Screenwriting, 1905-1930A Griffith & His Students
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Item Open Access Eisenstein, Part 1: 'A Fly in the Fly-Bottle' – Montage to 1930(1967) Cameron, Evan Wm.Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part I) I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay (Part II) reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition.Item Open Access Eisenstein, Part 2: '[As] in Life Itself' – Montage from 1930(1967) Cameron, Evan Wm.Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part II of two on the evolution of Eisenstein's conjectures about 'montage') I shall unpack what Eisenstein said in 1938 of the mistake that he had made early on and how to correct it, reaffirming thereby, though unwittingly, that Pudovkin had been right all along.Item Open Access The Exemplary Practices of David Griffith, Part 1: Establishing Events Historically(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.With the release of THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915, David Griffith established by common consent and emulation of his peers the prototype of international feature filmmaking – an exemplar of the possibilities of practice within a natural art. A year later he completed INTOLERANCE, the film that was to entice a young Russian, Vsevolod Pudovkin, to explain what was going on and thus complete the paradigm. Within this essay I explain what Griffith did, how he came to do and why the doing of it was so influential.Item Open Access The Exemplary Practices of David Griffith, Part 2: INTOLERANCE – 'A Drama of Comparisons'(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.With the release of THE BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915, David Griffith established by common consent and emulation of his peers the prototype of international feature filmmaking – an exemplar of the possibilities of practice within a natural art. A year later he completed INTOLERANCE, the film that was to entice a young Russian, Vsevolod Pudovkin, to explain what was going on and thus complete the paradigm. Within this essay (the second of two devoted to Griffith's achievement), I concentrate upon the unprecedented patterning of the screen times that he allotted to the supposed 'four stories' of INTOLERANCE, a seldom noted but remarkable foreshadowing of the strategies of the documentary tradition.Item Open Access Hugo Münsterberg: a German Jew (?) in America(2018) Horak, Jan-ChristopherAn historical account by Jan-Christopher Horak of Hugo Münsterberg's life and work in America – or, more exactly, upon the nature and consequences of being a German Jew at work within Harvard University during the first decades of the 20th-century.Item Open Access LADY IN THE LAKE: Münsterberg, Montgomery and the Muddle of Mental Events(1973) Cameron, Evan Wm.Item Open Access Pudovkin's Precept [Summary]: Pudovkin, Kant and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception(1990) Cameron, Evan Wm.In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin solved the fundamental problem of film design by showing filmmakers how to select and order the parts of a movie (its shots, scenes and sequences of them) to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of it. He did so by unwittingly bringing Kant's transcendental constraint of apperceptive unity to bear upon it, confirming with unprecedented elegance and power that respect for the constraints of the self-conscious perceptual integrity of observers is the primal precondition of authentic art. Within this address, I summarise Pudovkin's achievement and its Kantian context, condensing the story told within Parts 1-3 of the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection.Item Open Access Pudovkin's Precept, Part 1: the 'Basic Method' of Filmmaking(1967) Cameron, Evan Wm.In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin, a not-so-young Russian of thirty-two making his first movie of feature length, articulated within a brief manual for filmmakers how to solve the fundamental problem of film design by describing how to select and order the parts of a movie (its shots, scenes and sequences) to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of them. How did he do it? How, indeed, could anyone have done it, much less an inexperienced filmmaker, accomplishing a feat of a kind unprecedented within commentaries by others upon any other art? To answer those questions is to comprehend not only the rudiments of how filmmakers make movies but the distinctive nature of the art of filmmaking itself. Within the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept . . .' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection, I address those questions in order and with increasing refinement, unpacking in Part 1 how filmmakers came commonly to comprehend and use what Pudovkin said – the most significant prescription in the history of filmmaking.Item Open Access Pudovkin's Precept, Part 2: 'This Method of Temporal Concentration'(1977) Cameron, Evan Wm.In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin, a not-so-young Russian of thirty-two making his first movie of feature length, articulated within a brief manual for filmmakers how to solve the fundamental problem of film design by describing how to select and order the parts of a movie (its shots, scenes and sequences) to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of them. How did he do it? How, indeed, could anyone have done it, much less an inexperienced filmmaker, accomplishing a feat of a kind unprecedented within commentaries by others upon any other art? To answer those questions is to comprehend not only the rudiments of how filmmakers make movies but the distinctive nature of the art of filmmaking itself. Within the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept . . .' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection, I address those questions in order and with increasing refinement, unpacking in Part 2 how the precept, when understood as comprehensibly as Pudovkin would have wished, imposes additional requirements upon the making of movies intended to be 'works of art' – constraints within which too few filmmakers have been able and willing to work.Item Open Access Pudovkin's Precept, Part 3: Bringing Movies to Kant's 'Transcendental Unity of Apperception'(1987) Cameron, Evan Wm.In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin, a not-so-young Russian of thirty-two making his first movie of feature length, articulated within a brief manual for filmmakers how to solve the fundamental problem of film design by describing how to select and order the parts of a movie (its shots, scenes and sequences) to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of them. How did he do it? How, indeed, could anyone have done it, much less an inexperienced filmmaker, accomplishing a feat of a kind unprecedented within commentaries by others upon any other art? To answer those questions is to comprehend not only the rudiments of how filmmakers make movies but the distinctive nature of the art of filmmaking itself. Within the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept . . .' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection, I address those questions in order and with increasing refinement, unpacking in Part 3 how Pudovkin was able to do what he did only by unwittingly bringing Kant's transcendental constraint of apperceptive unity to bear upon the making of movies, confirming that respect for the constraints of the self-conscious perceptual integrity of observers is the primal precondition of achievement within every art.Item Open Access Review of Noël Carroll's "Problems of Classical Film Theory" (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988)(The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1989) Cameron, Evan Wm.A review of Noël Carroll's Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), x + 268 pages, published on pages 85 and 86 of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, No. 1 (Winter, 1989).Item Open Access Stroheim's Tactics of Comparison(1968) Cameron, Evan Wm.Three-quarters of Stroheim's GREED [1924] was cut from the film before its release at the insistence of the studio by a sequence editors who, in Stroheim's phrase, "did not know anything about my editing ideas", but the film, even in truncated form, remains among the most memorable ever made. What kind of "editing ideas" could have informed the making of a movie that remains powerful with only a fourth of it remaining? Stroheim, I suggest, had glimpsed the possibilities of a shot-by-shot 'tactics of comparison' within scenes comparable in aim and effect to the story-by-story 'strategies of comparison' that Griffith had foreshadowed in INTOLERANCE.