation. How many of us have seen Pickford other than in films? She herself is but a figment of our holistic imagination. Look at this from the standpoint of media ecology. All the Biograph actors we scrutinize in Scalar are two-dimensional, monochromatic creatures, mute like fish, only imaginable in the habitat of their medium—within the spatial and temporal parameters of silent film. 

  These parameters, as we have seen, are quantifiable. Everyone at Biograph—Pickford, Kate Bruce, Mack Sennett—knew they were not supposed to come closer than nine feet to the camera—the line was even farther off at other studios—so their heads did not loom too large, overlapping other players. The rule, of course, is easy to shrug off as irrelevant to acting, but not an observation like Jan Olsson’s regarding Pickford: the way Pickford plays depends on how close to the camera she stands.⁵ So much for the yardstick.

  The full scene

  As with blocking, so with cutting. Unlike us mortals, film characters live in a non-Kantian space–time continuum. It is discontinuous, contingent on what cutting scheme is currently on the director’s mind. Some directors are always poised to cut away. Whether you are a comedian like Charlie Chaplin or a diva like Olga Gzovskaia, what worries you is a lack of time within a shot for your character to emote or for you to develop a gag. Trade papers and actors’ memoirs resound with battles for acting time: between Chaplin and Keystone directors in 1914, Russian movie stars and their directors during the same decade.⁶ Here is one echo as it reached us from a Russian trade journal in 1916:

  In the world of the screen, where everything is counted in meters, the actor’s struggle for the freedom to act has led to a struggle for long (in terms of meters) scenes or, more accurately, for “full” scenes, to use Gzovskaia’s marvelous expression. A “full” scene is one in which the actor is given the opportunity to depict in stage terms a specific emotional experience, no matter how many meters it takes. The “full” scene involves a complete rejection of the usual hurried tempo of the film drama. Instead of a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of images, it aspires to rivet the attention of the audience on to a single image. . . . This may sound like a paradox for the art of cinema (which derives its name from the Greek word for “movement”) but the involvement of our best actors in cinema will lead to the slowest possible tempo. . . . Each and every one of our best film actors has his or her own style of mime: Mosjoukine has his steely hypnotized gaze; Gzovskaia has a gentle, endlessly varying lyrical “face”; Maximov has his nervous tension and Polonsky his refined grace. But with all of them, given their unusual economy of gesture, their entire acting process is subjugated to a rhythm that rises and falls particularly slowly.⁷

  So much for the stopwatch—which, let’s face it, Russian film directors before Lev Kuleshov were somewhat reluctant to consult. Who would venture to say “cut” to Mosjoukine? Kuleshov’s experiment was a revolt against long takes, the cult of slowness, and the faith in “faces.” The source of meaning is not Mosjoukine’s gaze but wherever the director shall direct it. This idea, however, only gained currency in the wake of the political revolt of 1917.

  Griffith, unlike his Russian prerevolutionary counterparts, was always a ready cutter. His philosophy was to cut before filmgoers want you to. We do not know how Griffith’s actors reacted to this policy, but we do know that many a film critic panicked. Thus, in 1912, a major American trade journal, Moving Picture World, launched a critical campaign against steadily accelerating cutting rates for fear that increasingly frequent scene changes might eat up whatever time was left for an articulate performance. 

  Cinemetrics

  The craze ought to be stopped—but first, who started it? The culprit must have been well known to Moving Picture World subscribers, but, as was deemed ethical in old-school scholarship, you shall not assign blame unless you can prove it. So, as we learn from Epes Winthrop Sargent, a staff writer for the magazine, he and a contributing editor, Reverend Dr. Stockton, decided to begin their campaign with a comparative study that, to our knowledge, was the first ever exercise in cinemetrics—the oldest, and by no means the easiest, method of examining film form. Armed with “a stop watch, a pocket counting machine, an electric flash lamp and a note book,” Dr. Stockton embarked on what otherwise may have looked like a film-watching binge.⁸ He saw twenty-five reels of film “through twice each, counting scenes the first time, and inserts the second,” Sargent reports. “We submit that 50,000 feet of film in two days is going some.”⁹

  Sargent’s brief introduction is followed by Table 1, which combines metadata (production company, film titles) and numerical data (number of shots, intertitles, and inserts for each title). 
  
  “These figures are most decidedly interesting to the student of photoplay, and we believe that this is the first time this sort of table has been presented,” Sargent concludes. “We are frank to admit that we find some of the figures startling.”¹⁰
  
  Table 1. Data Obtained by Dr. Stockton during His Field Study of the Number of Shots, Intertitles, and Inserts per Film, As Reported by Moving Picture World in 1912

  Company	Title	Scenes	Leaders	Inserts
  Lubin	A New Beginning	18	10	1
  Lubin	A Complicated Campaign	11	11	7
  Vita[graph]	Sheriff Jim’s Last Shot	40	15	3
  Cines	Disowned	18	7	3
  Edison	A Necklace of Crushed Rose Leaves	22	14	0
  Kalem	A Prisoner of the Harem (split reel)	15	15	3
  Kalem	Educational subject, not tabulated
  Selig	A Day Off	24	5	1
  Vita[graph]	Wanted—A Sister	32	10	0
  Vita[graph]	Adventure of the Thumb Print	46	11	0
  Essanay	The Understudy	36	11	3
  Biograph	The Sands of Dee	68	7	0
  Lubin	A Western Courtship	41	7	3
  Edison	The Little Artist of the Market	18	12	1
  Selig	The Hand of Fate	35	19	0
  Vita[graph]	The Victoria Cross	44	17	1
  Lubin	Becky Gets a Husband (split reel)	28	17	0
  Lubin	Industrial, not tabulated
  Cines	A Daughter Diplomacy	25	11	0
  Selig	The Pennant Puzzle	37	12	0
  Edison	Jim’s Wife	21	14	1
  Lubin	Just Pretending (split reel)	24	2	5
  Lubin	A Pair of Boots	14	0	0
  Edison	After Many Days	26	14	0
  Méliès	Run without title	21	10	1
  Selig	Dad’s Girl	31	15	0
  Pathé	On the Brink of the Chasm	33	2	0

  The floor is then given to Stockton, in whose view a surge in scenes, leaders, and inserts diffuses the plot and nebulizes the story of your film. The sun is one, and shines—do countless stars light up the night? “With the exception of the Edisons, the Cines and Selig’s The Hand of Fate [35, 19, 0], the last a really big story, the stories of all the others, dramas and comedies alike, were as slim and attenuated as the Milky Way.” And the dispersion appears to be very much an American disease. “It looks very much as if Edison and the foreigners were the only ones not bitten by the lightning bug, with the result that his releases are, to my mind, the only ones that are really drama. The others have a lot of action, but no acting and no chance for any.”¹¹

  Who is to blame? First, the exchanges, whose standing order policy is easily translated as “anything goes.” As a side effect of the nickelodeon boom, there was a shortage of screenplays, with more and more newbies sending in their patchy stuff. Last, but not least, there are directors whom Sargent calls faddists. “I suppose if one wants to sell one’s scripts one will have to conform to the prevailing jumping-jack tendencies,” concludes Stockton with a sigh. “But Oh! for the time when a man who wants to see things done with at least some pretension to verisimilitude will have a show to getting something really worthwhile produced.” 

