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Cinema
I Introduction
History of Motion Pictures, historical development of the visual medium known as motion pictures, film, cinema, or the movies. This article covers the medium’s history as a technology, as a business, as an art form, and as a means of delivering entertainment and information to audiences in theaters and at home. It discusses major filmmakers and their films, principal fiction and nonfiction genres, and film industries in the United States and throughout the world. For more information on the technical aspects involved in creating a film, see Motion Picture.
II Origins
In the early 19th century scientists took note of a visual phenomenon: A sequence of individual still pictures, when set in motion, can give the illusion of movement. These scientists attributed this experience to what they called persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. The eye’s retention of a visual image, now known as positive afterimage, has long been considered a founding principle of motion pictures, even though its relationship to the perception of motion is still not well understood.
A Early Experiments
The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.
Inventors began to conceive of combining the principles of these moving-image devices with the photographic recording of actual movement soon after the development of still photography in the 1830s. The most famous experiment occurred in the 1870s in California, where railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a racetrack and spread threads across the track with a contact to each camera’s shutter. Moving along the track, the horse broke the threads and caused a sequence of photographs to be taken. The photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground, and Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope.Muybridge’s endeavors stimulated French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to devise equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. He built what he called a chronophotographic camera that could take multiple images superimposed on one another. His work was aided in turn by developments in photographic materials. In 1885 American inventor George Eastman introduced sensitized paper roll “film” in place of the individual glass plates then in use. In 1889 Eastman replaced the paper roll with celluloid, a synthetic plastic material coated with a gelatin emulsion.
B Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson
Legendary American inventor Thomas Alva Edison drew upon the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman when he turned his attention to motion pictures in the late 1880s. In his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison assigned to a British employee, William K. L. Dickson, the task of constructing a machine for recording actual movement on film and another machine for viewing the resulting images. By 1891 Dickson had produced a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, dubbed the Kinetoscope.
The Kinetograph was operated by an electric motor that moved the celluloid film roll past the camera lens. Motor-driven cameras, which were bulky and stationary, were soon replaced by movable hand-cranked cameras. Dickson’s key contribution was a sprocket mechanism linked to the camera’s shutter, which momentarily stopped the film roll for each exposure. These separate still photographic images came to be called frames. Early cameras used a number of different speeds for exposing frames, but by the advent of sound film in the late 1920s the standard had become 24 frames per second.
In early 1893 Edison constructed a motion-picture studio on his laboratory grounds, dubbed the Black Maria by his staff who thought it resembled police patrol wagons known by that nickname. On May 9, 1893, he held the first public exhibition of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. But only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope. This boxlike structure contained a motor-and-shutter mechanism similar to the camera’s. It ran a loop of positive film past an electric light source, illuminating a tiny image, which the viewer observed through a small window. Kinetoscope viewing parlors containing many machines for individual viewing began to open in cities in 1894. Edison and Dickson apparently gave little thought to a single machine that could project moving images to a large audience, something Reynaud had achieved in his Théâtre Optique. Reynaud, however, had displayed drawings rather than images photographed by a motion-picture camera.
C The Lumière Brothers
In France, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who ran a factory in Lyons that manufactured photographic equipment, sought to improve on Edison’s accomplishment. By 1895 they developed a lightweight, hand-held camera that used a claw mechanism to advance the film roll. They named it the Cinématographe, and they soon discovered that it could also be used to show large images on a screen, when linked with projecting equipment. Throughout 1895 they shot films and projected them for select groups. Their first screening for the general public was held in Paris in December 1895.
Elsewhere other inventors were also busy. In Germany, the brothers Emil and Max Skladanowsky devised an apparatus and projected films in Berlin in November 1895. In Britain, a machine developed by Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul was used to project films in London in January 1896. In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope was constructed around the same time by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat then entered into a commercial alliance with Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, and the device exhibited projected motion pictures in New York City in April 1896.
The Lumière brothers held a unique place among all these simultaneous efforts, since they were innovative filmmakers as well as inventors and manufacturers. The many films they made during 1895 and 1896, though very short, are considered pivotal in the history of motion pictures. Arroseur et arrosé (Waterer and Watered, 1896), a brief comedy drawn from a newspaper cartoon, shows a gardener getting drenched with a hose as the result of a boy’s prank. La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, 1895) and Arrivée d’un train en gare (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896), which shows a train coming to a station and passengers getting off, were among the so-called actuality films—films that depicted actual events rather than a story told by actors—for which the Lumières became noted.
III One-Reelers
During the decade following the advent of projected motion pictures, films were shown as part of vaudeville or variety programs, at carnivals and fairgrounds, in lecture halls and churches, and gradually in spaces converted for the exclusive exhibition of movies. Most films ran no longer than 10 to 12 minutes, which reflected the amount of film that could be wound on a standard reel for projection (hence the term one-reelers). Many were comedies or actualities, following the Lumière brothers’ example. Their purpose was spectacle—to show something astounding, unusual, titillating, or perhaps newsworthy. But filmmakers also struck out in new directions, especially toward fantasy and narrative.French magician and filmmaker was the outstanding creator of fantasy films in early cinema. Méliès exploited the new medium to enhance his magic acts through techniques such as stop-motion photography—interrupting the camera’s action and moving or substituting people and objects—so that, for example, a woman appeared to turn into a skeleton. He created elaborate backdrops with multiple scenes and costume changes for these so-called trick films that were widely emulated by other filmmakers. Of the hundreds of works he made between 1896 and 1912, perhaps the best-known is Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), which in one scene features the animated human face of the moon being struck in the eye by a rocket.
