The History of Film
The
history of film (known variously as
film, motion pictures or movies) began in the late 1890s, with the invention of the movie camera.
Motion pictures were initially exhibited as a carnival novelty and developed to one of the most important tools of
communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century and into the 21st century. Most films before 1930 were silent. Motion picture films have substantially affected the arts, technology, and politics.[citation needed]
The movie theatre was considered a cheaper, simpler way to provide
entertainment to the masses. Movies became the most popular visual art
form of the late Victorian age. It was simpler because of the fact that
before the cinema people would have to travel long distances to see
major dioramas or amusement parks. With the advent of the cinema this
changed. During the first decade of the cinema's existence, inventors
worked to improve the machines for making and showing films.
The silent era
Initially, there were technical difficulties in synchronizing images
with sound. It was clear that Edison originally intended to create a
sound film system, which would not gain worldwide recognition until the release of "
The Jazz Singer"
in 1927. However, there was still significant interest in motion
pictures for films to be produced without sound. This is referred to as
the silent era of film. However, to enhance the viewers' experience,
silent films were commonly accompanied by live musicians and sometimes
sound effects and even commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. In most countries,
intertitles
came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus
dispensing with narrators, but in Japanese cinema human narration
remained popular throughout the silent era. The technical problems were
resolved by 1923.
Illustrated songs were a notable exception to this trend that began in 1894 in
vaudeville houses and persisted as late as the late 1930s in film theaters. Live performance or sound recordings were paired with hand-colored glass
slides projected through
stereopticons
and similar devices. In this way, song narrative was illustrated
through a series of slides whose changes were simultaneous with the
narrative development. The main purpose of illustrated songs was to
encourage
sheet music
sales, and they were highly successful with sales reaching into the
millions for a single song. Later, with the birth of film, illustrated
songs were used as filler material preceding films and during
reel changes.
1895 to 1906
The first eleven years of motion pictures show the cinema moving from a
novelty to an established large-scale entertainment industry. The films
represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, completely made
by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long
consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in
something like industrial conditions.
Film business up to 1906
The first commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14, 1894 at Edison's
Kinetoscope peep-show parlor. The most successful motion picture company in the United States, with the largest production until 1900, was the
American Mutoscope company. This was initially set up to exploit peep-show type films using designs made by
W.K.L. Dickson
after he left the Edison company in 1895. His equipment used 70 mm.
wide film, and each frame was printed separately onto paper sheets for
insertion into their viewing machine, called the
Mutoscope. The image sheets stood out from the periphery of a rotating drum, and flipped into view in succession.
By 1896, it was clear that more money could be made by showing motion
picture films with a projector to a large audience than exhibiting them
in peep-show machines. The Edison company took up a projector developed
by Armat and Jenkins, the "Phantoscope", which was renamed the
Vitascope, and it joined various projecting machines made by other
people to show the 480 mm. width films being made by the Edison company
and others in France and the UK. Besides the Mutoscope, American
Mutoscope also made a projector called the Biograph, which could project
a continuous positive film print made from the same negatives.
From 1896 there was continuous litigation in the United States over
the patents covering the basic mechanisms that made motion pictures
possible.
Film business up to 1906
The first commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14, 1894 at Edison's
Kinetoscope peep-show parlor. The most successful motion picture company in the United States, with the largest production until 1900, was the
American Mutoscope company. This was initially set up to exploit peep-show type films using designs made by
W.K.L. Dickson
after he left the Edison company in 1895. His equipment used 70 mm.
wide film, and each frame was printed separately onto paper sheets for
insertion into their viewing machine, called the
Mutoscope. The image sheets stood out from the periphery of a rotating drum, and flipped into view in succession.
By 1896, it was clear that more money could be made by showing motion
picture films with a projector to a large audience than exhibiting them
in peep-show machines. The Edison company took up a projector developed
by Armat and Jenkins, the "Phantoscope", which was renamed the
Vitascope, and it joined various projecting machines made by other
people to show the 480 mm. width films being made by the Edison company
and others in France and the UK. Besides the Mutoscope, American
Mutoscope also made a projector called the Biograph, which could project
a continuous positive film print made from the same negatives.
From 1896 there was continuous litigation in the United States over
the patents covering the basic mechanisms that made motion pictures
possible.
Film production
Besides American Mutoscope, there were also numerous smaller
producers in the United States, and some of them established a long-term
presence in the new century.
American Vitagraph, one of these minor producers, built studios in Brooklyn, and expanded its operations in 1905.
In France, the
Lumière
company sent cameramen all round the world from 1896 onwards to shoot
films, which were exhibited locally by the cameramen, and then sent back
to the company factory in Lyon to make prints for sale to whoever
wanted them. There were nearly a thousand of these films made up to
1901, nearly all of them actualities.
By 1898
Georges Méliès
was the largest producer of fiction films in France, and from this
point onwards his output was almost entirely films featuring trick
effects, which were very successful in all markets. The special
popularity of his longer films, which were several minutes long from
1899 onwards (while most other films were still only a minute long), led
other makers to start producing longer films.
In 1900
Charles Pathé began film production under the Pathé-Frères brand, with
Ferdinand Zecca
hired to actually make the films. By 1905, Pathé was the largest film
company in the world, a position it retained until World War I.
Léon Gaumont began film production in 1896, with his production supervised by
Alice Guy.
In the UK,
Robert W. Paul,
James Williamson and
G.A. Smith and the other lesser producers were joined by
Cecil Hepworth in 1899, and in a few years he was turning out 100 films a year, with his company becoming the largest on the British scene.
1906 to 1914
1906 saw the production of an Australian film called
The Story of the Kelly Gang.
The film ran for more than an hour, and was the longest narrative film
yet seen in Australia, and the world. Its approximate reel length was
4,000 feet (1,200 m).
It was first shown in
Melbourne, Australia on 26 December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.
The film business
In 1907 there were about 4,000 small "nickelodeon" cinemas in the
United States. The films were shown with the accompaniment of music
provided by a pianist, though there could be more musicians. There were
also a very few larger cinemas in some of the biggest cities. Initially,
the majority of films in the programmes were
Pathé
films, but this changed fairly quickly as the American companies
cranked up production. The programme was made up of just a few films,
and the show lasted around 30 minutes. The reel of film, of maximum
length 1,000 feet (300 m), which usually contained one individual film,
became the standard unit of film production and exhibition in this
period. The programme was changed twice or more a week, but went up to
five changes of programme a week after a couple of years. In general,
cinemas were set up in the established entertainment districts of the
cities. In other countries of the Western world the film exhibition
situation was similar. With the change to "nickelodeon" exhibition there
was also a change, led by Pathé in 1907, from selling films outright to
renting them through film exchanges.
The litigation over patents between all the major American
film-making companies had continued, and at the end of 1908 they decided
to pool their patents and form a trust to use them to control the
American film business. The companies concerned were
Pathé,
Edison,
Biograph,
Vitagraph,
Lubin,
Selig,
Essanay,
Kalem, and the Kleine Optical Company, a major importer of European films. The
George Eastman company, the only manufacturer of film stock in the United States, was also part of the combine, which was called the
Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), and
Eastman Kodak
agreed to only supply the members with film stock. License fees for
distributing and projecting films were extracted from all distributors
and exhibitors. The producing companies that were part of the trust were
allocated production quotas (two reels, i.e. films, a week for the
biggest ones, one reel a week for the smaller), which were supposed to
be enough to fill the programmes of the licensed exhibitors. Vitagraph
and Edison already had multiple production units, and so had no
difficulty meeting their quota, but in 1908 Biograph lost their one
working director. They offered the job of making their films to
D. W. Griffith,
an unimportant actor and playwright, who took up the job, and found he
had a gift for it. Alone he made all the Biograph films from 1908 to
1910. This amounted to 30 minutes of screen time a week.
But the market was bigger than the Motion Picture Patents Company
members could supply. Although 6,000 exhibitors signed with the MPPC,
about 2,000 others did not. A minority of the exchanges (i.e.
distributors) stayed outside the MPPC, and in 1909 these independent
exchanges immediately began to fund new film producing companies. By
1911 there were enough independent and foreign films available to
programme all the shows of the independent exhibitors, and in 1912 the
independents had nearly half of the market. The MPPC had effectively
been defeated in its plan to control the whole United States market, and
the government
anti-trust action, which only now started against the MPPC, was not really necessary to defeat it.
Multi-reel films
It was around 1910 that the actors in American films, who up to this
point had been anonymous, began to receive screen credit, and the way to
the creation of film stars was opened. The appearance of films longer
than one reel also helped this process. Such films were extremely rare,
and almost entirely restricted to film versions of the life of Christ,
which had reached three reels in length in the first few years of
cinema. They were always shown as a special event in special venues, and
supported by live commentary and music. A unique addition to this style
of presentation was
The Story of the Kelly Gang,
made in Australia in 1906. This was a four-reel version of the career
of this famous (in Australia) outlaw, and was incomprehensible without
explanation. More multi-reel films were made in Europe than in the
United States after 1906, because the MPPC insisted on working on the
basis of one-reel films up until 1912. However, before this, some MPPC
members got around this restriction by occasionally making longer
stories in separate parts, and releasing them in successive weeks,
starting with Vitagraph's
The Life of Moses in five parts (and
five reels) at the end 1909. In other countries this film was shown
straight through as one picture, and it inspired the creation of other
multi-reel films in Europe.
Pathé-Frères set up a new
subsidiary company
in the United States called Eclectic in 1913, and in 1914 this began
production of features at the Pathé plant in New Jersey. The French
Éclair company was already making films in the United States, and their
production of features increased with the transfer of more film-makers
when the French industry was shut down at the beginning of World War I.
Up to 1913, most American film production was still carried out around New York, but because of the monopoly of
Thomas Edison's film patents, many filmmakers had moved to Southern California, hoping to escape the litany of lawsuits that the
Edison Company had been bringing to protect its monopoly. Once there in Southern California, the film industry grew continuously.
The move to filming in California had begun when Selig, one of the
MPPC companies, sent a production unit there in 1909. Other companies,
both independents and members of the MPPC, then sent units to work there
in the summer to take advantage of the sunshine and scenery. The latter
was important for the production of Westerns, which now formed a major
American film genre. The first cowboy star was
G.M. Anderson ("Broncho Billy"), directing his own Western dramas for Essanay, but in 1911
Tom Mix
brought the kind of costumes and stunt action used in live Wild West
shows to Selig film productions, and became the biggest cowboy star for
the next two decades.