  “To this last we most heartily say Amen,” Sargent echoes Stockton’s melancholy comment and raises his eyes to look at Stockton’s table once again. The table, we recall, merely lists the number of scenes and other elements each film includes; the way Sargent reads it, however, is through the lens of what would become usual in cinemetrics. The key notion in cinemetrics is average shot length (ASL); that is how we distinguish between films and broader styles across studios—something Sargent and Stockton want (us) to know more about. To Sargent, the ASL data (acquired by way of dividing a thousand feet—the typical length of a single reel—by Stockton’s number and adjusting to the typical projection speed) looks apocalyptic:

  A twenty scene drama is run up to fifty or sixty scenes, with an average time length of from fifteen to eighteen seconds each. Acting is not possible. Clarity of story is not possible. Unfolding of plot is not possible. There is a succession of eye-pleasing scenes, but no stories, and self-contented directors, with concrete crowded craniums will presently be wondering why it is that the pictures are not as popular as they used to be; provided that they are capable of that much mental effort.¹²

  Here, Sargent’s rhetoric grows prosecutorial. There are studios and studios, some more steadfast than others. Stockton and Sargent decisively side with the former.

  Apart from a slightly excessive use of leader, we agree with Dr. Stockton that the Edison stories are the most complete, simply because time is taken to act out the scenes instead of merely sketching them in, and while it may be evidence of our weak intellect and inability to appreciate art, we confess that we would go ten blocks to see an Edison where we would not cross the street for the average multiple scened Biograph. Edisons have stories. Most Biographs are a succession of tableaux without plot.¹³

  The Biograph numbers

  Time to go ad hominem and point at the one that touched off the cutting race. There is but one Biograph film listed in Stockton’s data table: The Sands of Dee. His count for The Sands of Dee is sixty-eight scenes and seven leaders—the highest number of scenes per film after Vitagraph’s forty-six in Adventure of the Thumb Print by a margin of twenty-two. (The archival print of The Sands of Dee, remeasured in 2013 using a digital cinemetrics tool, yields seventy-seven shots and seven intertitles, with an ASL of 7.8 seconds). And there was but one noncomedy director at Biograph making noncomedy films in 1912.

  Some years ago the Biograph introduced the idea of close-up pictures with the result that the picture world gradually became populated with a race of persons who were cut off at the tops of their heads and the bottoms of their waistcoats. Now that three times the proper number of scenes are used to cover up the thinness of Director [sic] Griffith’s on the flap of the envelope stories, everybody is doing it, and strong, vital, gripping plots are shelved in favor of the short story with numerous shifts.¹⁴

  If Griffith at Biograph is a trendsetter, who are the faddists? Easy to figure out if we look at the table once again. Out of the twenty-four measured by Stockton, the highest numbers of scenes per picture are in three Vitagraph films. Three out of four Vitagraphs inspected had more than forty scenes. Compare this to where the “foreigners” are: two pictures released in the US by the Società Italiana Cines have eighteen and twenty-five scenes, respectively. 

  Apparently, by 1912 the tendency toward faster cutting was strong enough for Sargent and Stockton to admit they were swimming against the current. “This may be heresy,” says Sargent in conclusion, “but if it is, we are proud to call ourselves a heretic.”¹⁵ Why the two preferred to stay with the slower camp is hard to tell. While there may have been a modicum of lobbying involved—trade papers are trade papers, after all—Sargent and Stockton’s complaint about staging and editing at Biograph should not be written off as mere commercial politics or journalistic palaver. Rather, it is an early token of a controversy that has not subsided to this day. What defines what? Is the way movies are made—spaced, timed, and sequenced—defined by a preexisting property of the human mind, or is how we read a film shaped by directors and editors like Griffith? 

  Attention-driven editing

  While questions like these are reminiscent of the one about the chicken and the egg, they do resurface, now and again, across critical and psychological film studies. As we saw, a venerable tradition that goes back to American or Russian trade paper philosophers of the 1910s posits cutting and acting as competing variables. Explicitly or tacitly, at stake in such claims is the filmgoer’s attention. When Sargent, writing in 1912, warns that scenes whose length falls below such and such number of seconds make action and acting impossible to follow, he is calling on filmmakers to dovetail the length of their scenes with the audience’s attention span. By the same token, in 1916, the Russian critic I. Petrovskii, quoted previously, praises fellow filmmakers for “riveting the attention of the audience on to a single image” rather than dissipating it across “a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of images.”¹⁶ Quality acting, or so Petrovskii believed, requires an unhurried succession of what Gzovskaia dubbed “full scenes.” Indeed, an average shot length (sans intertitles and inserts) in Yevgeni Bauer’s Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913) is 28.9 seconds, and in Daydreams (1915), it is 30.4 seconds. “Riveting” is the right word for it. 

  Today the idea of attention-driven editing is very much alive—primarily in cognitive studies and experimental psychology. The concept reemerged in Tim Smith’s recent study “An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing,” in the course of which state-of-the-art eye-tracking equipment was used to trace what precisely film viewers instinctively watch within and across shots.¹⁷ Another study, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film,” focused on temporal rather than spatial aspects of attention, analyzes cinemetric data across seventy years of filmmaking—a trajectory which the principal investigator, James Cutting, boldly presents as replicating, in miniature, millions of years of natural selection:

  The makers of popular movies, over time and in some cases slowly over generations, have tried to make the layout and succession of shots as clear and as understandable to viewers as they can. They have explored different possibilities, and through a process of selection much like biological evolution, they have arrived at solutions.¹⁸

  Modern-day studies are beyond the scope of this paper; Cutting’s methods and premises have generated a productive and refreshing argument on cinemetrics theory here, here, here, and here. In a deeper historical perspective that interests us here, however, the pursuit of a correlation between attention and editing looks more like a wild goose chase. How short a shot is too short for the human mind to process? And what average scene length must screenwriters and directors look for in order to “make the layout and succession of shots as clear and as understandable to viewers as they can”? 

  The answer largely depends on when the question is posed. In 1912, we recall, Sargent set the threshold at eighteen—well, fifteen seconds per scene. For him, action and acting below these figures grew impossible to grasp. A more liberal estimate came in 1915, this time from one of the founders of experimental psychology—the chair of Harvard’s experimental psychology lab, Hugo Münsterberg.

  Much like Stockton, Münsterberg was, apart from his daytime occupation, a turn-of-the-century film buff and one of the first cinemetricians. He too watched motion pictures armed with a stopwatch, a pocket counter, and a notepad in order to find out how photoplays interact with our mind.

  Parallel currents

  Münsterberg’s findings were theorized in the first treatise on the psychology of film viewing and filmmaking: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, which came out in 1916. Unsurprisingly for a psychologist, his hypothesis is that cinema’s psychological apparatus externalizes processes of the human mind such as memory, imagination, and attention. At one point in his book, we find Münsterberg fascinated by an editing pattern he dubs “parallel currents”: two or more intertwined lines of action that take place at two or more different locations. “Life does not move forward on one single pathway. The whole manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections is the true substance of our understanding,” Münsterberg muses. “The soul longs for this whole interplay, and the richer it is in contrasts, the more satisfaction can be drawn from our simultaneous presence in many quarters. The photoplay alone gives us our chance for such omnipresence.”¹⁹

  How many parallel currents of action can our mind process without losing track, Münsterberg asks himself. He comes up with this optimistic estimate:

  There is no limit to the number of threads which may be interwoven. A complex intrigue may demand cooperation at half a dozen spots, and we look now into one, now into another, and never have an impression that they all come after another. The temporal element has disappeared; the one action irradiates in all directions.²⁰

  There is a limit, however, Münsterberg warns, to the frequency of scene shifts beyond which shifting as such, rather than the scenes, takes hold of our attention.