In the United States, a former projectionist and traveling exhibitor, , took charge of motion-picture production at Edison’s company in 1901 and began making longer films that told a story. As with Méliès’s films, these required multiple shots that could be edited into a narrative sequence. Porter’s most notable film—and the most famous work of early cinema—was The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is credited with establishing movies as a commercial entertainment medium. With its rapid shifts of location, including action on a moving train, this film offered spectators a breadth and immediacy of vision that became hallmarks of the cinema experience.
Spurred by The Great Train Robbery and subsequent story films, film exhibition greatly expanded in the United States around 1905. One phenomenon was the proliferation of nickelodeon theaters, converted storefronts in industrial cities that charged 5 cents for admission and attracted working-class audiences. Demand from these theaters increased the volume of film production and the profits for producers, but it also brought forth criticism from reformers concerning unsanitary or unsafe conditions in theaters and immoral subject matter in films. In 1908 Edison took the lead in establishing the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a consortium of producers with common goals: controlling production and distribution so as to eliminate cheap theaters, raising admission prices, cooperating with censorship bodies, and preventing film stock from getting into the hands of nonmember producers. However, the independent producers excluded from the MPPC continued to obtain materials and make the most popular films. They also led the way toward multireel, feature-length films. By 1915 the MPPC was under attack by the U.S. government as an illegal monopoly (although an ineffectual one), and the independents were combining into the companies that would dominate American filmmaking for decades to come.
IV Silent Movies
With a few experimental exceptions, motion pictures from their earliest days until the late 1920s lacked synchronous sound (sound that matches the action). But silent movies were rarely silent. Early films almost always were projected with piano or organ accompaniment, and sometimes also with a narrator or live actors behind the screen. As feature-length films (four reels, with a running time of 40 to 50 minutes or more) became the norm in the 1910s, live orchestras began to play in larger theaters, frequently using music written specifically for the film.
Until World War I (1914-1918) European filmmakers dominated the world film market. France was considered the leading film-producing country, though Italy, Denmark, and other countries also played a significant role. However, the war, fought on European soil, disrupted commercial filmmaking there. With a sudden drop in European film exports, some regions, such as Latin America, experienced a brief surge in film production. But U.S. companies soon took over markets overseas, using the same tactics of high-volume production and lower prices that the Europeans had. By the 1920s some three-quarters of films screened around the world came from the United States.
A American Silent Movies
Even before the war, the United States had made its mark on the world filmmaking scene with epics and comedies. Moreover, U.S. moviemakers had begun to congregate in southern California in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood (see The Move to Hollywood, below), creating a film community apart from older urban centers of politics and the arts, and a magical new symbol for popular entertainment and glamour.
A D. W. Griffith
The work of D. W. Griffith exemplifies the transformation of motion pictures from the early days of one-reelers to an era of Hollywood’s worldwide dominance. Starting out as an actor in films directed by Edwin S. Porter, Griffith in 1908 became a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. He was initially responsible for turning out two one-reel films a week, and between 1908 and 1913 he directed nearly 500 films. Amidst this breakneck schedule, he and his coworkers developed many of the cinema’s basic storytelling conventions: moving the camera close to the action, using many separate shots, and editing the shots to cut back and forth among different actions. All these techniques served to shape a narrative, rather than present a spectacle as earlier films had tended to do. Griffith also nurtured performers such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish and emphasized an intimate, restrained style of acting suitable for camera close-ups.
Leaving Biograph in 1913 to make full-length features, Griffith planned a historical epic of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Birth of a Nation (1915), three hours in length, stunned audiences with its dazzling spectacle of a still-recent event and established motion pictures as an art form for cultured spectators. Yet the film’s racist presumptions—specifically, its defense of white supremacy to protect racial purity—was controversial in its own time and remains repugnant decades later. Griffith made another epic, Intolerance (1916), which intertwined four stories about victims of prejudice, and continued to work as an independent filmmaker into the 1920s. Eventually, financial pressures forced him to become a director at a Hollywood studio, and he made his last film in 1931.
A The Move to Hollywood
The towering sets for scenes of ancient Babylon that Griffith built for Intolerance in an open Hollywood field became early landmarks of the new southern California movie community. Around 1910 Griffith and other East Coast filmmakers began to spend winters in California, and soon a number of film companies worked there year-round. Besides congenial weather, the locale offered varied terrains for filming: beaches, nearby mountains and deserts, and plenty of inexpensive land for building studio lots. A skilled workforce was available, and at lower wages than in other parts of the country. With no established older arts, in contrast to New York City and European film centers such as Paris, France; Berlin, Germany; and Rome, Italy; Hollywood became a movie “colony,” with a lifestyle that emphasized leisure, sports, and the outdoors.