Most of the major companies made films in all the genres, but some
had a special interest in certain kinds of films. Once Selig had taken
up production in California, they used the (fairly) wild animals from
the zoo that Colonel Selig had set up there in a series of exotic
adventures, with the actors being menaced or saved by the animals.
Essanay specialized in Westerns featuring "Broncho Billy" Anderson, and
Kalem sent
Sidney Olcott
off with a film crew and a troupe of actors to various places in
America and abroad to make film stories in the actual places they were
supposed to have happened. Kalem also pioneered the female action
heroine from 1912, with
Ruth Roland playing starring roles in their Westerns.
Minor curiosities were some of the films of
Solax
directed by Herbert Blaché and his wife Alice Guy. They left American
branch of the Gaumont company in 1912 to set up their own independent
company. The distinguishing feature of some of their films was a
deliberate attempt to use resolutely theatrical-type light comedy
playing that was directed towards the audience. This went against the
trend towards filmic restraint already visible in what were called
"polite" comedies from other film companies.
In France, Pathé retained its dominant position, followed still by
Gaumont, and then other new companies that appeared to cater to the film
boom. A film company with a different approach was Film d'Art. This was
set up at the beginning of 1908 to make films of a serious artistic
nature. Their declared programme was to make films using only the best
dramatists, artists and actors. The first of these was
L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (
The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), a historical subject set in the court of
Henri III. This film used leading actors from the
Comédie-Française, and had a special accompanying score written by
Camille Saint-Saëns.
The other French majors followed suit, and this wave gave rise to the
English-language description of films with artistic pretensions aimed at
a sophisticated audience as
"art films".
By 1910, the French film companies were starting to make films as long
as two, or even three reels, though most were still one reel long. This
trend was followed in Italy, Denmark, and Sweden.
Although the British industry continued to expand after its brilliant
beginning, the new companies that replaced the first innovative
film-makers proved unable to preserve their drive and originality.
New film producing countries
With the worldwide film boom, yet more countries now joined Britain,
France, and the United States in serious film production. In Italy,
production was spread over several centres, with Turin being the first
and biggest. There, Ambrosio was the first company in the field in 1905,
and remained the largest in the country through this period. Its most
substantial rival was Cines in Rome, which started producing in 1906.
The great strength of the Italian industry was historical epics, with
large casts and massive scenery. As early as 1911,
Giovanni Pastrone's two-reel
la Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) made a big impression worldwide, and it was followed by even bigger spectacles like
Quo Vadis? (1912), which ran for 90 minutes, and Pastrone's
Cabiria of 1914, which ran for two and a half hours.
La Caduta di Troia (The Siege of Troy) (1911)
Italian companies also had a strong line in slapstick comedy, with
actors like André Deed, known locally as "Cretinetti", and elsewhere as
"Foolshead" and "Gribouille", achieving worldwide fame with his almost
surrealistic gags.
The most important film-producing country in Northern Europe up until the First World War was Denmark. The
Nordisk
company was set up there in 1906 by Ole Olsen, a fairground showman,
and after a brief period imitating the successes of French and British
film-makers, in 1907 he produced 67 films, most directed by Viggo
Larsen, with sensational subjects like
Den hvide Slavinde (The White Slave),
Isbjørnenjagt (Polar Bear Hunt) and
Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt). By 1910 new smaller Danish companies began joining the business, and besides making more films about the
white slave trade, they contributed other new subjects. The most important of these finds was
Asta Nielsen in
Afgrunden (The Abyss), directed by
Urban Gad
for Kosmorama, This combined the circus, sex, jealousy and murder, all
put over with great conviction, and pushed the other Danish film-makers
further in this direction. By 1912 the Danish film companies were
multiplying rapidly.
The
Swedish film industry
was smaller and slower to get started than the Danish industry. Here,
the important man was Charles Magnusson, a newsreel cameraman for the
Svenskabiografteatern cinema chain. He started fiction film production
for them in 1909, directing a number of the films himself. Production
increased in 1912, when the company engaged
Victor Sjöström and
Mauritz Stiller
as directors. They started out by imitating the subjects favoured by
the Danish film industry, but by 1913 they were producing their own
strikingly original work, which sold very well.
Russia began its film industry in 1908 with Pathé shooting some
fiction subjects there, and then the creation of real Russian film
companies by
Aleksandr Drankov and
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. The Khanzhonkov company quickly became much the largest Russian film company, and remained so until 1918.
In Germany,
Oskar Messter
had been involved in film-making from 1896, but did not make a
significant number of films per year till 1910. When the worldwide film
boom started, he, and the few other people in the German film business,
continued to sell prints of their own films outright, which put them at a
disadvantage. It was only when Paul Davidson, the owner of a chain of
cinemas, brought Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad to Germany from Denmark in
1911, and set up a production company, Projektions-AG "Union" (PAGU),
for them, that a change-over to renting prints began. Messter replied
with a series of longer films starring Henny Porten, but although these
did well in the German-speaking world, they were not particularly
successful internationally, unlike the Asta Nielsen films. Another of
the growing German film producers just before World War I was the German
branch of the French Éclair company, Deutsche Éclair. This was
expropriated by the German government, and turned into DECLA when the
war started. But altogether, German producers only had a minor part of
the German market in 1914.
Overall, from about 1910, American films had the largest share of the
market in all European countries except France, and even in France, the
American films had just pushed the local production out of first place
on the eve of World War I. So even if the war had not happened, American
films may have become dominant worldwide. Although the war made things
much worse for European producers, the technical qualities of American
films made them increasingly attractive to audiences everywhere.
Film technique
With the increased production required by the nickelodeon boom, extra
artificial lighting was used more and more in the film studios to
supplement diffuse sunlight, and so increase the hours that film could
be shot during the day. The main sources used were modified
arc lights
made for street lighting. These were either hung on battens suspended
forward of the actors from the roof, or mounted in groups on
floorstands. The addition of a metal reflector round the arc source
directed a very broad sweep of light in the desired direction. Large
mercury vapour tube lights (Cooper-Hewitts) were also used in racks
placed in the same way. Arc lights had been used to produce special
lighting effects in films like the light from a lamp or firelight before
1906, but this now became more common.
Low key lighting for sinister effect in
The Mystery of Temple Court
A strong expressive use of a fire effect occurs in
D. W. Griffith's A Drunkard's Reformation
(1909). Here, the reformed drunkard is happily reunited with his family
before the fire in the hearth, in a set-up reproducing that at the
beginning of the film in which the fire is out, and the hearth is cold,
and the family is destitute.
Low-key lighting (i.e. lighting in which most of the frame is dark) slowly began to be used for sinister scenes, but not in
D. W. Griffith films. Vitagraph's thriller,
The Mystery of Temple Court (1910) has low-key lighting for a scene of murder, and their
Conscience (1912) shows low-key lighting done solely with artificial light for a scene of terror.
Nero lit by arc floodlights from below in
Quo Vadis?
This sort of lighting was appearing occasionally in European films by
1911, and in some cases was pushed much further. Lighting from a low
angle was used more strongly in the Italian epic film
Quo Vadis? in 1912, and then in the famous
Cabiria (1914) to reinforce the weird atmosphere in one scene.
Silhouette effects in location scenes began to appear in 1909 in both
the United States and Italy; though as things developed, European
film-makers made more use of this than the Americans did.
The most important aspect of this was that such shots involved having
the sun light the scene from behind, and this approach was extended by
using the reflected sunlight from a white surface below the camera to
light up the shadow on the actors faces from the front. This is the one
novel technique that D. W. Griffith and his cameraman
Billy Bitzer
may really have invented. The next step was to transfer this kind of
back-lighting onto the lighting of actors on studio sets. Up to this
point artificial lighting in studio scenes had always been put on from
the front or side-front, but in 1912 there began to be a few cases where
light was put onto the actors from arc floodlights out of shot behind
them and to one side, to give a kind of backlighting. It was not until
1915 that the effect of backlighting of the actors by the sun was fully
mimicked in studio lighting, by using a powerful arc spotlight shining
from above and behind the set down onto the actors. This slowly became a
standard component of the studio lighting of figures in American films,
but it took much longer to catch on with European cameramen.
Animation develops
The technique of single frame animation was further developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in
The Teddy Bears and by J. Stuart Blackton with
Work Made Easy.
In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on
their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform
construction tasks without human intervention, by using frame-by-frame
animation. The technique got to Europe almost immediately, and Segundo
de Chomon and others at Pathé took it further, adding
clay animation, in which sculptures were deformed from one thing into another thing frame by frame in
Sculpture moderne (1908), and then Pathé made the next step to the animation of silhouette shapes. Also in France,
Émile Cohl fully developed drawn animation in a series of films starting with
Fantasmagorie
(1908), in which humans and objects drawn as outline figures went
though a series of remarkable interactions and transformations. In the
United States the response was from the famous strip
cartoon artist Winsor McCay,
who drew much more realistic animated figures going through smoother,
more naturalistic motion in a series of films starting with the film
Little Nemo, made for Vitagraph in 1911. In the next few years various others took part in this development of
animated cartoons in the United States and elsewhere.
Cross-cutting between parallel actions
As the film boom got under way, the Pathéa film-makers continued to
refine the continuity of action from shot to shot in their films. In
films like Pathéa's
le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907), there appeared a new feature, which can be called
cross-cutting between parallel actions.
In this film, a delivery man is going about his lady's house inside an
apartment house while his horse steals a big meal from a bag of oats
outside a feed store. The film cuts back and forwards between the two
chains of action four times before the delivery man comes out, and the
horse runs away with him. More importantly, early next year the Pathé
production unit down in the south of France in Nice made
le Médecin du chateau (The Physician of the Castle),
in which there are cuts back and forth between criminals threatening a
doctor's wife and child, while the doctor himself drives home to rescue
them after being warned by telephone. This film also contains a cut in
to a closer shot of the doctor as he hears the dreadful news on the
telephone, which uses the new idea of getting in closer to the actor to
accentuate the emotion.
In the United States, Vitagraph was also trying cross-cutting for suspense in 1907 and 1908 with
The Mill Girl and
Get Me a Stepladder. Before
D. W. Griffith
started directing at Biograph in May 1908, he had seen the two Pathé
films just mentioned, and a number of Vitagraph films as well. But
Griffith's first use of cross-cutting in
The Fatal Hour, made in
July 1908, has a much stronger suspense story served by this
construction than those in the earlier Pathé examples. From this point
onwards Griffith certainly developed the device much further, gradually
increasing the number of alternations between two, and later three, sets
of parallel scenes, and also their speed. This intensified usage was
only slowly taken up by other American film-makers. So although he did
not invent the technique of cross-cutting, he did consciously develop it
into a powerful method of film construction. It is also important to
note that Griffith described cross-cutting indiscriminately as the
‘switch-back’ or ‘cut-back’ or ‘flash-back’ technique, and that by the
last of these terms he did not mean what we now understand by a
‘flash-back’. The true ‘flash-back’ was also developed in this period,
but not at all by D. W. Griffith.
