Musser vs. Gunning - Early Cinema

Musser’s article, “The Nickelodeon Era Begins,” is a response to Tom Gunning’s interpretation of the transition of film in the early 1900s. Gunning suggests that the subject matter of films and their presentation changed around 1907 in a pursuit of a more bourgeois audience, instead of the majority working class. Musser disagrees with Gunning’s theory stating that films became more sophisticated only to win the respect of art critics and to draw in more middle-class patrons. He also believes that it is the technological and narrative advances that created the major switch at this time. Since no dialogue existed at this time, the realm of storyline possibilities was quite small.

The development of accompanying sound during films made an enormous impact on the overall structure of films. By allowing for spoken dialogue from actors behind the screen or phonograph recordings to play synchronized with the movie, the narratives of movies became more complex and more engaging for the audience. This caused the temporal and spatial chains in films to become more complex as well, and required more strategical techniques for linking together shots. Some of these techniques were the match-on-action cut, cross-cutting and parallel editing. These methods were used to create a more complex narrative that the audience could enjoy. Simply changing the subject matter of these films to material endowed with the stamp of approval from the middle class was not good enough. In most cases, it backfired by relying on the audience’s foreknowledge of certain plays, operas and books. It was only when these “high class” stories were teamed with the aforementioned cinematic techniques, were they able to create an intriguing narrative for the middle class.

Originally, exhibitors obtained short, one-shot movies from the production company that altered the film so that it would fit in with the overall program. As longer films were created, studios rented out packages of films, a projector and a projectionist. This was quite expensive and the notion of training theatre employees to operate the projectors while renting the films was instituted. Once these story films became the main attraction, exhibitors were forced to narrate or lecture before the film to inform the audience of the missing narrative causality. The lecture before the film became a great solution for many, using the lecturer as a spectacle as well as the film. This created a problem though, as movie theatres began to replace nickelodeons in small towns, and the possibility of a lecture was removed. This required the producers to create a more comprehensible narrative film for mass audiences. Intertitles became more and more popular because of their ability to create a linear temporality and also by their function as written dialogue. This option was favoured over the up and coming synchronous sound and hired spoken actors. These sound techniques were not only very expensive but often gave poor quality and lessened the overall experience of the film itself. By distracting the viewer from the film, the realism factor was lost. Without spoken audio, producers were forced to use hand painted films and tinting to recreate that sense of realism in their films.
Now that intertitles were being used regularly and films had established their overall sense of linear temporality, lecturers and exhibitors were forced to take a showman role in the presentation of the films. With match cuts, parallel editing and the loss of temporal confusion between shots, exhibitors were now mainly concerned with the renting of films and the presentation of the theatre.