Hollywood’s development also marked the triumph of independent producers over the attempted monopoly by the Eastern-based MPPC. While the latter’s producers had tried to limit production and film length, the independents moved into feature-length filmmaking and built up a star system to publicize their works. Among the independents, Universal Pictures set up its own incorporated town in the San Fernando Valley, north of Hollywood, called Universal City. Paramount Pictures and the Fox Film Corporation also emerged as prominent independent companies in the World War I era. These firms developed the Hollywood studio system in which a small group controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. The studio system would eventually be challenged as another kind of movie monopoly.
A Silent Comedies
Despite the stylistic innovations by Griffith and others, which made narrative dramatic films more prevalent, comedy remained a staple of silent cinema. After the trick films and risqué comedies of the early years, a new comic style called slapstick emerged in one-reelers. This boisterous, physical comedy was named for the stick wielded by clowns in Punch-and-Judy puppet shows. Mack Sennett, who had worked as an actor and comedy director with Griffith, formed a new company, Keystone, in 1912 that played an important role in developing slapstick comedy. Keystone, home of the hapless Keystone Kops, employed a host of comic talents, the most notable of whom was English actor Charlie Chaplin.
At Keystone, Chaplin developed his signature tramp character. He soon went on to direct, produce, write, and star in his own independent productions. By the World War I era, such classic short comedies as Easy Street (1917) and The Immigrant (1917) had brought him international fame greater than that of any other movie performer. Chaplin’s poignant but indomitable tramp created universal comedy that was firmly rooted in common life. In the 1920s Chaplin began making feature-length comedies, including The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925).Two other performers in feature comedies during the 1920s, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, created more contemporary comic personas, young men coping with the mysteries of modern life. Keaton’s stone-faced character mastered machinery and his environment, most memorably in (1927), in which he gains control of a runaway railway engine. Lloyd portrayed an ambitious youth whose efforts to rise in life take physical form in Safety Last (1923), when his character climbs the side of a tall building, hanging precariously from flagpoles and ledges.
B European Silent Movies
After World War I circumstances of filmmaking in Europe greatly changed. American films by then predominated in a number of European countries, as well as elsewhere in the world. The once-powerful Italian and Danish film industries declined, while filmmakers in Germany and the newly founded Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came to prominence. France, though no longer dominant, remained a center for theorizing about cinema and producing innovative and experimental works.
B Germany
Throughout the 1920s Germany had the strongest film industry in Europe, even as American films made inroads there and Hollywood lured top talent. Although Germany produced commercial films strictly for entertainment, filmmaking in the country emphasized cinema as an art form, with particular attention paid to visual atmosphere, conveyed through cinematography (motion-picture photography), lighting, and set design. Because Germany was perceived as the aggressor in World War I, its films had to be particularly striking to overcome hostility in export markets. Expressionism, an artistic movement that used deliberate distortion to express emotion, influenced some notable postwar features, in particular director Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (, 1919) with its contorted abstract sets and narrative of a sleepwalking murderer who is controlled by a mysterious doctor.
Germany’s leading filmmakers during the 1920s included Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst. Lang’s films emphasized extraordinary visions of the material world in mythology, contemporary life, and the future. His most famous silent film was Metropolis (1927), a stunning depiction of a futuristic city with railway bridges running between upper stories of skyscrapers, while workers toil at huge machines underground. Murnau made works of deep psychological complexity, including the classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922) and Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), which visualizes the thoughts of an aging doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant. Pabst, known as a realist filmmaker, directed American actress Louise Brooks as Lulu in the sexual tragedy Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1928).
B Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
In Russia the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917 was followed later that year by the Bolshevik Revolution, which established a communist regime that eventually took the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the wake of these events, a young generation of filmmakers was eager to establish a new film art based on the revolution’s ideals. The state-controlled Soviet silent cinema became for a time a remarkable combination of politics and avant-garde aesthetics, until its experimental spirit was stifled by shifts in political ideology. Shaped by heated internal debates, the works of filmmakers such as and Dziga Vertov continue to pose challenging questions about the relationship of politics and art.
Eisenstein was an important theorist as well as filmmaker. His essays on montage (the French term for film editing) explored the way individual film shots can be juxtaposed and linked to create meaning and to elicit an emotional response from spectators. He put these theories into practice in such films as Stachka (Strike, 1924), Bronenosets Potemkin (Potemkin, 1925), and Oktyabr (, 1928, also known as Ten Days That Shook the World). Perhaps the most famous montage assemblage in film history is the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin, with approximately 155 separate shots in 4 minutes and 20 seconds of screen time depicting a massacre of civilians by soldiers.
Vertov (the professional name of Denis A. Kaufman) was an advocate of documentaries over fictional narratives. He too emphasized montage and the importance of the film editor in organizing and shaping the raw material of film footage. He directed, edited, and produced a newsreel series, Kino-Pravda (Cine-Truth, 1922-1925), and made documentary features, including Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929).
B France
In terms of commercial filmmaking, France’s film industry—the world’s strongest before World War I—occupied a struggling, marginal role after the war. Yet no other country had so firm a commitment to the medium as an art form or so rich a culture of journals and clubs devoted to criticizing and viewing innovative film work. In this atmosphere film took on a unique significance in intellectual life and among the other arts.