Although D. W. Griffith did not invent any new film techniques, he
was the best film director working up to 1913, and this was because he
made better dramatic and artistic use of the medium than other
directors. One aspect of this was the structure he gave his films, with
the final scene mirroring the opening scene, as in the example of
A Drunkard's Reformation already mentioned above. Many other examples of this like
The Country Doctor
(1908) can easily be found in his work. But the most important thing
Griffith did was work out significant and expressive natural gestures in
intensive rehearsal periods with his actors, before the film was shot,
such as the enraged and jealous husband in
The Voice of the Child
(1911) walking around his office chomping on a cigar and puffing clouds
of smoke out of it through clenched teeth. Griffith's increased use of
cross-cutting between parallel actions helped him to get more shots into
his films than other directors, but he also had another method for
doing this. This was to split a scene that could have been played in
room (or other place), into two or more sections that moved backwards
and forwards between adjoining rooms or spaces. The result of this was
that D. W. Griffith's films had at least twice as many shots in them as
did those of other American directors. Over this period, the other
directors speeded up, but so did Griffith. At first, the technique of
cutting in to a closer shot of an actor in a scene made no contribution
to the increase in cutting rate, because it was still very rarely done,
despite having been established as a possibility in the previous period.
The exception to this was a close shot of an object, which was
sometimes used to make clear exactly what a person was doing. It was
only towards 1913 that film-makers began to cut into closer shots with
any regularity.
However, American film-makers did get closer to the actors
on the average
by shooting the whole scene with the camera closer than previously. The
Vitagraph company led the way here, by using what they called "the
nine-foot line" from 1910 onwards. This meant that the actors played a
scene up to a line marked on the ground nine feet from the camera lens,
which meant that they were shown cut off at the waist in the image.
Some, but not all, American film-makers followed their example, calling
it the "American foreground", while European film-makers stayed with the
"French foreground" established by the Pathé about 1907, which only cut
the actors off at the shins. This corresponded to the actors playing up
to a line put down 4 metres in front of the camera lens.
Point of view shots
An even more important development was the use of the
Point of View shot.
Previously, these had only been used to convey the idea of what someone
in the film was seeing through a telescope (or other aperture), and
this was indicated by having a black circular mask or vignette within
the film frame. The true Point of View (POV) shot, in which a shot of
someone looking at something is followed by a cut to a shot taken from
their position without any mask, took longer to appear. In 1910, in
Vitagraph's
Back to Nature we see a Long Shot of people looking
down over the rail of a ship taken from below, followed by a shot of the
lifeboat they are looking at taken from their position.
A pair of reverse angles representing the POV of the people on the ship, and what they see in
Back to Nature (1910).
However, the Vitagraph film-makers continued to be a little uneasy
with the device, as a true POV shot is introduced by an explanatory
intertitle, "What they saw in the house across the court" in Larry
Trimble's
Jean and the Waif, made at the end of 1910. But a few months later, Trimble made
Jean Rescues, another of the popular series starring the fictional exploits of his
Border Collie,
which has Point of View [POV] shots introduced at an appropriate point
without explanation. After this, un-vignetted POV shots began to appear
fairly frequently in Vitagraph films, and also occasionally in films
from other American companies. However, D. W. Griffith only used them in
a theatrical situation, to show what the audience in a theatre were
looking at, as did European film-makers.
Reverse-angle cutting
Close in reverse angle shots of two people in confrontation in
The Loafer.
Another important development was in the use of reverse angle shots;
that is, continuing a scene with a cut to a shot of the action taken
from the opposite direction. There were isolated examples of this very
early, and the first of these, Williamson's
Attack on a China Mission (1900) has already been mentioned. But in 1908, starting with
l'Assassinat du duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise),
there began to be other films in which a scene was shown from another
direction by cutting to the opposite side. This effect was imitated
occasionally in Europe and the United States over the next couple of
years, and came to be called a "reverse scene".
The next step, in which two actors facing each other are shown in
successive close shots from taken opposite directions towards each of
them, is first to be seen at the end of 1911 in
The Loafer, made
by Arthur Mackley for Essanay. This is what is called reverse-angle
shot|reverse-angle cutting, and it is used constantly in present day
film-making. However, it took some years to catch on with other American
film-makers, but by 1913, it was starting to occur with greater
frequency in the work of a few directors. This happened entirely when
they were filming exterior scenes, where there was no problem about
shooting past the edge of the studio set. A leading example of this use
of close in reverse-angle cutting is
His Last Fight (1913),
directed by Ralph Ince for Vitagraph, in which one-third of the cuts are
between a shot and the reverse angle. However, this sort of thing never
happened in D. W. Griffith's films, or in European films.
Symbolism and insert shots
In this period the word "Art" was mentioned more and more in
connection with motion pictures, and as a result of the increasing
artistic ambitions of film-makers, poems began to be transposed directly
into films.
D. W. Griffith went further than this, by creating the visual equivalent of the poetic or musical refrain in
The Way of the World (1910), by cutting in shots of
church bells
at intervals down the length of the film. However, this was an
exceptional case, and it is not until 1912 that there were the first
signs of the special expressive use of
Insert Shots; that is, shots of objects rather than people. In the Italian Ambrosio companies film
La mala planta (The Evil Plant), directed by
Mario Caserini,
which involves a case of poisoning, there is an Insert shot of a snake
slithering over the ‘Evil Plant’. Another of the still very rare
examples at this date is in Griffith's
The Massacre, which was
made at the end of 1912. This includes an Insert Shot of a candle at a
sick man's bedside guttering out to indicate his death. Yet another is
in the Ambrosio company version of
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (
The Last Days of Pompeii)
(1913). This film includes a scene, preceded by the title "The thorns
of jealousy", in which a rejected woman overhears the man she loves with
another woman, and this is followed by a fade to a shot of a pair of
doves, which then dissolves into a shot of a bird of prey.
It was in 1914 that D. W. Griffith began to bend the use of the
Insert towards truly dramatically expressive ends, but he had not done
this often, and it is really only with his
The Avenging Conscience
of 1914 that a new phase in the use of the Insert Shot starts. In this
film the intertitle "The birth of the evil thought" precedes a series of
three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an
insect, though at a later point in the film, when he prepares to kill
someone, these shots are cut straight in without explanation. As well as
the symbolic inserts already mentioned,
The Avenging Conscience
also made extensive use of large numbers of Big Close Up shots of
clutching hands and tapping feet as a means of emphasizing those parts
of the body as indicators of psychological tension. Griffith never went
so far in this direction again, but his use of the Insert shot made its
real impression on other American film-makers during the years
1915-1919.
Film art
A scene in
les Debuts de Max Linder au cinematographe (1910) showing a Pathé film crew at work.
The vast increase in film production after 1906 inevitably brought
specialist writers into film-making as part of the increasing
sub-division of labour, but even so the film companies still had to buy
stories from outsiders to get enough material for their productions.
This introduced a greater variety into the types of story used in films.
The use of more complex stories derived from literary and stage works
of the recent past also contributed to developments in script film
construction. The general American tendency was to simplify the plots
borrowed from novels and plays so that they could be dealt with in one
reel and with the minimum of titling and the maximum of straightforward
narrative continuity, but there were exceptions to this. In these cases
the information that was difficult to film and lacking in strong
dramatic interest was put into narrative titles before each scene, and
this was also mostly the custom in European films of the more seriously
intended kind. Motion pictures were classified into
genres
by the film industry following the divisions already established in
other media, particularly the stage. The main division was into comedy
and drama, but these categories were further subdivided. Comedy could be
either slapstick (usually referred to as "burlesque farce"), or
alternatively "polite comedy", which later came to be referred to as
"domestic comedy" or "sophisticated comedy". D. W. Griffith made a small
number of the latter type of film in his first two years at Biograph,
but had little interest or aptitude for the genre. From 1910 he let
Frank Powell,
and then Mack Sennett direct the Biograph comedies. Sennett left in
1912 to set up the Keystone company, where he could give his enthusiasm
for the slapstick comedy style derived from the earlier Pathé comedies
like
le Cheval emballé (
The Runaway Horse) full rein. In Europe the more restrained type of comedy was developed in substantial quantities in France, with the films of
Max Linder for Pathé representing the summit of the genre from 1910 onwards. Linder's comedy was set in an
upper middle-class
milieu, and relied on clever and inventive ways of getting around the
embarrassments and obstacles arising in his single-minded pursuit of a
goal. Quite often a goal of a sexual nature.
D. W. Griffith had a major influence on the simplification of film
stories. After he had been at Biograph for a year, Griffith started to
make some films that had much less story content than any previous
one-reel films. In
The Country Doctor, the action is no more than
various people, including the doctor, hurrying backwards and forwards
between the doctor's house, where his child is sick, and a neighbouring
cottage, where another child is also sick. By 1912 and 1913, there are
beginning to be many films from many American companies that rely on
applying novel decoration to the story, rather than supplying any twists
to the drama itself to sustain interest.
Intertitles
Intertitles containing lines of dialogue began to be used consistently from 1908 onwards. In that year, Vitagraph's
An Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cup and How It Was Won, contains a couple of dialogue titles, and the same firm's
Julius Caesar
includes three lines of dialogue from Shakespeare's play quoted in
intertitles before the actors speak them, finishing with "This was the
noblest Roman of them all". From 1909 a small number of American films,
and even one or two European ones, came to include a few dialogue
titles, or "spoken titles" as they were called at the time. Film-makers
slowly progressed from putting these dialogue titles before the scene in
which they were spoken, to cutting them into the middle of the shot at
the point at which they were understood to be actually spoken by the
characters. This transition began in 1912. Once underway, the trend was
aided by the move towards the increasing use of cuts within scenes in
American films. In 1913 a substantial proportion of the dialogue titles
that were used in American films were cut in at the point when they were
spoken. Hardly any of the films where this happened were D. W. Griffith
films, and indeed many of his 1913 films still contain no dialogue
titles at all. Although some European film-makers picked up the trend
towards using dialogue titles, they did not pick up on the move towards
cutting them into the scene at the point at which they were actually
spoken until a few years later. The introduction of dialogue titles was
far from being a trivial matter, for they entirely transformed the
nature of film narrative. When dialogue titles came to be always cut
into a scene just after a character starts speaking, and then left with a
cut to the character just before they finish speaking, then one had
something that was effectively the equivalent of a present-day sound
film.
