The Story of Film

Gombrich’s argument was that artistic influence is a matter of “schema plus correction”, but I would prefer the word “variation”. His point is that for an artform to evolve, original images can’t always be copied slavishly. They should be adjusted according to new technical possibilities, changing storytelling fashions, political ideas, emotional trends, etc.

Protazanov, Sjöström, Stiller, Bauer, Phalke and Murata

Only if man one was looking right and man two was looking left would their conversation have been spatially clear and their eye-lines have matched.

In the period from 1903 to 1918, many of the ingredients of Western storytelling cinema fell into place: continuity cutting, close-ups, parallel editing, expressive lighting, nuanced acting and reverse angle editing: an impressive array of techniques.9 However, one is missing, perhaps the most important one. Its exact origin is difficult to trace, but it appeared at the very end of this period – “eye-line matching”.

Rojo no Reikon/Souls on the Road (Japan, 1921)

Erich Von Stroheim

it ambitiously showed that a cut between shots could be a thematic tool, that it could be an intellectual signpost, asking the audience to notice, not something about the action or story, but about the meaning of the sequence

Intolerance appears stodgy today, but its relevance is twofold. First it took intercutting a stage further than Pathé’s The Horse that Bolted. His intercutting is not saying “Meanwhile”. He cut between different time periods, between events that were not happening simultaneously. He was not cutting for action (Porter) or temporally (Pathé), but was doing it thematically. He was saying, “Look, these very different events are examples of the same human trait” – intolerance, or the failure of love

Griffith’s visual ideas for Intolerance

Griffith filmed the Babylon sequence from hot-air balloons and rigged up a type of dolly shot in mid-air, by placing the camera on a moving tower, which was a first.