French film theorists coined such terms as photogenie and cinegraphie to express their views that cinema must emphasize images and their flow, rather than conventions used in the theater to convey dramatic action. They put their ideas into action in mostly short films, of which perhaps the most noted in critical writings has been La souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1923), by female filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac.
The artistic movement called surrealism, which incorporated bizarre images and saw itself as an assault on everyday reality, also brought new concepts to filmmaking. Entr’acte (1924), directed by René Clair, used early cinema’s techniques of trick photography in the service of avant-garde art. Visual artists created films by animating designs and objects—painter Fernand Léger made Le ballet mécanique (1924) and Marcel Duchamp made Anémic Cinema (Anemic Cinema, 1926). A filmmaker who brought experimental ambitions to commercial feature efforts was Abel Gance, whose Napoléon (1927) was a five-hour film showing images in different combinations on three side-by-side screens.
Filmmakers from other countries also made important works in France. Carl-Theodor Dreyer of Denmark directed La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), considered a classic for its unprecedented attention to psychological realism. Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made a surrealist film, Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), which became famous for its unusual and disturbing imagery.
C The Mature Silent Film
By the mid-1920s the United States had the largest film industry and American films dominated the international market. Germany and Japan also had substantial industries, although Japanese films were produced primarily for domestic consumption. Many nations sought to foster film production as a matter of importance to national culture, sometimes by placing quotas on film imports. Meanwhile, film became an international medium, with filmmakers creating works outside their homeland, as did Dreyer and Buñuel, or emigrating to take up their careers elsewhere. Germany’s Murnau, for example, moved to Hollywood and made one of the era’s most critically acclaimed American films, Sunrise (1927).
The consequences for society of this proliferating new medium were much debated. Movie stars such as Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino were seen by millions and their glamour and sophistication had unprecedented impact on popular styles and behavior. Through the movies stories of sophisticated living and scenes of large-scale criminal activity were brought to rural areas and small towns as never before. Censorship bodies tried to control the influence of films by editing them before exhibition, or by proposing rules and standards for producers to follow.
As Hollywood and film industries elsewhere produced hundreds of films each year, certain standardized forms took precedence over individual creative inspiration. Movies adopted categories, known as genres, from earlier arts and popular entertainment. These included comedy, the Western, mystery, horror, romance, melodrama, and the war story. Within these genres were many variations and combinations, for example, the comedy-drama. Their hallmark was familiarity: Makers and spectators alike understood a genre’s conventions of story, character, setting, and costume.
D The Silent Documentary
Films of current events, which had been prominent in the early days of cinema, receded in importance as narrative fiction became the dominant mode of commercial filmmaking in the 1910s and 1920s. They were gradually replaced by the newsreel, a compilation of short news and feature clips that became a standard part of movie theater programs. Nonfiction films, known as documentaries, were largely confined to educational use, or were made for propaganda purposes in wartime.
Meanwhile, filmmakers continued to explore the world, recording people and places unknown to most spectators. One such figure was American Robert Flaherty, a miner and prospector in northern Canada who shot footage of Inuit people to preserve images of a vanishing way of life, though he created controversy by sometimes staging “traditional customs” that were by then obsolete. Flaherty made a feature documentary, (1922), that was released commercially and became the greatest popular and critical success of any nonfiction film since the days of actualities. A Hollywood studio sent him to the South Pacific islands of Samoa for his second feature documentary, Moana (1926). Americans Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, who later became famous as creators of the fictional King Kong, launched their careers with Chang (1927), a spectacular travel documentary set in Siam (now Thailand).
European experimental filmmakers also became interested in nonfiction film as a way of interpreting modern life. Their works have been called city symphonies, a name taken from a German documentary made by Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927), which traces a day of urban activity. In the USSR Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera was another such city symphony, about Moscow. In France, Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman (Vertov’s brother) made A propos de Nice (On the Subject of Nice, 1930).
V Sound Films
The advent of recorded sound in the late 1920s changed motion pictures forever. Years of experimentation resulted in two different recording systems: sound on disc, modeled on the phonograph, and sound on film, which involved recording a soundtrack directly onto the celluloid strip. At the same time, engineers achieved an effective amplification system for theaters by drawing on the new technology behind radio. First demonstrated in 1926, recorded sound was in almost universal use by 1930. By 1930 the sound-on-film method had become standard because of problems with the discs.
A Early Talkies
The first years of recorded sound forced a retreat from the sophisticated style of late silent cinema. Camera movement was curtailed because sound cameras had to be enclosed in stationary boxes so the noise of their motors would not be recorded. Actors’ movements were similarly contained because they could not stray too far from microphones strategically hidden on the set. In addition, there was the question of whether silent stars’ voices would be suitable for talkies. In Hollywood, a new wave of stage performers was brought out from Broadway.
These initial impediments were quickly overcome through technological innovations. To restore their mobility, cameras were covered with sound-insulating materials and mounted on dollies with rubber tires. Microphones were hung from long arms, called booms, and dangled over the action out of camera range, which reanimated the performers. As early as Applause (1929), American director Rouben Mamoulian demonstrated a rich variety of new aesthetic possibilities with recorded sound. Mamoulian overlapped sound from different sources, used sound to signal a scene change, and shifted sound emphasis within a scene. The impressionistic effects he sought contrasted with the industry’s efforts to develop a natural or realistic standard for film sound.