1914 to 1919
The film business
The years of the First World War were a complex transitional period
for the film industry. It was the period when the exhibition of films
changed from short programmes of one-reel films to longer shows
consisting of a feature film of four reels or longer, though still
supported by short films. The exhibition venues also changed from small
nickelodeon cinemas to larger cinemas charging higher prices. These
higher prices were partly justified by the new film stars who were now
being created. In the United States, nearly all the original film
companies which formed the Motion Picture Patents Company went out of
business in this period because of their resistance to the changeover to
long feature films. The one exception to this was the Vitagraph
company, which was already moving over to long films by 1914. The move
towards shooting more films on the West coast around Los Angeles
continued during World War I, until the bulk of American production was
carried out there.
The
Universal Film Manufacturing Company
had been formed in 1912 as an umbrella company for many of the
independent producing companies, and continued to grow during the war.
Other independent companies were grouped under the Mutual banner in
1912, and there were also important new entrants, particularly the
Jesse Lasky
Feature Play Company, and Famous Players, which were both formed in
1913 to take advantage of the fact that films could reproduce the real
substance of a stage play (plus embellishments), and so the best plays
and actors from the legitimate stage could be enticed into films. In
fact, the film industry adopted the term "photoplay" for motion pictures
at this time. In 1914 the Lasky company and Famous Players were
amalgamated into
Famous Players-Lasky, with distribution of their films handled by the new Paramount Pictures Corporation.
Another new major producing company formed during the war years was Triangle, with
Mack Sennett,
D. W. Griffith and
Thomas Ince
heading its production units. Despite the talents involved, it only
lasted from 1915 to 1917, after which its separate producers took their
films to Paramount for distribution. Equally short-lived, but still very
important, was the
World Film Company, which recruited most of the French directors, cameramen, and designers who had previously been working at the
Fort Lee, New Jersey studios for Pathé and Éclair.
The biggest success of these years was D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation
(1915), made for Triangle. Griffith applied all the ideas for film
staging that he had worked out in his Biograph films to a bigoted white
southerner's epic view of the Civil War and its aftermath. Despite
protests in the northern cities of the United States organized by the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and others, it took many millions at the box office. Stung by the
criticism of his film, Griffith made a new film he had just finished,
The Mother and the Law, into one of the strands of an even bigger film with an even bigger theme,
Intolerance (1916).
European film production
In France, film production and exhibition closed down as its personnel became part of the general
military mobilization
of the country at the beginning of the war. Although film production
began again in 1915, it was on a reduced scale, and the biggest
companies gradually retired from production, to concentrate on
film distribution
and exhibition. Hence the cinemas were given over to imported films,
particularly American ones. New small companies entered the business,
and new young directors arrived to replace those drafted or working in
the United States. The most notable of these was
Abel Gance.
Italian film production held up during the war, with long features
already established as the main form. However, there was a disastrous
move in subject matter to what were called "diva films". These romantic
dramas had the female star (the "diva") suffering from unhappy love, and
striking endless anguished
Art Nouveau poses, while surrounded by male admirers and luxury. They were a commercial failure outside Italy.
In Denmark the Nordisk company increased its production so much in
1915 and 1916 that it could not sell all its films, which led to a very
sharp decline in Danish production, and the end of Denmark's importance
on the world film scene. The Nordisk distribution and cinema chain in
Germany was effectively expropriated by the German government in 1917.
The Swedish industry did not have this problem, as its production was
more in balance with the market, and more importantly, the quality of
its films was now superior to those from Denmark.
The German film industry was seriously weakened by the war, though
with the major companies continuing as before. The distribution
organization Projektions-AG "Union" (PAGU) acted as an umbrella company
backing production by individual producers, and the Messter company also
made many films. The most important of the new film producers at the
time was
Joe May, who made a series of thrillers and
adventure films through the war years, but
Ernst Lubitsch also came into prominence with a series of very successful comedies and dramas.
Because of the large local market for films in Russia, the industry
there was not harmed by the war at first, although the isolation of the
country led many Russian films to develop peculiarly distinctive
features. The Khanzhonkov company retained its dominance, but the
Ermoliev company, which had been formed in 1914, became its principal
competitor, propelled by the work of its star,
Ivan Mosjoukin, and principal director,
Yakov Protazanov. The
Bolshevik revolution
in October 1917 did not eliminate the privately owned film companies at
first, though production was reduced through 1918. It was only in 1919
that the exodus of talent from the country took place, and fiction film
production was reduced to practically nothing.
Film studios
The major change in film production methods in the United States
during this period was the change to shooting in "dark" studios. The
existing glass-roofed studios were blacked out, and the many new ones
being built around Los Angeles were constructed with solid walls and
ceilings. This meant that shooting could continue all day and night,
without being limited by the changing sunlight. The general diffuse
daylighting in the old studios was completely replaced with floodlights,
and the actors were individually lit with floodlights on floorstands.
The use of a spotlight from high at the back onto the actors to rimlight
them became more frequent, and around 1918 some American cameramen
started to use spotlights to light the actors from the front. All this
meant that the figures of the actors were modelled more by the lighting,
and more separated from the background by the lower light levels now
used on the sets. This was a major step towards the standard studio
lighting methods of the sound period. At the same time there was the
beginning of a move towards using artificial light to light the actors
on location, and some of the biggest studios bought
electric generator trucks for this purpose. All these developments took years to reach Europe
Irising and soft focus
Complex vignette shot in
die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess).
A very noticeable technical development was the widespread adoption
of irising-in and out to begin and end scenes. This is the revelation of
a film shot by its appearance inside a small circular vignette mask
which gradually gets larger till it expands beyond the frame, and the
whole image is in the clear. D. W. Griffith, who used it relentlessly,
was responsible for the popularization of this device. By 1918 the use
of the iris to begin and end sequences was starting to decrease in the
United States, though in Europe it was just starting to become
fashionable. At that date it is quite easy to find American films such
as
Stella Maris in which only fades are used. There were other
variants of the simple iris as well and in these the mask opening or
closing in front of the lens had shapes other than circular. One of the
more frequent of these shapes was the opening slit; a vertical central
split appears in the totally black frame, and widens till the whole
frame is clear, revealing the scene that is about to start. Eventually
the diagonally opening slit appeared as well, and then there was the
diamond-shaped opening iris, as in
Poor Little Peppina and
Alsace
(1916), rather than the usual circle. Again, all of these variant forms
were very infrequently used, and when they did occur in American films
it was usually in the introductory stages. By 1918 the edges of ordinary
circular irises were becoming very fuzzy when they were used in
American films.
Enclosing the image inside static vignettes or masks of shapes other
than circular also began to appear in films during the years 1914-1919,
including symbolic shapes such as a cruciform cut-out in the
Mary Pickford film
Stella Maris (Marshall Neilan, 1918), and Maurice Elvey in Britain put romantic scenes inside a heart-shaped mask in
Nelson; The Story of England's Immortal Naval Hero (1918) and
The Rocks of Valpré (1919). The most elegant variants occur in some films Ernst Lubitsch made in 1919. In
Die Austernprinzessin (
The Oyster Princess)
a triple layer of horizontal rectangles with rounded ends enclose sets
of dancing feet at the frenzied peak of a foxtrot, and in
Die Puppe (The Doll) a dozen gossiping mouths are each enclosed in individual small circular vignettes arranged in a matrix.
A new idea taken over from still photography was "
soft focus". This began in 1915, with some shots being intentionally thrown out of focus for expressive effect, as in Mary Pickford's
Fanchon the Cricket. The idea developed slowly through the war years, until in D. W. Griffith's
Broken Blossoms (1918) all the Close Ups of
Lillian Gish
are heavily diffused by the use of layers of fine black cotton mesh
placed in front of the lens. Heavy lens diffusion was also used on all
the other shots carrying forward the romantic and sentimental parts of
the story of this film.
Subjective effects
It was during this period that camera effects intended to convey the
subjective feelings of characters in a film really began to be
established. These could now be done as Point of View (POV) shots, as in
Sidney Drew's
The Story of the Glove (1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the POV of a drunken man. In
Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) a camera shot tilting sideways (Dutch Angle) is intended to convey delirium, and by 1918 the idea had got to Russia, in
Baryshnya i khuligan (
The Lady and the Hooligan),
where the Hooligan's infatuation with the Lady is conveyed by his Point
of View of her splitting into a multiply superimposed image. The use of
anamorphic (in the general sense of distorted shape) images first
appears in these years with Abel Gance's
la Folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of people was suggested by shooting the scenes reflected in a
distorting mirror of the fair-ground type. Later we have
Till the Clouds Roll By (Victor Fleming, 1919), where
anamorphosis
is used to depict the nightmare effects of indigestion in a comic
manner. In fact, like so many film effects that distort the
representation of reality, anamorphosis was first used exclusively in
comic contexts.
"Poetic Cinema" and symbolism
Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and artistic
tradition continued to make some appearances in films during these
years. In D. W. Griffith's
The Avenging Conscience (1914), the
title "The birth of the evil thought" precedes a series of three shots
of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an insect,
though at a later point in the film when he prepares to kill someone
these shots are cut straight in without explanation. Possibly as a
result of Griffith's influence, 1915 was a big year for symbolism,
allegories, and parables in the American cinema. Films following this
route invariably included female figures in light, skimpy draperies, and
indeed sometimes wearing nothing at all, doing "expressive" dances or
striking plastic poses in sylvan settings. Titles include
Lois Weber's
Hypocrites, Vitagraph's
Youth, someone else's
Purity, and so on.
The Primrose Path
starts with a large painting illustrating the concept, which dissolves
into a replica of the same scene with actors posed, and then they come
to life, as these would soon become popular aspects of film making. This
is then amplified by closer detailed live action representations of
stations on "The Primrose Path". An interesting German example from a
few years later is Robert Reinert's
Opium (1919), which has some
notable innovations in the use of Insert shots to help convey the
sensation of the drug reveries. These are travelling landscape shots
taken from a boat going down a river, and they are intentionally shot
out of focus, or underexposed, or cut into the film upside down.
Symbolist art and literature from the turn of the century also had a
more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and Russia.
The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and forbidden
longings was a major feature of this art, and states of delirium dwelt
on at length were important as well. The first Russian examples were all
made by
Yevgeni Bauer for Khanzhonkov during the First World War, and include
Grezy, Schastye vechnoi nochi, and
Posle smerti, all from 1915. These to some extent live up to the promise of the `decadent' aesthetic suggested by their titles;
Daydreams, Happiness of Eternal Night, and
After Death.
