There's an eye-popping shot in the DVD release print of Cecil B. DeMille's Old Wives for New (1918). In the second reel, Elliott Dexter is fishing a mountain stream. He casts his line, and there is a brief shot of the line fluttering in the water. You see each detail clearly, from the play of light on the water's surface, to Dexter's line and lure, to individual pebbles on the bottom of the stream. It might have been shot yesterday. Because DeMille vaulted many of his films, and because Eastman House followed up with preservation work, we have remarkable copies of many early DeMilles. This shot, with its shimmering details of a mountain stream, must look close to how the original audience saw it a century ago.

Silent film buffs know how rare it is to find visually sharp prints of any pre-1930 title. In the case of the earliest American features (1912-1919), it is no exaggeration saying that nearly every print is damaged. If you love these films, or are simply curious about them, you must tolerate the ravages of time and neglect. At a minimum, most prints have lost contrast. The image may be murky, and the beginnings and ends of reels may be bleached out. In the case of films that survived in only one copy, there are typically gaps in the footage where some projector of long ago ate a few inches of film. Streaks and scratches running through entire reels are also common in these films.

At the worst, where all but the true buffs drop out, the films are so damaged that in spots they are incomprehensible. Bleaching may have advanced to the stage where actors' faces are white blobs and intertitles are illegible. Heaven help you if an important letter arrives and is shown to the audience. In many, if not most of the old prints, there is nitrate decomposition, in the form of speckles, momentary blotches, or sometimes a roiling, melted blob filling the frame as if someone had lobbed paint balls at the screen.

Regardless of visual quality, many films of the teens are missing reels. Although a few film festivals will show incomplete features, because they attract the knowledgeable fans, incomplete films rarely leave the vaults.

Elliott Dexter’s fishing line is a reminder of how all these films once looked, and how much we have lost. The ground rule with films from Woodrow Wilson's era: expect damage. Expect gaps. After you are inured to the sorry physical condition of the films, you can experience the delights of the early features. Some of them are delightfully antique, and some put across their stories as forcefully as they did on their first release.

Early features show us camera work and editing in the formative stage. Film makers were discovering with each release how to use the filmed image to tell a story, and how to use composition and visual rhythm to hold an audience. The less intuitive directors trained a camera on their set and let the actors perform in extended medium shots (sometimes a long shot.) This nondirection can be seen in features as late as 1916-17. It probably results from the fact that we were a nation of theater goers, and the director presented the same image that one would have when attending a play, that is, all of the onstage characters and the full set. Extant features of 1912-13 are often shot this way.

A bewildering sight in many early features is that of actors talking, laughing, and gesturing for many feet of film without an intertitle advancing the story. This occurs often in society dramas. The problem was taken up by Variety's critic in a review of The Stolen Rembrandt (May 1914): 'The players were allowed to talk their heads off, literally. With only a caption here and there to guide the story along, the house never had an inkling of what they were saying. Film makers learned, after watching these dead patches, how to use editing and a good proportion of text and gesture to explain the characters' interactions and keep the story moving.

Intertitles of the teens have a special flavor. Illustrated title cards were common by the middle of the decade. They can be charming, but if the film has strong visual elements, the title art does not add much. By the mid-20s, most titles were text only.

In some of the earliest features, the intertitles identified the speaker, as if reprinting a script. Thus, in The Spoilers (April 1914), one title reads:

HELEN: 'And may God strike me dead if I ever stop hating you.'

Since this title is preceded by the hero, Glenister, stealing a kiss and receiving a slap, one assumes that everyone in the audience would know they were Helen's words. This style of title writing was quickly banished. Editors could remedy any ambiguity by cutting from an actor who had started to speak to the intertitles.

Throughout the teens, it was common to use short phrases in the exposition titles, as had been done in early one and two-reelers. Sometimes they were in passive form:

'Spurned by His Friends.'

'Lost to the Howling Winds.'

These intertitles scan like the captions of illustration and magazine fiction of the day, and would not have seemed awkward. Some intertitles sound like chapter titles from turn of the century pulp novels:

'A Deadly Web.'

'The Lurking Figure.'

A more fluent style of title writing prevailed by decade's end.

