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A
Midsummer Night's Dream Starring:
Julia Swayne Gordon, Gladys Hulette, Walter Akerman, Maurice Costello,
Rose Tapley, William V Ranous |
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Ion
Martea | |
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In his article ‘The Motion Picture Story Considered as a New Literary Form’, published on 19 February 1910 in Motion Picture World, Walter M Fitch claims that ‘the motion picture brings its note of sympathy alike to the cultured and the uncultured, the children of opportunity and the sons of toil. It is literature for the illiterate… It knows no boundary lines of race and nation’ (quoted in Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon). This empathic statement was to be later taken both as a compliment to and as a potential damnation of the cinematic medium. At the time, however, Fitch struck the right chord in the minds of the filmmakers. For them, film’s potential to transcend cultural barriers and bring together rich and poor into a unified spirit of goodwill was essential to their artistic endeavour, and just as importantly, their business activity. While this idealistic view of the form is not the whole story, however, it is not entirely worthless in understanding the role cinema was to play for most of the 20th century and to the present day. Film, for early filmmakers, quickly moved from a simple mechanical development in photography to an independent art form confined (or enriched in their minds) by its own particularity. Two types of cinema emerged: one which developed as an extension of pre-existing artforms, the other which learned from those, but really established itself as an antithesis to them. The difference here is significant, for the former definition conforms to the rather lowly status of cinema suggested by Fitch’s statement, while the latter suggests the possibility of more artistic credibility. In order to clarify the point, it is useful to look at the role of literature and theatre in shaping film as a medium. In discussing Re Lear [King Lear] (Gerolamo Lo Savio/Italy/1910), it is easy to see that the potential of film to exploit realistic setting, either through shooting outdoor landscape, or through bringing attention to the action through close-ups, does create a certain cinematic effect worthy of analysis. However, while Lo Savio’s method worked wonders for a play centred on the irrelevance of human interaction, it was rather shabby when trying to deal with a circumstantial plot in Il mercante di Venezia [The Merchant of Venice] (Gerolamo Lo Savio/Italy/1910). The problem with Lo Savio’s Shakespearian adaptations is that he looks at the original play as final, and uses film only to develop slightly on the existing theatrical traditions. His over-reliance on longshots is not due to technical constraints, but the result of a conscious choice to look at the cinematic screen as a theatre stage. In consequence, the strengths in his films are imported into the medium, rather than originating from a cinematic tradition. Charles Kent, another theatre director charmed by film, took to adapting Shakespeare’s plays for the newly-born American movie-going public. Together with J Stuart Blackton, an early film maverick, he took on the bard’s comedies in a similar vein to Lo Savio. The aim of their company Vitagraph was to establish a more respected output than the silly entertainment to be had in a plethora of chase films and burlesque comedies. However, many of these adaptations are amongst the most dated productions from the period, being very disjointed and so depending on the audience’s knowledge of the narrative; and thus falling short of Fitch’s ‘literature of the illiterate’. One notable exception is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made in 1909, which was a real commercial success in the holiday season of that year. Despite being plagued by the same plot amputations, which threaten to make it a meaningless juxtaposition of comedic scenes, the film survives relatively unharmed as a successful take on Shakespeare’s play. The key is in the method with which Kent and Blackton approached the text. The opening scene, for example, is similar to Lo Savio’s King Lear. The shot shows the main characters in a rich Renaissance setting, firmly establishing the amorous plot. However, with the following sequences, it becomes clear that the scene serves a different function. Unlike Lo Savio, who is much concerned in getting Shakespeare right, Kent and Blackton are concerned in meeting the audience’s expectations. The opening shot features a number of contemporary stars, and their presence in the film would have been one of the movie’s main commercial assets. It was Vitagraph’s goal of exploiting and further popularising its stars that shaped the story, and not the play. Within a few minutes it becomes clear that knowing the original text might help, but with the emergence of Puck (played with glittering fireworks by the young Gladys Hulette), the audience’s attention is almost immediately taken up by the filmic special effects that enhance Puck’s magical powers. Her flight around the world is as intriguing as her trick at transforming Bottom (William V Ranous) into a donkey. The audience was offered Shakespeare as they had never seen it, and the commercial trick worked, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream delivered the play’s dream world in all its magical glory. It is important to make a clarification at this point. Kent and Blackton made the film in hope of a huge commercial success, but in this process they managed to construct a narrative that was solely cinematic: establishing a tradition of celebrity, magic and action-based scenarios, but most importantly the construction of a chimerical world, functioning by its own rules, which are easily understood by the film-going public. This is the reason the film has aged better than many of its contemporaries; the audience does not have to know the original context in order to be entertained, as the film is only a reminder of Shakespeare’s play, and an understanding of the latter has only a minimal impact on our enjoyment of the film. Returning to Fitch’s concept of the cinema as ‘literature for the illiterate’, it is clear that he was not so much concerned with either the commercial aspect of film (except to the extent that it is cheaper for the consumer than other artforms, and depends less on education), or even with the complexity of narratives in both literature and in film. What is at stake is the visual narrative, and the cinema’s power to construct identifiable realistic settings, neither of which require more from the audience than their existence. It is only at this point, that a new ‘literary form’ is born. In a more systematised way in 1916, Hugo Munsterberg was to identify this phenomenon, arguing that, ‘the photoplay tells us a human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely space, time and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination and emotion’. Even though this definition is independent of the artistic merit of the film, Munsterberg is referring to what is specific about film, therefore openly preferring the purely cinematic to a film which is more dependent on conventions imported from other, pre-existing arts. Unfortunately, a vagueness about what is purely cinematic meant that writing in the USA before World War I unconsciously accepted commercial film as the true representation of what true cinema is all about. Stardom, special effects, and populist spectatorship – all contributed to a misconception of what is truly unique about film. In consequence, developments on the technological front were often neglected in favour of a preoccupation with film stardom, for example, although the idea of stardom was in fact inherited from theatre. A Midsummer Night’s Dream works because it speaks in a cinematic language, in that the dream world is constructed in such a way that it is understood universally. This was more significant than the fact that Ms Gordon appeared in a few scenes, or that Gladys Hulette showed how easy was to fly over the world. Unfortunately, from the producers’ perspective this wasn’t obvious, and these more superficial elements became the driving force in the creation of a popular commercial cinema, particularly in Hollywood. Fitch’s ‘literature of the illiterate’ first emerged as just that, blind to Munsterberg’s artistic criteria for what truly constitutes the cinematic. About the Essential Films series.
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