B Gangster and Musical Films
Two new genres that flourished with the coming of sound were gangster films and musicals. The gangster genre drew on public concern with crime as well as the notoriety of famous criminal gang leaders. Much of the crime arose from illegal activities during the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, when the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages were outlawed in the United States. Early sound gangster films played up violence among ethnic urban gangs. Little Caesar (1930) made actor Edward G. Robinson a star in the role of Italian American Rico Bandello, and actor James Cagney won fame portraying Irish American Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931).
Musical films seemed a logical outcome of recorded sound, drawing on Broadway stage formats. But the genre gained wide popular appeal only after Warner Bros. released a series of musicals that broke with stage conventions, filming large groups of dancers from multiple viewpoints to create unique cinematic spectacles. These included 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (all 1933), all choreographed by American Busby Berkeley. Another type of movie musical featured individual performers, in particular the dance team of and Ginger Rogers in such films as Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936).
C Horror Films
An older genre that gained new energy with the coming of sound was the horror film. The heavy voice of Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi gave new thrills to audiences in the vampire film Dracula (1931), directed by American Tod Browning. In Frankenstein (1931), directed by British-born filmmaker James Whale, British-born actor Boris Karloff created a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the lumbering monster brought to life by an ambitious scientist. Based on 19th-century novels, these two works (themselves remakes of silent films) became classics that directors have continued to remake, with numerous variations.
D The Studio System and Star Vehicles
The advent of sound launched a round of mergers in the American motion-picture industry, reshaping the Hollywood studio system. Five large companies—Fox (later Twentieth-Century Fox), Loew’s Incorporated (later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount, RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), and Warner Bros.—functioned as producers, distributors, and exhibitors, exerting a level of control that the U.S. government challenged successfully in 1948 as constituting a monopoly and thus illegal. Universal, Columbia, and United Artists were also important but exerted less control since they did not own theaters. Studios employed directors and performers under long-term contracts, and they developed a star system as a means of promoting and selling films. So-called star vehicles were crafted to display the particular appeal of the studios’ most popular stars.Sound made more imperative the desire of many religious groups and social reformers to control motion-picture content. While state and local censorship bodies existed, outside pressures led the movie companies to establish a Production Code in 1930, and to strengthen its enforcement by adding a Production Code Administration in 1934. This body monitored scripts and finished films and eliminated dialogue, scenes, or story lines that violated the code’s regulations concerning the depiction of sex, crime, drug use, and other behavior. The code remained in effect until the mid-1960s.
E Developments in Europe
Inventors in Europe also developed recorded sound systems during the 1920s. In 1930 an international conference of patent holders came to general agreement so that legal disputes would not hinder the transformation to sound. The principal European film industries, along with Hollywood, shifted over to sound production in the late 1920s.
E Britain
British film hoped to gain from its strong theatrical tradition with the coming of sound. Producer-director made an international impact with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), starring Charles Laughton. Alfred Hitchcock directed popular thrillers and espionage films such as The 39 Steps (1935). During the 1930s Britain also developed a significant government-sponsored documentary film practice under the leadership of John Grierson. Directors Michael Powell (see ), David Lean, and Carol Reed made important narrative films in the World War II period (1939-1945), while war-related documentaries were produced by filmmakers such as Humphrey Jennings.
E France
A distinctive style of filmmaking called poetic realism emerged in France during the 1930s. This stressed the aesthetic dimension beyond the realities of everyday life, in which ordinary people struggled with fate and social circumstances. Leading directors of the movement included Jean Vigo with L’atalante (1934) and Marcel Carné with such works as Le jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939). The most versatile and prolific French director of the era was Jean Renoir, whose best-known works from the period are Le grande illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937) and La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939).
E Germany
In Germany, Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst, leading directors of the silent period, made innovative early sound films—Lang with M (1931) and Pabst with Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931). But the art film movement of the 1920s came to an end when the National Socialist (Nazi) party led by Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933. Many filmmakers fled Germany out of opposition to the Nazis or from fear of persecution. After the Nazis took control of the film industry, they began making propaganda films. Actor and director Leni Riefenstahl made films that glorified the Nazi party. But soon Nazi propagandists decided that their ideology could be more effectively conveyed in entertainment form, and they produced many comedies and dramas.
E Soviet Union
The coming of sound also coincided with political changes in the USSR that ended artistic experimentation in cinema. The government put forth a new doctrine called socialist realism that required simplified styles and stories that served as propaganda vehicles for government policies. Such filmmakers as Sergey Eisenstein were unable to release completed films. Though the atmosphere of repression continued, growing tensions between the USSR and Nazi Germany gave Eisenstein the chance to make Alexandr Nevskii (Alexander Nevsky, 1938), a historical epic set in the 13th century in which Russians repel an invasion by German knights.
