Popular (Silent) Film History

Brian has started off the discussion with a detailed and useful consideration of the continuity editing in The Golden Chance. I want to step back to reflect on how we (as cinephiles) approach a film like DeMille's. Popularly, silent film, most of all early silent film, does not fare well; just witness the Netflix stars or imdb ratings. Meanwhile, a popular cinephilia often falls prey to the "Griffith narrative": American cinema fumbled through awkward, one-reeler melodramas til D.W. Griffith refined a more supple film language and invented classicism. I myself have subscribed to this understanding, until I have watched a little more 1910s cinema. Crucially, I have to credit Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film History textbook for breaking me of this lingering historical picture. For they point out Birth of a Nation's importance in elevating the social status but seem to isolate the formal innovations elsewhere, either in Griffith's early work or in other films of the mid-to-late 1910s. And once one starts to look closely, one can begin to draw a different picture.

The Golden Chance, for example, lacks the epic scope of Birth of a Nation, the tracking shots, or the touches like the activation of off-screen space. But it feels to me closer to the direction in which Hollywood films would follow in the 1920s: continuity editing to give studio sets an illusion of 3-dimensionality (what Noel Burch calls haptic space), true yoking of dual-subplots, and most of all expressive use of artificial lighting. Meanwhile, 20s Hollywood arguably would forsake some of the Griffith traits, such as the schematic, naked parallel editing, a practice to find a more subdued existence. Thompson and Bordwell use The Cheat as an example of this pioneering use of lighting, but The Golden Chance revels in the new effects as well, even from the credit sequence, in which lighting reveals then conceals the drunken husband against the backlit window backdrop.

Also, arguably, while racism and white privilege remained a strong, dominant current, I'd venture that The Golden Chance is closer to Hollywood's key ideology than Birth of a Nation. Crucially, the Cindarella narrative taps into an ur-narrative of class transcendence (conflict meanwhile is external in BoaN). I've always been struck at how often in Hollywood films, to borrow and revise a phrase from Laura Mulvey, the glamorous impersonates the ordinary impersonating the glamorous. What's still missing in The Golden Chance is the complementary class transcendance: in mature classicism, the rich (here the millionaire Roger Manning) would themselves be breaking free of the stifling social roles and class traditions to truly experience life. Undoubtedly, films drew upon popular theatrical, melodramatic, and literary precedents in these narratives and ideologies. I would love to explore this period more, to watch more, and to read exactly what led to Hollywood's ideological formula, which seems established by the 1920s.

Moreover, not being a specialist in the period (and early classical film is really only beginning to get a fraction of the scholarly attention that early and transitional cinema has generated), I find myself asking: is The Golden Chance typical of what an American studio picture of the mid-1910s looked like? Or is De Mille exceptional? Maybe some film-of-the-month clubbers can help answer these questions.