  It is here that the watch and the counter came in handy. It so happened that in November 1915, two American screen versions of Mérimée and Bizet’s Carmen were released. One version, directed by Cecil DeMille, starred Geraldine Farrar; the other, with Theda Bara as Carmen, was directed by Raoul Walsh. Both were five reels long, with a good deal of crosscutting in the last reel. As a filmgoer, Münsterberg seems more pleased with DeMille’s version; the scientist in him is more interested in the other one, which he came back to watch again and measure. Here is his diagnosis:

  If the scene changes too often and no movement is carried on without a break, the [photo]play may irritate us by its nervous jerking from place to place. Near the end of the Theda Bara edition of Carmen the scene changed one hundred and seventy times in ten minutes, an average of a little more than three seconds for each scene. We follow Don José and Carmen and the toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly carried back to Don José’s home village where his mother waits for him. There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more unbroken development of the single action.²¹

  Much like Stockton and Sargent before him, Münsterberg timed a sequence, counted how many shots it consisted of, and calculated its ASL. Like them, he did it in an effort to define the perceptual threshold of cutting. Importantly for us, Münsterberg’s conclusion is a far cry from theirs. The Stockton–Sargent threshold was set at an ASL of eighteen seconds; Münsterberg’s is three seconds. As we happen to know, the ASL of DeMille’s Carmen—the one whose crosscutting our psychologist okays—is 11.4 seconds.²² All that to say between 1912 and 1915, the alleged threshold beyond which “acting is not possible; clarity of story is not possible; unfolding of plot is not possible” shifted toward faster cutting to the tune of fifteen seconds. It is not only things that change, but also the measure of things—and in no small measure owing to Griffith and his ilk. 

  Walls and Doors: Crosscutting to Crossacting

  Crosscutting

  “The photoplay alone gives us our chance for such omnipresence.” The film-specific pattern of storytelling that Münsterberg christened “parallel currents” used to be referred to as “cut-back” or “switchback” in Griffith’s time, by Griffith himself and in photoplay writing manuals. Both terms are out of use today. Instead, modern-day film historians speak of alternate scenes (Bowser), intercutting (Joyce E. Jesionowski), or parallel editing (Tom Gunning). The pattern is also known as crosscutting (David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson)—an industry-derived term we will be using here. The word “crossacting” is our coinage. Here is why we think it is of use.

  At the outset of this study, we introduced a distinction between action and acting, with every principal actor expected to provide a bit of both. Playing for films entailed playing two games at once: one narrative, another dramatic. It is along these two lines that we also construe the grammar of editing. Chases or montage sequences are used to propel actions; reaction shots parade reactions. Crosscutting, per Münsterberg, grants the viewer the joy of cognitive omnipresence and, per Bordwell, provides for narrational omniscience. Narrational editing expands or, as Münsterberg puts it, “irradiates in all directions.” Conversely, a facial cut-in enters the character’s soul and mind. Some editing figures serve to tell—others, to feel.

  True enough, crosscutting is action-friendly, whereas cut-ins, reaction shots, or shot-reverse-shots are better geared to shore up acting. A problem, though, is that these and other continuity devices, taken together, constitute a system known as “scene dissection” (Barry Salt) or “analytical editing” (Thompson), which came into use relatively late—toward the end of the 1910s. Can it be that there was no interplay between acting and editing before, say, 1917—the year in which classical Hollywood editing took hold? Or was there a missing link?

  Crossacting

  There was, and we call it crossacting. It takes two to tango. There exists a subset of dramatic situations—falling in love, resisting an intruder, running for one’s life, rushing to someone’s rescue—that entail team or tandem acting. Take falling in love. On a theater stage, dramatic or balletic, we usually find ourselves following a romantic pas-de-deux, the lovers’ feelings revealed via dialogue or footwork. In filmmaking, old as new, the unfailing technique of falling in love is in a two-shot, be it the Dantesque falling-in-love-over-the-book scene in On the Reef or the magnificent walk-and-talk-falling-in-love tracking two-shots in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021). 

  So much for the in-frame tandem acting—the two-shot has always been and will likely remain its default setting. How about tandem acting across frames or—which is the same thing—across a cut? An early attempt to explore this avenue is found in Griffith’s Lonely Villa (1909)—his sixteenth film after The Greaser’s Gauntlet to contain an extended crosscutting sequence. While Mr. Cullison is away, the country villa where his wife and daughters are staying is burglarized. Having barricaded the door, the wife reaches her husband over the phone. Their frenzied exchange, complete with synchronized gesturing (“find the pistol,” and the like) is one of the earliest samples of what we call crossacting—second only to the Pathé Frères’ Le médecin du château (The Physician of the Castle, 1908), of which Griffith’s Lonely Villa is ostensibly a rip-off. 

  Telephones are a handy but not prerequisite means of partnering across spaces. There is also telepathy. A shipwrecked sailor from After Many Years (1908) and his fate-fellow, the amnesiac fisherman from The Unchanging Sea, are washed ashore on a far-off beach. The fisherman’s wife is shown looking at the sea. Cut: he is shown looking at the sea pondering where his memory has gone. Are we to understand this cut as a cutaway—a rudimentary variety of crosscutting? Or did Griffith want us to follow the flight of the wife’s shots? Such cuts, as Gunning was first to suggest, cut both ways. Here, we tag such ambivalent moments “mental cuts.” The wife’s eyes meet her husband’s in a mental space—ours and, fictionally, theirs.
  

  Distance and the two-shot

  Crossacting is not necessarily about acting across diegetic distances as much as large ones. In Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, Bowser proposes an amendment to Thompson’s definition of crosscutting found in Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960:

  Kristin Thompson recapitulates [Bordwell’s] formulation a bit more simply: “Part One has defined ‘crosscutting’ as editing which moves between simultaneous events in widely separated locales.” . . . I would suggest that “widely” should be dropped from this definition. “Separated,” yes, but the distance of separation might be only inches: imagine a sequence alternating on the two sides of a wall, for example.²³

  In other words, per Bowser, the “separated” locales can also be adjacent. Fair enough. Plus (to add an amendment to Bowser’s), in whatever may serve as a wall, there is always something that functions as a door. Absent from most explanations of how crosscutting works is that, distant or adjacent, the crosscut locales must be mutually penetrable. Storywise, crosscutting is stress. This door must remain closed or be opened, barricaded or broken in. In the end, crosscutting always resolves in some kind of peace—well-being or death. The French physician reunites with his family in their castle; so does Mr. Cullison at their villa. The tyranny of distance dwindles to zero when the lost fisherman regains memory and home—literally: The Unchanging Sea ends in a two-shot in which we see him and his wife embrace by the seashore.
  Or the other way around: alone in her medieval chamber, Regina from Griffith’s Call to Arms (1910) attempts to hold closed a door to an adjacent chamber against a drunken cousin greedy for her jewelry and honor. After a stretch of crosscutting, Regina yields. In her case, the two-shot reunion spells death. In Griffith’s Sealed Room (1909)—another hair-raising medieval reversal of the last-minute rescue plot—where there was a door an hour ago, there is now a wall. A king in love orders a windowless dovecote built in a tower in his castle for him and his paramour to spend time together undisturbed. Tricked into thinking the king is away, his paramour brings her paramour—a court troubadour—to the trysting room, where the two make love. Little do they know, the jealous king has set them up. Yet we, the viewers, know. As scenes begin to alternate, we watch the lovers indulge each other in a game. Cut back to the antechamber: the king’s bricklayers are shown walling up the only entrance to the room. Cut back: headed for the exit, the lovers run into a wall. And so on, till the two have suffocated. The king triumphs. Game over. Sweet revenge.
  

  
  Sine waves in narrative

  A long-standing tradition in film theory views crosscutting as an established pattern, an alternating series, or a narrative vector. Crosscutting is all of that, of course, yet it is also a wave. To understand a wave, we need to study its speed and shape, its highs and lows as compared to narrative calm—if such a thing exists; Griffith’s advice here is to avoid it by any means. As software engineer Keith Brisson has shown—using mathematical modeling here—and statistician Mike Baxter confirms—using discrete density estimation (download the PDF here)— crosscutting is always a temporal wave, more often than not consisting of three crests (or “punches”), each crest followed by a bigger one. 

