Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

The question thus becomes how, in effect, did we get from films made by Lumière and others (starting in 1895) to those by Griffith and others (around 1908): how, in the matter of twelve or fifteen years, did filmmakers and audiences move from cinematic narratives built on spatial coherence and temporal succession to something like the inverse--narratives that take for granted temporal ellipsis/simultaneity and spatial separation? As my discussion already has suggested, this question entails another: how do we talk about such a transformation without relying entirely on terms such as continuity and shot that inevitably rest on a teleological set of assumptions imposed after the fact? Insofar as these critical concepts effectively define for us what we already know cinema to be, they run the risk of preventing us from appreciating the complex formal and historical processes by which cinema became so transformed.

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If motion largely defines the distinctive logic of the medium, helping to distinguish moving pictures from other media, then moving pictures that make such movement their primary subject would seem to hold the key for understanding how viewers learned to negotiate the shift from showing to telling. The chase film, "probably the most successful narrative genre from late 1903 through 1906,"1 borrowed from vaudeville routines, popular stage shows, dime novels, and other forms of mass culture. Elements of chase appear in many other films of the period such as The Great Train Robbery(1903) and arguably appear much earlier in films such as Lumière's famous single shot prank L'Arroseur arrose (1895). But the cinematic chase reaches its purest fulfillment in a series of highly popular films, starting around 1903, that depict the activity of pursuit, almost always a group of people chasing after an individual. Certainly there are other sorts of complex multishot film narratives that emerged around the same time as chase movies. But in its self conscious emptying of content in order to foreground sheer motion, the cinematic chase reveals much about how film could function to sustain narrative.2

1. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Early American Cinema (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p.46.

2. Alfred Hitchcock deemed the chase "the final expression of the motion picture medium" (quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality [New York, 1960], p.42, 276).