F The American Documentary
As in Britain, a documentary film movement developed in the United States during the 1930s, with important works produced both by independent filmmakers and by the federal government. In 1935 Time magazine launched a monthly documentary film series, The March of Time, that ran until 1951. For the Department of Agriculture, former journalist Pare Lorentz made two films dealing with Depression-era farming and environmental issues, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). During World War II Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, and other Hollywood directors joined the armed forces and made war-related documentaries. Capra supervised the Why We Fight series (1942-1945), seven films that sought to explain the war’s background and the reasons for U.S. involvement, and Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945) depicted the grim consequences of warfare in the Italian campaign.
G Animated Film
Film animation gained in popularity with the coming of sound. Through most of its history, this form of filmmaking has involved recording a series of drawings or manipulating inanimate objects, one frame at a time. When projected, the sequence of frames takes on the illusion of motion. (In the 1990s the use of computer graphics in creating animated images became more frequent; see Computer Animation.) Walt Disney made the first animated cartoon with synchronized sound, (1928), which was the third film to feature the popular Mickey Mouse character. Disney also pioneered the use of color animation, producing the short Flowers and Trees (1932), the first film released in the three-color Technicolor process. He began making feature-length animated films in color with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
H Orson Welles
In 1939 Orson Welles, a 24-year-old prodigy, arrived in Hollywood following a spectacular career in theater and radio to produce, direct, cowrite, and star in (1941), by critical consensus the most significant commercial American film ever made. Welles’s film explored the life of fictional media baron Charles Foster Kane, modeled on publisher William Randolph Hearst, through multiple viewpoints that probed the mystery of the man’s dying word, Rosebud. The film’s originality resulted from unusual techniques, concentrated and combined in nearly every scene: maintaining deep focus (in which all objects in the sets, both near to and far from the camera, are in focus), utilizing low and high camera angles and long takes (periods of uninterrupted filming), and using sound and lighting as editing devices. Welles went on to a long career as an actor and filmmaker, although none of his later accomplishments attained the status of his first film.
VI The Development of Color Films
From the early days of cinema, the films we think of as silent and black-and-white were screened not only with live musical accompaniment but in many cases in color. This was initially accomplished by laboriously hand-tinting individual frames. Later, tinting machines were developed, which involved bathing black-and-white positive film in a dye, producing a single overall color effect for a sequence. As early as 1908 a process called Kinemacolor used green and red filters both in photographing and in projecting black-and-white film to create an effective appearance of natural color.
In the 1920s efforts turned to recording color on the film negative so that filters or special projection equipment would not be needed. The process, known as Technicolor, at first utilized two color negatives that were pasted together in a positive print. Later, a dye transfer system enabled the two negatives to be printed as a single positive film. The first feature-length all-Technicolor film appeared in 1922. Two-color Technicolor remained in use until around 1930, often for special sequences within black-and-white films. During the 1930s a further improvement, three-color Technicolor, was first utilized by Walt Disney in animated films; Becky Sharp (1935), directed by Rouben Mamoulian of the United States, was the first feature-length film to use this process.
Color was used in only a minority of films until the 1950s, when Hollywood turned more frequently to color in an effort to differentiate movies from the increasingly popular medium of television, then available only in black-and-white. Further simplification and improvements in color technology meant that color movies had become the standard and black-and-white the exception by the 1960s in the United States, and shortly thereafter in most other countries.
VII Films After World War II
Although American movies reached the peak of their popularity in the United States in 1946, changed circumstances soon brought difficulties that were to shape the next quarter century of motion-picture history. Shortly after World War II, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Hollywood studio system—in which major companies controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films—constituted a monopoly in violation of antitrust laws and ordered the studios to give up ownership of theaters.
At the same time, committees in the Congress of the United States began investigating alleged “infiltration” of the motion-picture industry by members of the American Communist Party, who were accused of being disloyal to the United States and under the control of the Soviet Union. Movie companies fired or refused to hire writers, directors, actors, and others who had been accused, in an atmosphere of political repression that has come to be known as McCarthyism, after U.S. senator , who repeatedly accused numerous government officials of taking part in Communist activity. This era of so-called blacklisting brought further turmoil to the film industry (see Blacklist).
But the advent of television caused the greatest disruption. Although motion-picture attendance had begun to decline before television became widely available, the rapid spread of home television sets in the 1950s was accompanied by a steady decline in moviegoing, until movie attendance leveled off in the 1960s at about one-fourth the total prior to 1946. In an effort to combat television’s appeal, movie companies adopted new technologies—wide-screen and three-dimensional processes—that offered a more spectacular screen image. These technologies briefly stemmed attendance loss following their introduction in 1953 and 1954, but they could not halt the longer-term transformation of the entertainment industry. Three-dimensionality, or 3-D, involved the recording of multiple images through filters that direct light and required viewers to wear specially designed spectacles to observe the three-dimensional effects. In 1953 and 1954 perhaps three dozen 3-D films were released by Hollywood studios, featuring effects that “come off the screen right at you,” according to studio publicity. But the popularity of this gimmick soon waned, and it was quickly dropped.
Wide-screen processes did bring about a fundamental change in the size and aspect ratio (relation of height to width) of the motion-picture screen image. CinemaScope, introduced with (1953), and the most widely utilized process at first, required a camera lens that compressed a wide image onto standard 35mm film and a projector lens that decompressed the image, making it as much as twice as wide as standard screen images. In the 1960s Panavision, which could be used with or without special lenses, became the standard wide-screen process.