  Making meaning: Crossacting is emotion

  Importantly for acting, crosscutting is also an emotional wave, whether manifested by lonely lovers looking longingly at the unchanging sea, dying lovers’ convulsions inside a walled-up room, or the king’s gloating delight on his side of the wall. Consider this a divorce. Crossacting is coacting across cuts—distinct from coacting inside one frame across the duration of a shot. As Kuleshov, a pioneer of experimental film theory, has posited and tested in a series of 1921 experiments (two of these survive), at stake here is a degree of participation. Take two persons who recognize one another, come together, and shake hands. When the action is presented in a single shot, the first thing directors think of is the where of the matter—defining a locale. Conversely, if we first show the first person walking—cut—the second person walking, she looks off and smiles—cut—close-up of hands shaken, the where of their meeting can be the product of our mind, as Kuleshov shows by dint of his partially extant experiment titled The Created Surface of the Earth.²⁴ Likewise, he demonstrates, a well-placed cut can bring into existence a nonexistent dancer or reshape relationships among characters or between characters and objects. To make meaning on screen, the world must be cut into shards and reassembled. (Here is how Bordwell links Kuleshov’s experiment and contemporary-to-modern practice of editing.)

  A wishful surface: Crosscutting in distance and time 

  In one respect, at least, Griffith’s early experiments with mental cuts foreshadowed the ones Kuleshov would stage a decade later. The point of Kuleshov’s handshake experiment was to show how several easily identifiable locations—the Gogol monument in Moscow, the White House in Washington—can be edited together to merge into a semblance of continuous space, which Kuleshov dubbed the created surface of the Earth. When Griffith crosscuts the fisherman and his wife thinking of him while looking at the sea, he, in a sense, also created his own surface of the Earth—the wishful surface with no sea. At first, this operation may look like the opposite of Kuleshov’s. Kuleshov adds location upon location, five in all. Yet to think of it geographically, Kuleshov, like Griffith, eliminates a whole ocean plus half of Europe to combine Washington and Moscow. A cut can also cut through time, ten years in As It Is in Life or a thousand in Zvenigora. The wisdom of the montage cohort of the twenties—Kuleshov to Pudovkin, Vertov to Eisenstein, culminating in that Ukrainian master cutter Oleksander Dovzhenko, all of them the children of Griffith’s Intolerance—was that film cutting is not adding; cutting is actually cutting.

  From Facial Asides to Crossacting sans Crosscutting

  To go beyond the year 1912 would take us out of the scope of this study. In Griffith’s long creative career, the years at Biograph marked merely the beginning of what would become internationally known as his style of editing. At Biograph crossacting—acting across cuts—was unthinkable without crosscutting. To spark an arc between characters in two different shots, Griffith needed some kind of narrative motivation: a physical wall or a diegetic ocean. To account for how editing fared after 1912, we would want to reach outside Griffith’s output and keep an eye on his disciple, actor and fellow Biograph director Sennett, who, in his slapstick years at Keystone, jettisoned motivational barriers and sent things and bodies—bricks and custard pies, kicks and glances, Chaplin and Normand—flying and fighting freely across cuts regardless of whether the action took place in different spaces or the same. Furthermore, we would have to factor in large-scale industry changes we believe facilitated analytical editing as we know it, such as the gradual transition from shorts to features, which forced filmmakers to think in terms of longer scenes—which, in turn, demanded some in-scene cutting. 

  Profiles over time

  Instead of going through all these changes step by step, let’s do it in a leap. Here is a falling-in-love scene Griffith staged in 1910, and here is falling in love as he conceived it in 1926. Spot the difference. The former is a story set in the feudal days of Ireland. The lord of a manor on a promenade walks into an “artless colleen” napping on the stoop of her peasant house (Figure 1).²⁵

  The lord is thirsty (Figure 2). “Arousing her, he commands her to bring him a drink [of water]. Commands, mind you,” stresses the Biograph Bulletin of August 25, 1910. “Well, this is surely rubbing Peggy the wrong way.” “At first,” the synopsis goes on, “she positively refuses to budge, and he then becomes more suppliant and begs her to please favor him with a drink, so she condescends.” The lord has discovered a person in a peasant girl; she, a human being in a lord. Clearly this is the beginning of a romance.

  The scene runs for roughly seven seconds, till the lord of the manor, having quenched his thirst, exits the scene front right. The character arc the lord and Peggy share here might be defined as mutual warming. How does Griffith signal this in 1910? Take another look at the two stills in Figure 2. As was customary across silent pictures at the epoch, both players are posed laterally—roughly in three-quarter profile. This, of course, is a trade-off between visibility and verisimilitude. On the one hand, we expect the collocutors to face each other as we do in life; on the other, to read what the characters think and feel, we as filmgoers want to see their faces and bodies better. The three-quarter profile meets both in the middle. 

  This might have been enough for a dramatic stage, for there, in addition to what we see, we also hear what characters say. The characters’ words and actors’ voices will gradually warm. Not so in the world of silents. In the absence of sound, the director’s second choice is actors’ faces. How to make them readable? Post-Biograph Griffith, as we are going to see, cuts in to show the faces—now his, now hers. Biograph Griffith’s solution is to resort to what we have chosen to tag as “facial asides.” Whenever he wants the viewers to register the lord’s emotional warming up toward willful Peggy, he tells Henry B. Walthall to turn his face toward the camera and “register” (the period term) growing infatuation (Figure 3).
  Pickford as Peggy follows suit. We see her purse her lips as she sees the lord leave and register tenderness as she looks after him (Figure 4). Only a few years later, it will be the camera, not actors, that will move and turn for us to better read the characters’ faces.

  Cinemetrics and pacing 

  Let’s leap a few years and land in 1926—not to look at a film, but to read a passage from Griffith’s article “Pace in the Movies,” arguably the most detailed and extended of our director’s statements on editing and acting. Here, we find Griffith interested less in the readability and credibility problems—he has solved the former by now and matured enough to shrug off the latter—than in the rhythm, the pace of editing. Must the movie be slow or fast throughout? The pace must change as the movie unfolds; it would not be pace if it didn’t. Griffith’s essay proves this by assuming the opposite:
  

  If the picture were made so that each scene contained the same (or even approximately the same) number of frames . . . the audience would drop into the Land of Nod. To escape this eventual result of monotonous repetition, the director is forced to vary the length of his so-called shots—whether he has some conception of pace or not.²⁶

  A remarkable thing about this assumption is that it is exclusively numeric. No one is entitled to restrict Griffith’s notion of pace to shot lengths alone, but to rule them out would go against his mandate. Throughout the essay, Griffith talks about pace in terms of counting. Terms like the number of frames are what cinemetrics understands best, and this is how Griffith interprets slow and fast when he says, “The pace must be quickened from beginning to end.” A term like climax may point in all directions and has been used by many to refer to dramatic tension, but when we read, “The action must quicken to a height in a minor climax, then slow down and build again to the next climax, which should be faster than the first,” we know the formula has to do with speed and, yes, the speed of cutting.

