>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:02 ^M00:00:18 >> Daniele Turello: So good afternoon and welcome. I'm Dan Turello. I'm a staff of the Kluge Center. And before we begin, I want to remind you that we are filming today's event for placement on the library's iTunes and YouTube channel. And please silence your cellphones and any other device that might interfere with the lecture. This has been a week of David Bordwell events which started last Wednesday with a visit to the cool Packard Campus, which houses the library's National Audio Visual Conservation Center. And there were lots of amazing things about this visit. It was a really superb day. But one of the things that stuck with me was witnessing the dialogue. Everyone on the technical staff was very familiar and had engaged with David's work. And it was inspiring to see this dialogue between film history and active film conservation. And then last Monday, David hosted James Schamus, who was down from New York City. He screened his film "Indignation," which was adopted from a Philip Roth novel and it was a fantastic discussion following that. And that brings us to today. And it's a bit of a better sweet occasion because it's-- it marks David's conclusion of his time here at the Kluge Center as the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture. The Chair in modern culture is one of the five original Kluge Chairs. The Chair holder typically focuses on modern arts and the media and their impact on societal development. And David has simply been a superb chair in every way. I'll give you a brief run down on his distinguished work. But before that, I think I could tell you everything I needed to tell you by remembering that he arrived at the Kluge Center on the first day and was wearing a sed [phonetic] jacket from the Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds. So on a scale, if there is a cool scale from zero to 10, David is consistently a 12. And it's been a real pleasure and honor to have him here. In terms of a more formal introduction, rendition of his work, he is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written on all manner of subject matter related to film. Some of his titles include The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, The Cinema of Eisenstein, On The History of Film Style, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. So you see his range is broad. Perhaps the book that he's most well-known for is Film Art: An Introduction, which has been reprinted numerous times and has made its way into most syllabi of film schools around the country and around the world. Here at the Kluge Center, he has been drawing on the resources of The Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. And today's talk comes from this research and it is titled, "Studying early Hollywood: The Search for a Storytelling Style." Please join me in welcoming David. ^M00:03:44 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:47 >> David Bordwell: Thank you. Thanks to so many of the people I've seen, my colleagues and friends at the Kluge Center and at The Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division for showing up. I'm very pleased to see you all here. It is based on my research here. And I have many people to thank but that's for later. For now, I just want to sketch out a little bit of what I've been doing over the last two and a half months in hopes of persuading you that it's interesting or even might be important. The larger project is indeed the one called The Art of Cinema, 1908-1920 and I hope to convince you that that's a good focus because I think in a way, the modern cinema and the classic cinema begin in that period. My focus was also on stylistics, the way movies are using the medium to tell their stories. And I've focused particularly on the period because I couldn't do everything. I decided to simply deep-dive into the period, 1914 to about 1918, which coincided with the war, of course, but I was not really concerned to relate it directly to the war. We can talk about that if you want because I know many of you are interested in that period and its relationship-- the relationship of the war to culture at the time. So let me start. Let's take a case. Let's take a case. How are you going to show on film face-to-face encounters, two people having a conversation was one another? Well, here's an example. From Hidden Figures, a recent film you might have seen, where the computer, as she's called, faces off against the boss of the NASA agency she's working for. And instead of playing out that scene in the entirety of that long two-shot, we get a cut to her speaking-- explaining why she takes so long-- such long breaks. And then, we have another cut to him looking at her answering and speaking to her, asking her further questions, and then we have a shot of her again. And I'd point out to you that the shot of her isn't the same one we had before. It's a different framing or much closer to her. Now, this may seem no news. This seems very natural. In fact, you might ask, how else would you film a face-to-face encounter except by setting it up and then singling out each person in turn as they take turns in the conversation? Well, it goes back. We go back to hundred years from 2016 to 1916, Reginald Barker, the man you saw at the beginning in my first slide, handled it much the same way. We have our master shot, not in the wide screen like we have with Hidden Figures, but that's a more recent development. Master shot of the two people engaged in conversation, more than a conversation, a cut to her reacting, a cut to him reacting. And then another shot of her, closer, just as we had in Hidden Figures, sort of intensifying our attention on her reaction. So, you think again. So what, how else would you film a conversation? Well, it turns out that if you assume cinema is invented around 1895, it takes about 20 years for people to figure out how to do this. It would seem to be the most natural spontaneous thing in the world. And yet, it takes a long time for filmmakers to adopt this particular manner of representing these face-to-face encounters. Before that, things were shot very differently, long shots, distant shots, long-held shots as in The Passion of the Christ, the early Lumiere film. And then 10 years later, Accidents Will Happen. You see it's very flat, very distant and no cutting. Filmmakers start in the [inaudible] to mount more complicated scenes than the examples I'd just given you, but they don't use editing. Now, one of the points of using that example of the-- of Hidden Figures and Vain Desires is that it guides your attention, doesn't it? Those shots, those cuts point you to what's important in the scene. But a scene like Ready Money or the scene of The Sign of the Cross, it just seems to be dumping everything in. It seems to be a kind of mess. So the question is, what would make anyone think that this, for 20 years, is preferable to this cleaner, neater more efficiently way of lining things up. So, my tasks today are these. I want to sketch the filmmaking context of that period, to suggest the circumstances that would lead to people, intelligent people like ourselves, to make that kind of choice. I'd like to consider how the trend toward editing got going. And then I'll try to consider an alternative style which actually was the loser in that battle. And then I'll sketch some causes very briefly at the end, some causes for the developments that we see. So let me start with the period, the context. This is an important period, as I said at the outset, because it's really the emergence of many dimensions of filmmaking. First, the business of film, film industries. You start to get the consolidation of the international film business around World War I, the creation or revamping or decline of major European firms like Nordisk in Denmark, Film d' art in France, Svensk Filmindustri of Sweden. And especially important for our purposes is the fact that at this point, we start to see the birth of Hollywood in that period. The major studios which are still with us today, Loew's or Metro, Fox, Paramount, Universal, Goldwyn, United Artists, and the very tailend around 1920, Columbia. All these studios are really started in one form or another, sometimes pretty crude as business enterprises in this period. So the market film industry is about 100 years old. We also had many important artists-- film artists working in those industries, Urban Gad, Gallone in Italy, Feuillade, Gance, Griffith, of course everybody knows that name. Mack Sennett, Cecil B. DeMille, Thomas Ince, Charlie Chaplin, again, very familiar. These