Schastye vechnoi nochi
includes a visually very striking vision of a medusa-like monster
superimposed on a night-time snow scene, and *Posle smerti*has a
somewhat subtler dream vision of a dead girl, picked out by extra arc
lighting, walking through a wind-blown cornfield in the dusk. In Italy,
another country somewhat isolated filmically by the war, the same kind
of realization of the
fin-de-siecle
decadent symbolist aesthetic can be found, mostly in films associated
with the "diva" phenomenon. The most complete example, which also has
decor to match, is Charles Kraus'
Il gatto nero (The Black Cat).
This last is one of the few films of this kind to use atmospheric insert
shots to heighten the mood. The first film explicitly intended by its
maker to be a visual analogue of poetry,
Marcel L'Herbier's
Rose-France (1919), continues further along these same paths.
Insert Shots
The use of
insert shots,
i.e. close-ups of objects other than faces, was established very early,
but apart from the special case of Inserts of a letter that was being
read by one of the characters, they were infrequently used before 1914.
It is really only with his *The Avenging Conscience*of 1914 that a new
phase in the use of the Insert Shot starts. As well as the symbolic
inserts already mentioned,
The Avenging Conscience also made
extensive use of large numbers of Big Close Up shots of clutching hands
and tapping feet as a means of emphasizing those parts of the body as
indicators of psychological tension. Griffith never went so far in this
direction again, but his use of the Insert made its real impression on
other American film-makers during the years 1914-1919. Cecil B. DeMille
was a leading figure in the increased use of the Insert, and by 1918 he
had reached the point of including about 9 Inserts in every 100 shots in
The Whispering Chorus. He also pushed the insert into areas of
visual sensuality inaccessible to D. W. Griffith, with such images as a
Close Up of a silver-plated revolver nestling in a pile of silken sexy
ribbons in a drawer in
Old Wives for New (1918).
The atmospheric insert
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's
The 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's
Rose-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.
Continuity cinema
The years 1914–1919 in America also saw the consolidation of the
forms of what was to become the dominant mode of commercial cinema:
"continuity cinema", or "classical cinema". During this period there
were other styles that were still important, and these can be considered
to lie along a spectrum between the best examples of "continuity
cinema" at one extreme, and at the other extreme the "DIS-continuity
cinema" of D. W. Griffith. There are a number of factors involved in the
strong and apparent visual discontinuities between successive shots in
Griffith's films, and the use of cross-cutting between parallel actions
is only the most obvious of these. In 1915, cuts within the duration of a
scene were still relatively infrequent in his films, and when they do
occur they were frequently from
Long Shot
or Medium Long Shot (which were the shots he most used) to a Big Close
Up of an insert detail, which only occupied a small part of the frame in
the previous shot. This in itself introduces a fairly strong visual
discontinuity across the cut, but as well as that, the cut-in shot might
often have a circular vignette mask if it were a Close Up of a person,
so reinforcing the effect. And sometimes the now-standard Griffith
iris-out and iris-in might also be left on the inserted shot, even
though it had action continuity with the shots on either side of it. As
well as all this there was Griffith's habit of moving the action into
another shot in an adjoining space, and then back again if it was at all
possible, which produced a marked change in background, which also made
its small contribution to the discontinuity between shots.
One of the advanced continuity techniques involves the exact way the
movement of actors from a shot in one location to another in a
neighbouring location is handled. At best this kind of transition had
previously been dealt with by having the directions of travel of the
actor in the two shots correspond on the screen, but in a film such as
The Bank Burglar's Fate
(Jack Adolfi, 1914), one can see shot transitions in which a cut is
made from an actor just leaving the frame, to a shot of him well inside
the frame in an adjoining location, which have the positions and
directions so well chosen that to the casual eye his movement appears
quite continuous, and the real space and time ellipsis between the shots
is concealed. Other good examples of this technique for eliminating
several yards of waste space and a few seconds of waste time can be seen
in Ralph Ince's films, particularly
The Right Girl (1915), and
by 1919 it was widely diffused in American films, but not in those made
in Europe. All this connects with the rise of the use of cutting to
different angles within a scene during the years 1914-1919, and in
particular to the development of reverse-angle cutting.
Reverse-angle cutting
Cutting to
different angles within a scene now became
well-established as a technique for dissecting a scene into shots in
American films. This approach had appeared a few times in earlier years,
but in general cuts to or from a closer shot within a scene were still
being made more or less down the lens axis as established in the Long
Shot of the scene in question. The particular form of cutting to
different angles within a scene in which the direction changes by more
than ninety degrees is called reverse-angle cutting by film-makers. The
leading figure in the full development of reverse-angle cutting was
Ralph Ince. Films that he made at Vitagraph in 1915 such as
The Right Girl and
His Phantom Sweetheart
have a large number of reverse-angle cuts in interior, as well as
exterior, scenes. Other directors were also just starting to take up
this style in 1915, for instance
William S. Hart in
Bad Buck of Santa Ynez.
As for Griffith, in
Birth of a Nation there are just eight
cuts to reverse-angle shots in the scene in Ford's Theatre, while
elsewhere throughout the two-and-a-half hour length of this film there
are only four more true reverse-angle cuts. Nevertheless, the Griffith
style of film-making was still followed in its full idiosyncrasy, with
extensive use of side by side spaces and a definite "front" for the
camera, in most slapstick comedy. Directors of dramatic films who had
worked Griffith also followed his style fairly closely, and it the
standard for films made by his Fine Arts section of the Triangle
company.
By 1916 there are a number of films in which there are around 15 to
20 true reverse-angle cuts per hundred shot transitions, such as
The Deserter (Scott Sidney) and
Going Straight. By the end of the war such films formed an appreciable but minor part of production: e.g.
The Gun Woman (F. Borzage, 1918) and
Jubilo
(Clarence Badger, 1919). All this hardly concerned European cinema,
where those few reverse-angle cuts used were mostly between a watcher
and what he sees from his Point of View, both being filmed in a fairly
distant shot. However, after the end of the war some of the brighter
young directors such as Lubitsch started using a few reverse-angle cuts,
mostly in association with Point of View cutting.
The flash-back
The use of
flash-back
structures continued to develop in this period, and the usual way of
entering and leaving a flash-back was through a dissolve, and this was
in fact the principal use at this time for this device. The Vitagraph
company's
The Man That Might Have Been (William Humphrey, 1914),
is even more complex, with a series of reveries and flash-backs that
contrast the protagonist's real passage through life with what might
have been, if his son had not died. In this film dissolves are used both
to enter and leave the flash-backs, and also the wish-dreams, and also
for a
time-lapse
inside a reverie at one point. But fades are also used for these
purposes in this and other films of the period, and flashback
transitions are also done with irising in other films, and even straight
cuts. During World War I the use of flashbacks occurred in films from
all the major European film-making countries as well, from Italy (
Tigre reale) to Denmark (
Evangeliemandens Liv) to Russia (
Grezy and
Posle smerti), where it arrived in 1915.
As the years moved on a sudden decline in the use of long flash-back
sequences set in around 1917, but on the other hand the use of a
transition to and from a brief single shot memory scene remained quite
common in American films. However, there could still be an even more
complex flash-back construction in American films in the case of
W. S. Van Dyke'sThe Lady of the Dugout
(1918). This film has a story that happened long before which is
narrated by one character in the framing scene, and initially
accompanied by his narrating dialogue in intertitles, though after a
while this stops, and the intertitles then convey the dialogue occurring
within the flashback. Inside this main flashback there develops
cross-cutting to another story, happening at the same time, and at first
apparently unconnected with it, though the connection eventually
appears. Next, inside this first flashback, the Lady of the title
narrates another story, presented in flashback form, but with cutaways
inside it back to events occurring in the time frame in which she is
doing her narrating. Actually, all this is fairly easy to follow while
watching the film, in part because what happens in all these strings of
action is relatively simple.
Cross-cutting between parallel actions
After 1914
cross cutting
between parallel actions came to be used whenever appropriate in
American films, though this was not the case in European films. It
should be noted that a good deal of the American use of cross-cutting
was not the rapid alternation between parallel chains of action
developed by D. W. Griffith, but a limited number of alternations to
make it possible to leave out uninteresting bits of action with no real
plot function. In Europe, some of the most enterprising directors did
use cross-cutting sometimes, but they never attained the speed of the
many American examples of this technique.
Cross-cutting was also used to get new effects of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMille's
The Whispering Chorus,
in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a Chinese
prostitute in an opium den, while simultaneously his unknowing wife is
being remarried in church. All this was simple compared to D. W.
Griffith's
Intolerance (1916), in which four parallel stories are
intercut throughout the whole length of the film, though in this case
the stories are more similar than contrasting in their nature. The use
of cross-cutting within these parallel stories as well as between them
produced a complexity that was beyond the comprehension of the average
audience of the time. The influence of
Intolerance produced a few other films that combined a number of similar stories having similar themes, such as Maurice Tourneur's
Woman (1918), but the box-office failure of
Intolerance ensured that these later films had simpler structures.
The development of film art
The general trend in the development of cinema, led from the United
States, was towards using the newly developed specifically filmic
devices for expression of the narrative content of film stories, and
combining this with the standard dramatic structures already in use in
commercial theatre.
D. W. Griffith
had the highest standing amongst American directors in the industry,
because of the dramatic excitement he conveyed to the audience through
his films. But there were others who were also considered as major
figures at the time. The first of these was
Cecil B. DeMille, whose films, such as
The Cheat
(1915), brought out the moral dilemmas facing their characters in a
more subtle way than Griffith. DeMille was also in closer touch with the
reality of contemporary American life.
Maurice Tourneur
was also highly ranked for the pictorial beauties of his films,
together with the subtlety of his handling of fantasy, while at the same
time he was capable of getting greater
naturalism from his actors at appropriate moments, as in
A Girl's Folly (1917).
Sidney Drew was the leader in developing "polite comedy", while slapstick was refined by
Fatty Arbuckle and
Charles Chaplin, who both started with
Mack Sennet's
Keystone company. They reduced the usual frenetic pace of Sennett's
films to give the audience a chance to appreciate the subtlety and
finesse of their movement, and the cleverness of their gags. By 1917
Chaplin was also introducing more dramatic plot into his films, and
mixing the comedy with sentiment.
In Russia,
Yevgeni Bauer put a slow intensity of acting combined with Symbolist overtones onto film in a unique way.