  It is here that a falling-in-love example comes in. Griffith’s idea—or perhaps metaphor—was that each sequence or scene should be cut to an imaginary score, depending on its dramatic dominant. A battle, maybe, is best cut to brass and drums. His sample, however, will be love. What kind of music should a director keep in mind when staging and editing a love scene? An illustration Griffith comes up with is not from an actual movie—it is a mental experiment, a mock-up. Here is how Griffith says he would stage and edit a perfect tryst. Let us quote him first and then formalize and interpret what he says:

  Let’s rephrase Griffith in terms of what we call decoupage, in the period sometimes named “continuity script”:
  1. A boy and girl are seated on a stone wall beside a country road. The camera records them as full-length figures for a count of perhaps six to three seconds. 
  2. Then the camera moves closer, picturing the boy talking earnestly with the girl for a count of nine. 
  3. Placed closer still, the camera photographs the boy pleading with her for a count of twelve. 
  4. A close-up of the girl. She registers indifference. The count is three—a second and a half—the basis of the tempo. 
  5. The camera turns back to the boy’s troubled face for a count of six. 
  6. He swings down from the wall, and the camera moves back to record that action for a count of nine.
  7. The girl is interested now. She watches the boy as he turns away from her. Count six.
  8. Abruptly he turns around and renews his pleading. The girl seems to be yielding. Such a scene would probably run to the count of twelve because of its importance. 

  As we can see, Griffith’s mental movie consists of eight shots, with two sets of values—nominal and numeric—assigned to each. The nominal scale ranges from long shot (LS) to medium-long shot (MLS) to medium shot (MS) to close-up (CU). Which shot scales Griffith had in mind either follow (as in shots 1–6) or can be ostensibly construed (shots 7, 8) from the description. Since we are dealing with a mental, not a real, movie, we are entitled to leeway as to assigning values where Griffith’s own thinking is not clear. 

  Since the first of the eight shots shows “two full-length figures,” it is easy to conclude that this scene is imagined within the idiom of analytical editing that requires that it begin with an establishing, or master, shot. And if we indicate b for boy and g for girl, we will see that what we are dealing with here is crossacting sans crosscutting:

  bg / bg / b / g / b / b / g / bg

  The waltz of love

  Now, what do we learn from Griffith’s “Pace in the Movies” about the shot lengths of the imaginary tryst? “[Pace] it in the rhythm of a waltz,” Griffith recommends, “or in scenes [i.e., shots] whose lengths are multiples of three.” He times each shot in counts. Since in music two counts equal a second, we can attach a numeric value to each shot: 
  
  Table 2. Nominal and Numeric Values in Griffith’s Mock-up Sequence

  Shots	Shot scale	Counts	Seconds
  1	LS (“full-length figures”)	6	3
  2	MLS (“the camera moves closer”)	9	4.5
  3	MS (“placed closer still”)	12	6
  4	CU (“close-up of the girl”)	3	1.5
  5	CU (“boy’s troubled face”)	6	3
  6	MLS (“camera moves back”)	9	4.5
  7	CU (conjectural; MLS or MS might be used here too)	6	3
  8	LS (conjectural; MLS might be used here too)	12	6

  “I have always found it necessary to depend entirely upon memory and judgement in this pacing of scenes never having found a record chart which was simple or exact,” Griffith admits in “Pace in the Movies.”²⁷ What we are tempted to do now is what Griffith neglected to do: present his out-of-the-head example as a chart, simple and exact:
  What conclusions can we draw from this chart? As Griffith tells us, the bars (i.e., shot lengths) indeed alternate by threes: 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8. In other words, the rhythm is fast slower slower, fast slower slower, faster slower:
  How does Figure 6 dovetail with Griffith’s philosophy of pacing? To repeat what he says in “Pace in the Movies” apropos action, “the action must quicken to a height in a minor climax, then slow down and build again to the next climax, which should be faster than the first.”²⁸ Griffith’s mental experiment is less about action, however, than it is about acting. The boy and the girl are not saving or chasing each other. While “a stone wall beside a country road” is mentioned in Griffith’s description of the locale, no villain has walled it up, and no one is trying to bust the gate. The two lovers are peacefully sitting on this wall, ostensibly oblivious of its existence (isn’t that really how all walls should be used?). It is a waltz wall, and it may not be by chance that Griffith’s cutting pace in this love scene is anticlimactic. It runs opposite to the action recipe (minor climax, the next climax, a faster climax). It is acting, not action—love, not war. The rhythm quiets down. Action has given way to acting.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²⁹
  
  Daria Khitrova is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She writes about Russian literature, film history and ballet. Her first book, Lyric Complicity: Poetry and Readers in the Golden Age of Russian Literature was published in 2019 by the University of Wisconsin Press. She has recently submitted her second book manuscript, Impossible Project: The Story of Russian Ballet and Its Survival.
  
  Yuri Tsivian is the William Colvin Emeritus Professor with the University of Chicago. Author of five books and over one hundred publications in sixteen languages, Tsivian is also credited with launching two new fields in the studies of film and culture: carpalistics and cinemetrics. Carpalistics studies and compares different uses of gesture in theater, visual arts, literature and film; Cinemetrics, developed in 2005 collaboration with computer scientist Gunārs Civjans, uses digital tools to explore the art of film editing.
  
  Action and Acting at Biograph Studio, 1908-1912 © 2024 by Daria Khitrova and Yuri Tsivian is licensed under CC BY 4.0 .
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.
• 1 2024-09-17T05:59:43+00:00 Learning to See on the Screen: Exploring Female Performance in Early Film through the Media Ecology Project 6 image_header 2024-11-24T06:49:53+00:00

  by Victoria Duckett

  Deakin University
  
  Abstract

  Introduction
  “As in chess, openings in research are important, at times decisive.”
  New Tools for Old Questions: Ekphrasis and our return to early film history
  Reading between the Lines: Embracing heterodox truths
  Gestural Looking: Learning to look on the screen
  Readying for Research: The films that follow

  Introduction

  This article is focused on what I regard as one of the most promising achievements of the Media Ecology Project (MEP): the development of digital platforms and collaborative initiatives that allow fresh attention to be given to performance in early film. As I will explain below, the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT)—a time-based tool available to users so that they can annotate chosen geometric regions within the motion picture frame—directs our attention to what we see on-screen in new and interesting ways. Rather than focusing on the formal elements of film—the cut, the dolly, the zoom, and so on—users are instead asked to look within the frame and focus on the moving and gestural body of the actor to determine meaning. Traditionally, within film studies, the more mechanistic aspects of cinema have driven what we understand as “filmmaking.” Theories and debates about film’s nascent claim to medium specificity in the early twentieth century were focused on its capacity to reorder and represent the visual and social world anew, through experimentation with technical processes and technological forms. In contrast, SAT asks users to look at—and pay close attention to—the gestural nuance and emotional resonance of the acting body in early film. While we do not lose sight of formal film language and are invited to use this in our time-based annotations, we are equally urged to watch, describe, and recognize the work of performance on-screen.

  The attention that MEP is bringing to questions of performance in early film is timely. In her recent book Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane Gaines employs the phrase “lost in plain sight” to highlight the invisibility of female achievement in early film. Gaines is particularly concerned with highlighting the film actress’s contradictory invisibility in early film.¹ Although Gaines does not explore performance or theatrical gesture, her statement implicitly recognizes that we have lost the vocabulary and achievement of female performance, and a focus on celebrity—and with it, the field of star studies—has obfuscated the historical achievement of women in the entertainment industries. As I will explain, Gaines is not alone in noting the absence surrounding discussions of performance, particularly female performance, in early film. MEP is significant because it intervenes to direct our attention to this area, asking that we begin our exploration of film through this specific, yet enormously rich and large, lens. 