are the people whose careers start in that window. At the same time, the industry is starting to show us what movies can be like in exhibition. We had the emergence of what we might call our movie theatres. Early on, legitimate theatres were converted for film screenings. This is after the period before 1908 where films are shown in carnivals, in small storefronts, so-called Nickelodeons and so on. But around this period of 1908, we have purpose-built-- or purpose-rebuilt film theatres. ^M00:10:03 And especially with the rise of the feature film. The feature film was a film initially that simply could be featured. You could advertise it that people would come by name rather than simply treating it like YouTube. You just turn it on and what-- you walk in or whatever is playing is playing. A feature film is originally just one that could be advertised by title. But later, this so-called feature film was as we know it today, is a long movie, is a separate long movie as opposed to a short. The length might vary. It might be a two-reeler, a three-reeler, or a four-reeler and gets standardized around the mid themes at about five reels or about an hour and 10 minutes or so. Seven minute though, but that could be a little bit less. So the feature comes in, and that reinforces the growth of these movie theaters, these purpose-built movie houses. So let's go to Wisconsin for a while. I don't recommend it all the time, but let's do it now. Let's go with the Baraboo, Wisconsin, 1916. If you went to see a movie in Baraboo, Wisconsin, you go to the Gem Theatre and it's a movie house. It's not that different from a movie house in the town you grew up in. It's rather different from a multiplex as they are today, but a single screen theatre, you go in, you pay your money, you watch a few movies. More elaborately, still in Wisconsin, and this is why I really do wish for a time machine, 1916, the Butterfly Theatre in Milwaukee. This is one gorgeous look in movie theatre, isn't it? This is not even yet a picture palace. There isn't that huge inside, but it's magnificent on the outside. I'd go there today if I could, no more, of course. But this gives you a sense of the scale of the American film industry at this period, with-- exhibitors can actually invest in a venue like this. OK, not just in Wisconsin, the American Cosmograph Theatre in Cairo is a very impressive theatre. And, of course, the Palads Teatret, which is about the size of a train station in Copenhagen in 1912. Movies are now big business. Thousands and thousands of people want to see them around the world. Reflecting the same thing is the emergence of a culture around movies. In fact, all the things now, we think of as part of, you know, movie buzz, the movie world being a standard file, start that. You have the rise of film culture as the film press. In France, for instance, the Cine-journal, and several other journals and you have major critics and theorists of cinema emerging in France at this period. Same as through in other countries. In the USA, you'd start to have trade papers, newspapers devoted just to the film business, Moving Picture World, Photoplay, and you'll have critics and theorists here too, most famously I suppose, Hugo Munsterberg. And just a look at Photoplay from the period, with Pearl White, a charmer that she is, it's not that different. It's not that different. Same kind of culture, same kind of buzz in this whole churn of entertainment, infotainment is there in the beginning. I want to focus on something else. The way that movies behave, the look, I can't say sound of movies at the time, and I believe the true foundations for the way movies behave now were laid down then. Artistically, you've got the emergence of certain kinds of appeals and forms, for instance, stars. This is the beginning of the star system in this period. This does in years, 13 years, Asta Nielsen, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, and so on and so forth. The genres that we still have today are formulated at this period. Detective films, societies, melodramas, horror. They're all there. So even science fiction is there. The formats, as I've mentioned, the multiple-reel film, the idea that a reel movie is at least an hour and 10 minutes long. And the dramaturgy, the structuring of stories. The thing is when you have a longer film like a feature, how do you complicate it? How do you tell a story that lasts 50 or 60 minutes? Kind of between a novel and a short story, how do you fill that out with an interesting plot that will keep people interested? Well, my argument is this. Because of this immense growth in audiences and film culture, and the development of the long film, there's a pressure to develop to use the medium in ways, to use film, staging, shooting, cutting, performance, in ways that are suited to telling these more lengthy and complex stories. So, a couple of trends develop. I'm being schematic here for the purposes of exposition, but I think this is pretty much true. On the one hand, filmmakers decide the thing we've seen already. The option that we mentioned, we cut the scene up as John Ford does for instance, in straight shooting. You're going to have a western. You're going to have a showdown with western. Big close ups of the two guys facing each other down on the city street, just like [inaudible] would, just the way what Clint Eastwood would, the same, the editing option. The other option is to do things a little differently. You do it through staging. Instead of cutting the scene up, you move your actors around the frame in various patterns. That's the loser. There are many options, or many tasks that you need to fulfill if you're going to use film to tell stories. You have to engage the audience emotionally. You have to find ways to align them with characters and so on. There are many different things. I'm just going to focus on one, which is kind of a precondition for all the others. And that is directing the audience's attention to follow a story on stage in a novel, wherever, in a ballet, whatever narrative form you're talking about. The attention of the audience has to be focused on particular items of, in the array. So the question is given film, how do you focus attention? Well, editing offers the choice. Editing says, here's how you do it. You cut the scenes up. You either cut them by showing two events or more, taking place at roughly the same time, and you switch from one to the other, so-called crosscutting. As The Birth of a Nation is in Birth of a Nation with Griffith, while Lillian Gish is besieged in this parlor, the Ku Klux Clan is riding to her rescue, back and forth, back and forth. And then so, the eyes are like pointed up, novels did this all the time. This is not-- This is simply a straightforward, but kind of intensifying and focusing of what novels have done in terms of intercut chapters or even intercut sections within a chapter. While X is strolling in the park, Y is murdering his wife, back and forth, back and forth. So that's adapted to film and editing is necessary to make it work. The other option is so-called scene analysis or scene dissection where you'd take a master shot or this and break it up into its component parts. So while the little colonel is recovering from this battle wounds in the bivouac hospital, he's lying there and we got a shot of him. And he hears Lillian Gish playing her mandolin, I guess that is her banjo. While we understand the emotional interaction that's starting to emerge between them. And it's the focusing of the attention with the separate close-up shots of them that drives our understanding and response to the drama. So editing does that focus of attention for you. And that's what happens essentially in the course of the themes. The dominant style for handling those one on one encounters is a standardized pattern of continuity editing. This and other things, I'll be mentioning some that you've seen before. At a 1917 film based on Wilkie Collins' novel, "The Woman in White", you'd get a master shot, and then you'd get a closer view as Count Fosco opens the door and Marian is there. And then you'd get a reverse angle on the husband who has been standing off the one side, looking suspiciously at her. And then another view of the three, but a different framing. And by this point, they're thinking OK, we don't need to see that, all of that painting and all that candle around the left. We just go tighter in on the characters. This is very modern and it's very much what has developed on those period based on editing. So for moment to moment, your attention is focused on what each character is doing or