Author Tom Gunning, in his volume D.W. Griffith and the origins of Narrative Film, likens The Lonely Villa to "A Narrow Escape", only to descry D.W. Griffith's having developed its elementary techniques into a more narratively integrated work. "'A Narrow Escape' creates suspense through parallel editing, using the pattern to create an agonizing delay....which is a direct prefiguration of the narrator system." Gunning sees the techniques appearing in "The Lonely Villa" as only haing briefly appeared in "The Narrow Escape", included among those habing been a "three-pronged editing pattern" around which centered its principal characters. "Indebted although it may be, Griffith's film elaborates on the Pathe pattern through further articulation."
If within a cinema of attractions narrative exposition had previously used a discontinuous style, one of filming a single action within what was then an autonomous shot, it would acquire as form a continuous style; where there were to be juxtapositions within narrative from shot to shot, there would be decisions of editing used for the advancement of plot. Technique would become the ordering of images within an arrangement of shots that would bring seperate compositions into a relation with narrative-the film technique that would be later described by Christian Metz as consisting of syntagmatic categories, technique that would avail questioning whether a segment would be autonomous, chrological, linear, narrative or descriptive, chronological, linear, narrative or descriptive, continuous or whether it would be organized, was beginning to be decided. Metz in fact had viewed the narrative function in cinema as being what had brought about its development, it being more possible that the techniques developed by Ince and D. W. Griffith. Narrative would no longer need to be only linear in regard to its structure and the syntax of the film could include transitions between scenes: technique, in part could become the attraction. In fact, Roger Manvell quotes an author who credits Griffith with developing the "cinematic or conjunctive" method of narrative, where the tempo of "continuity movement" was accelerated.
John H. Fell, in his bolume A History of Films places himself in the historiography of film criticism by tracing an "evolution of narrative" cinema. He lists the film "The Hundred-to-One-Chance" (Vitagraph, 1906) as approaching instances of parallel editing by virtue of alternating shots between a racing car and the events transpiring at the finish line. In regard to technique he positions the cut-in as being in continuous time, but a cut to a closer angle as an insertion between to shots at the same camera distance, the parralel editing in the Vitagraph film too seemingly being in continuous time.
During 1908, The Pathe studio, Societe Pathe Freres, founded by Charles Pathe in 1896, performed a magic trick exactly opposite of the break from non-narrative by the cinema of attractions and the temporalities being adapted by narrative form; while George Melies continued toward his 1912 Conquest of the Pole", Pathe invented the newsreel that was to be shown with cartoons and short subjects. Newsreels went to London during 1910 under the name Pathe's Animated Gazette. The temporality created by Segundo de Chemon in the Pathe film "The House of Ghosts" would become friendly competition for the immediacy of royal coronations being filmed as they happened, a diegesis of reality. Screen time transpired just outside the theater based on an event, if not reverting to an earlier form of attraction. Perhaps at the core of the cinema of attractions are the actuality films of American Mutoscope and Biograph, despite Edison's choosing subjects which could be filmed theatrically indoors, including his film of Annie Oakley shooting.
Interestingly, inasmuchas a contemporary historiography directs itself to a transnational analysis, Arthur Knight, author of the volume The Livelist Art a half century ago wrote of a dynamic interaction within a cinema Towards and International Film. "There was no question of showing foreign movies in an "art house" in those days...Thus new developments in one country were soon seen and absorbed by filmmakers here, while our own pictures sent abroad in precisely the same way unquestionably influenced profoundly the European producers." Porter had incorporated the techniques of early trick photography into one reelers early in his career and inturn "The Great Train Robbery" had gained international acclaim, predating Cecil Hempworth's "Rescued by Rover" by two years. Knight credits Porter with having established the standard onscreen running time of the period and whether he is slightly exaggerating or not adds, "And it inspired other directors to join Porter in exploring the implications of his disjunctive style of editing and his juggling of time and space."
Crosscutting and D.W. Griffith Silent Film