  I argue that MEP thereby provides an important example of a digital humanities project that cautiously and judiciously curates data so that a microhistorical method can be used to ask new questions of film history.² These questions are linked to gesture—the physical expression of meaning—and bring attention to actresses. In this way, film history’s uneasy relationship to female achievement on screen and late nineteenth-century theater and its actresses is brought to the fore. As David Armitage and Jo Guldi confirm in The History Manifesto:

  Questions such as these draw deeply from the traditions of microhistory with its focus on how particular and vulnerable troves of testimony can illuminate the histories of slavery, capitalism, and domesticity. And, indeed, questions about how to preserve subaltern voices through the integration of micro-archives within the digitised record of the longue durée form a new and vitally important frontier of scholarship.³

  
  

  “As in chess, openings in research are important, at times decisive.”⁴

  MEP is a digital platform that provides us with a wide range of films to review. Drawn from some of the most important moving image archives in the world—the Paper Print collection at the Library of Congress, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Film Institute (BFI), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—these films feature actresses whose work in early film was significant. The availability of SAT to examine the early work of Florence Lawrence, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Marion Leonard, Blanche Sweet, and Mae Marsh brings attention to the actress and her formation. Rather than addressing an actress’s movement and gesture through the framework of D. W. Griffith, the celebrated director associated with many of their early films, we are instead asked to examine the actress as a professional and experienced creative worker in her own right. Her stance, gesture, physical phrase—and the minutiae of her moving limbs, face, or hands—are read and explored for narrative and emotional meaning. This takes some of the extensive resources that we have pertaining to Griffith in new directions; it builds, in a sense, on the collective Griffith Project that was curated between 1996 and 2008 at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, under the foresight and leadership of Paolo Cherchi Usai.⁵

  What is important about the films we can currently access is that they feature actresses performing before they became recognizable figures. In MEP Florence Lawrence can therefore be examined as the “Biograph Girl,” just as Lillian Gish can be examined in her early work before she claimed national attention in The Birth of a Nation—before she “emerged as a fully established star” in Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918).⁶ The cases that MEP frames for Lawrence and Gish as unknown actresses pose important questions about agency and authorship on screen. We know, for example, that between 1912 and 1913, Gish appeared in thirty-one films, yet her name was unknown to the public. It was only in June 1913 that Motion Picture Story first announced her name in response to an “Answers to Inquiries” section of the paper.⁷ In MoMA’s fragmented print of A Cry for Help (completed in November 1912, available through MEP), we consequently see an experienced yet unknown actress playing the supporting role of a fainting maid (see Figures 1a and 1b).
  She receives off-camera instructions—presumably from Griffith—to repeat the dismay, confusion, and fear that she performs, leading us to believe that Griffith exerted immense control over his actresses. This view is reinforced by Eileen Bowser in her book The Transformation of Cinema. In it a photograph shows Griffith pointing a finger, holding papers in the other hand, all action frozen around him while he gives instruction on set for The Battle of the Sexes (see Figure 2).⁸

  Through SAT, however, we are asked to repeatedly watch Gish while her expression and gesture change. While her performance, particularly in the repetitive framework of A Cry for Help, displays the role of theatrical rehearsal in early film, she also demonstrates her own acting skill and adaptive capacities. This agency can be considered alongside, or even in contrast to, the autonomy of Griffith’s directorial vision or his renown as a theatrical coach. 
  In an important “Document of Performance” published in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Helen Day-Mayer provides evidence that supports the reiterative viewing encouraged by SAT. Discussing a series of six articles focusing on Gish that were published in the American homemaker magazine Liberty in 1927—preserved in a pair of scrapbooks compiled by a Philadelphia bachelor, Basil Clunk, and held in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas—Day-Mayer argues that Gish was remarkably self-aware. As she explains, although most of the Liberty articles are “intended for the uncritical, but adoring, movie fan,” the second article cites Gish’s remarks on acting. These show the depth of her professional knowledge and skill. In this article, Gish is quoted extensively. She explains that actresses have to recreate stories in “a brand new way”: on-screen, they must translate written worlds into widely intelligible performance. Within a single scene, this could mean that an actress employs “four different kinds of acting—a different technique every moment.”⁹

  In Gish’s discussion of the attention that needs to be paid to her screen performance, she concludes that an actress’s eyes and physical timing are the twin pillars of her performance. This is a reflection that returns us to the achievement of SAT. In asking that we cast Griffith as a figure who encourages a rapprochement between actresses and early film, we gain the visibility of the very actresses whose early film careers and knowledge of stage traditions and techniques have been all but elided in scholarly discussion. SAT also grants us the ability to watch rehearsals and repetitive gestures repeatedly on-screen so that the undeniable capacity of the actress to differentiate and change her performance is recognized. Through individual time-based annotations, we use our eyes to temporally identify change in her expressive body. In this way, our research reiterates Gish’s final admonition to her readers: “It is my advised opinion that the most important things in motion picture acting are the eyes and timing—the former by far the most important thing in our world, and the second merely another name for the mountain of experience I call technique.”¹⁰
  
  In addition to proposing a revision of our understanding of female acting in early film, MEP uses performance as a tool for comparative and critical analysis. As Mark Williams and John Bell explain in their foundational article “The Media Ecology Project: Collaborative DH Synergies to Produce New Research in Visual Culture History,” MEP—and with it, SAT—invites us to witness “the uneven development of more ‘cinematic’ performance styles that evolved in relation to the proximity of the motion picture camera.”¹¹ As they suggest, we might contrast, for example, the performance style of Lawrence with other Biograph actresses such as Pickford.¹² Performance variability emerges within a generation of young actresses, within the nascent work of a single production company, through the work of a single director, and within the context of a national cinema.

  While Day-Mayer and Gish remind us of the minutiae of performance change within a given scene, the acknowledgment that physical style was divergent and idiosyncratic across a given series—however you might like to categorically define this: the actress, film company, national cinema context, and so on—is particularly empowering. In other words, the invitation to demonstrate difference between popular film actresses highlights, quite simply, the range of interpretative work they undertook. Moreover, if the comparative lens is extended to a cross-cultural analysis, we can newly appreciate the actress as a celebrity competitor. Indeed, in an era in which women were at the helm of the global acting industry as both empowered businesswomen and theatrical entrepreneurs, it makes sense to direct our attention to what they achieved on-screen. Moreover, during a period in which Gish lamented that she was not given license to play “great characters conveying human emotions in a great way,” it makes sense to ask how she nevertheless instrumentalized her performance to achieve theatrical and popular renown.¹³
  
  

  New Tools for Old Questions: Ekphrasis and our return to early film history

  It is the visual availability of early film, as well as the ability to annotate gesture within a chosen scene, which fundamentally changes our relationship to film history. As most film historians know, a large amount of our work involves explaining what we have seen on-screen to readers who, we expect, have not watched the particular film we are discussing. If we are fortunate, we can obtain screenshots or still frames of a film to illustrate physical action. Even if we provide these still images, they nevertheless fragment movement, describing it in terms of sequential still frames. Moreover, unless colleagues and students have watched the film or films we discuss, it is difficult for them to properly understand action. Indeed, even if a given title has been included in a DVD, screened at a specialized festival—such as Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna or Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone—or specifically requested and accessed from an archive, we can presume that we are presenting new works to unfamiliar readers, or at best familiar works to readers who might not remember the particular detail we need to recount. As Miriam Hansen notes in her foreword to Heide Schlüpmann’s groundbreaking book The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early Cinema, this has meant that scholars have had to recreate early film through description and written words. Hansen explains that Schlüpmann’s text returns readers to lost, elided, and overlooked works through “beautifully written ekphrastic accounts.”¹⁴ Schlüpmann, in her turn reflecting on the importance of writing film history through the experience of accessing, watching, and making early film available to viewers, celebrates finding women’s history “there in the catacombs of the archives and in the light of the editing table projector.”¹⁵
  
  While MEP’s collection effectively brings the editing table projector to the computer screen, it is not comprehensive. It does not include the Asta Nielsen films that Schlüpmann discusses, for example, and it is largely focused on American early film. Nevertheless, it goes a terrific way toward building communities of scholars around early film and avoiding the need to describe in words what users can see on-screen. In an interesting way, the tools available to us—SAT and the shared vocabulary tool from Onomy.org that has been developed for use in the time-based annotations—present film as a time-art that can also be uniquely and newly arrested. In Murray Krieger’s 1967 article “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited,” he argues a similar point in relation to poetry and literature. As Krieger explains, ekphrasis is no longer defined by its object of imitation—the still artwork—but by its ability to create stillness within the time-bound framework and serialized structure of poetry: he cites the poetic meter and poet’s repeated description of the circular urn.¹⁶ MEP similarly invites new considerations of temporality and stillness, ekphrasis and the visual image, yet places these within a new and accessible platform. In turn, renewed attention is given to the language we share and employ in order to describe physical gesture in early film. 