saying to, in relation to the others. And what develops at this point among critics and historians is a kind of chauvinistic claim about editing. It's so powerful. It transcends time and space because it cuts around all over the place. It focuses our attention, rivets us to particular things going on. It has to be. It's not only a great tool. It has to be the uniquely cinematic technique. No other medium has an exact equivalent for editing. So the theorists and critics say. And in a way, cinema was destined to reveal its essence as editing. More and more, if you read, people in the 20s and 30s are saying, we had to get rid of all that other stuff in order to find the real true essence of cinema. Its fate was to be an editing-based medium. Why? Well, it directs and maintains attention as we've seen. And it permits what we might call camera ubiquity. That camera can be anywhere in time and space. And then, the cut becomes a kind of beat or kick, a little bump. You may perceive it. You may not perceive it. Ideally, you don't perceive it most of the time because the filmmaker's technique is aiming to make it invisible. But sometimes, as in this later segment I'd show you from Hidden Figures, actually it functions as a beat. As the couple kiss, we cut to an extreme long shot that we had not seen before. But it gives a kind of code into the scene. It concludes the scene. OK, we're backing discreetly away from them. This is so powerful. How can you not fake? This is the engine that drives cinema. You'd get so many-- It buys you so much. It gets you so many advantages. Take this which I found here in the archive. But I never heard of it before, it's a very interesting film called, "The Running Fight". Earlier in the scene, the curtain is revealed to have someone behind it. There, you can see the couple in foreground, the father and the daughter. And someone is peering in at them. Later, a different setup, camera setup of that sort of office laboratory, shows the men gather around the retorts and stuff and the curtain. ^M00:20:04 And then thanks to good old camera ubiquity, boom, we're in closer to the hand that emerges from the curtain. Then back to the master shot, the shot is fired, back to the hand, the pistol is dropped. So, you could not miss it. You could not misunderstand that that pistol shot was fired from behind that curtain. If we'd had only the long shot, this little shot here, who knows what you would have thought. Interestingly later in the film, we do find out who fires the shot. It's a woman who's been taken to a mental institution. She's had a kind of breakdown after doing this. And so we see her on her deathbed confessing. And what's done is on the left-hand side of the frame, she's lying on her bed and there's an attendant, you can see I hope, bending over her. The right-hand side of the frame is a replay of the shooting from behind the curtain, if you can see that silhouette there on the front-right. Here. This is her, shooting. Here's the scene-- the present-time scene of her in the institution. So the camera has not only jumped back in time, it's given us two spaces and two times in the same framing. You know, this is a celebration of the power of cinema. And of course it's not-- you imagine, well, we could do this in a comic strip, sure, but it doesn't move. One of the things I discovered or at least I should have known before but kind of was brought home to me during my stay here was what I might call the punch of the axial cut. Now an axial cut is editing which doesn't vary the angle on the subject. It comes right in on the camera axis. So the camera is pointed this way, we have a shot from here, then here, then here, boom, boom, boom, straight in. So for instance, in "The Typhoon", while woman's Asian lover, Japanese lover is arguing with her French lover in his study, we see her listening in the bedroom. And we cut back to the quarrel between the men and we cut back to her, but note that we've had axial cut back to her. It's punching up our attention. It's focusing our attention. Just in case, you know, remember, she's listening. Also, it's a kind of mimicry of her act of attending. The fact that she's focusing more and more what the men are saying makes us-- is echoed in a way by this closer view of her. And finally, as the quarrel gets going, we go even tighter to her, boom, boom, boom, three axial cuts on her sort of sandwiched between shots of the men. For even bigger punch, I found in "The Juggernaut", a magnificent film, unfortunately only a fragment, released the same week as "Birth of a Nation" actually. A woman has been rescued from a train wreck that's taken place on a bridge, the bridge is collapsing, the cars are underwater. It's a fantastic scene. And she's been rescued, she's hauled up by the man who loves her, but it looks like she's dead. The axial cut takes us in closer. Is she dead or isn't she? Bang, it's a very percussive kind of cut. And then again, in on her. So here, there's nothing in between, we go boom, boom, boom. And then back a bit, and there's the suspense moment, will she revive or not? Is she really dead? Cut to the close-up of her lifting her head and cut back to the master shot. He doesn't even realize it but we do. That's in alignment with us. So here, all the cuts are along that camera axis and are being used very carefully to enhance the emotional effect of what we're seeing, the suspense of the moment and kind of riveting our attention to whether her eyelids will flutter or not. One more example. This hasn't gone away. The axial cut is still with us. You see it on TV almost every night. I picked a film I like, "The Hunt for Red October", when our two heroes are being fired upon from the guy in the stadium up above, the station up above, boom, boom, boom, axial cuts all the way. And most action films use axial cuts for this kind of, you know, fist-in-your-face look. So that's an example. Camera ubiquity from narrative purposes gives you something else, it buys you omniscience, can also have that bump or pump effect that I mentioned but it lets you go anywhere. Here's a beautiful example from another film I saw of Rich Motion Picture Division [phonetic], "The Bargain", also by Reginald Barker. William S. Hart is set on sides by the sheriff and his men. He's trapped in his room and we get a master shot of him in the room. We go outside to the door he's pointing his pistol at. The sheriff and his men are outside, but they're on the other side too, a closer shot of Bill looking at the door. And now we go walk to the other side where we see the deputy hammering away at the window. He starts to break the window in fact to kind of get-- to surround or ambush Bill. And then we got the shot completely from around the other side. So we can see the deputy and actually see the glass breaking in this shot. So the camera has been able to hop around anywhere. It can go inside the room, outside the room, at different points within the room. Thanks to editing, completely clear, completely coherent and focusing your attention instant by instant on each dramatic development. Now he really is surrounded. So as I said, by 1917, editing wins. You are not a competent filmmaker if you don't use editing by 1917 in America, in America this is. There are a few refinements. I'll just mention one enhancement. "Victory", we see it a little bit later, 1919, filmmakers start to give a kind of redundant cue to let us-- to remind us that these characters were in proximity, so shoulders come in. You start to have what we call now OTSs, over-the-shoulder shots. This come in the same golden period I'm talking about. If you love shoulders, you'll love Hollywood cinema because they are everywhere. And again, same thing we find in hidden figures, shoulders all the time. So that's one of the enhancements. There are a few others. But basically, the foundation has been laid. Editing is the dominant mode of expression for commercial mass market cinema. So what's the alternative? What did editing defeat? Well, what's been come to be called mostly by film scholars rather than filmmakers, tableau cinema. Here, the emphasis is on staging rather than cutting and a fixed camera rather than that camera ubiquity that we get with the power of editing. It's very strong in European cinema in the period I'm discussing where editing is generally more minimal. Take this early example, beautiful example, very early, "The Assassination of Duc du Guise". This is-- You might think it's like a theater play. It looks like very theatrical. I want to try to convince you it's not theatrical. But at any rate, this becomes very elaborate in Europe, very