One can have great fun with the old florid subtitles. There is a hoary old melodrama called The Great White Trail (1917), which has turned up at several festivals as a guilty pleasure offering. It includes two scenes where an indignant white-haired gentleman cuts a miscreant down to size, sweeps his finger toward the door, and says, 'Go!' The second appearance of 'Go!' set off waves of giggling at the showing I attended.

We should not assume that earlier generations took the overblown titles seriously. Reviewing The Lights of New York (May 1916 -- not the Warner Brothers gangster film of 1928), Variety's critic made sport of the silly titles. Describing a cat thief, one read: 'And the wolf slinks like a dark shadow along the great gulches of the dark street.' Another title ran off the rails with rampant alliteration: 'Oh! The will of a woman is woeful when she knows not the wiles of the wicked.'

A more serious writing problem plagued the early features: loose plot structure, a deficiency in many films, which reflects the early days of film making. When films were one or two reels in length, they were produced off the cuff with a great deal of improvisation. D. W. Griffith was producing nine films a month in the 1908-1911 period at Biograph. Charlie Chaplin remembered the early days of his film career in My Autobiography (1964) with great affection. He wrote of taking a small crew to the park, where he and his co-stars, perhaps Minta Durfee or Mabel Normand, with Ford Sterling or Mack Swain as his nemesis, would improvise a story. Many early shorts were shot in two or three days.

Several phenomena led to the feature film. There were three-reel specials and later chapter plays or serials theaters could book individually or run together. The big budget European films of six or more reels that played in key American cities excited both audiences and film makers. By 1912, the fans had made stars of Mary Pickford, King Baggot, Florence Lawrence and others, and they wanted to see their favorites in vehicles that approximated the length of a stage play. Film makers began to produce anywhere from four to eight reels of story; by 1916, DeMille's Joan the Woman was out in ten reels and Griffith's Intolerance was shipped in fourteen reels. Early features, particularly comedies and action films, often have jerry-built plots, as if several shorter films have been spliced together (and sometimes, notably in Tom Mix releases, this is actually the case.) Episodes pile up without giving the story pace or shape. One watches Mabel Normand's Mickey (1918), which was a popular hit, with exasperation as it lurches from climax to climax in its final reels. Mickey is torn between two suitors, but we know from the start whom she picks, and the issue is cluttered with false endings, including a horse race thrown in to show Normand impersonating a jockey.

The False Faces (1919), an early Lone Wolf film, stars Henry B. Walthall as Michael Lanyard, the 'Lone Wolf,' and Lon Chaney as his mortal enemy. The film is a series of showdowns between the two, structured like a serial. As a seven-reel feature, it becomes repetitive. Walthall's ship is torpedoed, he is taken aboard a German sub, he sinks the sub, the story resumes in Manhattan...What is missing is the rising action of a well-knit scenario, in which episodes build in emphasis, or, as in the best scenarios, in which character determines action.

It took time for the studios to realize that there was a need for skilled scenarists. The early features were part of an auteur era, because directors often took the writing credits. 'Written by' or 'Adapted by' were vague credits, at that. Silent films scripts were often shooting schedules with descriptions of action and key camera set-ups. The final wording of interitles was done in post-production.

In a highly competitive market, the film makers got sophisticated in a hurry, as did fans and trade reporters. The industry noticed what the key players were doing, and in writing, that meant they noticed Griffith's literary touches and storytelling by suggestion, and Pickford's character-driven plots. They noticed when audiences jeered at hackneyed story devices. By 1917, Variety's reviewers were calling attention to the scenarist as a key figure in films. Three of the earliest scenarists to achieve name recognition among knowledgeable critics and fans were women: Jeanie McPherson, who began her long association with Cecil B. DeMille in 1915; Frances Marion, who wrote many of Pickford's hits; and Anita Loos, who wrote a string of popular comedies for Constance Talmadge and was still writing hit comedies in the 50's.

These changes played out in an uneven fashion. There are well-paced early features such as The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914), The Cheat (1915), and Hell's Hinges (1916), which display concise plotting in the genres of, respectively, fantasy, melodrama, and western. But one can find films from the end of the decade that are crawling with subplots and lack the most basic structure.