In Sweden,
Victor Sjöström
made a series of films that combined the realities of people's lives
with their surroundings in a striking manner, while Mauritz Stiller
developed sophisticated comedy to a new level.
In Germany,
Ernst Lubitsch got his inspiration from the stage work of
Max Reinhardt, both in bourgeois comedy and in spectacle, and applied this to his films, culminating in his
die Puppe (
The Doll),
die Austernprinzessin (
The Oyster Princess) and
Madame Dubarry.
Hollywood triumphant
Until this point, the cinemas of
France and
Italy had been the most globally popular and powerful. But the
United States
was already gaining quickly when World War I (1914–1918) caused a
devastating interruption in the European film industries. The American
industry, or "
Hollywood", as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in
California,
gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: film factory
for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and
controlling the market in many of them.
By the 1920s, the U.S. reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800
feature films annually,
[16] or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of
Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton, the
swashbuckling adventures of
Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of
Clara Bow,
to cite just a few examples, made these performers’ faces well-known on
every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical
continuity editing was developed and exported – although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong
realist traditions in art and drama, such as
Japan.
This development was contemporary with the growth of the
studio system and its greatest publicity method, the
star system,
which characterized American film for decades to come and provided
models for other film industries. The studios’ efficient, top-down
control over all stages of their product enabled a new and ever-growing
level of lavish production and technical sophistication. At the same
time, the system's commercial regimentation and focus on glamorous
escapism
discouraged daring and ambition beyond a certain degree, a prime
example being the brief but still legendary directing career of the
iconoclastic
Erich von Stroheim in the late teens and the ‘20s.
The sound era
Experimentation with
sound film
technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant
throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate
synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to
overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio
Warner Bros. introduced the "
Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding
recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. During late 1927, Warners released
The Jazz Singer,
which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the
first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this
process was actually accomplished first by
Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film
The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early
sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by
sound-on-film methods like Fox
Movietone, DeForest
Phonofilm, and
RCA Photophone.
The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking
pictures", or "talkies", were the future. A lot of attempts were made
before the success of the
Jazz Singer, that can be seen in the
List of film sound systems.
Industry impact of sound
The change was remarkably swift. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was
almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be
standardized). Total changeover was slightly slower in the rest of the
world, principally for economic reasons. Cultural reasons were also a
factor in countries like
China and
Japan,
where silents co-existed successfully with sound well into the 1930s,
indeed producing what would be some of the most revered classics in
those countries, like
Wu Yonggang's
The Goddess (China, 1934) and
Yasujirō Ozu's
I Was Born, But... (Japan, 1932). But even in Japan, a figure such as the
benshi, the live narrator who was a major part of Japanese silent cinema, found his acting career was ending.
Sound further tightened the grip of major studios in numerous
countries: the vast expense of the transition overwhelmed smaller
competitors, while the novelty of sound lured vastly larger audiences
for those producers that remained. In the case of the U.S., some
historians credit sound with saving the Hollywood studio system in the
face of the
Great Depression
(Parkinson, 1995). Thus began what is now often called "The Golden Age
of Hollywood", which refers roughly to the period beginning with the
introduction of sound until the late 1940s. The American cinema reached
its peak of efficiently manufactured glamour and global appeal during
this period. The top actors of the era are now thought of as the classic
film stars, such as
Clark Gable,
Katharine Hepburn,
Humphrey Bogart,
Greta Garbo, and the greatest box office draw of the 1930s, child performer
Shirley Temple.
Creative impact of sound
Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in
some ways, film briefly reverted to the conditions of its earliest
days. The late '20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in
front of and behind the camera struggled with the stringent limitations
of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to
utilize the new medium. Many stage performers, directors and writers
were introduced to cinema as producers sought personnel experienced in
dialogue-based storytelling. Many major silent filmmakers and actors
were unable to adjust and found their careers severely curtailed or even
ended.
This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year:
William Wellman with
Chinatown Nights and
The Man I Love,
Rouben Mamoulian with
Applause,
Alfred Hitchcock with
Blackmail
(Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring
greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of
sound (Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed
further, technical advances in microphones and cameras, and capabilities
for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all
sound directly at the time of filming).
Sound films emphasized on black history and benefited different
genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the
musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was
The Broadway Melody (1929) and the form would find its first major creator in
choreographer/director
Busby Berkeley (
42nd Street, 1933,
Dames, 1934). In France, avant-garde director
René Clair made
surreal use of song and dance in comedies like
Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and
Le Million (1931).
Universal Pictures begin releasing
gothic horror films like
Dracula and
Frankenstein (both 1931). In 1933, RKO released
Merian C. Cooper's classic "giant monster" film
King Kong. The trend thrived best in
India,
where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama
made the musical the basic form of most sound films (Cook, 1990);
virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian
popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. (
See also Bollywood.)
At this time, American
gangster films like
Little Caesar and Wellman's
The Public Enemy
(both 1931) became popular. Dialogue now took precedence over
"slapstick" in Hollywood comedies: the fast-paced, witty banter of
The Front Page (1931) or
It Happened One Night (1934), the sexual double entrendres of
Mae West (
She Done Him Wrong, 1933) or the often subversively anarchic nonsense talk of the
Marx Brothers (
Duck Soup, 1933).
Walt Disney,
who had previously been in the short cartoon business, stepped into
feature films with the first English-speaking animated feature
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; released by
RKO Pictures in 1937. 1939, a major year for American cinema, brought such films as
The Wizard of Oz and
Gone with The Wind.
The 1940s: the war and post-war years
The desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like
49th Parallel (1941),
Went the Day Well? (1942),
The Way Ahead (1944) and
Noël Coward and
David Lean's celebrated naval film
In Which We Serve in 1942, which won a special
Academy Award. These existed alongside more flamboyant films like
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger's
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943),
A Canterbury Tale (1944) and
A Matter of Life and Death (1946), as well as
Laurence Olivier's
1944 film Henry V, based on the
Shakespearean history Henry V. The success of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to make more animated features like
Pinocchio (1940),
Fantasia (1940),
Dumbo (1941) and
Bambi (1942).
The onset of US involvement in World War II also brought a proliferation of films as both
patriotism and
propaganda. American propaganda films included
Desperate Journey,
Mrs. Miniver,
Forever and a Day and
Objective Burma. Notable American films from the war years include the anti-Nazi
Watch on the Rhine (1943), scripted by
Dashiell Hammett;
Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's direction of a script by
Thornton Wilder; the
George M. Cohan biopic,
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring
James Cagney, and the immensely popular
Casablanca, with
Humphrey Bogart. Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and 1942 including
John Huston's
The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the first films now considered a classic
film noir. In 1941,
RKO Pictures released
Citizen Kane made by
Orson Welles.
It is often considered the greatest film of all time. It would set the
stage for the modern motion picture, as it revolutionized film story
telling.
The strictures of wartime also brought an interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's
Gainsborough melodramas (including
The Man in Grey and
The Wicked Lady), and films like
Here Comes Mr. Jordan,
Heaven Can Wait,
I Married a Witch and
Blithe Spirit.
Val Lewton also produced a series of atmospheric and influential small-budget
horror films, some of the more famous examples being
Cat People,
Isle of the Dead and
The Body Snatcher. The decade probably also saw the so-called "women's pictures", such as
Now, Voyager,
Random Harvest and
Mildred Pierce at the peak of their popularity.
1946 saw RKO Radio releasing
It's a Wonderful Life directed by
Frank Capra. Soldiers returning from the war would provide the inspiration for films like
The Best Years of Our Lives, and many of those in the film industry had served in some capacity during the war.
Samuel Fuller's experiences in World War II would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as
The Big Red One.
The Actor's Studio was founded in October 1947 by
Elia Kazan,
Robert Lewis, and
Cheryl Crawford, and the same year
Oskar Fischinger filmed
Motion Painting No. 1.
In 1943,
Ossessione was screened in Italy, marking the beginning of
Italian neorealism. Major films of this type during the 1940s included
Bicycle Thieves,
Rome, Open City, and
La Terra Trema. In 1952
Umberto D was released, usually considered the last film of this type.
In the late 1940s, in Britain,
Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including
Whisky Galore!,
Passport to Pimlico,
Kind Hearts and Coronets and
The Man in the White Suit, and
Carol Reed directed his influential thrillers
Odd Man Out,
The Fallen Idol and
The Third Man.
David Lean was also rapidly becoming a force in world cinema with
Brief Encounter and his
Dickens adaptations
Great Expectations and
Oliver Twist, and
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like
Black Narcissus and
The Red Shoes.
The 1950s
The
House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in the early 1950s. Protested by the
Hollywood Ten before the committee, the hearings resulted in the
blacklisting of many actors, writers and directors, including Chayefsky,
Charlie Chaplin, and
Dalton Trumbo, and many of these fled to Europe, especially the United Kingdom.
The
Cold War era zeitgeist translated into a type of near-
paranoia manifested in
themes such as
invading armies of evil aliens, (
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
The War of the Worlds); and
communist fifth columnists, (
The Manchurian Candidate).
During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was also
threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium
meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close. The demise of
the "studio system" spurred the
self-commentary of films like
Sunset Boulevard (1950) and
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
In 1950, the
Lettrists avante-gardists caused riots at the
Cannes Film Festival, when
Isidore Isou's
Treatise on Slime and Eternity was screened. After their criticism of
Charlie Chaplin and split with the movement, the
Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they showed their new
hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film is
Guy Debord's
Howls for Sade of 1952.
Distressed by the increasing number of closed theatres, studios and
companies would find new and innovative ways to bring audiences back.
These included attempts to literally widen their appeal with new screen
formats.
Cinemascope, which would remain a
20th Century Fox distinction until 1967, was announced with 1953's
The Robe.
VistaVision,
Cinerama, and
Todd-AO boasted a "bigger is better" approach to
marketing
films to a dwindling US audience. This resulted in the revival of epic
films to take advantage of the new big screen formats. Some of the most
successful examples of these
Biblical and
historical spectaculars include
The Ten Commandments (1956),
The Vikings (1958),
Ben-Hur (1959),
Spartacus (1960) and
El Cid (1961). Also during this period a number of other significant films were produced in
Todd-AO, developed by
Mike Todd shortly before his death, including
Oklahoma! (1955),
Around the World in 80 Days (1956),
South Pacific (1958) and
Cleopatra (1963) plus many more.
Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The fad for
3-D film would last for only two years, 1952–1954, and helped sell
House of Wax and
Creature from the Black Lagoon. Producer
William Castle
would tout films featuring "Emergo" "Percepto", the first of a series
of gimmicks that would remain popular marketing tools for Castle and
others throughout the 1960s.