refined in a film like "Life of an Evangelist", the Danish film. You get shots of incredible complexity in a single framing, with apertures of people poking in and out, the sort of peekaboo effect. It's all over the place. It really is a very refined and delicate art and it hangs on longer, this tableau approach, in Europe than in the US. But what is it really? I'll try to explain. At first glance, as I mentioned, it seems very theatrical, and that's not wrong. If you think in terms of acting or performance, it does draw on theatrical traditions, such as the Italian diva films where you have kind of operatic acting style captured by the camera. It wouldn't be wrong to call that dimension of expression there theatrical I think. But in another respect, it's very indebted to painting and in fact is somewhat anti-theatrical. If you think about pictorialist filmmakers like the Yevgeni Bauer in Russia, we have images that you just want to look at and look at for a long time. Allan Levinson [assumed spelling] talked about this. You want to soak yourself in them and they seem to owe much more to the traditions of academic 19th century painting than they do to theater. But I'm going to try to argue that film is partly theatrical, partly painterly, but also something else, something different. And I have to give an example from an early Danish film, one of my favorites called "Pat Corner". There are scenes in "Pat Corner"-- It's a detective film. There are scenes in "Pat Corner" that are indeed very theatrical. The one I show you is of a man trying to break into a bank that has all these different bank vaults in it. And he doesn't seem to notice that he could simply walk around the edge of the wall. The theatrical convention is that he is on the other side of the wall, burrowing in while the guard is listening for what's the noise being caused here. We just take for granted that there's been a fourth wall sliced away and he really can't walk around. That's a classic theatrical convention. But, later, at the end of the film, when the client comes in to congratulate our detective Pat Corner for a great solution to the case, he comes striding into his office. And you can see him there, moving in I hope. And then he takes up a position to thank Pat and shake his hand. In the course of that though, he blocks that third man who's a clerk. You see the clerk there in that second shot standing there? The client, the third frame I'm showing you, stands in his way. You can't see him. The clerk knows this and so, he takes a step to one side. He just steps in to let-- just moves like this so you can see him, just like me and this stupid column, you know, like this, this. Well, Pat steps in front of him and says, "Oh, no problem, I was happy to solve your case." But the clerk is not to be defeated, because he just takes another step back to the left and we can see him again, scene-stealer, OK? My point is it wouldn't work on the stage. It could not work on the stage. It isn't theatrical. It's purely cinematic. Why? Well, because at least in Western Theater, but a lot of Asian Theaters too, at least those I know of, the audience can be arranged in a circle or semicircle. ^M00:30:09 But the stage is lateral, the stage is a rectangle, it's horizontal, as here in this room, this is a theatrical setup. My playing space is this stretch right here, and you're arranged in a kind of semicircle around it. Well, if we go back to Elizabethan theater, back still further to ancient Greece, we find this array. And it still continues into the Renaissance with Lope de Vega, it continues with Eugene O'Neill and other playwrights using these kinds of horizontal, lateral staging as the norm in theatre. And it makes sense for the very reason that you could see right now, sight lines, right? Every one of you has a different sight line to me right now. No two angles are the same. So, if we're going to have me and maybe my co-players hashed out across here, interacting, we have to do it pretty much on a horizontal line. It can have some variance. I can turn my back if you want to look at-- if I want-- the director wants you to look at a player, I can go on stage of course. But basically, this is the axis of action in theatre, but not in film, because film isn't theatre. Film is a projection system. It's an optical projection system. In that respect, it's like Renaissance perspective, classic Renaissance perspective. I'll show you this example from the period. People at that time were thinking about this. It's a pyramid, a tipped-over pyramid with the point resting on the lens. That's the playing space of every film shot. Indeed, certainly, every live action film shot, it's even that way in CGI and in animation as well, for the most part. There are some more experimental. But the most part, this is the optical rule of cinema. Even though when you look at a film frame, it seems to be a space, a cubic space with something just sliced out of it, and all those people standing in the box, mm-mm, it's that shape. That's what-- That's the contents of the container, that tapering pyramid. And indeed, in 1913, very helpful for my purposes, a screenwriting manual spelled it all out. This is the stage base, right there, that pie-slice-shaped wedge of action is what the camera captures, different from theatre. OK, so what? Well, here's an example by the way of a film that includes a theatre performance. And you can see the difference I think rather clearly. In the stage in the distance, people are spread out like a gatefold. But in the space in front of it, people arrayed in all these different angles, but our camera sees only one spot. The camera has only one sightline, wherever the camera happens to be. By the way, that film was by Sergio Leone's father. So what happens now with the task of storytelling? What happens with the problem of guiding attention? How do you do that with that kind of playing space? Well, my argument would be that the punch and bumps that you feel with editing, it gets replaced by something we might call flow, a continuous mobile changing of what we're seeing onscreen. A simply example from a fairly kind of crude example but it's illustrative from the Tannhäuser film "David Copperfield", not in your collection. I took this from a DVD. Two features I think are worth mentioning. First, because of that tapering, that triangular wedge-shaped piece of space, there's a lot of depth in a cinematic image. Theatre space is shallow, film space can be deep. So, you have depth staging. Here in "David Copperfield", when Betsey comes to the office and greeted by Uriah Heep and Micawber sitting there at the desk, everybody gets their own little piece of the space, foreground, middle ground and background. That means you can do something that's not so effective on theatre, what I call blocking and revealing. You can have the figures in the foreground mask at certain times what's in the background. So what happens is as the man who's ruined Betsey's investments, I forget his name, you probably remember, apologizes. Becky steps over so you can't really see Uriah Heep's reaction. He's engineered the whole thing. He's stolen the money. And while David talks with Micawber there on the back, the contrite lawyer bends down. Betsey listens to him and then bends down to forgive him. And then you get Uriah Heep's reaction. See in there on the far right, peeking and gloating there. Now, as I said, this is a TV frame, so there would be more for the original audience to see, and it's a simple example of this. But you see how the revelation of his reaction has been delayed by the blocking of his face. And when Betsey moves, he can pop out. This seems really simple, but it couldn't work that way on the stage. Some of the peoples in the-- people in the audience would see him, Uriah, all the way through if they were sitting over there. So that's kind of flow yielded by depth, gets picked up undeveloped through this blocking and-- revealing strategy. It's worth mentioning that the kind of depth the people think about in cinema usually is associated with the 1940s. We tend to think of Orson Welles and his comrades as developing deep space or deep focus cinema. And it's true, he does in the '40s. But I would point out that the foreground planes in the '40s cinema tend to be much closer, much more aggressive and in your face. In the 1910s, what we get is something that in some ways is more attractive. It's less violent use of foregrounds where the characters are cut off at the waist or the hips or the crotch or the knee or whatever to give a more fuller sense, more air around them. But if you have more air around