1.10 – Now; blink
The "vignette" defined silent cinema—and then it faded away
In the sticky lexicon of film we continue to use the same word that we’ve always used to describe loosely circular images within films, particularly silent films. We call them “vignettes”.
The vignette is an “iris”; is a closing sphere; is a word that attaches to the eye, floats above the eye, describes the technical blinking of a cinema camera (which is also a type of eye). It does all these things.
I like to think of it as a telescope described as a telescope; a delimiting of space—its centre giving way to sharp-suddenly or fading-away black. It is often blurry. It might wobble.
The vignette draws attention to its centre and delimits its edge; quartering space as it does so. It’s an arrangement in which the periphery functions as its own border—losing saturation until it burns into total blackness. Vignettes might seem a little janky; even amateurish. It is a kind of blurring fall-off. Skid, skim, drop. It reminds us that there is a centre—a kind of geometry. Even Sjöström—who so often filled his shots from edge to edge—found cause to use them, eventually; when the mood was right. In The Phantom Carriage (1921)—let’s call it Körkarlen, its Swedish title—buttered its extremities with a wavering crust of black. It better suited the morbid, deathly tone of his New Year’s flash-backed Thanatos. Death was coming. Fate was looming. Life was being hemmed in.
Really, the vignette is a device that we most intimately associate with the early days of cinema. To use it today would feel anachronistic, a wilfully antiquated revival; like wearing a monocle or a bowtie. You might look down on it. Fusty.
But how does it happen? Easy. When the light of the lens doesn’t entirely cover the frame of the film. That’s one method. It’s about proximity. Because the lens is accidentally located too close; or because the filmmaker sought this effect. This is why it’s so ambivalent; because we can’t decide whether the vignette being shown to us was intended by accident or design. It’s not always obvious.
The other technique is that of the iris; where the camera operator closes the camera’s iris—the “lid” of the film’s “eye”—in order to create an inverted halo of bitter darkness around the image. No light gets in; we watch with tunnel vision.
Is it the same as a “circle”? I don’t think so. Not quite.
Some of the earliest film images were circular. You might think of Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s moving photo-images of Trafalgar Square. They were taken in 1890; several years before the Lumière brothers “invented” their cinema (I’ve written about this particular fallacy). David Goodman writes very well on it. He introduces Donisthorpe and W.K.L. Dickson and Charles Francis Jenkins; all of whom worked with intentionally circular projections—aping the format of Kodak’s 1888 circular “snapshot” picture format. They did it because it was popular.
Filmmakers learnt how to bathe the frame in sufficient light so as to fill the image to its edges; where the captured shot “bleeds” to its permitted maximum. It fills up like milk in a bowl. The vignette is destroyed. To bring it back, the filmmaker must manufacture it.
During the silent era, filmmakers used the vignette to draw attention to specific actions within their scenes; whether that was an actor—we might think of Jean Amsler’s distraught expression in Jacques Feyder’s Visages d’Enfants (1925)—or how it can isolate a gesture, an act, an event; as was used so effectively by D. W. Griffith in his gigantic Intolerance (1916): like the poised blades that will cut the rope leading to Robert Harron’s execution blade; when Mae Marsh so forlornly attends to a dead flower’s stem; or the voluptuous pale skin in the Babylonian harem. Here it was used intentionally; it was just one of the tricks of the filmmaker’s trade. Griffith used the vignette to pick out narratively significant actions in the pell-mell marbling of his scenes; there’s so much going on that he needs to nudge us, to draw our attention, to lure our eye: “hey, over here—look”. The vignette cuts away unnecessary “flesh”; it leaves that which is vital.
Robert Harron’s face is vital. He is tormented and wracked and shocked and alone. Griffith shows us his face, centres light on his face, tells him to look at us—and for us to look at him. Other scenes in the film are filled to their edges. In this instance, with Harron—“The Boy”—locked in his cell, standing trial for a crime he didn’t commit, trembling in the littleness of his prison—Griffith wanted us to focus only on the centre; and to feel the whole narrative weight of the film, and the promise of his reprieve, pushing toward this point. The vignette drew attention; it also heightened suspense.
