ASL (Average Shot Length) as calculated manually before it ever occurred to anyone that a computer could be used for that effect has always been conceived as a single number, one per film. Suppose we know that film A has an ASL of x, and film B an ASL of y. The only meaningful conclusion ASL can provide us with respect to films A and B will be by necessity a comparative one: to learn more about A and B, compare x and y. What this essay attempted to do when I wrote it (which took place, roughly, around 2005) was to show that nowadays, in the age of computerized statistics what we can do with ASLs goes beyond comparing films. Nowadays, we can project comparative statistics to throw light upon its inner structure, something that the title of this essay defines as “internal dynamics.” I used D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance as a case study. What follows is an account of what I did.
Indeed, an obvious limitation of the ASL index is that it can only be used to relate films. Looking at it the we only thing we can learn is, for instance, that Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera (ASL 2.1 seconds) is cut slightly faster that Eisenstein’s 1926 Battleship Potemkin (ASL 2.8 seconds) or that these Soviet movies run tenfold faster than Bauer’s pre-revolutionary masterpiece After Death (1915) whose
The latter is something cinemetrics is designed to outline. Instead of reducing film’s cutting rate to a single average figure it stores in the computer memory the exact length of each individual shot and shows as a diagram the tides and ebbs of cutting within the duration of a film. As it registers the length of each shot and the position of each cut, cinemetrics is also a handy tool to
Take Griffith’s Intolerance, one of the most ambitious and influential films in cinema’s history. Intolerance is a tale of tales. To get across a homily summarized in the film’s title Griffith shows us four stories from four ages in human history. The idea of using multiple narratives to bring home a moral they have in common is not new in literature or film; what was new and unusual about Intolerance was
The question that concerns me about Intolerance is not what moved Griffith to experiment with a complex and potentially confusing structure like this or what goals he was trying to achieve. Not that I consider such questions unimportant, but this aspect of Griffith’s film has been addressed and well explained. The most famous analysis of the cross-story cutting in Intolerance comes from the pen of my countryman Eisenstein, who (like,
Two other powerful explanations of editing in Intolerance come, I am proud to add, from two of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, Miriam Hansen and Tom Gunning. If we trace cross-cutting back to The Lonely Villa (1909)—the first film in which Griffith cuts back and forth across distant spaces to connect two simultaneous lines of action—Gunning says in a study published in 1991 that we will be able
It was in the same year that Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film came out. One chapter of this book is about Griffith’s cross-cutting between ages. To understand its cultural roots we must look at Intolerance in the context of two ideas that occupied many a turn-of-the-century mind, Hansen explains. One of these is the millennialist belief in the forthcoming restitution of the universal language—the return
Nothing of substance can be added to these well-argued accounts, two by historians of film and culture, one by a major player in the field. It was less an interpretative need that urged me to use cinemetrics on Intolerance than a curiosity about film metrics as such, about its limits of relevance. I wanted to see what happens if I gathered the shot-length data about Intolerance as a whole, about each
The first—and simplest—question that cinemetrics allows us to ask is about the average shot of Intolerance. It is 6 seconds long—nothing unusual for an American movie of the teens (though if one weighs this number against 21.2 seconds, the average shot length of After Death, made in Russia one year prior to Intolerance, one will be able to see what Russian prerevolutionary film journalists meant when they wrote, with a
A more interesting question to ask might be whether or not the average shot length varies depending on the kind of the story Griffith deals with and on the epoch in which it is set—in other words, if there is a correlation between cutting rates and subject matter. If there is none, the average shot length within each story will be the same as it is throughout the film, but if
As it turns out, a discrepancy is present. Almost a second-long gulf separates the average speed of the more modern stories (one set in twentieth-century USA, the other in sixteenth-century Paris) from the ancient ones (Judea, 1st century AD; Babylon, 4th century BC), whose pace is below the average 6:
1st place: the French story (4.9 seconds)
2nd place: the modern story (5.6 seconds)
3rd place: the Babylonian story (6.5 seconds)
4th place: the Judean story (6.7 seconds)
Though there seems to be a trend in this distribution of cutting rates, these data are not always easy to interpret. I do not think many will be surprised to find out that the Judean story which takes Jesus Christ from the wedding at Cana to the cross is the slowest, but that the Modern story loses 0.7 seconds to the French one is counterintuitive; those who know Intolerance will likely
Yes, average numbers can be deceptive, but this does not rule cutting statistics out of court. As I mentioned earlier on, cinemetrics can represent data not only as a number but also as a graph that shows us the dynamics where naked numbers fail.
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The graph in fig. 1 represents the dynamic profile of Intolerance as a whole, all its stories included. The straight dotted line (called “trendline”) shows that as a general tendency the cutting rate of Intolerance climbs during the film; the two-humped curve, the polynomial trendline, shows that this tendency is not steady; that the film starts slowly; has two waves of activity, a minor and a major one, and slows
I find this graph useful but not indispensable, for most people who know Intolerance well can say without looking that there must be something like an upsurge in film’s tempo around the place when the troops attack the strikers in the modern story, another one when the Persian troops attack Babylon, and, of course, a peaceful apotheosis responsible for the slowdown in the end.
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A more interesting picture will emerge if we look at the metric profiles of each of the four stories taken separately(Figs. 2-5). While three of them comply with the film’s general tendency to pick up the pace, the Judean story (the slowest of the four) slows down as it follows Christ from Cana to the cross. My guess is that this anomaly may be due to an interference of a generic
There is an interesting similarity between the dynamic profiles of the modern and Babylonian stories: both go up and down, then again up and down. Does this pattern reflect some general rule of dramatic rhythm, or is it perhaps Griffith’s trademark way of shaping the narrative flow of his films? Again, the future may show; to answer this we’ll need to examine metric data from more Griffith movies. So far
Note that the curve of the French story does not dive towards the end as the other three stories do—in other words, this story never slows down. This is not hard to explain, knowing that the French story ends in medias res, as it were. Griffith quits this story before the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is over. A trickier question might be what makes him do so; it is here I
I do not think anyone will disagree if I say that leaving off in the heat of a battle in not Griffith’s normal way of ending a story—so little so that his biographer Richard Schickel has tried to explain this anomaly by a mistake on Griffith’s part: “as for the French story, it has a truncated feeling about it, as if, perhaps, Griffith shot more of it than survived the final
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It is this unique feature of the narrative style of Intolerance, the teamwork of its four stories, which the elegant sinuous line in fig. 6tells us about. Remember, what made Intolerance different from other multistory narratives until then was that Griffith kept jumping back and forth between his stories. The data summed up by this diagram are not shot lengths as in previous cases but the length of the story
Let me conclude this on a methodological note. Films like Intolerance have not only multiple stories but also multiple selves. Alongside the cultural, social, and historical selves shown to us by Gunning, Hansen, or Eisenstein, Intolerance has an inner self whose life is made visible by cinemetrics. Neither cinema nor its history can be sighted or sized up from a single perspective. In this respect I am, as one of
On the other hand I am not quite prepared to surrender the Babylon of film history by saying actually, Babylon is whatever you think it is. Nor am I pushing towards some sort of additive, multidimensional image of film history saying that cinema equals literature plus photography plus editing plus whatever other fields it has drawn upon.
The question of style is one of change. Cinema borrows things from other arts, but it also changes everything it borrows. If an arithmetic operation existed that could help us get a better sense of the history of film it would be not addition but subtraction. Cinema equals theater minus the techniques and conventions used on the theater stage. Cinema equals literature minus all the talk about meanings and texts.