Page "History of film" Paragraph 136

Like many other devices that were more fully developed in Europe during the next decade, what could be called the " atmospheric insert shot " made its first appearance in American films during the years before 1919.

This kind of shot is one in a scene which neither contains any of the characters in the story, nor is a Point of View shot seen by one of them.

An early example is in Maurice Tourneur's The Pride of the Clan ( 1917 ), in which there is a series of shots of waves beating on a rocky shore which are shown when the locale of the story, which is about the harsh lives of fisher folk, is being introduced.

Simpler and cruder examples from the same year occurs in William S. Hart ' sThe Narrow Trail, in which a single shot of the mouth of San Francisco Bay taken against the light ( the Golden Gate ) is preceded by a narrative title explaining its symbolic function in the story.

This film also contains a shot of wild hills and valleys cut in as one character comments that the country far from the city is so clean and pure.

By 1918 we can find a shot of the sky being used to reflect the mood of one of the characters without specific explanation in The Gun Woman ( Frank Borzage ), but it must be emphasized that these examples are very rare, and did not either then, or within the next several years, constitute regular practice in the American cinema.

The Tourneur example just mentioned also could stand as part of the beginning of the " montage sequence ".

Maurice Elvey's Nelson – England's Immortal Naval Hero ( 1919 ) has a symbolic sequence dissolving from a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II to a peacock, and then to a battleship.

The atmospheric Insert began its notable career in European art cinema in Marcel L ' Herbier ' sRose-France.

Here amongst the intentionally " poetic " uses of vignettes and filters and literary intertitles, a shot of the empty path once trod by the lovers is used to evoke the past.