them, you also have more room to play that little chess game of choreography of the other figures. So let me just run a couple passes through here, once that I saw here. I was lucky enough to see over in the Madison building. Take "The Case of Becky" from 1915, a very interesting movie about a woman with a split personality induced by hypnosis, kind of a schizophrenic case. She comes to get a job at this dry good store and the camera as you see is cut off around the knee or by the calf and the-- what we get are three figures, the supervisor then the women supervisor and Becky and a man in the background. And so we have depth already. In this case, it's a little exceptional because the camera budges a little, it swivels a bit, it pans as we say. Because as the woman supervisor takes her back behind the counter, this is kind of an audition to see how she does with customers, the camera nudges itself over a little bit but still keeps the guy in the background for us. You still get that rich depth. But what they did that's rather daring, I think, is they don't follow the way a modern filmmaker would, the people as they walk all the way to the edge of the counter, the clerk and Becky, they hold on the guy. They let-- He lets the others go off screen in a way no theatre director would ever let them go off stage and lets us-- there's' really nothing else much to look at except that guy. So his reaction is very salient for us. And indeed, as Becky comes up and she looks at him, his reaction changes and changes again. And you get a sense of the rapacious interest on his part. And by the end, when Becky has dealt with the customer and turned away, you can tell he's kind of sizing her up as a possible girlfriend without a close-up, no cuts, just a little bump of the camera, and gave us just that moment to look at him and be aware that he is going to be important in this interaction that's coming up. So that flow that I'm talking about substitutes for the-- a percussive break that you get with editing, and is in many ways no less effective I think. Let me show some tactics in this strategy. "The Circus Man", I read a little blog entry about this, so you can look at it online if you want. Here's a nice simple example, I think. The young man is uprighting the guys who sent this woman's husband to jail for some years. And he's giving him a piece of his mind. Whenever you see a door in tableau films, keep your eye on the door, something is going to happen. And-- But he is dead center, he's almost at the geometrical center of the picture format, and the wife pulls him away. It looks like a perfectly spontaneous gesture. Don't be so aggressive, you know, he'll hurt you. And indeed, the man on the left is pushing a little bit. But, then, by virtue of the young man's pulled back to the right and the business man's aggressive on the left, he actually, businessman, you have to believe because it's true, actually, moves his body a little bit this way to allow us to see the woman's husband come in, just released from jail. This sort of micro-choreography of these figures, moving slightly, this way and that, it's the same thing as the clerk in "Pat Corner", only it's orchestrated now. Actually someone has planned it to be this way and to make the attention saliency be on that center zone that the husband is going to come bursting into. If you want a comparison with film and something, maybe not film on theatre but film and dance would be a better example. Here's another example, a subtler one, I think, from Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley's film "False Colours". And again, I put this on my blog, you can look at it. The young woman in the center is being consoled by the theater manager on the right. Her father who has abandoned her when she was a baby has come in. And there he is standing on the background. There, you get the depth, the kind of depth that I've actually talked about. And then, he comes forward to apologize. He's very sad for what he's done. And the choice is what the daughter will do. In the background steps, Director Lois Weber is also one of the stars in the film, who has pretended to be the daughter. ^M00:40:01 She's won this man's affection by pretending to be the long-lost daughter. And so she's completely upset because of course she's had this massive deception. And the father and the daughter being reunited is by no means guaranteed. The father then, in a gesture contrition, begs forgiveness. Lois Weber in the background, even though she is star, turns away and it's a good thing too because the father's hand would have blocked her anyway. The crooked of his arm would have-- you couldn't have seen her face, again, perfectly calculated. The gesture and the two faces in the middle, that's what we need to see. We don't need to see Lois Weber yet. And then, when the hand comes down and he offers his hand in friendship, we get her watching apprehensively. So here, what depth is being done-- being used for is to give us both action and reaction. The two planes has give us two dimensions of the drama, the possible reconciliation of father and daughter and the self loathing really of the woman who has pretended to be the daughter, all in the same frame, no cuts, needless to say. And at the end, when she begs forgiveness and begs the father to take-- to try again, to try to win the daughter over, we get her moment. She pops out saliently, father turned away, the theater manager has been standing there like fireplug; he hasn't done anything on the far right. We don't need-- he-- if he did, it would be a problem. Part of this is some people have to stand very still, unlike that clerk in "Pat Corner". And of course to make sure that we see Lois Weber's anguished expression, the daughter turns away, motivated of course is her clasping into herself and crying. This is Subtler, I think, than "The Circus Man" example I gave you because the flow is being maximized on two levels. And the emotional power is very great without the cutting option. This is not-- My stills aren't so great from this, another film I saw over across the street, "The Sign of the Cross". This might seem t be the prototype of the mess, the messy tableau. It's one of those sword-and-sandal pictures, then you have Marcus talking to Nero with Poppaea crouching on his elbow, and a major figure of this counselor on the left and tons of people behind, it looks rather messy. Well, that's-- this taken out of isolation, it does, but let me give you a little context. The scene begins with one of those orgies where people seem to be having much more fun than us. And Nero is-- he got people spread around, dancing, all this. But then what happens is they get cleared away, the whole open area gets emptied out, all those revelers vanish and in comes Marcus from the depth, from the distant depth. He comes in and that's the frame I showed you before with him hailing Caesar and making his proposal that at least one of the Christians be speared, the woman he loves. Poppaea objects. She has a right on Marcus anyway. She objects and we get to see her saliently by virtue of that gesture. She occupies the frame center, Marcus pivots a little bit to her. She really commands your attention within the big, big, dense frame. Nero says, "Let me think about it. I'm ruling this way." And he stretches his hand across Poppaea's face. So, we can't see her reaction. He hold his arm out there in his decree and that's what has to be emphasized here, the gesture, the way the father's gesture was emphasized in a much cleaner, more open frame in the Lois Weber example. So even in a very densely packed composition, this kind of micro-movement of choreography can take place. Let me give you a couple more virtuoso moves. I know I'm collecting butterflies specimens actually. I'm just looking for all these different beautiful things. "The Man from Home", this will be De Mille. This is a mind-boggler but I'll just give you a piece of it. And by now, you know what to look for. Door opens, we've got a door, something is going to happen around that door, the light pours in beautifully, and this woman who has abandoned her husband, just standing there, very confident, standing there in her beautiful sheath. But then when he comes in, she's less confident. And he comes roaring in there. And suddenly, we can see those people behind. See those people crouching behind the woman with a kind of feathered hat and the man, and he's ready to wreak some violence on her. He's been a political prisoner; she's betrayed him, gone off with another man. And so, he's ready to fight. There's a struggle on the front plane. The