Acting styles show a similar evolution in the teens. Most early film actors had done stage work, and it took a skillful actor (or director) to realize that bold theatrical gestures would look overstated and even ridiculous when projected on a screen. The camera's intimacy called for a new style of acting, and in the span of 1910-1920, much of the grand manner came out of film acting.

Variety was pushing this line as early as 1914. Reviewing The Toll of Mammon (June 1914), Variety's critic complained about the players 'knowing more about posing than picture pantomime acting.' The same critic ('Sime'), reviewing Robert Edeson's work in The Call of the North (August 1914), wrote that 'he confused stage expression with picture expression now and then.' A year later, critic 'Mark' wrote, in a review of The Sporting Duchess (June 1915), 'There's a vast difference between putting over a line or 'bit' or stage business on the legitimate boards and in registering screen action.' Critic 'Jolo', in a review of The Better Woman (October 1915), remarked on Lowell Sherman's practice of 'evincing feeling with the aid of his nostrils, like a thoroughbred racehorse.' A year later, Jolo complained of actor E.H. Sothern's constant strutting in The Chattel (September 1916), adding, 'He is not yet camera-broken.' By 1919, flamboyant acting met with scathing ridicule. Variety's critic (no byline this time) vented at length on the acting in The Divorce Trap (May 1919): ' composes one of the funniest pictures on the screen this year. But it is not meant to be funny...to many, many people it is the sort of heavily spiced candy they cry for constantly.' He names five of the supporting players and comments: 'Such over-acting as theirs has not been seen since Owen Davis wrote melodramas for the Bowery.'

The reference to candy is a touchstone for silent film buffs, for even the florid, overwrought melodramas can be a treat. All of these films capture the cinema at a formative stage. They must be judged on the formal terms of conception and artistry, but also placed in historical context.

Recommended Viewing

D. W. Griffith is the giant figure in early American features. Whatever their status as flawed masterpieces, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) are musts for students of film. They are the Iliad and Odyssey of the teens. Griffith is unmistakably an artist, using every capacity of the early motion picture camera to tell a story. Broken Blossoms (1919) is a wonderful small-bore Griffith work, notable for its stylized sets and intimate photography of his favorite actress, Lillian Gish. All of Griffith's work is revealing. He was studied for his technique as he released these films, and they trace the history of cinema for us today.

After one has seen a good selection of Griffith films, there are the famous firsts among the features of the teens.

Earliest complete print of an American feature: Richard III (1912) is an ambitious production of Shakespeare's play, made by a professional acting troupe. There is very little camera movement, but there is double exposure work to show Richard's nightmare, a pan shot in the coronation scene, and several inserted close ups of letters and warrants. Also, there is a good economy of shots, with none held for long, dragging moments. Frederick Warde, as Richard, gives a real performance. You will not soon forget the way he dispatches Henry VI, running him through three times and skimming the blood off his sword with a finger.

Earliest comedy feature: Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), with the one-time-only teaming of Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Marie Dressler. This is very broad comedy; Dressler's temper fits are at the peak of her range. Her target is Chaplin, playing a fortune-hunting roue; Normand is the other woman. If you approach this expecting a brisk (73 minute) comedy burlesque with a game cast, you will be entertained.

First version of The Spoilers: The 1914 version has some draggy exposition, but there are good atmospherics when the action reaches the Yukon. The climactic fight between Glenister and McNamara ('I broke him with my bare hands!') was the highlight of the story, and in Hollywood's four remakes, the fight became wilder and more destructive, with heaps of broken furniture, lamps, and banisters. This earliest version is a letdown. It runs 1:45, takes place in one corner of a legal office, and the two men merely knock over a wood stove and a bookshelf. Perhaps their torn shirts and the stage blood on their faces were novelties to the original audience. (There is a thrilling scene a bit earlier, when the camera pans to show a series of explosions that wipe out the mine works.)

First vamp film: A Fool There Was (1915), with Theda Bara, may not actually be the first. George Eastman House is said to own a 1913 film with Alice Hollister as The Vampire. Bara's film certainly set off the vamp cycle. The story and acting are ridiculous, but that's really the point of seeing such films.