  The latter points—the establishment of a shared and transparent language around gesture in early film as well as the ability to freeze a gesture and then watch it spatially unfold—bring attention to the words we deploy in our discussion of film. The semantic taxonomies available through MEP are currently restricted to glossaries, themes, and topics that emerge from cinema studies. For early film, for example, there is Film Theme and Topic, developed by film historian Richard Abel (992 entries), a film language glossary of sixty-seven words developed by Columbia’s School of the Arts, and a ten-term taxonomy of film roles. When the MEP Compendium is available for sustained use by scholars, this linked data can usefully expand what we see in a given annotation, the language we might use to describe gesture, and whether series or patterns of movement can be identified within or between films. 

  The possibilities that this development of gestural language proposes are of wide, interdisciplinary use. Film historians might learn to integrate the language of theatrical performance into their discussion of silent film. Likewise, theater historians might newly appreciate the importance of film techniques in the circulation of late nineteenth-century theatrical performance as well as the impact the recording technologies have had on human expression.¹⁷ Moreover, important work that Abel has recently undertaken—on the development of a critically active, culturally astute, and ambitious female writing workforce in American newspapers that collectively helped to develop the critical language of the early American film industry—might also be added to the taxonomies so that a contextual language of film criticism is understood.¹⁸ In any case, whether or not annotative language is adapted or changed, MEP proposes theatrical gesture as a test case for the development of a new critical language of performance in early film. 

  Reading between the Lines: Embracing heterodox truths

  In addition to inviting us to reconsider histories of screen acting that predate popular fame and performance patterns in early film through the evidence of films themselves, MEP realigns the scholarly practice of reading between the lines to the consideration of gesture in early film. This realignment is important. It builds on the established importance of conjecture as a driving impetus for the development of film history. This joins us to wider discussions in history while also giving focus to the specific and often quite different circumstances and media specificities of film history. The 2022 summer issue of Feminist Media Histories, for example, focuses on “Acts of Speculation.” Building on the spring issue—dedicated to “Sites of Speculative Encounter”—Allyson Nadia Field argues that speculation now enables us to account for media history’s losses, absences, and occlusions. Proposing speculation as a historic methodology and drawing on the work of Giuliana Bruno in Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Field argues that speculation is powerful precisely because it challenges established disciplinary methods and conventions. As the opening sentence to her summer editorial makes clear, speculative history is wide-reaching and unapologetic; it weaponizes gender, sexuality, colonialism, and race—and, implicitly, also class. Launching this editorial with a series of piercing what-ifs, Field asks a trio of questions that begin: “What if the implications for scholarship of the longstanding, ongoing, and pervasive misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and racist environment are not solely a problem of the archive but also of how we discern evidence and produce history?” (emphasis mine)¹⁹

  A key authority for this historically speculative methodology is the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. Citing his 1976 book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller as the source for her own historical method, Bruno explains:

  My microhistorical work on Dora Film participates in a vast cross-cultural project that, theorizing history and film historiography, investigates local and regional knowledge and female discourse . . . today savoirs mineurs and les savoirs des gens (suppressed knowledge) have claimed entrance into a history that is driven by a deeper curiosity for the knowable. This curiosity, which one senses in Carlo Ginzburg’s detective inquiry into the microcosmos of a fifteenth-century miller, urged me to map out the production of a woman, Elvira Notari, who operated within a Neapolitan cinematic “mill,” within the shadow of the Italian film industry and a history interested only in the gestes of the kings, one in which “woman,” accorded no space, remained out of sight.²⁰

  In Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers’s 2019 Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, both Judith Thissen and Mariagrazia Fanchi also cite Ginzburg, in their separate chapters, to explain their use of a circumstantial historical paradigm to explore forgotten and hidden directions in film history.²¹ Thissen, stating that microhistory brings an important lens to local cinema history, cites Ginzburg’s essay “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It” to explain that she seeks to bring “a constant back-and-forth between micro- and macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long shots so as to continually thrust back into the discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration.”²²
  
  Fanchi argues that Ginzburg’s focus on data and materials that have been neglected by traditional historiography “allow[s] us to examine questions differently, reveal[s] neglected aspects, permit[s] us to formulate new hypotheses, and encourage[s] that sort of lowly inference typical of working with raw, lost, ill-organized empirical data that demand flexibility and rigor fitting for an historical reconstruction.”²³ Fanchi also states that evidential value can be constructed through the historic accumulation of individual clues. In each of these instances—Field’s speculations, Bruno’s mapping, Thissen’s expansion of local history, and Fanchi’s reconsideration of data in relation to audience studies—we are reminded of the overlap between the work that scholars, particularly feminist historians, undertake when they explore new directions in film histories and the parallel efforts that MEP undertakes to direct us to the overlooked histories of performance and performing women in early film. 

  In the introduction to his recent book La Lettera uccide, Ginzburg cites Leo Strauss’s 1941 article “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when he observes that the critical reading practice needed to undertake microhistories of this sort also involves learning to read between the lines.²⁴ Ginzburg characteristically explores a vast array of texts in his advocacy and illustration of this form of close reading, which, he mentions, might also be considered “slow.” Strauss, in his article, instead focuses on how we might learn to interpret works penned by people who are independent enough of totalitarian regimes to publicly express a “heterodox truth.” Strauss’s hypothetical example is a historian whose work is being read by “young men who love to think.”²⁵ Discussing how to read between the lines while also explaining how to write between the lines, Strauss urges the repeated reading of texts—“reading the book for the second or third time”—paying attention to places that are not necessarily the most obvious, and remaining aware that speech and candor are both contextual and ever-changing.²⁶

  The similarities between Ginzburg’s microhistorical close reading, Strauss’s reading between the lines, and the identification of gestural nuance on film through the use of SAT on MEP can be readily listed. Films need to be rewatched repeatedly for a gesture to be chosen and isolated in the frame. Time-based annotation also draws attention to an aspect of the film that is not necessarily obvious: we can begin with a consideration of gesture itself, moving through to the interplay that gestures create between characters on-screen, and so on, in any given moment. Further, the notation of gesture must take into account the environment in which the originating performance was articulated. Early film was performed in conditions (spatial, cultural, physical, industrial) very different from those of our own time. Moreover, Strauss makes it clear that his focus is educative; he optimistically demonstrates that reading between the lines can be taught and argues that this is the sine qua non of education. He concludes:

  This always difficult but pleasant work [of reading between the lines] is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education. Education, they felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.²⁷

  MEP is similarly educative. It was developed as a tool for classroom use in a university context. Samples of assignment work that I was given access to on Mediathread were filled with notations by students who might or might not have understood microhistory as a methodology but who were certainly intent on marking physical moments in the temporal unfolding of the film. Yet whereas Strauss’s hypothetical students are “young men who love to think,” MEP positions us all as students. It is in this wider, more inclusive context that we can annotate acting on film and might each separately be prompted to ask “What if?” 

