Intertitre et film narratif de fiction: Genèses, développements, et logiques d’un procédé filmographique, 1895-1916. L'exemple de la production aux Etats-Unis et le cas d’Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)

Abstract

The silent film intertitle has long been ignored by cinema history and theory, and by film archives; or regarded as an intruder, a palliative to the absence of sound, which became obsolete after the invention of talking pictures. The teleology imbued in this historiographical trend, influenced by the intertitle’s contemporaneous controversies, sentenced it to silence. Even today, research only concedes a marginal space to its study. This thesis fits into the framework of studying cinema as an emerging medium around 1900. It constitutes the first comprehensive history of the intertitle in the early stages of cinematography, from its origins until 1916; that is, from spectacular attraction to discursive narration. The thesis’ approach finds its inspiration in historical pragmatics, and unites the conceptual tools of intermediality, narratology, semiology, filmology, and Russian formalism, to understand the logics of intermedial and discursive conjunctions of the text and the moving image. This research opens up historical and theoretical perspectives about the intertitle’s genesis, developments and impacts. It bases itself on rare existing studies and on media archeology: preserved copies, catalogues, corporate press articles, and manuals and archives from the period. The results show that the intertitle has been a key device in the transformations of cinematography between 1895 and 1916: from the first projections of animated views to the advent of the classical feature fiction film. The device’s genesis is rooted in the projection of film titles through magic lantern slides, which constitutes one of the oldest, if not the first, forms of editing on screen. Pivotal technological innovations of the title on film ensued and allowed for the rise of narrative fiction films around 1902-1903. Its subsequent developments, mostly composed of narrative innovations, as can be observed in American productions, were experimented with and discussed in the trade press. The device is a very controversial one: criticisms evoke it as interrupting the image flow, being exterior to the story, and hampering the suspense. However, the use of it spreads as its advantages are numerous: the intertitle allows for the narration of autonomous stories without lecturer, and of original and longer stories; more importantly, it allows to construct the character, to use dialogue, and to synchronize the latter with the character’s locution. The intertitle appears to be the written incarnation of the omniscient filmographic narrator. Together with the images, its configurations generate the spectator’s identification with the narrator and the characters. This device is also capable of enhancing the spectator’s expectations and of producing suspense. The very drafting of the intertitles is crucial, so that the film may be understood by the spectator, and in the way the filmmaker intended it to be. This is revealed in the case study of the writing phases of the complex feature by Griffith, Intolerance (1916). The intertitle is one of the foundations of film editing, of narration, and of the construction of fiction. Its history and its analysis show that it has been a decisive actor in the transformations of film and in the rise of cinematography.