During the early years of silent cinema until around 1909, interiors for film sets resembled theatrical and vaudeville stages with painted backdrops and limited three-dimensional representation. Action was depicted at long-shot distance immediately in front of the backdrop creating a shallow playing area. The earliest narrative films consisted of a single shot of actions on a stage and spectators were positioned in relation to the action as though viewing a traditional theatrical presentation. After 1911 the development of the American film industry in Hollywood as one based primarily on considerations of narrative storytelling over the esthetics of form, meant that a preoccupation of early studio set technicians and cinematographers, designers, producers and artistic directors was a drive toward greater narrative progression and the realistic representation of action on screen.
Innovations in editing through the use of the fast film stocks characteristic of silent cinema had two profound cinematic effects.
First, continuity editing,rift gold as it came to be known, meant that scenes could be broken up into discrete shots, creating a break from theatrical conventions and the creation of a truly cinematic space. The standard continuity technique is shot-reverse shot and crosscutting. The former, used in filming twoway conversation, works in conjunction with editing and camera angles in order to produce the effect of seamless movement between speaking characters. Shots are taken from one character’s point of view or over the shoulder and intercut with those from the other person. Crosscutting, pioneered and refined in the work of D. W. Griffith, refers to the alteration of shots, this time between scenes. It implies multiple actions in different locations that are occurring simultaneously. Techniques of continuity editing, in hiding the constructed nature of the action represented on screen, produces a second cinematic effect contributing to the establishment of the particular ‘‘look’’ or esthetic of American film. The codes and practices of editing have remained largely consistent with these early innovations and have been little affected by subsequent developments in technology. This emphasis on narrative continuity led to the early identification of American film with realism. Cinematic realism holds that what is represented on screen accurately reproduces that part of the real world to which it refers. Thus, American film through the use of continuity editing techniques introduced a realism of cinematic representation and positioned film spectators close to the action. This reversed technique that led to the distancing of the audience from the spectacle, common to European formalism and experimental cinema, offering audiences the illusion that they are watching a seamlessly coherent and wholly realistic representation of reality. The realistic codes of American cinema also demanded the representation of three-dimensionality, the cinema frame as a window on the world extending beyond the limits of the frame into space off-screen. To this end developments intended to produce realistic cinematic effects occurred in liaison by cinematographers and art directors working with miniatures and techniques of composite photography such as glass shots and mattes. Glass shots worked to give cinematic depth through the technique of shooting through a clear pane of glass containing either a painted or photographic image. An early example of special effects, glass shots were used widely in the 1920s and 1930s and featured famously and extensively in the work of M. C. Cooper and E. B. Schoedsack in King Kong (1933).
By the 1920s, depth and three dimensionality was also being added to set design through modifications to stage architecture. The arrangements of props, increasing use of multiple room stage constructions, artificial lighting effects rift gold and careful construction of mis-en-sce´ne were all directed at creating the sensory illusion of depth and the participation of the audience in the screen space. Early attempts to represent the illusion of depth graphically were most convincing on location filming but proved incongruous when edited beside the shallow effects offered through traditional stage setting. However, developments as early as 1908 ushered forward techniques of deep focus cinematography through modifications to lens lengths and the use of wide angles, narrow apertures, and the manipulation of lighting, and provided for multiple planes of action area. As a technique of shooting, deep focus ensured that realism in depth could be achieved by allowing a number of actions to take place in multiple planes simultaneously during a single shot. Deep focus cinematography worked in combination with the development of techniques to enhance depth in set design. The illusion of depth offered through deep focus cinematography quickly became both the norm and the signature of American narrative cinema, though it was not fully realized until the pioneering work of Gregg Toland in the 1930s.
Toland, considered the greatest cinematographer of his age, experimented with arc lamps, wide angles, lens coating and fast film to produce a distinctive deep focus impression. The culmination of his work can be seen in Citizen Kane (1941) where Toland creates enormous and sumptuous spaces that achieve both great height as well as great depth. Toland’s greatest innovation in Citizen Kane is considered to be his use of unusually long takes, using static cameras to achieve incredible shot depth of long duration. Toland’s use of long takes added to the canon of deep focus techniques and was later developed in conjunction with the Garrett Brown’s Steadicam to provide both an unusually long depth perception coupled with unerring rapid movement in The Shining (1980).
Contemporaneously, developments in special effects techniques from the pioneering work done in the 1920s and 1930s have become the modern signature of Hollywood productions. Common photographic techniques such as fades, wipes, and dissolves have been augmented by techniques such as rear projection in which live action is combined with painted backdrops or miniatures. Rear projection was used to fantastic effect by George Lucas in Star Wars (1977), the film considered to have reinvented the effects-led blockbuster film. Since then, digitization; that is, the use of electronically programmed motion control and computer graphics in which the fantastic is able to be represented realistically, has become ubiquitous in Hollywood productions in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough work of Jurassic Park in 1993.
Taken together, continuity editing, depth of field cinematography, composite special effects photography, increasingly sophisticated set design, and staging through mis-en-sce´ne, have each contributed to giving visual clarity and realism to multiple planes of action simultaneously. This has achieved the cinematic effect of greatly enhancing spectator perception of screen space by extending it forward toward the audience and approximating what the French theorist Andre´ Bazin, referring admiringly to American film production, called ‘‘total cinema.’’
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