  Gestural Looking: Learning to look on the screen

  It is one task to determine an occluded film history—for example, American actresses in early film, particularly in the years before they achieved fame—and quite another to distinguish gestural difference and technical variety in the terms that Gish describes. Theater historians David Mayer and Helen Day-Mayer have long advocated for our need to appreciate the cultural context of performance in early film, as well as the importance of recognizing variety and difference on-screen.²⁸ In an article comparing John H. Collins’s 1917 silent film adaptation of Blue Jeans to Joseph Arthur’s popular melodrama that debuted on the stage in New York’s Fourteenth Street Theatre in 1890, they argue that film before 1920 is “a liminal area.” This period saw film turn to the theatrical stage for its content, methods, and verification. Playing to audiences that were familiar with theater, they argue, film offers historians of the nineteenth-century stage evidence of otherwise lost creative practices. As they explain, “We are able to look at many early films and see the Victorian stage, actually witness performances and practices we had previously—and only—known through textual and pictorial sources.”²⁹

  The process of looking at film in order to appreciate theatrical gesture and its visibility and availability on film enables exchange between two disciplines—film history and theater history—that have traditionally been separated within academia.³⁰ As Mayer and Day-Mayer explain, when Blue Jeans was brought to film, significant change was effected in the structure and meaning of the original play. The play’s comic roles, comic dialogue, political allusions, and musical interludes were removed. The narrative was also changed to create “a taut drama of love, ambition, family woe, and, significantly, to foreground female heroism.”³¹ In replacing the dominance of the traditional male melodramatic lead with a resourceful heroine, we are again prodded to acknowledge an actress’s agency in early film. Developing a role that had not earlier enjoyed such a spotlight, Viola Dana—Collins’s wife and the twenty-year-old “star” of the film—is asked to create a new performance. Is this visible on film to anyone but a theater historian, who has a gauge of what has been added to a performance we see on-screen? Moreover, when we are reminded that actors were stage-trained and so habituated to joining gesture to musical accompaniment, are we able to appreciate what this means when we watch a film silently, on a computer screen, with no accompanying music? 

  In his article “Acting in Silent Film: Which legacy of the theatre?”, Mayer argues that music is not merely an accompaniment to gesture on stage and screen; it provides the tempo, coloring, tonality, force, rhythm, direction, and impulse for gesture. As he succinctly explains, “Music is to the actor what water is to the swimmer.”³² I cite Mayer and  Day-Mayer to demonstrate that just as theater was inevitably adapted to film, so too is early film inevitably adapted to the computer screen in the movement of early film onto new digital platforms. Iterative and intergenerational, this movement repeats but does not and cannot replicate the originating circumstances of silent film gesture. 

  The need to explore catalogs with attentiveness but also with the experience and knowledge that help us frame what we see and cannot see—or hear, in the case of silent film history—is a point that Ginzburg makes when he discusses his own experience of searching an online catalog, specifically Orion at UCLA. Concluding his discussion of contingency with a reflection on Siegfried Kracauer’s posthumous book History: The Last Things before the Last—a book in which Kracauer makes an analogy of the historian to the photographer—Ginzburg adroitly reminds us to remember that although a snapshot might be taken quickly, it is also constructed through memory and choice.³³ Citing Leo Spitzer and his use of the word “click” to denote the understanding and new insight that a critic can gain after a repeated reading of a text, Ginzburg reminds us: “It is the slow accumulation of experience that makes the instantaneous reaction to chance possible . . . the identification of a promising theme of inquiry (the snapshot) must necessarily be followed by a film. Simply put, research.”³⁴

  Readying for Research: The films that follow

  It is this last correlation between film and the research process—or a literary metaphor for research itself—that suggests a shift in how we might approach and interpret MEP and the research and pedagogic tools it offers. Rather than presume that we explore MEP with knowledge we already have—the importance of music for silent film, the gestural teachings of the late nineteenth-century stage, and so on—we might instead engage it in a game of chance that is similar to Ginzburg’s word search in Orion. However, rather than begin our search in a catalog like this—which Ginzburg describes as “emic,” following the American Kenneth L. Pike and referring to a cluster of unmediated data—on MEP we begin and complete our research using mediated data. That is, we might be watching digitized films we can annotate, but we are nevertheless undertaking our work in an etic context—one formulated in the external language of the researcher. Indeed, if we consider the range of the film prints that have been digitized and made available to us from leading audiovisual archives, the comprehensive information provided in the available metadata, as well as the impressive array of resources available on MEP’s Airtable resource, our digital catalog is not an emic deep dive but an etic cluster of roughly forty years of thorough, groundbreaking film history provided by some of the leading figures in our field. 

  The Airtable data set available to us on MEP is simply named “Early Cinema.” It includes the metadata drawn from Charles Musser’s 1890–1900 Edison collection, Paul Spehr’s remarkable work on the American Mutoscope and Biograph Production Log (1890–1910), the American Film Institute’s 1893–1920 catalog, Tom Gunning’s Library of Congress Paper Print notes (with citations), and the early film pioneers data—otherwise available online through the Women Film Pioneers Project, including the names, roles, provenance, and place of work of female film workers as available. Thanks to the materials in this collection—there is also an Early Chinese Cinema collection and the EYE Filmmuseum 68mm collection, among other resources—we can appreciate that we are not merely looking at gesture and performance in early film. We are also privy to a unique collection that provides us with a sophisticated platform through which we might reconsider early film. Moreover, just as Williams and Bell collect institutions and scholars in order to build and expand their MEP resources, so too does the MEP platform encourage us to work collectively on the collections they amass. 

  Those of us who work in film history are aware that Musser, Gunning, and Spehr—as well as a host of other important film historians whose work is implicit in the breadth and depth of this resource—were part of the annual congress of the Federation Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) held in Brighton, England from May 29 to June 1, 1978. The scholars, researchers, students, and archivists at this event viewed 690 films from 1900 to 1906. Their response to these films—what they learned from watching film history together, focusing on a specific section and type of film history (largely American, largely narrative)—fundamentally changed our view of film history. Much has been written about this forum; what I wish to underscore is the collective process and procedure that were put in place in order to advance and expand our knowledge of film history.³⁵
  
  As Eileen Bowser retrospectively explained, “It [the FIAF congress in Brighton] is probably the first time that an international team of film historians undertook the study of a little-known period of film history as a collaborative project.”³⁶ MEP, expansive in its outlook and ambitious in its effort to propose change in the methods, language, and focus we bring to early film, rekindles the collective vision and inquisitive collegiality of Brighton. It asks us to gather as a community of users around performing actresses in early film. How do we undertake this collective work? We join Spitzer in appreciating what a click can manifest, literalize Ginzburg’s association of film with research, and understand that the overlooked history of female performance in early film is central to Field’s question: What if?
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.³⁷

  Victoria Duckett is Associate Professor of Film, Co-Director of the Deakin Motion Lab, and Associate Dean (International and Engagement) in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne. An internationally recognized scholar and educator with over 30 years of experience in universities worldwide, she is the author of the award-winning Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent and co-editor of Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives and Guglielmo Giannini: Uomo di Spettacolo. Victoria is a founding editorial board member of Feminist Media Histories, on the editorial board of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film and Media Peripheries, and is a past president of Women and Film History International. Her most recent book, Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett, is available open-access through the University of California Press’s Luminos.
  
  Title Image: A Cry for Help (Biograph, 1912), Museum of Modern Art
  
  Learning to See on the Screen: Exploring Female Performance in Early Film through the Media Ecology Project © 2024 by Victoria Duckett is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.