woman with the hat very kindly turns away. You see her? She sort of pivoted to embrace that other guy. You see-- You can still see her feather. Use that as your marker. And another man, the villain of the piece, is revealed far in the background there. You see him there in a strip of-- a part of this involves making sure faces can be seen against darker backgrounds, so that he's against that gray wall between the two black curtains. So he's watching but he's moving towards the window. And as he does so, the real enemy, the returning refugee, realizes he is the one he should be going after and turns towards him. Everybody looks in that direction and I swear this is true, the villain back there by the curtain steps into a spotlight. His face just bursts out at you, no way you don't see that. He's opened up the curtains so the guard can come in and the guard comes in to arrest this escaped fellow. Our man, he's an American of course, and he stands up for this guy. So he says, "If you're going to arrest him, you have to arrest me too." I love the way the wife just sits crouching there this whole thing, doesn't try to get out, just sits there. She's the equivalent of that theatrical manager. And in comes the commissar who's going to save the refugee from the back. And everybody turns so that you'd be a fool not to look in that direction. And then the quarrel ensues and there's much more. I'm just giving you a couple highlights. But you can see how much you can do with that combination of deep space and blocking and revealing, lighting parts of the set, but also actors block certain key actions because actors can move. They move to reveal to reveal things. One more, again, we go back to Lois Weber. Earlier in the scene that I showed you, the theatrical manager arrives in the apartment, greeted by the daughter and apprehensively by the impostor, Lois. The father is waiting out in the wings there. We know that she can't see him. The theatrical manager goes on in, the daughter senses somebody else is out there and already also back there in the background is a little worried. And the father comes in and this is really pretty good. He steps up and blocks the two women we just saw, so that only the daughter's horrified reaction is visible. And then, he moves a little and you get the other reaction, the reaction of Lois, the impostor, and even the man on the left who's kind of there to balance to be the next part of the scene. This flow is remarkable and it's pointed. It's as if they drew a dotted line around each of these figures that pop out, this kind of peekaboo effect. Well, back to 1917, bye-bye tableau. I can't find any American films that use these techniques after 1917. In fact, I can't use any-- find any in 1916 that use these techniques. Don't say they're completely extinct but I haven't found any yet. In that window between 19-- particularly 1911 to 1914-15, people really tried this in America. The Europeans hung onto it longer. It persists to the teens as I say here. And some directors get very hip to American methods, someone like Abel Gance in Paris figures out the American continuity system immediately and does virtuoso things with it. Victor Sjöström does as well in 1918 on Sweden, but it's slower to achieve some saliency. By 1920 though, really only the Germans cling to it. And the reason is simple, I think, because German-- Germany didn't import American films until 1920, January 1st, 1920. So they're not seeing the William S. Hart films, the things like the Lois Weber films, all these things I've been showing you, they're not seeing them. And what you get though are some very interesting options of the tableau method. I don't have time to go into this but particularly interesting for instance is Robert Reinert's films, "Opium" and "Nerven", which kind of looked forward to Orson Welles in a way with those big foregrounds, the big head that we saw and we saw in "Citizen Kane". But they also seem to employ the tableau method of jamming things in and having figures peek in and peek out. The daughter there on the lower frame sticks her head out from behind that cabinet, for instance, while her father just moves in the foreground there. So even the tableau gets subjected to a kind of retortion where the camera is closer than it would have been, it's not just cutting people off and fully down the body, it's framing them tighter but they're still squeezing in all these other things. Tableau staging, I think it's rediscovered at various points in film history and on with this. In early CinemaScope for instance, many of the techniques that we see in those 1910s films are spontaneously revived. I'm not saying that CinemaScope directors of Hollywood went back to the archives and watched these old films. It's just that when they decided they couldn't cut in CinemaScope, wrong, but they thought they couldn't cut in CinemaScope, they reverted to that same single shot tableau method. So, for instance, James Mason and Suzy Parker are there with Joan Collins, that fine doorway on the background. Joan Collins coming in, Suzy moves to the left, into the kind of the middle foreground, James Mason looks after her. Here comes Joan. Joan goes to a mirror. Mirrors are much beloved in the 1910s. And James is left standing there at that classic framing, and then she goes out in the background again, leaving James there, just what we've been seeing in the 1910s, revived in the 1950s. ^M00:50:06 Again, that didn't last too long. It does return more strongly, I think, in what we might call Asian minimalism. Filmmakers like Hou Hsia-hsien in Taiwan, who gets heavily I think imitated by Chinese filmmakers on the Mainland and in Japan as well, develops a kind of modern version of the tableau approach, I think. So for instance, when the gangsters meet in "City of Sadness", the camera is one spot, they come and sit down, and you get this little geometry of heads, display of heads, blocking and revealing each other, different expressions there. I hope you can see some of those, until the climax bursts out with the man on the far left, threatening the other man on the left. So, the tableau is not absolutely dead in world cinema but it certainly, I would say, is dead in mass market commercial cinema, because Hou Hsia-hsien is not making mainstream films even to this day, I suppose. Finally, I want to say some things about why. Why did the editing approach gain supremacy? There are several possibilities and we can talk about them if you want, but the one I think is most compelling, at least as a major if not the only cause, you know, the conditions of post-production and particularly production in the American cinema at the time. Remember I mentioned this explosion of filmmaking because there's an immense popularity of the medium. They way you shoot a tableau is really dependent on the director. The director is the conductor of the orchestra. The director is shouting out-- Remember, this is a silent cinema and directors have megaphones. The director is shouting out, move, pause, step behind the table, pause, and so on. In fact, you can argue in fact the bump that we get with editing, the little sense of a bump in a cuts is kind of matched by poise-- a position, freezing into place, pausing in tableau cinema. So the rhythm of the scene is partly dependent on people halting and just not moving. The director commands that because that's where the focus of attention has to be. So the director is really king and controls the moment-by-moment recording of the thing on the camera. But the problem with that for a mass market film industry is you can't really change much in post-production. You don't have close-ups to cut to. You don't have anything but this one long ribbon of film that's one long scene. You can interrupt it with titles, and maybe if you want to take a few things out a little bit, but it's very hard to alter those shots in post-production, those long take tableau shots. So you see here as an example of it, this is an earlier film studio. This is about 1907 or 8 I suppose. But you can see, the directors are all lining up there, the cameras are all lined up, several settings lined up side by side, because they're filming side by side. And the directors are really calling the shots, well I should say, the shot. But with editing, there are two strong advantages. One-- For a mass market industry, one is you can plan out all the shots in pre-production. Today, we have storyboards, animated storyboards done digitally, but you can map out every shot in advance if you want. You can make a shot list, you can change it, you can make the whole movie in your head on paper or on