Narrative Clarity: 1907-1909
The explosion in film production meant that reliance on the spectator's prior familiarity with a story was becoming rapidly outmoded. A textbook demonstration was offered by Arthur Honig, who analyzed the viewer's reaction to Porter's The Devil (September 1908). This critic had already witnessed Henry Savage's play of that title when he saw Porter's adaptation. He not only used the play as an aid to following the film's narrative, but imagined the spoken lines and judged the acting and sets in relation to the play. For a modest nickel, Honig happily recalled the Savage production. While pleased with the film, this writer was also accompanied by "an intelligent friend" who had never seen the play. The friend started asking Honig questions about the story line, forcing him into
the role of personal narrator. Without the necessary frame of reference, the friend's enjoyment of the film was spoiled.[84] Like Honig, the Dramatic Mirror felt that "the Edison players did remarkably well, although to appreciate the pictures one must have seen the original play or read the story."[85] The average nickelodeon viewer did not have this special knowledge, however, and was at a loss to understand the narrative.
While the moving picture world increasingly avoided relying on an audience's prior knowledge of the story, Porter continued to depend on it. Such reliance was fatal, however, in two respects. First, since only a limited number of stories had wide circulation in American popular culture, it limited available narratives unacceptably. There were just not enough stories to go around. Second, the craze or hit on which a story was based often had a more limited audience than the film that emulated it. Narrow, specialized audiences for such films were undesirable and created problems for renters and exhibitors who served a mass audience. Porter and his contemporaries continued to use simple stories and variations on a single gag as the basis for their film narratives, but these were also incapable of providing an overall solution to the problem. As a group, these films were too lacking in diversity and too limited in the kinds of subject matter they could portray.
As the rate of production increased in 1907-8, the only way to achieve product diversity was through the use of more complex, unfamiliar narratives. As this happened, audiences often found it difficult to follow what they saw on the screen. Variety remarked of one film:
This reel offends against the most important of the elements of motion photography—following it involves a decided mental strain. Moving picture subjects, we take it, should be selected first of all for their directness, simplicity and ease of adequate exposition. As little as possible should be left out to the unaided imagination of the spectator. The story, the whole story and nothing but the story should appear on the illuminated sheet. In this subject an effort has been made to tell a complicated and intricate allegory. . . . When it is all over the spectator asks himself what it is all about. That's enough to mark the best picture, mechanically, ever made a failure.[86]
In a fictitious exchange between two moviegoers, one declares, "I guess they have exhausted all of the old subjects and have nothing else to show us than pictures we cannot understand." Her friend agrees, "Yes, they are at the end of their rope."[87] These complaints were common. People "do not want to sit in a dark room, yawning and asking their neighbors, 'What do the pictures mean?'" Moving Picture World observed.[88] The problem of narrative clarity could be solved either (1) by producing self-sufficient work that could be understood without assistance from the exhibitor or the audience's special knowledge of the material, or (2) by facilitating audience understanding through a lecture or
behind-the-screen effects and dialogue. Porter's work was aligned with this second alternative.