Mirriam Cooper’s face is vital. The “Friendless One”. Her eye trembles on the edge of tears. Here, Griffith wants us to spend a moment with her; to drink in the weight of her terror after shooting down Walter Long, “The Musketeer”. Harron will stand trial—unfairly—in her place. The vignette eradicates the walls, the room, the people around her. Living inside her guilt, with the probability of Harron’s execution; she is entirely alone.1
The winking iris is different. It closes out a scene and transitions us into the next; it says, “this moment is over; but another one is coming”. This was before filmmakers had mastered the dissolve—one scene “melting” into another—and before they’d fully appreciated the cut. This took time; where hard, blunt cutting felt too abrupt, too violent. It was only later that people—mostly Russians—would begin to theorise the cut as a kind of punctum, a piece of grammar, a “part of speech”; and it would be many more years until yet other people—mostly French—would theorise the cut as a kind of “suture”, a psychoanalytic wound stabbed into the eye-genitalia-body of the film.
The vignette was a remnant of film’s attachment to theatre, to the camera lucida, to the pin-hole, to the obscura. In this it retains a kind of tricksy Vaudevillian ambiguity; a ruined part of the “old world” that persists into the terrain of the new.
F. W. Murnau would still be applying the device into 1924. In The Last Laugh, a soft vignetting—the work of cinematographer Karl Freund—draws our eyes and our focus. The heavy suitcase in a room’s corner; Janning’s despair, clasping gloved hand to face; rain slicking down into the Berlin streets; his heavy-but-glad departure from the hotel where he has laboured and struggled and won.
Murnau’s vignette—it’s very soft here, barely a gentle furze of trembling darkness—keeps our focus tightly kept on faces, on the Kammerspielfilm aura of effects, on the inner lives of the people we’re seeing on screen. When he preens his carefully kept head of hair and bushy beard in the mirror, we see his daughter cooking in the reflection. The vignette eclipses his line of sight, connecting Jannings and his Maly—soon to be married. Now he turns, fondly, affectionally; Murnau’s camera not losing focus on Maly’s patient work. The line of sight—though it’s been reversed; pushing back through us—remains fixed on his daughter. Jannings’ soft, out-of-focus head reminds of this; it’s a clever visual metaphor; saying, “you’re seeing what’s inside the old doorman’s head—the person he most cares about”. It’s literal, figurative, quiet; and Murnau does it all—this hazy piece of impressionistic perspectivalism—with a softened edge to the frame. Our eyes don’t flick left or right. We look ahead.
But the same focusing-looking-tightening of the vignette also works against the poor, forlorn, fatuous doorman. The vignette highlights his fall from grace, his demotion, the horrible secret of it that he carries with him. How shattered his pride is. When the rich guest jabs at his now shaggy, mortified body, demanding that Jannings clean his shoes, the camera looms down on him—his clothes scruffy and rumpled, no longer neat and puffed up. The vignette tightens Jannings’ sorrowful face, hides the detail of the rich man’s body—now we see only his hand jabbing and the bright lit tip of his pointed beard; so unlike the unkempt mass of Jannings’ own. Here, the vignette works both ways; building up and throwing down.
The vignette would hang around for a little longer yet, where the “weighty immobility” of the silent film—that’s Lotte Eisner’s figuration—would give way to an increasingly literal and dynamic form of narrative storytelling; and the vignette would seem too poetic, too old-fashioned, too heavy handed. It would fall and fade away; to be picked up only by a few latter-day experimenters nodding and winking their way at their cinematic heritage. Polanski, Kieslowski, in their own way, in their own time. But we still have a long way to go before we get to them.
David Goodman—quoting Mark Cousins—indicates that Griffith and G. W. Bitzer, his cinematographer, used a type of “lens hood” to achieve there very dramatic, tightly-screwed vignette effects.