the screen before you expose any film. Also, producers like the possibility of editing, because you can change things. If a scene seems to be too slow, you have something to cut away to. The producer always says, "I need coverage. Show me different positions of the camera, different parts of the scene so I can pick up the pace, I can emphasize a performance thing I like. I can cut out this actor who is too mean," and so on. That means the director is no longer in the driver's seat scene by scene and the film can be controlled by many other hands, the producer, the editor, people further down the line. I'll show you an image from-- This is from an exchange, a film exchange, not a film production company. Typically, when films arrive, you know, in a city or really a center of distribution, people usually women would be assembling them for distribution to the actual theaters, and they're checking the film, in this case, probably they're cutting in some titles, possibly tinting the film, doing various things. The point is that once you've got cuts, you can change things around in many, many ways. You could if you were one of women working in this exchange actually cut out things that local sensors didn't want to see. You can simply take them out. In Chicago, maybe they don't a play it. But in Cleveland, you could see it. So all those kinds of manipulations are much more usually done with editing. So, I would argue that among the prime causal reasons for the push towards editing is the need for controlled, predictable mass production. If the tableau is the friend of the directors, let's say editing is the invention of producers. I'll give you a quick example of what that look likes when the producer is in the driver's seat and you get the layout of shots scene by scene. This is a 1917 film now lost I believe called "Love or Justice", but you can see very clearly, at Nan's table, we have scene 5. They called shots scenes then. At Nan's table, Bill comes to the table, moves around to Nan's side, seems to be carefully-- everything is mapped out for the performer. Nan listens a moment then looks off toward the other table. That's at scene 5. And the OK scribbled through it means we made the shoot, we did what we were supposed to do. Then, scene 6, flash close shot on Jack Dunn, close shot on Jack allowing waiter's hands to come in. Even specifying the shot scale, only see the waiter's hands, don't see the waiter, and place the sandwich and the drink. He stares at them moodily. Again, OK, we made the shot. Above it though is something interesting. Before scene 5, someone scribbled in 4A, long shot, 4B, close-up boy. That was done on the set. But please not that now, the script becomes a record of the production. We now know that the director or somebody said, "Look, we better have a couple more shoots here", maybe to give more playing time or maybe it's to clear up where this action is taking place. OK, the script girl, that's what she was called, wrote in 4A, that's not 5 but there was a 4 before that that we don't we see. This is 4A, a different shot , a long shoot and 4B, the close-up. And those are X'ed out as having been completed. So, the script is controlling not just production in the front office from the distance. Moment by moment in the filming, you're fitting what you do into the script, i.e. into the shots as they're punching along. I want to thank everyone who's assisted me here and it's a long list. So, here is the list. These are the people in the Kluge Center in the Motion Picture Division, strangers who gave me directions on the street, all these people I owe a lot. I really have benefited enormously from my stay here. I'm grateful for-- to the Kluge center for inviting me to participate in their important work and to-- particularly to my friends in the Motion Picture Division across the street who had then come unfailingly courteous and helpful. I really have enjoyed my stay here. I wish it could go on forever. But thank you for your attention. And of course, I'm happy to answer any questions or respond to any comments. Thanks very much. ^M00:57:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:27 How do you want to handle questions? You want me to take them or do you want to take them? >> Daniele Turello: You can take them and there's a mic roaming around. >> David Bordwell: OK. There's a roaming mic. Yes, please? Hi. >> Hi. I'm unsure about this but is basically montage was developed by Kuleshov and Eisenstein on the '20s or was it the-- and didn't Eisenstein commend D.W. Griffith for-- So, those techniques of editing really sort of were developed very early. I mean, Griffith didn't himself invent them, he just put-- >> David Bordwell: No, he didn't. >> -- got them in one package. But now this montage itself was just this hyperkinetic form editing in vague meaning. How does this film spit into what you've been saying? >> David Bordwell: It's a very good question. These films were seen in-- the films or the kind of films I'm describing were seen in many parts of the world during the teens. And they eventually made their way to Russia and were taken up the by the younger generation filmmakers, the one you mentioned Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, they saw them as-- it is perfect example of what I've been describing. They saw them as the coolest new thing. The tableau ruled Czarist cinema. But once the revolution took place, the young directors decided this is the way to go, just as Lenin wanted electrification and power plants and things like that. They were able hitch their wagon to that star and say, look, we have to modernize. And the Americans are the source of this kind of modernity. So, we will take what the Americans did. And in fact, you know, we call it Soviet montage but the Russians called it American montage, because they saw themselves very much as influenced by this trend. And as you say, they pushed it farther. They realized that there are more possibilities in montage than the Americans have realized. You can make shots very, very short. You can make abstract points with shots and that's kind of an error in some of the teen's films. There's moralizing or allegorical films that use sort of abstract-- use editing for abstractions. But of course, people like Eisenstein went much farther with that, it sends us in "Strike" and "October". So, they push the American continuity system to a kind of crisis, I would argue, and create a kind of cinema of discontinuity that's built on the continuity system. They keep pushing and pushing in various ways. Each one of them has their own style, those major soviet directors. But you're right. This is where it becomes a new kind of cinema. The other point you raised about Eisenstein is dead right also. ^M01:00:05 But that's in a period of Eisenstein's work where he's looking-- he's less of a radical. He writes that essay, "Later". And he's less of radical than he was in his 20s. And he's looking for classical sources for what cinema has done. He's trying to give cinema a distinguished lineage in the history of the arts. So just as he'll say, "Well, here's a framing here from Pudovkin that reminds you of Del Greco," and so on. He'll try to give a kind of intellectual authority of legitimacy to what cinema has been as in cinema is the next logical step for him in the evolution of the arts in general. So, naturally, what the 19th century novelists were doing, Griffith with his crosscutting in "The Cricket on the Hearth" is what Griffith did. Griffith did it too but he did it on film. He swallowed up another art form and pushed it farther. So that's a particular position Eisenstein wants to push. But you're right. This American cinema is very, very influential on the Soviet montage people. Yes, Andrei, please? >> Doctor Bordwell, thank you for this lecture. A couple of years ago, I was watching George Clooney on "Inside the Actors Studio". And James Lipton asked him, what's the most important aspect of directing? And Mr. Clooney didn't hesitate. He said, point of view. And I thought about that quite a bit since then. So, point of view not just in the sense of emphasis but identification to get the audience to identify with a particular character. So my question is, for you, in this period that you've focused on for study, do you -- did you see, shall we say, instances of the beginning of some of these techniques for the purpose of enhancing identification? >> David Bordwell: Mm-hmm. Well, I think there's two or three ways to deal with it, yes. One is we could identify with figures that we see simply because we see them. We're very responsive to faces and postures