In the U.S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early
activism of the
Civil Rights Movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as
Blackboard Jungle (1955),
On the Waterfront (1954),
Paddy Chayefsky's
Marty and
Reginald Rose's
12 Angry Men (1957). Disney continued making animated films, notably;
Cinderella (1950),
Peter Pan (1953),
Lady and the Tramp (1955), and
Sleeping Beauty (1959). He began, however, getting more involved in live action films, producing classics like
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and
Old Yeller
(1957). Television began competing seriously with films projected in
theatres, but surprisingly it promoted more filmgoing rather than
curtailing it.
Limelight is probably a unique film in at least one interesting respect. Its two leads,
Charlie Chaplin and
Claire Bloom,
were in the industry in no less than three different centuries. In the
19th Century, Chaplin made his theatrical debut at the age of eight, in
1897, in a clog dancing troupe, The Eight Lancaster Lads. In the 21st
Century, Bloom is still enjoying a full and productive career, having
appeared in dozens of films and television series produced up to and
including 2010.
Golden Age of Asian cinema
Main article:
Asian cinema
Following the end of World War II in the 1940s, the following decade, the 1950s, marked a 'Golden Age' for non-English
world cinema,
[17][18] especially for
Asian cinema.
[19][20] Many of the most critically acclaimed Asian films of all time were produced during this decade, including
Yasujirō Ozu's
Tokyo Story (1953),
Satyajit Ray's
The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) and
The Music Room (1958),
Kenji Mizoguchi's
Ugetsu (1954) and
Sansho the Bailiff (1954),
Raj Kapoor's
Awaara (1951),
Mikio Naruse's
Floating Clouds (1955),
Guru Dutt's
Pyaasa (1957) and
Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), and the
Akira Kurosawa films
Rashomon (1950),
Ikiru (1952),
Seven Samurai (1954) and
Throne of Blood (1957).
[19][20]
During
Japanese cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s, successful films included
Rashomon (1950),
Seven Samurai (1954) and
The Hidden Fortress (1958) by
Akira Kurosawa, as well as
Yasujirō Ozu's
Tokyo Story (1953) and
Ishirō Honda's
Godzilla (1954).
[21] These films have had a profound influence on world cinema. In particular, Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai has been remade several times as
Western films, such as
The Magnificent Seven (1960) and
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and has also inspired several
Bollywood films, such as
Sholay (1975) and
China Gate (1998).
Rashomon was also remade as
The Outrage (1964), and inspired films with "
Rashomon effect" storytelling methods, such as
Andha Naal (1954),
The Usual Suspects (1995) and
Hero (2002).
The Hidden Fortress was also the inspiration behind
George Lucas'
Star Wars (1977). Other famous Japanese filmmakers from this period include
Kenji Mizoguchi,
Mikio Naruse,
Hiroshi Inagaki and
Nagisa Oshima.
[19] Japanese cinema later became one of the main inspirations behind the
New Hollywood movement of the 1960s to 1980s.
During
Indian cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s, it was producing 200 films annually, while
Indian independent films gained greater recognition through international
film festivals. One of the most famous was
The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) from critically acclaimed
Bengali film director
Satyajit Ray, whose films had a profound influence on world cinema, with directors such as Akira Kurosawa,
[22] Martin Scorsese,
[23][24] James Ivory,
[25] Abbas Kiarostami,
Elia Kazan,
François Truffaut,
[26] Steven Spielberg,
[27][28][29] Carlos Saura,
[30] Jean-Luc Godard,
[31] Isao Takahata,
[32] Gregory Nava,
Ira Sachs,
Wes Anderson[33] and
Danny Boyle[34] being influenced by his cinematic style. According to Michael Sragow of
The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful
coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy".
[35] Subrata Mitra's cinematographic technique of
bounce lighting also originates from
The Apu Trilogy.
[36] Other famous Indian filmmakers from this period include
Guru Dutt,
[19] Ritwik Ghatak,
[20] Mrinal Sen,
Raj Kapoor,
Bimal Roy,
K. Asif and
Mehboob Khan.
[37]
The
cinema of South Korea also experienced a 'Golden Age' in the 1950s, beginning with director Lee Kyu-hwan's tremendously successful remake of
Chunhyang-jon (1955).
[38] That year also saw the release of
Yangsan Province by the renowned director,
Kim Ki-young,
marking the beginning of his productive career. Both the quality and
quantity of filmmaking had increased rapidly by the end of the 1950s.
South Korean films, such as Lee Byeong-il's 1956 comedy
Sijibganeun nal (The Wedding Day),
had begun winning international awards. In contrast to the beginning of
the 1950s, when only 5 films were made per year, 111 films were
produced in South Korea in 1959.
[39]
The 1950s was also a 'Golden Age' for
Philippine cinema,
with the emergence of more artistic and mature films, and significant
improvement in cinematic techniques among filmmakers. The studio system
produced frenetic activity in the local film industry as many films were
made annually and several local talents started to earn recognition
abroad. The premiere Philippine directors of the era included
Gerardo de Leon,
Gregorio Fernández,
Eddie Romero,
Lamberto Avellana, and
Cirio Santiago.
[40][41]
1960s
During the 1960s, the studio system in
Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as
Pinewood in the UK and
Cinecittà
in Rome. "Hollywood" films were still largely aimed at family
audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced
the studios' biggest successes. Productions like
Mary Poppins (1964),
My Fair Lady (1964) and
The Sound of Music
(1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade. The growth in
independent producers and production companies, and the increase in the
power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of
traditional Hollywood studio production.
There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema in
America during this period. During the late 1950s and 1960s, the
French New Wave directors such as
François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard produced films such as
Les quatre cents coups,
Breathless and
Jules et Jim which broke the rules of Hollywood cinema's
narrative structure
/well, they actually broke the rules of the cinéma du papa film-making
system, since they didn't make "hollywood films" before the 1950s.
Cinéma du papa has a lot of similarities with classical Hollywood
narrative structure but they are not identical/ . As well, audiences
were becoming aware of Italian films like
Federico Fellini's
La Dolce Vita and the stark dramas of Sweden's
Ingmar Bergman.
In Britain, the "Free Cinema" of
Lindsay Anderson,
Tony Richardson and others lead to a group of realistic and innovative dramas including
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
A Kind of Loving and
This Sporting Life. Other British films such as
Repulsion,
Darling,
Alfie,
Blowup and
Georgy Girl (all in 1965-1966) helped to reduce prohibitions sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the
James Bond films, beginning with
Dr. No in 1962 would render the series popular worldwide.
During the 1960s,
Ousmane Sembène produced several French- and
Wolof-language films and became the 'father' of
African Cinema. In Latin America, the dominance of the "Hollywood" model was challenged by many film makers.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino called for a politically engaged
Third Cinema in contrast to Hollywood and the European
auteur cinema.
Further, the nuclear paranoia of the age, and the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange (like the 1962 close-call with the
USSR during the
Cuban missile crisis) prompted a reaction within the film community as well. Films like
Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove and
Fail Safe with
Henry Fonda were produced in a Hollywood that was once known for its overt patriotism and wartime propaganda.
In
documentary film the sixties saw the blossoming of
Direct Cinema, an observational style of film making as well as the advent of more overtly partisan films like
In the Year of the Pig about the
Vietnam War by
Emile de Antonio.
By the late 1960s however, Hollywood filmmakers were beginning to
create more innovative and groundbreaking films that reflected the
social revolution taken over much of the western world such as
Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
The Graduate (1967),
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),
Rosemary's Baby (1968),
Midnight Cowboy (1969),
Easy Rider (1969) and
The Wild Bunch (1969).
Bonnie and Clyde is often considered the beginning of the so-called
New Hollywood.
In Japanese cinema, Academy Award winning director
Akira Kurosawa produced
Yojimbo
(1961), which like his previous films also had a profound influence
around the world. The influence of this film is most apparent in
Sergio Leone's
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and
Walter Hill's
Last Man Standing (1996).
Yojimbo was also the origin of the "
Man with No Name" trend.
Meanwhile in
India, the Academy Award winning
Bengali director
Satyajit Ray wrote a script for
The Alien in 1967, based on a
Bengali science fiction
story he himself had written in 1962. The film was intended to be his
debut in Hollywood but the production was eventually cancelled.
Nevertheless, the script went on to influence later films such as
Steven Spielberg's
E.T. (1982) and
Rakesh Roshan's
Koi... Mil Gaya (2003).
1970s: The 'New Hollywood' or Post-classical cinema
'
The New Hollywood' and 'post-classical cinema' are terms used to describe the period following the decline of the
studio system during the 1950s and 1960s and the end of the
production code, (which was replaced in 1968 by the
MPAA film rating system).
During the 1970s, filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual
content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic
images of bloody deaths - a good example of this is
Wes Craven's
The Last House on the Left (1972).
'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing
methods of storytelling of the "New Hollywood" producers. The new
methods of
drama
and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during
the classical/Golden Age period: story chronology may be scrambled,
storylines may feature unsettling "
twist endings", main characters may behave in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the
antagonist and
protagonist may be blurred. The beginnings of post-classical storytelling may be seen in 1940s and 1950s
film noir films, in films such as
Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's
Psycho. 1971 marked the release of controversial films like
Straw Dogs,
A Clockwork Orange,
The French Connection and
Dirty Harry. This sparked heated controversy over the perceived escalation of violence in cinema.
During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as
Martin Scorsese,
Francis Ford Coppola,
Roman Polanski,
Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas and
Brian De Palma. This coincided with the increasing popularity of the
auteur theory
in film literature and the media, which posited that a film director's
films express their personal vision and creative insights. The
development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these
directors far greater control over their projects than would have been
possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial
successes, like Scorsese's
Taxi Driver, Coppola's
The Godfather films, Polanski's
Chinatown, Spielberg's
Jaws and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
George Lucas's
Star Wars. It also, however, resulted in some failures, including
Peter Bogdanovich's
At Long Last Love and
Michael Cimino's hugely expensive Western epic
Heaven's Gate, which helped to bring about the demise of its backer,
United Artists.
The financial disaster of
Heaven's Gate marking the end of the
visionary "auteur" directors of the "New Hollywood", who had
unrestrained creative and financial freedom to develop films. The
phenomenal success in the 1970s of
Jaws and
Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern "
blockbuster".
Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of
very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional
campaigns. This trend had already been foreshadowed by the commercial
success of
disaster films such as
The Poseidon Adventure and
The Towering Inferno.