First Demille epic: In Joan the Woman (1916), with opera star Geraldine Farrar, we see the pattern for the DeMille historical epic: acres of scenery, thousands of extras, lumpy exposition and court intrigue offset by titanic battles and bold acting. This is crowd pleasing cinema. Wallace Reid co-stars as the love interest, although it is necessarily a chaste love. In editing and production values, this film compares well with DeMille's 20's epics.

First Tarzan film: Tarzan of the Apes (1918) makes for a jarring experience on first viewing. Tarzan (Elmo Lincoln) is described as middle-aged and chubby by some reviewers. I would agree to barrel-chested, and, if his published birth date is correct, he was 28 when this was made. More disturbing are the actors in the gorilla family who play his ape family. The scenario is truer to Edgar Rice Burrough's novel than most subsequent Tarzan films, and there is a long sequence in the early reels with Gordon Griffith playing Tarzan as a boy. This is a curious but watchable film covering Lord and Lady Greystoke, Tarzan's adoptive ape mother, his boyhood, his maturity, the arrival of Jane and her expedition, and a native uprising in an hour's run time.

Cecil B. DeMille's features of 1914-1919 display the technical and artistic developments of the period. Quite a few of them have seen DVD release, often in excellent print quality. Compare the static camera set-ups in his first film, The Squaw Man (1914), with the fluid editing of Carmen (1915) or Joan the Woman (1916) and you sense the vitality of the era. Film makers, fans, and trade writers were seeing the emergence of a powerful art form. DeMille's films in these years included westerns, comedies, spectacles, and melodrama. The Cheat (1915) is an outrageous society drama in which the villain (Sessue Hayakawa) literally brands his victim. The Whispering Chorus (1918) is a proto-noir in which an absconding embezzler changes identities, only to find himself accused of his own murder. Old Wives for New (1918), a melodrama, includes some satirical digs at long-married couples that presage DeMille's boudoir comedies of the early 20's.

Thirty-two of Mary Pickford's teens features exist; at least a dozen are available for viewing, most from the years 1917-1919. All of these films have the production values and plot construction that were important to Pickford. Above that, they have her spontaneous acting, which charms audiences today. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) gives her the range to play brattiness, which she pushed farther in 1918's M'Liss, in which she plays a rough backwoods girl who cusses and scoffs at religion in the intertitles. In the first version of the rags-to-riches romantic comedy Daddy Long Legs (1919), Pickford found a perfect vehicle and had huge box office success. Additional gems from her filmography: The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), which shows her uncanny ability, at age 23, to play children; Stella Maris (1918), with Pickford's dual role as the beautiful Stella and the deformed, abused Unity Blake, and Heart o' the Hills (1919), with John Gilbert, which features Mary as a gun-toting hillbilly girl.

Douglas Fairbanks' films of the teens were, with few exceptions, light-hearted adventures that showed off his athleticism and spoofed such trendy topics as vegetarian diets, hypnosis cures, and sensationalistic newspapers. They are a playful and scrappy run of pictures, always fun because Doug was so full of zest, but it is hard to pick a distinctive list. Also, sadly, few of his pre-1920 features exist in excellent quality. One startling sequence in When the Clouds Roll By (1919) deserves mention. Doug eats a heavy meal and suffers gastric pain. Cut to Doug's stomach. Actors playing an onion, a lobster, a welsh rarebit, and a slice of mince pie drop in and begin to cavort. Later, in Doug's nightmare, the food creatures chase him over a surreal landscape, including a gravity-free house in which Doug walks up the walls and across the ceiling while, through double exposure, the creatures remain on the floor, jumping up and down in frustration.

And there are many more. Do not miss a chance to see the era's other box office names : dashing Wallace Reid, beautiful and doomed Olive Thomas, Jack Pickford (especially in Tom Sawyer and In Wrong), William S. Hart (Hell's Hinges, The Narrow Trail, and many more),the Gish sisters, Fatty Arbuckle, Richard Barthemess, the Talmadges...

I believe there are buffs, like me, who want to see all the existing early features, the grand ones, the primitive ones, the compromised masterworks and the atrocious, kitschy antiques. There is no better way to catch a glimpse, the only glimpse we can have, of what those audiences saw a century ago when they were the first people to experience the thrill of the movies.