and those can enhance identification and I think that's the actor's craft in both of the trends that I'm trying to analyze. You get a powerful sense of empathy for instance in that Lois Weber example. But a more broader sense, I think, what you're asking is even more interesting and that is one of those faults of the tableau cinema, you can argue, is that it doesn't allow for that kind of optical point of view, the editing does. You can't really put the camera in the shoes or the eyes of another character in the tableau cinema. Everything is based on a kind of omniscience. We see everything we need to see and then maybe it's not like the kind of omniscience on the theatre stage. Nevertheless, there's a sense of hovering over the action and we may be aware of things that the actors aren't, often because they're standing with their backs to each other. So, there is a harder hill to climb to get that kind of say, let's say, Hitchcockean shot of person looking, shot of what they see, closer shot of looking, closer of what they see, that kind of intensification on point of view is harder to achieve in the tableau cinema. And if that's one of the routes we can take to an identification, then that's, you know, one of those things that it is a deficit of the tableau cinema and probably help the advance of editing. So it comes in-- POV shots come in very early in the history cinema, then they drop out for a while. They're usually just stunts or what Tom Gunning calls attractions. Later, they get integrated into stories and editing is the way it's done, yeah. So that mention of point of view is really, I think, you know, there's a bias in editing towards that. But of course, you know, empathy takes many forms and you can find lots of cases where extreme long shots, people are watching in the extreme long shot and crying. You think of the end of say, Kiarostami's "Through the Olive Trees", I don't know if you've seen that film. Well, it's prolonged long shot, it must be a mile away. I don't know how far away it is. And everybody is riveted, and feeling for the character who's in that shot. So, there are many avenues, I think, towards that kind of identification you're talking about. But certainly, it can be bought pretty cheaply through cutting. Yes, please? >> When you said the tableau system survived in Germany till 1919-1920, then began running "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"-- >> David Bordwell: Yes. >> And that seems like tableau film because they certainly want you to make use of those sets. But it also incorporates these shot cuts of Cesare. So, I wonder how you would categorize Caligari? >> David Bordwell: Yup, yup. That's a great point. I didn't have time to elaborate on this but you're quite right. What happens in the teens in both America and Europe is that directors start to sort of go halfway or partway towards editing, the tableau directors through a simple axial cut in and out. So for instances, they understand you're supposed to emphasize things, but instead of building the scene out of cuts the way in an American would, you simply have the tableau, it goes on and on and on, and then boom, an enlargement of a face, and then boom, back into tableau. This might thought of as like a proto-continuity system. You're always in the master shot. And that is what you get in Caligari for the most part. You get the enlargements of either Cesare or the doctor, often in an iris, a kind of circular-shaped mask which emphasized that, a kind of a little italicization of that Roman. But Caligari also uses crosscutting, a lot of crosscutting. And that shows by that point, American cinema's-- that's seen everywhere now. The people adapt that. Even Fayyad who is very conservative adopts crosscutting. So, it's a partial concession, I would say, to the American system, Caligari. But Caligari, you're certainly right. The absorption of the sets and the emphasis on a quasi-dance-like performance style in both Cesare of course, but in the others, is there too. So, there a lot of compromises in that tableau tradition, particularly after the Americans would get out there. Caligari was made when they could see American films as is the film that I mentioned, "Nerven" by Reinert, which was made the same year as Caligari. And in my view, if you can see it, it's on DVD. You can get on online. "Nerven" would be as famous as Caligari if people had seen it outside Germany but it wasn't well-known, it wasn't preserved in archives, and not so-- it wasn't as publicized in such a self-congratulatory way as Caligari was. But in general, your point is quite right, that there are-- these films have sort of partial use of each tradition and sometimes it's just the matter of using one more than another. Yup? This side. >> The French Criticoms wrote this in, wrote about the superiority of the deep focus or the deep sets and it seems to have something in common with tableau. It's more, I think-- he was saying the audience had more freedom, you're not directed every single-- And also, there's more ability to-- it's more of a contemplative-- >> David Bordwell: Yes. >> -- cinema than the editing style. Do you agree with that? Do you see a similarity with tableau? How do you relate that? >> David Bordwell: I really am listening. I'm just trying to find an image, I think, that will help us. Yeah. What I would say is this, that Bezen [assumed spelling] generalizes from the Welles and Wyler films he's been seeing. And he wants to know where they come from. And I guess the complicated argument about that deep focus style, if I can show you this, there, that. His argument as I understand, it goes like this. Back in the day, there is what he calls primitive deep focus, and that would include the very earliest films, mostly those shot outdoors like the Lumière films and things like that where you can see lots of space in the background, cityscapes, people moving around, all that. You have primitive deep focus but that's kind of given automatically by the camera, the nature of lighting, and so on. And then, thing become very hermetic in the studios, you're inside the studios and cutting rules. And then, by the '30s,-- Bezen's, this is a story Bezen tells. By the '30s, everybody knows how to cut, and sound has been mastered, so we know how to cut for sound cinema. So, there's a kind of equilibrium reached throughout 1939 where you can really use this standard continuity system to say anything. You can tell a gangster film. You can tell a musical, whatever. What Welles and Wyler do is they come to fulfill a kind of prophecy of synthesizing the primitive deep focus and the cinema of editing. His argument is that shot like this is a kind of compact diversion of a close-up, a medium shot and a long shoot. It's as if Welles had figured out a way to give us all the information that would normally be given in an edited sequence in a single frame. He spaced them out almost-- Bezen, you know, suggests it's like an explode a diagram of a motor, you know, like all the pieces are kind of hovering in space but it's within this one diagram. So his argument is the primitive deep focus is absorbed but classicized or continuitized in Welles and Wyler. So the version of deep focus he has here is a synthesis of the continuity, editing tradition and what he called primitive deep focus. From my standpoint, he can't be blamed for this because people didn't see the films, he didn't know about these films of the teens, the tableau films of the teens, which are not primitive deep focus in the way he's thinking of it, but also aren't editing either. So, to my sense, Bezen, you know, he saw what he could see and he said what he can. But there's a sense in which that argument sees everything is evolving towards this. He was a very much a pretentious critic. He thought this is really kind of the end of cinema style. There's no further to go than this. We can have color, yes. We can have 3D. You can have those things. But as far as style is concerned, it's pretty much a dead end. We're finished. Welles and Wyler have given us the perfect form of cinema. ^M01:10:02 Editing is given to us in a way that it respects the integrity of time and space. So the problem with editing is it chops everything up. Here, we get the world organized, dynamized, focused for our attention without doing those things. And it's part of his theory about what is really artistic cinema, the value of certain kinds of filmmaking. That's my take on it anyway. >> Daniele Turello: Let's thank David Bordwell. >> David Bordwell: Thank you. ^M01:10:28 [ Applause ] ^M01:10:29 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:10:37