Although the U.S. film industry remained dominant in the world arena, Hollywood’s difficulties occurred as other film cultures began to recover from World War II and make their own international impact through innovations in artistry and subject matter. What follows is a survey of the most important of these developments in the era after 1945.
A The Italian Cinema and Neorealism
The first important postwar film movement came from Italy, and was called neorealism. The term was originally coined to link trends in Italian filmmaking with French poetic realism of the 1930s. Whatever its roots, neorealism took shape in an Italy recently liberated from fascism and hoping for a more democratic society. It was committed to rendering social actuality as art, outside the conventions of the accepted entertainment genres.
The leading directors of neorealism were Roberto Rossellini, whose Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946) helped to launch the movement, and , who collaborated with scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini on Sciuscia (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), and Umberto D. (1952). These directors shot their films on location—in city streets and other authentic settings, rather than on studio lots—and they used postsynchronized sound (dubbing of dialogue in the studio after filming) to enable a more fluid camera movement amid realistic settings.
Director made what is often considered the first neorealist film, Ossessione (Obsession, 1942), during the war years, and created a film about a Sicilian fishing village, La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), using actual fishermen and their families instead of actors. Director Federico Fellini got his start in the neorealist movement as a scriptwriter on Rome, Open City and Paisan, but as a director in the 1950s and later his works emphasized comedy and a spiritual dimension.
Although it won worldwide acclaim, neorealism was controversial within Italy for its critical views of contemporary society. A 1949 law permitted the government to withhold production loans and export licenses from films deemed to have “slandered Italy.” Nevertheless, neorealism’s impact was lasting. Filmmakers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America saw neorealism as an alternative model to Hollywood’s dream factory and an example of how to make inexpensive films about their own country and people. Emerging directors from India to Cuba credited neorealism as the inspiration for their filmmaking.
B French Film and the New Wave
During the 1950s another new movement took form in France under the guidance of young film critics. These critics complained of what they saw as the highly literary style of French films, which (in their view) regarded the scriptwriter as more important than the director. They wrote articles praising Hollywood directors such as Alfred Hitchcock as the true “authors” of their films because they controlled the visual image, and they proclaimed a “politique des auteurs” (literally meaning “author policy,” but usually referred to as auteur theory). Their emphasis on the director has had a lasting influence on the writing of film history and criticism.
In the late 1950s a number of these critics directed their first feature films, which reflected their theories developed earlier in the decade, and collectively became known as the French nouvelle vague (new wave). The leading figures included François Truffaut, whose first feature was Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), and Jean-Luc Godard, with his first feature, À bout de souffle (1959; Breathless, 1961). Godard’s film challenged narrative conventions by utilizing jump cuts, in which gaps in time break the continuity of a scene. Such innovations signaled a desire among new wave filmmakers to reconceptualize cinema, while at the same time they paid homage to Hollywood and were deeply immersed in popular culture. Other French critics who became directors include , , and Claude Chabrol, and other new wave filmmakers include Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy, and Agnes Varda.
The French new wave revitalized the role of France as a leader in world cinema culture, and strengthened the link between cinema’s aspirations to artistry and its popular appeal. Coming just before the turbulent decade of the 1960s, it inspired young filmmakers everywhere, and “new waves” followed in such c
C Ingmar Bergman
In addition to Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, the 1950s were marked by the emergence of an international art cinema, emphasizing the achievements of individual filmmakers. Among the leading figures of the international movement was Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman’s film career, which began in 1946, covers half a century, with his most admired and influential work produced in the 1950s.
Bergman’s filmmaking vision was strikingly displayed in two films released in 1957, Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) and Smultronstallet (). These films concern large philosophical and religious themes: God’s presence in the world, life’s absurdities, and the loneliness and coldness of death. The Seventh Seal is set in the Middle Ages and features a symbolic chess match between a knight and a figure representing death. Wild Strawberries follows an elderly professor of medicine as he reflects on and dreams about his past life, presented in flashbacks, while traveling to receive an honorary degree.
D Luis Buñuel
Another prominent figure of the international art cinema was the Spaniard , though his name was not new on the world stage. Buñuel had become famous in avant-garde circles with Un chien Andalou (1929), a surrealist film made with Salvador Dalí, followed by a feature-length work in the same mode, L’age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930). In the 1930s he directed his only nonfiction film, a stinging report on an impoverished region of Spain, Las hurdes (Land Without Bread, produced 1932, released 1937).
Going into exile during the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930s, Buñuel spent almost a decade in the United States without making a film before resuming his career in Mexico in 1946. His Mexican film (The Young and the Damned, 1950) won festival prizes and returned him to international prominence. This was a film about impoverished street youths, yet Buñuel insisted it was not a work of realism, and it utilized dreams, visions, and representations of states of consciousness to augment his psychological portrait of the characters.In the 1960s Buñuel returned to Europe and made films for the next two decades, primarily in France. These late works continue his surrealist project with a lighter and more satirical touch, though not without moments of cruelty and absurdity. Prominent among these films are Belle de jour (1967) and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972).