During the mid-1970s, more pornographic theatres, euphemistically
called "adult cinemas", were established, and the legal production of
hardcore pornographic films began. Porn films such as
Deep Throat and its star
Linda Lovelace
became something of a popular culture phenomenon and resulted in a
spate of similar sex films. The porn cinemas finally died out during the
1980s, when the popularization of the home
VCR
and pornography videotapes allowed audiences to watch sex films at
home. In the early 1970s, English-language audiences became more aware
of the new
West German cinema, with
Werner Herzog,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and
Wim Wenders among its leading exponents.
In
world cinema, the 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the popularity of
martial arts films, largely due to its reinvention by
Bruce Lee, who departed from the artistic style of traditional
Chinese martial arts films and added a much greater sense of realism to them with his
Jeet Kune Do style. This began with
The Big Boss (1971), which was a major success across
Asia. However, he didn't gain fame in the
Western world until shortly after his death in 1973, when
Enter the Dragon
was released. The film went on to become the most successful martial
arts film in cinematic history, popularized the martial arts film genre
across the world, and cemented Bruce Lee's status as a cultural icon.
Hong Kong action cinema, however, was in decline due to a wave of "
Bruceploitation" films. This trend eventually came to an end in 1978 with the martial arts
comedy films,
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and
Drunken Master, directed by
Yuen Woo-ping and starring
Jackie Chan, laying the foundations for the rise of Hong Kong action cinema in the 1980s.
While the
musical film genre had declined in Hollywood by this time, musical films were quickly gaining popularity in the
cinema of India, where the term "
Bollywood" was coined for the growing
Hindi film industry in
Bombay (now Mumbai) that ended up dominating
South Asian cinema, overtaking the more critically acclaimed
Bengali film industry in popularity. Hindi filmmakers combined the Hollywood musical formula with the conventions of ancient
Indian theatre to create a new film genre called "
Masala", which dominated Indian cinema throughout the late 20th century.
[42] These "Masala" films portrayed
action, comedy,
drama,
romance and
melodrama all at once, with "
filmi" song and dance routines thrown in. This trend began with films directed by
Manmohan Desai and starring
Amitabh Bachchan, who remains one of the most popular
film stars in South Asia. The most popular Indian film of all time was
Sholay (1975), a "Masala" film inspired by a real-life
dacoit as well as Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai and the
Spaghetti Westerns.
The end of the decade saw the first major international marketing of
Australian cinema, as
Peter Weir's films
Picnic at Hanging Rock and
The Last Wave and
Fred Schepisi's
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith gained critical acclaim. In 1979, Australian filmmaker
George Miller also garnered international attention for his violent, low-budget action film
Mad Max.
1980s: sequels, blockbusters and videotape
During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching films on their home
VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the
film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of
copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on
home video became a significant "second venue" for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries.
The
Lucas–
Spielberg combine would dominate "Hollywood" cinema for much of the 1980s, and lead to much imitation. Two follow-ups to
Star Wars, three to
Jaws, and three
Indiana Jones films helped to make sequels of successful films more of an expectation than ever before. Lucas also launched
THX Ltd, a division of
Lucasfilm in 1982,
[43] while Spielberg enjoyed one of the decade's greatest successes in
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the same year. 1982 also saw the release of Disney's
Tron which was one of the first films from a major studio to use
computer graphics extensively. American independent cinema struggled more during the decade, although
Martin Scorsese's
Raging Bull (1980),
After Hours (1985), and
The King of Comedy (1983) helped to establish him as one of the most critically acclaimed American film makers of the era. Also during 1983
Scarface was released, was very profitable and resulted in even greater fame for its leading actor
Al Pacino. Probably the most successful film commercially was vended during 1989:
Tim Burton's version of
Bob Kane's creation,
Batman, exceeded box-office records.
Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the demented
Joker earned him a total of $60,000,000 after figuring in his percentage of the gross.
British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of
David Puttnam's company
Goldcrest Films. The films
Chariots of Fire,
Gandhi,
The Killing Fields and
A Room with a View
appealed to a "middlebrow" audience which was increasingly being
ignored by the major Hollywood studios. While the films of the 1970s had
helped to define modern
blockbuster
motion pictures, the way "Hollywood" released its films would now
change. Films, for the most part, would premiere in a wider number of
theatres, although, to this day, some films still premiere using the
route of the
limited/roadshow release system.
Against some expectations, the rise of the multiplex cinema did not
allow less mainstream films to be shown, but simply allowed the major
blockbusters to be given an even greater number of screenings. However,
films that had been overlooked in cinemas were increasingly being given a
second chance on home video.
During the 1980s,
Japanese cinema experienced a revival, largely due to the success of
anime films. At the beginning of the 1980s,
Space Battleship Yamato (1973) and
Mobile Suit Gundam
(1979), both of which were unsuccessful as television series, were
remade as films and became hugely successful in Japan. In particular,
Mobile Suit Gundam sparked the
Gundam franchise of
Real Robot mecha anime. The success of
Macross: Do You Remember Love? also sparked a
Macross franchise of mecha anime. This was also the decade when
Studio Ghibli was founded. The studio produced
Hayao Miyazaki's first
fantasy films,
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and
Castle in the Sky (1986), as well as
Isao Takahata's
Grave of the Fireflies (1988), all of which were very successful in Japan and received worldwide critical acclaim.
Original video animation (OVA) films also began during this decade; the most influential of these early OVA films was
Noboru Ishiguro's
cyberpunk film
Megazone 23 (1985). The most famous anime film of this decade was
Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk film
Akira (1988), which although initially unsuccessful at Japanese theaters, went on to become an international success.
Hong Kong action cinema, which was in a state of decline due to endless
Bruceploitation films after the death of
Bruce Lee, also experienced a revival in the 1980s, largely due to the reinvention of the
action film genre by
Jackie Chan. He had previously combined the
comedy film and
martial arts film genres successfully in the 1978 films
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and
Drunken Master. The next step he took was in combining this comedy martial arts genre with a new emphasis on elaborate and highly dangerous
stunts, reminiscent of the
silent film era. The first film in this new style of action cinema was
Project A (1983), which saw the formation of the
Jackie Chan Stunt Team as well as the "Three Brothers" (Chan,
Sammo Hung and
Yuen Biao). The film added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and
slapstick humor, and became a huge success throughout the
Far East.
As a result, Chan continued this trend with martial arts action films
containing even more elaborate and dangerous stunts, including
Wheels on Meals (1984),
Police Story (1985),
Armour of God (1986),
Project A Part II (1987),
Police Story 2 (1988), and
Dragons Forever (1988). Other new trends which began in the 1980s were the "
girls with guns" sub-genre, for which
Michelle Yeoh gained fame; and especially the "
heroic bloodshed" genre, revolving around
Triads, largely pioneered by
John Woo and for which
Chow Yun-fat became famous. These Hong Kong action trends were later adopted by many Hollywood action films in the 1990s and 2000s.
1990s: New special effects, independent films, and DVDs
Cinema admissions in 1995
The early 1990s saw the development of a commercially successful
independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was
increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991),
Jurassic Park (1993) and
Titanic (1997), independent films like
Steven Soderbergh's
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and
Quentin Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs
(1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on
home video. Filmmakers associated with the Danish filmmovement
Dogme 95
introduced a manifesto aimed to purify filmmaking. Its first few films
gained worldwide critical acclaim, after which the movement slowly faded
out.
Major American studios began to create their own
"independent" production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s,
Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino's runaway hit
Pulp Fiction
in 1994. The same year marked the beginning of film and video
distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also
regained their popularity, with Disney's
Beauty and the Beast (1991),
Aladdin (1992), and
The Lion King (1994). During 1995, the first feature length
computer-animated feature,
Toy Story, was produced by
Pixar Animation Studios
and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer
animation would grow to become the dominant technique for feature length
animation, which would allow competing film companies such as
Dreamworks Animation and
20th Century Fox
to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own.
During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical
film stock to
digital cinema technology. Meanwhile
DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.
2000s
The
documentary film also rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time, with the success of films such as
March of the Penguins and
Michael Moore's
Bowling for Columbine and
Fahrenheit 9/11. A new genre was created with
Martin Kunert and
Eric Manes'
Voices of Iraq,
when 150 inexpensive DV cameras were distributed across Iraq,
transforming ordinary people into collaborative filmmakers. The success
of
Gladiator lead to a revival of interest in
epic cinema, and
Moulin Rouge! renewed interest in
musical cinema.
Home theatre systems became increasingly sophisticated, as did some of the special edition
DVDs designed to be shown on them.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released on DVD in both the theatrical version and in a special extended version intended only for home cinema audiences.
There is a growing problem of
digital distribution to be overcome with regards to expiration of copyrights,
content security, and enforcing copyright. There is higher compression for films, and
Moore's law allows for increasingly cheaper technology.
More films were also being released simultaneously to
IMAX cinema, the first was in 2002's Disney animation
Treasure Planet; and the first live action was in 2003's
The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of
The Matrix Reloaded. Later in the decade,
The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.
There has been an increasing globalization of cinema during this
decade, with foreign-language films gaining popularity in
English-speaking markets. Examples of such films include
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin),
Amelie (French),
Lagaan (Hindi-Urdu),
Spirited Away (Japanese),
City of God (Portuguese),
The Passion of the Christ (Aramaic),
Apocalypto (Mayan),
Slumdog Millionaire (parts in Hindi-Urdu), and
Inglourious Basterds (multiple European languages).
Recently there has been a revival in 3D film popularity the first being James Cameron's
Ghosts of the Abyss which was released as the first full-length 3-D IMAX feature filmed with the
Reality Camera System.
This camera system used the latest HD video cameras, not film, and was
built for Cameron by Emmy nominated Director of Photography Vince Pace,
to his specifications. The same camera system was used to film
Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003),
Aliens of the Deep IMAX (2005), and
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005).
2010s
After James Cameron's 3D film
Avatar
became the highest-grossing film of all time, 3D films have gained
increasing popularity with many other films being released in 3D, with
the best critical and financial successes being in the field of feature
film animation such as
DreamWorks Animation's
How To Train Your Dragon and
Walt Disney Pictures/
Pixar's
Toy Story 3.
As of 2010, the largest film industries by number of feature films produced are those of India, the United States and China.
[44]
The Long Tail
One major new development in the early 21st century is the
development of systems that make it much easier for regular people to
write, shoot, edit and distribute their own films without the large
apparatus of the film industry. This phenomenon and its repercussions
are outlined in
Chris Anderson's theory,
The Long Tail.
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