Staging Methods, Cinematic Technique, and Spatial Politics

Abstract

Spatial Politics. Toward the middle of The Girl of the Golden West (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915), the Girl enters a restaurant, buys food, goes home and, with the help of her Indian maid, prepares to entertain Ramerrez, the outlaw whom she takes to be a gentleman. The film cuts between this narrative and various outdoor locations: Ramerrez's Mexican outlaws, the sheriff's men reaching the Girl's saloon, Ramerrez arriving at the Girl's cabin. Such crosscutting is not confusing or disruptive, but it is nonetheless obtrusive enough to be noticeable; and because the causality among the different locales remains obscure, there is no tension among them. Crosscutting here does not juxtapose, produce alterity, and encourage the spectator to draw a moral conclusion, as Griffith's Biograph films often did, but instead assembles different spaces and allows the spectator to travel leisurely among them.' And since the Girl is not confined to her domestic space but acts as a consumer, the film does not juxtapose outside and inside spaces, casting female domesticity against male outdoor heroism, but instead seems to combine domestic melodrama and western adventure without conflict. The lack of moral juxtaposition and conflict, indeed the relative lack of danger, all allow for a spectatorial mobility that may well be read in social terms. Crosscutting here enables a social space in which different genders, ethnicities, moral outlooks, ways of living can come together without impinging on each other. The spectator is free to engage in some or all of them, yet never has to feel threatened. Another reading would stress how this sequence epitomizes what we may call the fundamental contradiction of crosscutting: that it always seems to be in the service of narrative while simultaneously also defying it. David Bordwell has argued that crosscutting constitutes a discreet narration [that] oversees time, making it subordinate to causality, while the spectator follows the causal thread. Rick Altman, on the other hand, contends that crosscutting is a legacy from stage melodramas and defies classical narrative in that it produces episodic construction. Tom Gunning, who sees crosscutting as a crucial aesthetic component that helped stabilize the emerging film industry and woo a middle-class audience, asserts that crosscutting nonetheless moves both toward the invisible editing of