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ABSTRACT: Common contemporary usage of the term intertitle reflects a misunderstanding of the function of title cards up to the early 1910s. Unlike the later role of intertitles as captions placed in between shots within scenes, early title cards were headings, either serving as titles of individual films (and initially presented as lantern slides) or as subtitles naming component scenes within longer individual films like Edison's Uncle Tom's Cabin. This use underscored the systematic alternation of scene and title and the autonomy of the scene.
KEYWORDS: title, subtitle, intertitle, concatenation, early kinematography, Lumière Cinématographe, exhibitioners, editing, animated pictures, D. W. Griffith, E. S. Porter, censorship board
A slight terminological and hence methodological clarification to begin: film scholars still have difficulty agreeing how to name, generically, the sorts of written remarks, generally on a card, that are filmed and inserted into the continuity of the film strip. The term used is almost always abusive, if only partially, especially if one does not confine oneself to film in the 1910s and 1920s alone but includes early kinematography as well.
The most commonly used term would appear to be intertitle. Its use, however, presents two difficulties. The first has to do with the fact that we are using a term to describe a historical phenomenon that did not exist during the period we are observing. This is the same sort of telescoping that occurs when, for example, we think of Louis Lumière as a cineaste, using a term that was only proposed many years after Lumière had ceased working in film. According to Jean Giraud,1 the term cinéaste, in French, was suggested by Louis Delluc in the late 1910s, but took hold with great difficulty, and at a very late date, in the 1930s. A similar thing happened with the word intertitre, which was also a very late arrival. In French, the Robert dictionary traces the term back to 1955, a time when the silent film intertitle was no longer being produced-to a time, in short, when it had become something of a historical object.2
This historical lag between phenomenal reality and vocabulary is not just a minor difficulty. As long as the sign and its referent match, the abuse in question does not cause a problem....