E New German Cinema
Germany was divided after World War II into a Soviet zone of occupation (which became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany) and an allied zone (which became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany). Each followed separate filmmaking policies until the country was reunited in 1990. For some years after the war neither cinema made much of an impression on the international scene. But this began to change in the 1960s in West Germany when a group of young filmmakers sought to create das neue Kino (the new cinema), akin to the new waves springing up elsewhere at that time.
The leading figures in a loosely connected West German movement that became known as New German Cinema included , Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. The most prolific and controversial among the West German directors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made nearly 40 films over a 13-year career before his death in 1982. Fassbinder’s early works concerned power and desire in sexual relationships. In his later films, such as Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978), he shifted the focus of his explorations of this theme to the period in West Germany following World War II.
History was a major subject of New German Cinema, as filmmakers carried out what some have called a “work of mourning” over the destructiveness of World War II and the burdens of German history, especially under the Nazis. Another significant aspect of the movement was the prominence of women filmmakers such as Helke Sander and Helma Sanders-Brahms, who approached history and contemporary life from a feminist viewpoint. A third theme was the dominance of American popular culture in postwar West Germany. In Wenders’s Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976) a character says that the Americans “have colonized our subconscious.”
F British and Irish Filmmaking
In the years immediately after World War II veteran directors such as Michael Powell, , and Carol Reed, as well as such newcomers as actor-director Laurence Olivier, contributed to an extraordinary period of creativity in British cinema that ended when Hollywood films again dominated British theaters in the late 1950s. British film in the 1950s was especially notable for exceptional comedies, such as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and (1955), produced at Ealing Studios. A number of leading filmmakers also worked in Hollywood or on international coproductions. Lean, for example, won Academy Awards for best picture and best director with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
In the British tradition of nonfiction filmmaking, a Free Cinema movement developed in the 1950s that revived documentaries about working-class life. This impulse toward social realism carried over into fiction films in the early 1960s in (1962), directed by Tony Richardson, and other films. Innovative documentary work came from filmmakers such as Peter Watkins, who made what he called “reconstructions” of historical events, past and future. His film The War Game (1965) concerned a possible nuclear attack on Britain and generated controversy for its graphic portrayal of a nuclear holocaust.
In later decades, social realism was carried forward by directors such as Mike Leigh and , who made films that realistically portrayed middle-class and lower-class life. British cinema also offered a rich variety of alternative works, including feminist films by directors such as Sally Potter, and films representing Britain’s black and gay cultures from filmmakers including Isaac Julien and . Irish cinema began to gain attention in works by such directors as Neil Jordan, whose (1992) was an international hit.
G Soviet Union
State control of filmmaking remained strong in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II years and continued until the breakup of the USSR in 1991. For several decades after 1945 few Soviet films circulated in Europe and the United States. Those that did tended to address such themes as the injustices or futility of war, as in Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying, 1957), a film about World War II directed by Mikhail Kalatozov.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, during a period of greater creative freedom in Soviet cultural life, several filmmakers emerged whose startling works were hailed as major achievements in world cinema, even as the filmmakers themselves faced persecution within their own country. Sergei Paradzhanov, from the Soviet republic of Georgia, made Teni zabytykh predkov (, 1964), a stylistic tour de force that was remarkable in its depiction of characters’ emotional states. Andrei Tarkovsky directed Andrey Rublyov (1966), (1972), and other mystical, highly symbolic works.
The period of glasnost (reform) in the 1980s led to the release of older films that the government had suppressed, as well as new films that dealt with the previously off-limits topics of politics and private life. With the end of the Soviet Union and its division into separate republics, some filmmakers began (as in Germany after World War II) to examine the burden of recent history.
ountries as Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Brazil.
H Eastern Europe
The countries of Eastern Europe that came under Soviet domination after 1945 followed Soviet practices of state control over cinema, until the political transformations that began in 1989. Nevertheless, film was an effective medium for gaining international cultural prestige, and many Eastern European countries strongly supported filmmaking and sought to circulate their films widely.
Poland was the first to make its mark internationally, with the films of Andrzej Wajda, including Pokolenie (A Generation, 1954), (1957), and Popió³ i diament (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958). The last film was a visual triumph of deep-focus and long-take cinematography. In the 1960s, a period of cinematic ferment everywhere, Czechoslovakia produced its own “new wave” with such films as Lasky jedne plavovlasky (Loves of a Blonde, 1965), directed by Miloš Forman; Ostre sledovane vlaky (Closely Watched Trains, 1966), directed by Jiøí Menzel; and Hori, ma panenko! (The Firemen’s Ball, 1967), directed by Forman. The Czech New Wave ended abruptly in 1968 when the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia to suppress political reforms.
In Yugoslavia (a country that broke up into separate republics in the 1990s) filmmaker gained prominence with films such as Covek nije tica (Man Is Not a Bird, 1966). The best-known filmmaker from Hungary was Miklós Jancsó, who made meticulously choreographed works in the form of folk ballets depicting historical events, such as Meg ker a nep (Red Psalm, 1971). The end of Soviet domination enabled other filmmakers to return to their homeland after exile abroad. Lucien Pintilie, for example, returned to Romania in the early 1990s and with French financing made Le chene (The Oak, 1992) and other films about the region’s recent history.
End of Part I
("History of Motion Pictures," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
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